Category Everything is Terrible

That’s one way to keep me from eating a chicken fried steak for a while.

3 Comments read Everything is Terrible

Recently, Napoleon hasn’t been quite himself; fussing and crying and licking at his rear end (more than normal, and fussing, crying, and slurping at his nether regions are his favorite things on Earth, so it may have taken me a while to notice the increase in volume). A week ago, I came home after being out for just a few short hours to find that he’d licked/torn out a patch of fur on his rear end near his tail, and I hauled him immediately to the vet, where I learned something so awful that had I known about it beforehand, it may have put me off dog ownership entirely:

Anal gland squeezing.

Apparently when dogs poo, it squeezes out some fluid from stink glands on either side of their anus…at least, that’s what happens in large dogs. Some small dogs have difficulty squeezing out said fluid, and (lucky me), Napoleon is one of them. I never would have guessed this, because he’s a total professional at all other kinds of fluid and solid excretion, but I suppose no one can be good at everything. So now I have to take him to have his booty squeezed with regularity to prevent the sort of build-up that caused this issue, but in the meanwhile, he had five years of backup in there. In the aftermath of his first squeezing, both the vet and the tech couldn’t use enough descriptive words to convey just how awful it had been. “You see, it’s normally like a clear brownish fluid. This was like…thick, creamy, and chunky, like gravy. Like, you know…chunky.”

I think I could have slept better without ever hearing that description, but thank you for being a veritable anal juice wordsmith.

Jason wouldn’t let me show gravy fountaining out of a dog’s butt into the bowl, so just be thankful for that.

I’m considering renaming him, but I’m not sure that Campbell’s Chunky Gravy GooBooty will fit on a nametag.

“Oh look what you did! Now I’ll have to go get my cold cream gun.”

3 Comments read Canada, Everything is Terrible, Live Shows, Travel

In July, Jason and I took a trip to Vancouver for IMATS (the international Makeup Artist Trade Show). We had plans to attend the previous month’s event in Los Angeles as LA is by far the bigger show, but it unfortunately fell on the same weekend that Jason was committed to being in a wedding so it didn’t work out. However, the next LA IMATS is in January, which is right around the time that I start losing my mind in the cold, dark Seattle winter, so it will be an ideal time for a trip to a place where the sun peeks through the smog. Vancouver is essentially a cleaner, friendlier Seattle, with better candy AND Plants vs Zombies scratch off tickets!

I wasn’t interested in the push and shove aspect of the trade show floor–I love makeup, and I love discounts, but it has to be a hell of a discount or a product I cannot purchase otherwise to make me want to deal with crowds of people elbowing one another to get the last item–I’d rather pay full price AND shipping and never have to deal with a human being. What I was interested in was the student creature competition, the makeup talks, and the makeup museum. The student competition was broken up over the course of two days, with beauty on Saturday and creature on Sunday; I only attended on Sunday, and I was impressed by the quality of the work I was seeing. I wish self-taught people like myself could compete, but unfortunately it’s only open to makeup school students.

The makeup museum, though small, was also very cool, featuring mostly work by Toby Lindala (keynote speaker, creator of SFX for X-files, Supernatural, and V, among others) and Todd Masters (featured speaker, creator of MastersFX, SFX on Big Trouble In Little China, Predator, Underworld, True Blood, and more). Questionably, however, they also included submissions from various local schools, some of which were so bad that I was embarrassed for the artist and the school. Everyone has to learn somewhere and everyone works to the best of their personal abilities, and hating on someone for trying is the height of uncool…but showcasing pieces that aren’t ready to be shown do a disservice to both the student and the school. It’s why you don’t see macaroni necklaces in the Louvre.

Taking a photograph of a video camera videotaping a video feed. The only thing that could make this better is if someone behind me took a photograph of me taking a photograph of a video camera videotaping a video feed. Both Todd Masters’ group and Toby Lindala struck me as likeable, humble artists with a genuine love for their craft and fascinating stories to tell, and their speaking time went by far too quickly. If MastersFX still had a Seattle studio, I would beat down their door for an opportunity to work there, to observe, to help, to sweep their floors…but sadly, it is no more. The only thing that stuck in my craw about the event in general was that the floor was full of tons of women (and some men, but predominately women), but nearly all of the speakers were men. Where are the women, and why don’t they rise to the top of this craft? More women learn to use makeup than men, so how is it that the most notable figures in the business are men? Is it the glass escalator effect? Surely there are women who are just as talented…so where are they? Halfway through the day, we decided to take a break and head to a nearby pub for lunch rather than suffer through convention food, and there I learned two important things. One, there are vampires actively prowling Vancouver:

