I’m not always retarded
The other day I was at Target getting those boring things that you don’t care about but need (animal control febreeze, socks, underpants, condoms, scrubbing bubbles, clif bars). I was getting ready to go and decided to take a brief look around at the bras. I have an ample bosom. A really ample bosom. Big, pendulous boobs combined with really narrow shoulders is a problem that television is too ashamed of to talk about. I suffer in silence. Not really, i complain about it alot. The issue is that if you have heavy boobs and narrow shoulders, your boobs pull your bra and your brastraps cannot stay on your shoulders.
For years I had permanent indents on my upper arms from where my brastraps dug in. I would get giant granny bras with 5 hooks and huge padded straps and missile-like cups. It didn’t make a difference, the boobs would pull, the straps would fall and I looked like I was about to engage in some mutually assured destruction with my feet.
All this changed when I discovered the convertible bra. hhhwwwwaaaaaaaa the angels sang to me. A convertible bra is essentially a strapless bra that comes with straps. You can connect them in all manner of configurations or not connect them at all. Of course the very thought of me not using the straps has most major governments pulling out the Geneva Conventions and trying to find the section that applies to charging me with crimes against humanity. I take the straps and have them criss-cross across my back. They can’t fall down my shoulders because I’ve got physics on my side.
Okay, so the STYLE of bra is taken care of, but finding it in my size is sometimes an issue. The thing is, big titted women generally have bad luck with strapless bras because there’s really only so much you can reasonably expect from some fabric, a couple of underwires and fervent prayer. Technically the convertible bras are sold as strapless bras in lots of places. Also, it is assumed that if you have such an ample chest you are either buying your bras at Sex World or you are buying the aforementioned giant granny bras.
So, back to Target. There I am just wandering through, kind of envying my flat chested sisters and all the amazingly cute options they have when i spied GIANT CONVERTIBLE BRAS!!!!! They were big! and convertible! and available in various colors!!! I grabbed one and tried it on and again the angels sang to me (or it was the lady at the desk by the dressing room, i don’t know). It fit! The damned thing fit! The last time i bought a bra at Target it came in a box and reminded me of retirement homes and oatmeal.
I grabbed 4 of those fuckers.
As I was checking out the cashier stopped and looked perplexed. The first bra rang up at the $14.99 suggested retail price, but the other three rang up at $3.74. We were confused. The UPC codes were correct and the description in the computer was correct. We declared it a good day and she was going to go buy a bunch on her break. I would have gotten more, but I felt that karma had already gifted me big time both with finding the bras and with giving me 3 of them at a ridiculous discount. i decided to accept that moment as ‘good’ and not strain the universe.
I love my new bras! The old ones were purchased about a month after I met David, so they’re 2 1/2 years old. They’re tired and busted. The elastic was shot, the underwires were drilling into me like an amoral oil company in the wilds of Alaska, and my boobs were always trying to escape out the bottom of the cups. The new bras hold everything in place. The old bras got old slowly and gradually, I forgot what a new, functional bra felt like.
It kind of feels like it’s pushing your tits up to your chin.

Why is it that my retarded moments always have so many steps and variables.
1) I can never remember the URL for adding a post to this site. It involves the IP address a ~ and lots of bins and mt’s and whatnot.
2) I can bookmark the link and I have
2a) it’s bookmarked on my work computer
2b) it WAS bookmarked on my currently incapacitated laptop
2c) it is not bookmarked on David’s computer because It’s David’s computer and even after almost 3 years I’m still all about “this is your computer, I shall not sully it”. Also, he is really meticulous about his computer and he has systems and whatnot and I’m not one to mess with things.
3) when i want to post from home, I have to use David’s computer because my laptop is currently (and for a few long months now) incapacitated
3a) Keith and I are going to work together and install the damned hard drive even though I have a fear of opening the damn thing because apparently they used tiny premature chinese orphan babies to construct the very tiny insides of the 12 inch powerbook. All of the instructions say things like “remove CAREFULLY” and “find the very small yellow tab”.
3b) If it doesn’t work out I’m just gonna yell ‘fuck it’ and buy a new MacBook Pro through work where I get a discount and interest free financing…except I’ve heard rumors that they are coming out with a 12 inch version and i will wait for that as I have freakishly small hands and I love the smaller laptop even if it means that I must import my own set of illegal chinese orphan babies to maintain the fucking thing. Also, I want the Pro simply because I like the silver and do not like the white and REALLY don’t like the black. i know that’s dumb.
