Okay, HI

HI,

I’m in Hawaii. I’m not so much into being in front of the computer right now. What with all the beach and parents to look after Arch. I do have work to do while I’m here, and I’ll be back to posting then.

Right now I’m watching Emperor Strikes Back with my 18 year old brother. I’m sunburned and I went running on a long-dormant volcano today.

I’m going to drink tea and knit now.

Wish you were all here! Imagine that party!

XOML

Aloha, Fan Club!

Dear Fan Club,

I want to say thank you. I’ve often said (to excuse any insecurities I might have over getting a fraction of the uniques my regular commenters get) that I am a blogger’s blogger. I am like the caviar of the blogging world, and you, dear readers, are the caviar wanters. The caviar desirers. The caviar cadavers. Wait, not that. The caviar carers, caviar crankers, cockers, cookers, combusters?

Whatever.

You guys are the champagne of beers.

And I appreciate you. I want to taste your fish eggs and have your Miller High Life shaken up and poured on my head and, more importantly, my chest as I wear a white t-shirt.

Because, without you, (and without my innate, shocking ability to network, good shoes, nice cleavage and pretty smile, which I use to get people to pay me money to write for the internets and teach classes on social media) I would not be going to Chicago as a speaker at BlogHer. Yes, Fan Club, I am going to influence other bloggers. Eep!

I’m going to talk about how I used this tiny little blog to leverage myself into paid internet writing gigs. Panel description here.

It was sort of a long journey from blogging to getting paid to write for the internet, and teaching classes. But so many people have helped me along. Mainly V. But there are others who read this blog and have actually hired me to do stuff. There are people who have called me brilliant and their influence on others led me to other things. Speaking at Ignite Portland helped a ton. And there is a lot to be said for smiling pretty and unwavering determination. For never actually believing the word no. Believe me, every single major milestone in my life, began with a no. I was the LAST person on the waiting list for the MFA program from which I graduated. My novel was turned down by 21 different editors. As a freelance journalist, I was turned down by every single paper for whom I’ve written.

People love to tell writers that it’s impossible to make a living. Writers have felt no hesitation in expressing, to my face, their distaste of blogging. The word disparaging comes to mind. Shortly after one of these discussions, I started calling myself a professional blogger.

And so, Chicago. I’m excited. I hope you’ll be there too.

I’d like to say thank you, to all of you. And, to quote Zoe Trope, it’s all your fault.

PS. While you’re reading this, I am on an airplane. I’ll be back!

I Got a Hair Cut

Yesterday I went to Bishops here in Portland to get my hair cut. For those of you not in Portland, let me break down Bishops for you. There are several Bishops. You can get a hair cut for about $20; you don’t need an appointment. No matter what time of day you’re there, they offer you beer. Free beer. And, best of all, it’s all rockabilly types who cut the hair. No 20 year-old gay men in silver lamé shoes that will FUCK YOUR HAIR UP despite being all, “I’m gaaaaay! And I live in the Misssssssion! In San Franciscoooooo! I know how to cut curly haaaaaair! And I have silver lamé shoooooooes!” [Private message to that little punk who cut my hair about four years ago, not only did you make me hate silver lamé shoes and anyone wearing them, but for a solid day, I thought to myself, I will never trust a gay man to cut my hair again. THINK ABOUT THAT!!!]

And, what’s better, there are a ton of rockabilly chicks who work there. These chicks are all tattooed and they wear little clothing and wash hair all tough and you can just stare at their cleavage complete with like twelve tattoos on each breast.

It’s a truly wonderful Portland experience.

As I was waiting for my *free* haircut, (they also give out punch cards and Steve generously gave his filled out punch card to me) I was sitting on the black leather couch listening to, I don’t know, Johnny Cash remixed by Ratatat, and writing this very blog post in my mind. It was all about the hot rockabilly chicks and how I was sitting there picking my chick out. And thinking to myself, the blond one has done me many times and she’s good, but who is that brunette across the room? Hmmm. Maybe she’d give good head (get it!).

