hearts and laserbeams book report: into the wild by jon krakauer

ok so this last weekend josh, brittanie and i went to minnesota for my brother justin and his girl ashley's wedding - we get to the airport and talking to my sister brittanie, she had a sexy vampire book while i had nothin' to read at all and this aggression will not stand!


while josh usually sleeps through flights or listens to tunes and movies on his ipod, i like takin those big long chunks o time as an opportunity to do some reading, cuz honestly there's just not enough time for stuff like that. so off to the airport bookstore i go - and i saw into the wild on one of the tables. i always wanted to see the movie, but never quite got around to it. and i like readin' the books before i see the movie of the book, cuz i like seeing the contrast between what i play in my head while i'm reading and then what they actually do with the film when it's brought to life. so there you go! read on to the end (or just scroll down to the bottom of this post if you're in a hurry) and find out how to get your hands on my copy of into the wild, complete with a little note from me to you and a hearts and laserbeams doodle on the inside cover!



hearts and laserbeams book report: into the wild by jon krakauer


ok lemme share with you the premise of this true story is really super appealing to me.



if you didn't know and haven't seen the movie, this book is a journalist's telling of how a kid named chris mccandless graduated from college, then gave away all his money, packed up a few possessions, and ran off to see america for 2 years. his adventure culminated in one final big hurrah when he went to alaska for a few months to live completely off the land, and he died after like 112 days or something in the alaskan wilderness.



the part i love about this idea is just picking up and going. camping, livin' off the land, gettin the hell outta southern california and seeing real places that don't kinda kill my soul. i can't wait to move to georgia someday where we're in a more rural setting and have the option to grow most of our food and fish at our own place and just be left the hell alone.



that being said, i should wanna hang out with this chris mccandless dude. but i totally don't.



number one, he died over 10 years ago and i'm sure he's pretty smelly by now.



number b, with all due respect to all the cool things he did do and see over his 2plus years of adventuring across the u.s., he really comes across as a bit of an arrogant douchebag. just the way he changes his name to alexander supertramp, for example... love the name supertramp, but if you're actually a for reals hobo, and you give yourself the name supertramp, that pretty much means you're king of the tramps and you should probably be smarter than thinking you can just prance off into the alaskan wilderness with not enough gear and not enough experience to actually make that happen successfully.



there's lots of letters and excerpts from postcards chris wrote in this book, along with highlighted passages from books that he had with him when his body was found, and all of those just kind of add to the man this kid was kinda a jerk feeling i got while reading it. ok awesome you like reading old books about nature, but don't get all i'm better than you about it and don't demand that other people live your hobo life or else they're stupid. i'm a very live and let live type, and when people shove their own beliefs or way of life down my throat it's a huge turnoff.



the end of one letter to a friend of his was written juuuust before he went up to alaska. it ended with a sentence that was something to the effect of "i now walk into the wild". and at this point, i put down my book and told brittanie and josh that this dude annoys me just as much, if not more, than emo kids.



so yeah... i don't know if we would've been friends if we met.



but his personality aside, wow. WOW. who wouldn't want to just walk away from the 9 to 5 and just drive away, and hike everywhere and canoe at the beach and just live life every day without worrying about when the next rent payment's due? i kinda can't wait to rent the movie and see how this all plays out. did they use the actual bus that supertramp was found in? that would creep my shit out.



i was totally into how well this book was written - even though i wanted to punch the hobo in the face i was still totally riveted to the story and i honestly can't say that about many nonfiction books. total page-turner. until you get to the end. then you pretty much stop turning pages.



ratings

hearts: 4 hearts - really solid good book, would definitely recommend it to my friends even though i generally hate non-fiction.

farts: 1 fart - i really spent most of that book wanting to punch the kid in the face. and also, probably he should've taken something a little stronger than a .22 into the wild for the purposes of obtaining dinner.



so on to the giveaway! What would your hobo name be if you were to pull a chris mccandless and leave town to live a hobo life on the road exploring? mine would be The Venerable Hobo McTootPants.



leave a comment tellin me your chosen hobo name, and i'll pick a name at random from all entries received before midnight friday june 19th. the winner gets my copy of this book!

happy new years!!!

omg i am awful, it's already a week into the new year, i've been home from vacation for like 3.5 days now, and i STILL have not updated anything on the blog!!

i'll keep it short and sweet, but the holidays were a blasty! was bequeathed with a spanky new buttonmaker that will greatly expand the amount of stuff i can make for your artsy fartsy enjoyment, keep an eye out for all kinds of new designs soon!

a big ol group of us went to savannah to stay at the farm for a week and it was amazing. lots of good times all around - if ya wanna take a gander at our shenanigans, go here! if ya wanna see what celeb paid a visit to the ol' farmstead, go here! if ya wanna see actual for real pics of our farm, go here! enjoy!

i did a crazy amount of reading on the trip out and back, so in the next couple of days i'll have new book reports for you!

pow!!! it's great to be back!

notes from work - the thanksgiving edition!

ok so with tomorrow being thanksgiving, i have like a billion things on my to do list today - i thought i was being smart, and tried to get a bunch of it done before work. which left me running late to the office, as usual.


and of course, strangeness from the moment i get to my desk.


who the hell would leave a frozen turkey sitting on my laptop?!!?


i mean, there's all kinds of water, ice, condensation, things that are generally BAD FOR COMPUTERS!!! almost everyone here at hearts and laserbeams headquarters is pretty competent, so there's really only one person it could be--


and JUST as i was thinking that, guess who's boss comes breezing in.
"HI!!!" she says brightly... too brightly... i couldn't help thinking to myself what the eff is going on?!


i guess she could read that all over my face, cuz the next thing outta my boss's mouth was "what's your problem?" so i ask her what this thing is on my desk.