4) David quite often cleans out the history in the browser when he goes through and tidies things up on the computer. This means that I must REMEMBER and actually TYPE OUT the websites I visit regularly instead of just lazily hitting the first letter and scrolling down until it appears on the list. I try to explain this to him. He is not sympathetic to my laziness.
5) Since I cannot remember the address for adding a post I have to seek it out.
6) to get the address I have to log into the control panel for my domain at the host and look at the stats (‘vet numbing lube’ is the number two search term bringing people to my site this month, it comes after ‘velvet-c’. god bless you people)
7) the address shows up under “connect to site from” in some form or another.
8) I am at David’s computer now and I was thinking of writing about my sudden obsession with the New York Times crossword puzzle but as I was trying to find the link I decided that writing about how I was working to find the link was more interesting.
9) maybe I just should have stuck to the crossword puzzle bit.

I’ve been reading a whole hell of a lot lately and I figure I’m pretty qualified to tell you what books to read since i a) am bipedal and b) have this here bloggy to write upon.
Here we go in no particular order:
Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
This book kind of sucked. I get a ton of my reading recommendations from the NPR book review podcast and this came recommended and it definitely sounded interesting. In fact it SHOULD have been interesting. The premise of the seedy underside of Japan, repressed school girls gone wild, murder, deception, prostitution and jealousy. It should have been good. At first I attributed my issues to a poor translator thinking that maybe something was lost, but as time wore on (and I mean WORE ON) I discovered that it would not be fair to blame the poor translator. Nothing was even remotely believable, all of the characters talked in the same exact voice, situations were so forced as to even make the reader uncomfortable. Bad bad bad. And the ‘twist’ at the end? The twist sucked. It was a stupid ‘twist’. It wasn’t even really a twist, just a meager way of maybe apologizing for this crapfest
Un Lun Dun By China Mieville
If you love Neil Gaiman, specifically the Neil Gaiman of the Neverwhere/Mirrormask type stories, you will adore this book. It’s definitely written for teens, but amazingly so. It’s a simple girl saves the world (and the secret unknown world) type story but it is delightfully fun. If you’ve read other China Mieville novels you will be surprised. It is as unique and creative as any of his books but still covered in an innocence you would not have expected. I really enjoyed this book, also, the illustrations are done by him.

King Rat by China Mieville
Again with the China Mieville thing you say! It’s his first novel and it is definitely rough around the edges, but the story is solid and fascinating. And speaking of Neil Gaiman similarities, written 2 years before Gaiman’s American Gods (also an awesome book), the stories are surprisingly similar, but this one is all Mieville, from the grit to the sewers. Like American Gods, there is folklore and father troubles played throughout. I’d say read it, but it’s not as good as the Bas Lag books.
Jamestown: A Novel by Matthew Sharpe
an unhistory? a fantastical retelling of the Jamestown story? Post apocalyptic Jamestown. Hard to say. The story of the Jamestown settlement is set in the near, post apocalyptic future. Strange. I found the writing to be easy to read, I blew through the book in a days or so. The story was…eh. It was good and it had funny moments, but the characters just weren’t developed well and I had a terrible time keeping all the Johns and James’ apart. It also seemed unnecessarily violent, or perhap crude and gimmicky in its violence.
Schrodinger’s Ball by Adam Felber
This book is just pure fun. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Chaos Theory and Schrodingers Cat all told around 4 friends, the president of Montana and a crazy lady who rewrites history. Of course there’s a dead guy who can’t be dead because nobody has actually witnessed him being dead and therefore all states of dead and undead are still possible, a cat in a box and the world’s largest molecule. Read it for fun. Being one who gets quite angry at the idea of quantum physics and string theory (see, I can’t imagine the universe as a sheet of fabric because a sheet of fabric is very very flat and the universe is very very 3 dimensional. But I also think time is a construct, that the laws of physics are immutable regardless of how fast you’re going and YOU CAN’T JUST PULL CRAZY THEORIES OUT OF YOUR BUTT LIKE THAT! I NEED SOME DAMNED PHYSICAL PROOF)
Whoa…yeah. I got problems with science. I adore science, but mostly I adore real, calculable science. Taking a 65 million year old bone out of the ground, finding the markings that indicate where the muscles attached and extrapolating information like that. THE BONE EXISTED WHETHER OR NOT I OBSERVED IT.