And it was my turn to get a haircut, and sure enough, the brunette was open. So I marched right up, and, as I approached, I thought, that’s a man. A man, baby.

Now I have some experience with the rockabilly thing. In my 20’s I went out with mods, and then married a scooter boy. I know vintage clothes. I know how long one has to work at looking the part. And what with all the dry cleaning, thrift shopping, airing out of smoky b.o. items, and hair and makeup, it’s a lot to do. The rockabillies have it harder than mods because the girls need to put their hair up in complex buns and curls and whatever. Plus they need that alabaster skin.

And here’s a man dressing up as a woman in that part. So the work is just doubly time-consuming and tedious.

So she (I’m going to refer to this rockabilly chick as a she, though he was a he, because I live in Portland and the people here have trained me to refer to people in their gendernuetralorientedidentified preference) cut my hair and we chatted, and all I wanted to say was, Dear God, what time do you wake up in the morning? IS A GUY IN A PAIR OF DICKIES AND A WIFE BEATER WORTH IT? And then I remembered that yes, a guy in a pair of dickies and a wife beater is very, very worth it.

And she gave me an awesome haircut!

Hello Internet

Hi Fan Club,

Back Fence PDX was last night and it was off the hook. So good. The tellers were on fire, the audience was in a great mood. It was just marvelous. I’m so proud to co-produce the show. Brew did some video. And I recorded it using Garage Band so we can get some MP3’s happening. It was just great!

And, if you missed out on paying to watch me speak to you, please know you can still do that! You can pay $65 for me and MediaChick to skool you on social media on Saturday. Link to the class here. There’s free lunch and by the time you’re done, you’ll have a nice, solid grasp on social media and how to write for the internets.

Finally, Recovering Californian has entered into a partnership with Face of the Cookie for a new blog feature without a name. Maybe someone can come up with a name? Yes, please come up with a name. Anyway, here’s the deal, Kiala and I were not meant to be apart. What’s more, my shiny-haired friend is living in a city that basically invented the sanctimonious white liberal. It’s ground zero for food snobbery and this repellent under-handed classism unique to former hippies, which involves said former hippies pandering to anyone of a different race, but the person working behind the counter at the Starbucks is nothing more than shit on their shoes. People in San Francisco never, ever make eye contact. EVER. Giving someone your phone number is a great way to ensure they will never call you. San Francisco is so isolating, it verges on soul-scorching. And before anyone jumps on me and defends the City by the Bay, know that I lived there for ten years.

And there’s Kiala. Living there and doing yoga. A lot of yoga.

Well, no more Internet. No more.

There are some cool things about San Francisco. And Kiala has yet to find them. So I’m going to send her out on assignments to go and find these cool things the city has to offer. And she’s going to send me out to find cool Portland stuff because, while I love this city, it can be *ahem* difficult to live in a city of half a million people, after living in San Francisco and LA.

We will give our assignments out on our blogs, and then the assignee will document her experience on her own blog.

Without further ado–

Kiala’s first assignment:

San Francisco loves giving a hand out to artists. This was especially true in the depression when everyone was broke but artists were like, hey! Money! There are a ton of WPA art projects that remain in San Francisco, including the amazing murals at the Beach Chalet, and some Diego Rivera work at City College. But Beach Chalet is at the beach, which is sort of far from Kiala, and City College is located in the armpit of San Francisco.

My favorite murals are in Coit Tower in North Beach. I loved them so much, Steve and I used to sit in the free part of Coit Tower and spend an afternoon with some pastels and sketch different parts. We were talking about this last night and how odd it was that suddenly I thought, “Oh, I know that I draw worse than a koala bear with a sharpie and a shred of toilet paper, but yes, let’s go sketch at Coit Tower!” But we did it. A lot. And it was really, really fun.

So, Krazybee you must go to Coit Tower and check out / draw the murals inside.

