Words to Eat By

As I drove past the Third Pounder billboard featuring McDonald’s newest sandwich offering I thought to myself, “I will never eat anything with the word pounder in it.”

Then I began to think of all the words that I will not eat.* Here’s a list with their translations.
Crunchy = Fried
Crispy = Fried (unless it refers to lettuce)
Creamy = Fat
Cheesy = Fat
Melt = Fat
Big = Lots of what you don’t need
Double = Twice what you don’t need
Triple = Three times what you don’t need
Pounder = Seriously?
Liver = It’s an organ - the organ that is a filter. Ick - and I can say that because I have tried it. I like to say, “Ick!” with authority.

*Disclaimer: I love ice cream, and I will have it when I want it. Also, while I have never eaten an order of fast food fries, I love fresh cut curly fries floating (I do not exaggerate) in vinegar from vendors at summer fairs. I’m salivating at the thought.

Remembering Chevettes and Fig Newtons

I have procrastinated all morning to not clean my house, but finally I’m sweeping my bathroom floor and listening to Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast. She remarks that her favorite question to ask her guests is, “What is your first creative memory?” One time after the show a guest asked her, “What is your first memory?” She thought about it for days.

As I fluffed my couch pillows (I go all over the house when I clean) and straightened the slipcover on the first piece of furniture we ever owned with cushions, I started thinking about what my first memory could be. Debbie talked about wonderful times spent with her grandparents. Some of my earliest memories are ones with my Gram as well. She lived in an apartment in a small city, and it had a porch off the back that pigeons would come to. I’m sure they were viewed as pests, but I remember loving seeing them and listening to their cooing. There are morning doves in the countryside where I grew up, but you rarely see a pigeon. City birds, I guess. I remember riding to town with my dad on a sun-drenched summer day in one of our long line of Chevettes - one of which would become my first car. I can remember looking out the window as we rode past the farm where we would get our milk in a glass jug we’d bring to the milk house, everything was green in the fields, and I love the memory for the stillness of myself in the passenger seat utterly content as the world whirrs past the window. Riding in the front seat with my dad was a great treat. I’m pretty sure seat belts didn’t exist yet, and I hadn’t a care in the world.

Those memories are before I was eight, and I’m trying to travel back farther. My mom took tons of photos of my childhood - well, my whole life up to present - and one of my favorite things to do as a kid was pull out all her wonderful photo albums, flipping pages and asking questions. It is hard to differentiate memories from memories of photos. Oh, here’s one though: My other grandmother used to give me Fig Newtons. There is no picture of that. I don’t even like Fig Newtons, but I would always take one and eat it. What a strange, rectangular, gelatinous-filled cookie. Maybe because it was peculiar I found some enjoyment in it. Maybe it was just following her down the hallway to the closet where they were kept.

I’m procrastinating again, and it’s time to go clean some more. I’ll keep thinking.

Oblique Thoughts

As I was choosing a font the other day, I started thinking about oblique, Helvetica Oblique to be exact. Any font with oblique after the name gives you italics. “Why isn’t the font called Helvetica Italics or Helvetica Slanted,” I wondered.

I Googled oblique to find such adjectives as slanting, skew, indirect, sloping, slant, devious, sidelong, awry, circuitous, roundabout, inclined and the definitions of the word:
1. If you describe a statement as oblique, you mean that is not expressed directly or openly, making it difficult to understand.

2. An oblique line is a straight line that is not horizontal or vertical. An oblique angle is any angle other than a right angle.

Fascinating. Then I thought I’d rather like it if the font were called Helvetica Devious.

Finally, I pondered my abs. Yes, those oblique muscles on the sides of the torso that, it turns out, lay on a slant. Huh. Those are a lot of oblique thoughts I was having that are now perfectly clear to me.

