Hiking Boot Miles Will be Found Elsewhere

Well blogspot, we've had a good run. However, I'm moving on.

New blog: http://alissajean.wordpress.com/

Please come visit :o)

GAGA...

I'm all for funky fashion. Wear what you want, make your own trend, mix trends, forget trends, make it yours. "Funky", however, should not be confused with "nightmare-ish". Yes, this is a direct reference to Lady Gaga.

If you have managed to watch TV, be on the internet, listen to the radio, or have conversation with citizens of the general public in the last couple days, chances are that you have heard the names Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga being tossed around. The Kanye/Taylor/Beyonce VMA triangle was truly bizarre, but Gaga has captured my full, disturbed, attention.
I realize this is exactly the point, you don't be Gaga in order to be ignored, but my intrigue has won over my aversion to playing into celebrity's attention getting games.

Gaga's fashion choices have made headlines before; a coat made entirely of Kermit the Frog puppets was supposedly an anti-fur statement, according to a Ryan Seacrest interview, although a different interview answer gave a somewhat less noble explanation: “My friends and I in New York dress this way because it’s the way we live. We believe in vanity.”

She also seems to believe in some sort of morbid sexuality. How else would you describe a live performance that ends with her hanging limply in blood covered underwear or a music video revolving around the different ways scantily clad Gaga personas can be brutally killed? Art? Publicity? Statement? Perversion? I'm going with Disturbing...

Of Orange Closets, Crowded Calenders, and Plastic Doors

[alternate title: The Adventures of Moving Into a Bachelor Pad]

New Home, Old Side of Town. Old Friends, New Adventures; New Friends, New Adventures. Old Work, New Work. Old Caffeine Addictions, New Coffee Maker Location. And a closet that has a bright orange glow. I seem to be capturing the best of all worlds at the moment.

The beginning of September brought the end of my ghetto apartment lease and the start of a new one, in one of those big, beautiful, old, East Grand Rapids homes. East Grand Rapids, how I have missed you! I'm not that far from my old place, but it's a total different side of GR, literally and metaphorically speaking. I am once again sharing traffic space with AQ students, Yesterdog customers, and Gaslight Village Soccer Moms. I love it.

So. I live in a big house. Not a funky apartment. Weird. There are some things I will need to adjust to. Example 1A: My bed no longer consists of a mattress on the floor. (Okay that's not the best example. I suppose I could have had a bed frame in the funky apartment.) Example 1B: I have space to hang my clothes up - on hangers, not chair-backs. Example 1C: The kitchen is down the hall, downstairs. As in, no longer two feet from my bedroom. Read: my coffee maker is far far away. Also read: a boy lives upstairs so I should be somewhat decent to venture into the kitchen. Read further: I have a tendency towards laziness before caffeine has been consumed. Ah well, adjusting to a new home is a process, right?

The move itself was a blast and a half... returning borrowed furniture, borrowing cars to move the token pieces of furniture I actually own, conning friends into helping me carry stuff (thanks, guys!), moving into a temporary bedroom while the ex-but-then-current tenant of my new room moved out a day late, and finally moving across the hall into my official room and unpacking, utilizing, of course, my new closet. Which has an orange glow.

Seriously. It does. It's one of those twisty florescent lights, like the ones that are supposed to be energy efficient, except it's orange. I'm not sure if that makes it more energy efficient or just kinda trippy. I'm gonna go with kinda trippy. You may just have to visit and experience it for yourself to understand what I mean.

[bonus - I now have a perfect scapegoat for any outfit that seems slightly "off". It's the orange light, I swear.]

In other news: life is busy with lots of adventures, including an expedition further into the land of "Social Media". I'm now managing social media for Covenant Developments, playing around with ideas for website *stuff*, and learning that there is so much to learn, experiment with, and try. Thank goodness for wonderful people willing to impart their vast knowledge of this electronic conversation.

In other news X2: The first week in my new residence, my front door was constructed of a piece of plastic stapled to a door frame. Thanks to my ghetto roots, this was somehow totally okay with me. Don't worry Mom, we have a real front door now.

I live in the ghetto.

i live in the ghetto. i partly say that to sound cool - living in the ghetto increases your street cred. i partly say that as a heads up - people tend to get a little nervous the first time they come to my apartment. but really, i mostly say that as an intro to all the interesting things that come along with that living arrangement, things that i have had the wonderful opportunity to witness and experience in the last year...