Last Chance

Okay, Back Fence PDX has gotten so much attention over the past week and tickets are going so fast! I want you all to be there. I want you all to root for these amazing storytellers. So buy tickets in advance! Fair warning…

A Tiny Bit of Over Reaching

Normally I just don’t care about holidays. The rest of my life could pass without a single holiday and I wouldn’t miss them. At all. I just don’t care. But Steve loves holidays so I’ve been trying over the past year to love them too. Trying, Internet. He put up Christmas lights for the first time (they’re still up, thankyouvermuch) and I actually enjoyed Thanksgiving last year.

This Valentine’s Day I thought, well, I’m a heterosexual American woman so I will place unrealistic expectations on myself and my mate and the amount of pressure created will correspond exactly with the amount of love Steve and I have between us.

And yesterday was a perfect day to do this, not only because it was Valentine’s Day, but because my short list of errands for that day included, the bank, the grocery store, the liquor store (you can’t buy booze at the market here in Oregon, you have to go to a liquor store. This is so fucking Oregon, the state where not a single thing can be simple but rather must be set up so that people will feel warm and fuzzy inside because they’ve SAVED PEOPLE/THINGS/ANIMALS/RECYCLED GOODS LESS FORTUNATE and spent extra time doing so), copy store to pick up something that is big news for me, but you must wait to know what it is, three loads of laundry, bike ride, take Archie to the park, library and read some stories, make Steve’s Valentine’s Day card , clean all the messes that occur when I’m cleaning other messes and, AND because food = love, make homemade ciabatta bread, homemade ice cream and chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. All with a three year old who does not nap and, have I mentioned, I HAVE NO CHILDCARE. EVER!

(Anyone want to watch Archie on February 21st for four hours in the morning? I agree that taking sitters based solely on the fact that they read my blog is a questionable method, but I need a sitter. For four simple hours. Please.)

So I did all of this, Internet. I did all of it. Except the chicken was still frozen solid when it came time to roast it. And I was running about an hour late with all the food. And Steve came home to find me wild eyed. WILD EYED. A little like I am now, because I haven’t fully recovered from the whole situation. And I wanted to cry a bit because I hate Valentines Day and holidays in general and why did I just do this?

So, he put away the roasted veggies. He wrapped the chicken back up. He sliced off some bread for all of us and then took us out to hot wings.

And so, Internet. The moral of the story is, chicken wings = love.

On the Fifth Day We Rest

Well, do you all feel incredibly superior now? I hope so. It’s been a tough week, Internet, of making others feel small, but we’re here, at the end.

I don’t have much planned today because I’m living through the final hours of a migraine that started at about 4pm yesterday. Aren’t migraines the best? I always think of them as the cost of my creativity and awesome brain power. It’s true!

Some thoughts on palm oil: I think the woman was using it because it’s got superb mouthfeel and it’s very, very cheap. Plus our palate has become used to it. Until recently, most everything had palm oil. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s palm oil was the choice of fat for processed food. In fact, legislation was passed to encourage palm oil consumption. But because palm oil, as Stoogie pointed out, is by no means an American grown food, American farmers were pissed. And then came High Fructose Corn Syrup so American farmers could plant corn and make their money providing a sweetner that was like eleventy million times more sweet than sugar. With this cheap (and vegetarian aka “healthy”) fat and sweetener, processed food could be very cheap and consumed by the masses. So you see a rise in processed food right along with the rise in palm oil imports and farmers planting a ton of corn. Problem is, palm oil and HFCS are so incredibly bad for us (worse than sugar or lard or butter or whatever) and these processed foods provided cheap calories, the poor were just eating it up. Cheap calories! Think about that for a second. And now Type 2 diabetes is rampant in the lower classes. They’re eating far too many calories and fat and the calories and fat they’re eating are toxic. It’s the first time in history that the poor are consuming too many calories. Used to be the poor were skinny (starving) and the rich were fat.