Dammit. Anyway, I learned more from the afterword about the theories than I did from the book, but still, it was fun and I finished it yesterday and I am just tickled by it.
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
I just finished this book an hour ago, started last night. I could not put it down. I don’t even know how to describe the story in this book. It’s considered a teen novel, which surprised me, I think it’s a bit beyond young teens, though older ones might appreciate it. There is nothing childish about this book and rarely is there fun or joy. Octavian is a boy born as an 18th century slave into an experiment. Both he and his young, slave mother are housed and lavished upon, educated to the highest degree, the boy not realizing even that he is a slave. Then things change. It gets ugly. And yet it is beautifully written.
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
AWESOME! It’s everything House of Leaves or Memento could have been if they weren’t so self aware. It’s fun, it’s a mystery, a thriller, a romance and much much more. It bounces everywhere equally, a wild ride that you can’t get bored with (with which you cannot be bored). Words as a shark released and attacking a man with no memory. He must use the words of others, of anonymous people to shield himself from the words of a life he does not remember. The words are a shark, a real shark and that shark is trying to eat him.
Drowning Ruth by Christine Schwarz
Meh. It wasn’t a bad book, but it was predictable. The characters were fleshed out and sympathetic, but ultimately you just got to the point where you knew that what the author was trying to get you to believe was a ploy to surprise you in the end and you can figure this out because they are pushing you too hard to believe this idea without actually saying the idea. See? Imagine a book is a flat sheet of fabric and sometimes the threads get…wait DAMN SCIENCE! Get out of here!
Okay, yeah. I read too much!
EDIT:
I totally forgot a book!
The Day of Small Beginnings by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum
This was a really…cute(?) book. I enjoyed it while I was reading it though it was flawed. The writing style kept me engrossed, a story of 3 generations losing and reconnecting with their Jewish faith in pre and post war Poland. The scope of the book was immense and in an effort to keep it manageable, it felt like much was cut out or glossed over, bringing some characters to an abrupt end. Also the love story felt forced and unnecessary. And this is kind of a little pick, but every once in a while the author would go into too much detail regarding what Ellen is wearing (“I was glad I was wearing a silk bias cut skirt…” or something like that). Don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated by the story and I got to learn a lot about Eastern European Jewish customs and whatnot.
Also, I started Black and White by Dani Shapiro last night and I am almost done. It’s an intriguing portrait (see, I can write like book reviewers, too) of a dysfunctional family and the aftermath. The mother, a controlling, narcissist uses her young daughter from the age of 3 as a model in her photography. The photographs of the child are not only in the nude, but somewhat provocative, perhaps bordering on the pornographic. The mother becomes an overnight success in the art world with the photos of her 3 year old daughter and must continue to use her daughter to feed her own success machine. The daughter leaves home, the sister who was not photographed is angry for being ignored throughout her childhood and no one is happy. The mom is pure creepy overbearing. If she were a real person you’d have a hard time not punching her (well, except she’s all dying of cancer and you can’t really punch 65 year old cancer patients)

Sunday night I could find nothing of interest to occupy our time that did not involve a bar concert or a crappy movie. It was already 9pm, too late for us old people to find a museum devoted to figurines or some sort of community eating situation. Those things happen much earlier in the evening. Even earlier on Sundays.
I went upstairs to inform Davidu-san of the hopeless situation. Surely another night of pitching ourselves around aimlessly until one of us gets a concussion. “That’s okay, ” he replied with much cheer, “I just packed us a picnic.”
All I could do was proclaim how happy that was and go about grabbing up a blanket and asking him to grab the mustard (still he forgot). We went over to the creek and found a quiet spot near a bend. We unpacked the picnic and opened the wine just as the last of the sunlight faded from the sky and the moon showed it’s exceedingly bright face to us.
We laid there talking and joking and eating while the bats dove and chittered around us. I love watching bats fly, it’s almost hypnotic.
And just when I thought the night could not get any more romantic…a couple of homeless dudes decided to raid the trash on the other side of the park. They were pulling out all the aluminum cans, tossing them to the ground and flattening them. The beauty of the moon, the lullaby whisper of bats and the sweet music that is trash being tossed around and occasionally stomped on.
God bless city life.