*bikes get stolen. obviously. you don't have to live in the ghetto for this to happen. but broken bikes? bikes that cannot actually be ridden? really? my dear friend luke was biking over to my place one night when his chain broke slightly past mid-ride. terrible luck, but he decided to just walk/coast the rest of the way, being slightly past mid-ride. later that night he got a ride home with somebody who happened to actually drive over, leaving his bike on my porch. concerned it would be stolen, i called him the next morning, but he assured me that it would be fine, broken and all. that night, i came home and the bike was gone. okay, not really gone, more like, a few feet away from the porch, laying across the sidewalk. about as far as you can ride a broken bike. so i was convinced, broken bikes are safe.

sadly, this is not an absolute truth as i discovered when i left my own broken bike upside down and unlocked on my porch in an attempt to diagnose the broken-ness. thanks to the upsidedown-ness, i had a clear view of the problem. thanks to the leaving unlocked-ness, i never have to deal with the problem again. actually, it's a problem my mom will never have to deal with again, seeing as it was her bike. oops.

a few days later i saw a make-shift sale sign, you know, the type scribbled on a piece of cardboard, taped to a telephone pole: "used bikes for sale 1025 Somerandomstreet". How much do you want to bet... [i was unfortunately on my way out of town for a few days and never made it over there to check]

*supposedly, people used to hang out on their porches all the time, back in the day. it was the cool neighborhood thing to do. based on my observations, this porch-loitering now only takes place in select neighborhoods; like the ghetto. sit on your porch for too long in the wrong neighborhood and people start wondering what your problem is. sit on your porch as long as you want in northwest Grand Rapids and nobody gives a damn.

suburbia pretentiousness has no place here. i love the sense of freedom that comes with that. case in point: i can sit on my front steps in my pj's eating frozen fat free cool whip straight out of the tub and nobody walking by (see next point) bats an eyelash.

*people walk on my street. a lot. most likely because there is a bus stop on the corner, a pedestrian underpass behind my house, and a dollar store around the block. and the fact that a lot of people probably don't own cars. and the fact that walking is just a nice way to fill time. anyway, there is a lot of foot traffic, and it's not the color-coordinated-work-out-outfit-i-pod-tuned-out-suburbia type foot traffic. it's the i'm-gonna-walk-on-the-sidewalk/middle-of-the-street/grass-and-talk-really-loud-or-sing-or-not-talk-at-all type foot traffic.

*my car has been decorated by spray paint. no, "decorated" is a stretch. somebody felt the need to put a blue line of paint on the driver's door. classy. uncreative. ghetto.

*kids in the ghetto seem to have different bed times. or no bed times. what other explanation could there be for 10 year old children playing in the street at 11:30 pm? don't make those kids mad though, or tell them to stop doing things like wrestling on the hood of your car, they'll throw rocks at your door...

*shopping carts belong in grocery stores. and on my street. okay, maybe "belong" isn't the right word choice here but, regardless, within the last several weeks, i have not gone more than a couple days without a cart siting, either being pushed along or just chillin, usually parked in some cock-eyed fashion on the sidewalk, because the pusher has broken one of the wheels that has been expertly engineered for laminated floor, not potholes and sidewalk cracks. an empty shopping cart doesn't stay in one place for long though. similar to bikes, they seem to be hot commodities around here [what else can hold that many empties???] and soon disappear until the next "owner" realizes how much work pushing a broken cart is. one morning, as i was contemplating life through my giant front window (see sidenote), i noticed yet another shopping cart across the street. not uncommon, barely worth noticing. a few minutes later, an un-marked white van pulls up, the driver hops out, heaves the cart into the back, and drives off. interesting.

[sidenote] this giant front window is possibly the best part of my apt. you can see a lot by looking out a window like that.