and two, I learned an important lesson about Canadian light and how it interacts with steak fibers. At the time, I was on a restrictive diet and could only eat carbohydrates one day a week, so I’d been eating/preparing/ordering a lot of proteins and veggies. I ordered a medium-rare steak with veggies while Jason ordered some carbtacular dish that I remember being insanely jealous of at the time. What I received was a completely well done steak, and even though I’m the sort of person who haaaaates sending anything back to the kitchen, I flagged down the waiter and told him that it was far too well done while apologizing profusely for bothering him. He disappeared with my plate and came back twenty minutes later with….another well-done steak! He disappeared before I could cut into it, and when he came back around again to ask if this one was better and I responded negatively, he said “Oh, I know what your problem is” and grabbed the fork off my plate and poked at the steak. “Yeah, that’s medium rare, I can tell. It’s just that you’re sitting by the window and the light is what makes it look brown. It’s why steakhouses are so dark inside, so you can’t see that the meat is actually brown when you expect it to be red.” HUH. It’s fascinating to learn that the Canadian visible light spectrum is missing the color red! You’d think that I would have heard about that before, read it somewhere, seen it in a documentary…SOMETHING. I didn’t think to look while I was still in Canada, but does this mean that their national flag is actually a brown leaf and they’ve been too (typically Canadian) polite to inform the rest of the full light-spectrumed world that we have it wrong? Because, and I don’t mean to boast, I have cooked and eaten many a steak within the borders of the United States in both darkness and in light, and they’ve always been a varying shade of red inside. So it must be Canadian light, right? I refuse to believe that an actual Canadian could have lied to me just to get me to shut up and eat an overcooked, shoe-leathery piece of meat.

The next time I burn the hell out of dinner, I’m going to tell Jason that we must have had a Canadian air front sweep through the kitchen, but not to worry…even though it looks and tastes burned, that’s just a factor of the air, and it’s actually the most succulent thing he’s ever had in his mouth. Thank you, Canada!

“Oh, and how is ‘education’ supposed to make me feel smarter?”

Comments Off on “Oh, and how is ‘education’ supposed to make me feel smarter?” read Everything is Terrible

I absolutely love receiving the Bellevue College “Continuing Education” catalogs in the mail–not because I’m seriously considering signing up for any classes, but because I like to see the sort of things people pay for in the name of receiving an education. Things like:

Mystery shopping! The ultra rare Sasquatch of jobs–get paid to shop and eat out! Except what they don’t say in the class description is that you have to front the money for the shop, often waiting 60-90 days for reimbursement IF the company decides you performed the shop correctly. So pay for their products now, and the gas to get there, and the interest on the credit card and maybe earn $8-10 an hour for your time three months from now, which means it will almost take as long to see a return on your investment as a regular college degree, except no one respects you after you proudly announce you went to school for mystery shopping. It’s also not easy to get paid–I went on a mystery shop with a former neighbor and the requirements were that we make certain that specific Hewlett Packard printer papers were displayed correctly at an office store…and we couldn’t find 80% of the list. We spent two hours in that store and she never got paid, making it like a shelf-stocking internship. Oh, and there’s a mystery shopper certification class that you need to take in order to be hired by most companies…and this isn’t that class. SUCKER! You probably should have also taken…

Hint: THEY’RE ALL SCAMS. Ok, maybe that’s not true. But with as much work as it will take for you to figure out whether someone is scamming you or if the job’s for real, you could get a guaranteed non scam job. No one is going to pay you hundreds of dollars to stuff envelopes when they can get an intern to do it for free. Use the golden rule: if it sounds too good to be true, it is. There, I just saved you $60, which you can remit to me via U.S. mail. No checks, please. Though I guess there is one way to start a home-based business…

Ah, eBay. Last resort of the ripoff artist and the scoundrel, the promised land for knockoff luxury goods…unless you count the new manufactured goods that people are now selling on Etsy as ‘vintage’. If you have no idea how to set up an eBay account, I don’t know how you decided that you wanted to start a serious eBay business, but I bet that for your $79, they won’t tell you that their feedback system is irrevocably broken, you get dinged with fees three times–listing, commission AND paypal (and eBay owns paypal, so they’re triple-dipping the same chip), and that a buyer can receive a product, say they didn’t, and you’ll have to refund them completely even if you can prove you shipped it. Plus, nobody wants to buy your used crap, they all want NEW crap at bargain prices–you could feasibly LOSE money selling on eBay. If only you could predict what people will buy…

Become a futurist! Sorry, they won’t tell you exactly what that is without you shelling out the $70, but from what I can discern from the description it probably involves a time machine. What they also won’t tell you is that in addition to your course fees, you’ll need to provide your own DeLorean or police box AND a shovel and knee-high boots to wade through the pit of bullshit they’re spewing. I do see a bay in your future. Bay…bay…eBay? San Francisco Bay? Bay…

Oh, LaBay. Yes! The “let’s nap and make shit up” class, yours for only $39! Based on the exhaustive 8 hours of research I did into my past lives last night, I can tell you conclusively that not only did I personally walk with dinosaurs but I was also a person who intensely liked doughnuts. Probably some kind of royalty, I can’t imagine that I was ever someone common in one of my past lives, but definitely doughnut-oriented. This knowledge of my past life does help to give my current life some context and perspective–I need to be the sort of person I want to dream about 60 years from now when I’m reincarnated as a cyborg with laser eyes.

None of these appeal to you and your educational needs? There’s always “Quality Cruising For Cheapskates”, “Views of the News with Jim” (basically paying someone to talk about current events with you, for those who have no friends), and “Quilts! Quilts! Quilts!”. Who says education needs to be educational?