Resolution #19

Meet my pretty new glasses! Yes, that is bright pink you see racing around the inside. It is a pleasure to wear them this Saturday morning and allow my eyes to wake up before putting in my contacts. After roughly five years of constant contacts, it’s amazing what I forgot about being Four-Eyes: I must move my head to see beyond the edges of the frame (glancing downward/upward/sideways with clarity does not happen for the nearsighted eyeglass wearer) and trying on turtlenecks is a pain, but it’s fun to wear them out and about and catch a glimpse of studious-me reflected in a window. Perhaps it’s a sign of things to come.

Progress Report

I could wait until I’ve really made a dent in this list, but it gets done bit by bit so I’ve bolded what is in progress and crossed out goals already attained. What’s on your 2010 list? Take action on a bit of it today.

1. Focus (There are things I think I should do. So I’ve got to pick a thing, focus and do it.)
2. Get Adobe Certified - in anything (That’s one of the things I think I should do.)
3. Make time spent on the computer more productive
4. Tour a real, medieval castle, preferably with a moat (I’d put a moat around my house if it were allowed. They are just cool.)
5. Go to New York with my friend V
6. Surf again
7. Hike to Machu Picchu
8. Get paid for this clean living (My health care plan offers $500 cash back for doing healthy things; I’ve earned 1/5 so far!)
9. Go to Hawaii again
10. Visit Venice
11. Be better
12. Be better to my houseplants (This is an ongoing goal so time will tell. I’m just about to water them.)
13. Move on and forward
14. Snowboard in Utah or Colorado
15. Go on a insanely inexpensive trip to an incredible locale
16. Read more design books
17. Melt glass into beads that I am absolutely pleased with
18. Add something new and interesting to my hobby of doing new and interesting things
19. Get great new glasses to give my eyes a break from contacts*
20. Take advantage of Lynda.com
21. Knit a pair of socks
22. Print this list and post it in plain sight

*I’m so excited about my new glasses! I’ve worn contacts for the last five years or so, but my over-a-decade-old backup glasses were just good enough for me to drive in in the event of a contact lens emergency. Last week my eyes were feeling kind of dry and crappy with my lenses in and even scratchier with them out. If you Google that sort of thing, horrifying things come up. Don’t they always for any minute medical thing you might wonder about? This made the timing extra good to go get my eyes checked since it was on my list anyway, and since there was a cancelation, I was able to get in the next day! My worries of giant papillary conjunctivitis (google that and click images - yikes!) were unfounded. Besides the ever present near-sightedness I’ve had since third grade, the doctor deemed my eyes perfectly healthy.

Now the fun began! I looked at frames all week at three different places. Two are known for fun and funky (expensive) frames, and the third was right at my eye doctor’s office. I took pictures of myself with my iPhone to show prospective choices to my coworkers and was choosing better looking frames as the week went on. Finally B and I went frame shopping together as I value his opinion most. Even when I put on my old glasses that were deemed by a coworker to look like ones Mrs. Claus* - yes, Santa’s wife - would wear, he said, “Aw, there’s my love” as he fell in love with me when I was wearing big, red, circa 1980’s plastic frames day in and day out. This guy loves me in glasses or not. In the end the key was for me to shop in the kid section. I have a small head; I have a small body to go with it so that’s good, but adult-size eyeglass frames stick out way too far on the sides. After a half hour of pondering, there were two pair I could have been extremely happy with - one matte metal in dark brown with these cool beetle-green nose pad connectors and hinge screws (mature with personality), the other triple-layer plastic in dark brown outside, a thin layer of fuchsia and then very light pink on the inside in a stylish rectangular shape with an almost optimistic upward arc (professional and fun). I was 60/40 for the metal frames when I spotted a woman behind the desk. “I need your expert opinion,” I said. People love to help and she was no different nor was she wishy-washy. She asked me to switch them back and forth a couple of times and decidedly wholeheartedly on the plastic frame. I concurred. This frame made me smile when I had it on. It was also $200 dollars cheaper as I would have had to pay extra to get super thin lenses to fit the thin metal frame. That made me smile even more.

Oh, you want to see them? I’m making everyone wait until next week when I pick them up and that includes you.

*Gold, oval, wire-rimmed frames - she is absolutely right.