*one of my favorite "i live in the ghetto anecdotes" to date is the Baby Car Seat Anecdote. My previous upstairs neighbors had a baby. [well, they still do, but they don't live there anymore. so,,, had? have? hmmm] With a baby comes a lot of things, like car seats. Sometimes car seats break, or don't fit, or start to smell really bad, or need to be thrown away for some other reason. Whatever the reason was, the neighbors were trashing the seat, and it was hangin by the road with the rest of the throw-aways and recyclables [look how environmentally friendly we are here...] As i enjoyed my coffee on that particular morning, i witnessed five different people stop to "rescue" the car seat from the trash - in a span of about 20 minutes. my favorite rescuers drove by, stopped the car, reversed the fifty yards or so back to my house, put the seat in their car, and then brought it back five minutes later after realizing it was broken.

MORAL OF THE STORY: everybody wants a free car seat. everybody wants a free shopping cart. nobody wants a broken one. they only like broken bikes.

Roth Un-Buried

Spent my fourth of july weekend embracing the current day hippie vibe at Rothbury, a four day music festival camping extravaganza. Headliners Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, etc. Pics are worth a thousand words:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2007112&id=108200076&l=99c73962d5

I can't take credit for this shot - from the official site - but it does a fantastic job of capturing the epic-ness that was the Grateful Dead double set Saturday Night. I am in the crowd. Somewhere. Surrounded by craziness.

Lifeguards' Choice

I could always tell if someone snuck a swipe of my “lifeguards choice” chapstick.

About three years ago, my friend Benjamin Sampedro introduced me to the most intense lip-protectant I have ever used: Burt’s Bees Weatherproofing Lip Balm. It’s basically straight beeswax and coconut oil with just enough titanium dioxide to turn your lips completely white if you aren’t careful (but hopefully not enough to give me cancer, apparently). A nice shade of purple can also be achieved by varying the amount applied… Anyway, Ben gave it to me as a gift. It was quite fitting, given the fact that I lived in Florida at the time, spent a good deal of every day in the sun, and was [still am] addicted to applying glossy and/or creamy type things to my lips. Either that or it was a practical joke to get me to unknowingly walk around with white lips. The absence of a make-up mirror on my bike ensured that happening a couple of times.

Regardless, the tube served me well and had great longevity. The longevity aspect is somewhat surprising, given the immense frequency with which I apply product to my lips. This perplexity is easily resolved by the fact that I could only apply tiny amounts at a time to prevent the white-lip look. Unknowing friends did not realize this however, and would so apply just like any normal chapstick. And I could always tell. [This is significant in the world of Alissa Jean because I don’t normally share lip products, or makeup in general. Call me a germaphobe but really, sharing chapstick is like kissing the person. I don’t feel like kissing everyone who forgot their tube of Burt’s Bees.] Tell-tale white lips were a nice way to maintain my small sense of "I know what's going on in my world".

Last week was the end of that era. After a thus-far cold and rainy June, summer has finally managed to break through to West Michigan. It has done so with a vengeance. Perhaps it’s making up for lost time, or maybe I’m just not used to the feeling of sunshine (what is that burning ball of fire in the sky? It looks sort of familiar…)

As the sun deigned to shine on West Michigan, raising the temperature about 30 degrees overnight, I felt obligated to soak up some of the rays. The outdoor pool at MVP (my place of employment) is a great location for doing this. It’s also a great location for going down water slides, running through sprinklers, and pretending to be a kid again, but that is a different topic. For those of you already thinking, wait a second, red heads don’t “soak up rays”, you are wrong. This was made quite obvious by the abundance of tan lines that made their appearance just in time for that wedding I went to. But again, that is a different topic. I am here to talk about chapstick, the thing that really matters.

It melted.

Restrooms located at the end of long, scary, smelly, hallway. Proceed at your own risk.

I don't shop very often. Probably because I find it a terrible chore. This becomes quite evident when a relatively routine shopping trip becomes a philosophical contemplation of life. It's the whole doing-something new-and-broadening-your-horizons thing. Who knew you could get that from shopping.

Anyway, I went shopping. It was time for a new bathing suit. Actually, make that new bathing suit separates. Yes, the clothing industry has figured out how to make even more money off these squares of fabric: separate the tops from bottoms, charging individually and creating countless potentially matching combo's. Clever, delightful, and maddening all at once.

Thoughts from the day:

Why do they always put mall bathrooms at the end of long, scary, smelly, hallways? Seriously, walking around my ghetto neighborhood at night is not supposed to feel safer than taking a potty break at our materialistic headquarters. On my way to the ladies' room I passed a teenager being apprehended for shoplifting. I think. I sincerely hope the guy with the pony-tail was a security guard.