And here’s this salad dressing bitch trying to poison the middle and upper class with her poor diseases!

(Couldn’t let you think I’d gone soft with this headache.)

Anyway, when my head feels better, I’m going to contact this salad dressing maker and do what Ceci said in the comments, which is just be direct and say to her that there’s no reason palm oil needs to be in that dressing and why didn’t she use olive oil. I’m going to be friendly and as direct as possible. I’m actually not that into the Portland method of communication, which involves using twitter as a bitching board about people you know instead of just approaching them directly, and complaining on my blog about things I could address with people in a friendly way. I mean, I still put it on my blog, but I’ll just, you know do something too.

And, at 10pm tonight I’ll be on Strange Love Live. I’m getting excited. We’re all wearing jammies. Until yesterday, I owned no jammies. So I bought some at Target. All I know is that these jammies involve a red camisole with white hearts and I’m going to need to safety pin it to my flesh so my boobs don’t fall out. Yes, it’s a video podcast.

Day Four: I Know! How Much More Will You Have to Endure?

*Special Note: I will be on Strange Love Live talking about sex on Friday at 10pm. Tune in, would you?*

Today’s challenge is to do your American duty and vote!

I’m going to do a poll here at MelissaLiondotcom. I know.

So, here’s the sitch — Steve and I and Arch went to the hippie organic sanctimonious market aka New Seasons. For my non-Portland readers, let me fill you in. This is the organic, posh expensive market in Portland — the capital of sanctimonious food worship.

I love it there.

Nothing makes me feel more superior than paying a small fortune for California citrus.

And they always have free samples. Very good free samples. Like wine and beer. And cheese and California citrus.

Yesterday they were sampling salad dressing. They were putting it on mixed baby greens and serving it in wee compostable bowls and you’d eat it with a wee compostable spoon.

I took a serving and handed one to Steve. It was very good. Now, I normally don’t buy salad dressing because that’s an excellent place to find really disgusting fat and high fructose corn syrup. I haven’t bought salad dressing in probably five years. But this dressing was pretty good. So I checked out the label and saw palm oil. I know because I taught food politics that palm oil is more fattening than lard.

So I say to Steve, who was behind me, “Steve, this has palm oil. ICK!” And then I check out the nutritional information and the serving size of TWO TABLESPOONS has 26% of ones daily recommended fat. 26%!

So then I put the dressing back and say to Steve, “Oh my god! That has 26% of my daily recommended fat! For two tablespoons!”

And the woman behind the free sample counter says, “Excuse me. Do you have any questions about the dressing.” And I say, “No.” Because my questions were pretty much answered. And she said, “Well I make the dressing.” And I promptly sunk my head into my shoulders and walked away.

Steve said he could see me putting my foot in my mouth from a mile away and chose not to stop it.

I wandered the store after that feeling a mixture of guilt (because I’d been a total douche to a small business owner) and outrage (if you’re going to be all local and sustainable, part of that is being mindful of your customers’ health. Palm oil is disgusting. As is two tablespoons containing one quarter of the fat you should eat in one whole day.)

And now, Internet, use your god given American right and VOTE!

Day Three of the MeL-ISSSIC

Whoa I didn’t even do that on purpose.

Here’s what you can do on day three — stay true to your elite white liberalism and support the arts! Nothing says superior like uttering the phrase, “I support theeeeee aaaaahrts.” You must say it like that. So, you can support the arts in a variety of ways. I like giving money to KCRW because their Morning Becomes Eclectic is magnificent. So you can do that, OR you can buy a ticket to the next Back Fence PDX! It’s a week from today and the storytellers are most awesome. And there will be hula hoopers. HULA HOOPERS! Add this image to your blog and tell your friends to support the arts too. By lining my pockets with CASH.

If you’re not in Portland, then buy a ticket anyway and give it to a Portland orphan. A Porphan, if you will.

Day Two

And we’re up.