"mmmm, looks like a frozen turkey, genious," she says, "you oviously can't work like this why don't you go home early?"


"what are you talking about? i just got here," i tell her.


"whatever, happy thanksgiving, give me a hug and get out of here! but be here before 4am on friday, i'm going to kohls to buy gloves on sale and i want someone in the office just in case."

so... do i win because i got to go home early, or do i lose cuz i have to be here at 4am friday? i dunno... i'm just thankful my boss isn't a jerk ALL the time. have a great holiday folks!

portland weekend recap!

ok so as you know we went to portland last weekend! we were visiting our buddies rachael and justin (of the ruckus fame, it was halloween, justin is currently in an agatha christie play, so it was a busy few days chock full of fun!

we flew on jet blue, and normally telling you about our vacation wouldn't include saying what airline we used because it usually leaves us super-surly. but omg jet blue is the bomb. you know those commercials where the music is superhappy and feelgood and it just makes you all bubbly inside watching it? it's all true! friendly employees! free snacks! leg room for days! tv at every chair so i didn't have to miss the halloween episode of the office! it was fabulous!

ok so our first day there, rachael and justin took josh, gayle and i to a little breakfast joint in downtown milwaukie (where they live). after breakfast we walked around town a little bit, and near the library there were a bunch of ducks engaging in duck butt showing activities:



we also saw possibly the coolest logo ever:



later in the day, justin went to play rehearsal and rachael was cool enough to take us WAY out of the way to the pumpkin patch. this was seriously the high point of our weekend cuz all josh and i wanna do is run away and start a farm. we went through a corn maze, where josh adopted a lonely ear of ground corn and ate almost all the kernels off of it through the course of the rest of the weekend:



after the maze we all hiked out to their pumpkin patch and picked out some faboo pumpkins - my camera's battery died while we were out there so i didn't get to document what our jack-o-lanterns ended up looking like, but rest assured they were awesome!

went home to don halloween costumes to wear to the opening night of justin's play - i had a pocket full of clear plastic rhinestones with me, and every stranger i talked to that night i gave them a handful of "diamonds" and told them very seriously, "these have always brought me luck". and NO ONE knew who i was, which made it that much more awesomely hilarious. the halloween party following the play was also a hoot, lots of good costumes all around! this worked out well, because when josh and i were tasked with coming up with what the no costume penalty would be, the best we could come up with is "you must drink a cup of pee and get raped."




the next day, justin had his play all day and gayle, josh, rachael and i met some of rach's friends for a tour of the shanghai tunnels underneath portland... can't post any pics of that because they watch that stuff like a hawk, but it was kind of sort of more than a little anticlimactic and i don't know if i'd recommend it to a friend... basically you don't see tunnels you see one place's basement and hear a LOT of references to tv shows that talk about tunnels, and way way way way too many little stories that don't necessarily need to be part of a tour. it was fun hanging out with everyone so i wouldn't say it was a total goose egg, but i don't think i would need to go back to that...

sunday started out as a bummer of a day - somewhere in the course of saturday night burroughs the cat got out of the apartment, and it sucked. totally sucked. burroughs is an awesome cat. so we all spent most of the day working on getting him back. he came home that night though, which is completely awesome. (i was way more excited about the cat coming home than i was that i just saw a basement in downtown portland, by the way...) he came home while a bunch of us had gone out to hang out with josh's buddy jerry that he's known since childhood and his wife also named rachel. this is what rachel looks like holding a camoflauged beer:



that night was pretty sweet, we went to a bar called dots in portland and hands down any place that has velvet paintings on the wall = best places on earth! after that we paid a visit to powells books and had our minds blown by the sheer size of it, and finished the night off with a trip to ground kontrol, this bar with a crapload of video games. got to play the elvira and addams family pinball machines, which are my favorite ones ever, so i count that as a win!

came home on monday afternoon, taking the train to the airport was super easy and highly recommended! the flight home was on-time and just as rad as the flight out, so lemme just say again jet blue rools!

that's my story and i'm sticking to it, there's a buttload more pics of this adventure at my flickr page so enjoy!

welcome to the monkey house

i never did get around to reading more vonnegut books like i've always meant to, and now when i go pick up slaughterhouse five it's gonna look like i'm only interested cuz the guy died. welcome to the monkey house was a cool book of short stories, and you should also probably read breakfast of champions. don't ask me what they were about, i read em ages ago, but i remember they were wacky and good.

this week has dragged more than any week has dragged before!! mostly because vacation looms on the horizon and i just can not effing wait. just one more day of work and then glorious, glorious freedom!

i finally got my roll of chain in the mail this week which means soon soon SOON there will be shrinky dink necklaces in the shop! soon soon soon means i haven't quite gotten off my butt to put them together, but let me assure you they will rock your socks off!

finished a painting last night for a group show and i'm totally lovin it - so bright and happy! hopefully someone else will think so too and take it home with them. but hopefully they will pay for it first, because that's how these things work, you understand. take a gander:



one last thing - josh and i were commenting the other day about how we haven't seen the segway santa in ages again. i hope he's okay!

and good god i hope it's a new office tonight...