Feeling the need to provide someone with a running commentary of my shopping trip, I texted my dear friend Gazzo, asking about the whole bathroom at the end of long, scary, smelly, hallway thing. He astutely replied that it is done to scare customers shit-less. BuDumCrash.

Sometimes I wonder what tourists do when they come to the Midwest, especially foreigners. Not that I don't love the Midwest, and not that there isn't plenty to do, it just doesn't necessarily seem like an international destinatition. I am pleased to announce: I figured it out. They go shopping at TJ Maxx.

It makes sense. TJ Maxx captures some of the key elements of the American Dream, which is obviously what tourists come here to experience. Make a life for yourself. Announce to the world that you have made that life by wearing brand name clothes. If you haven't made that life, wear discounted brand name clothes and fake it. Then get a TJ Maxx credit card and keep faking it. Until you make it. Or break it. Your bank account that is. Or the life. I suppose, however, since we're talking about the American Dream here, they're one in the same.

[It should be noted thatTJ Maxx is not the primary activity for all foreign tourists. I made this discovery a few weeks ago when Grand Rapids was bustling with Asian Suits in town to celebrate Amway's 50th birthday. Walking around downtown videotaping and photographing *everything* was clearly a much more attractive use of tourism free time than shopping the TJ Maxx clearance racks. ]

Trends annoy me. To a certain extent. I mean, I'm not going to be all elitist and say how terrible they are and how I'm so above them and disregard the fact that imitation is the best form of flattery, BUT, they get under my skin. I like to have a certain element about myself that is so, just, alissa jean. I'd say "unique" but that's so cliche... I like to follow fashion and styles somewhat, but more as a general guide or source of idea, never as a hard rule. Rules, specifically in the case of style, although one can continue the thought further, are limiting. [this is why What Not to Wear is a terrible show] Let's say I need a new skirt. Even better, let's say I need a new bathing suit. Excuse me, bathing suit separates. Given the limited amount of time and money I am willing to spend to meet this need, I find myself limited to the basic trends of the season. IE, a bunch of stuff that all, basically, looks the same. And the killer is that if I do manage to find something a little different, other people are going find it eventually too, which will then take away any actual sense of different at all.

Take, for example, my bright blue, plastic sunglasses. I was, by no means, the first to wear shades like this. I was, however, one of the first in my circle of people. That made them cool. To me. Now, they are cool to other people too, and, instantly, less cool to me. *sigh* The challenges of life are such.

But I digress. Sunglasses shopping was a while ago. I was shopping for bathing suit separates. I did not find what I wanted at TJ Maxx, or the next few stores I stopped at. I did find, however, that TJ Maxx is onto something with their dressing rooms.

Step into a TJ Maxx dressing room and you are instantly cast in the most flattering light possible. You're tanner, skinnier, and damn that outfit looks good; you should buy it. Seriously, the folks of TJ Maxx are onto something here. The key to making a sale is convincing the purchaser of how good they look in the clothes. Strategic lighting and mirror set up can make a world of difference. Unfortunately for them, they didn't make a sale on my because, no matter how good I looked in that dressing room, the suits just weren't what I was looking for.

Finding what I was looking for proved to be quite challenging. Probably because I had such an idea of what I was looking for, exactly. I didn't just want a suit; I wanted a Suit for Alissa Jean. Knowing what you want makes finding something that just sort of works not enough. You want what you want and not anything less. [Until you realize that you need something, because something is better than nothing, especially when it comes to swimming in public locations...]

Gazzo (to whom I was continuing to provide a text message play-by-play of my shopping trip, poor soul) took this as an opportunity to remind me that happiness isn't getting what you want, it's wanting what you have. or something like that. He didn't actually say the whole quote, he just made a reference to it which I immediately brushed off with a "as if you need to tell me that". because, obviously, I know the quote so well... I got the general idea at least.

Regardless, I want to get what I want.
The circular irony of it all is quite beautiful, really.

Okay, so maybe these thoughts weren't quite on the level of philosophy. They were however, the thoughts of my shopping trip. Take them for what they are.

much love!

PS - I did, eventually find some suitable bathing suit separates.