Posts from — January 2003

MIKANBOYA is a little orange boy! Exciting journey to be good freezed orange!!

Few things make me tingle the way the San-X site does. I’ve had a thing for Kogepan (The Sourpuss Bread Gone Wrong For Being Burned!) for a while now, but then one day Dana alerted me to the existence of Tissue San and The Shivering Buru Buru Dog, and so we spent the afternoon exploring the site and instant-messaging each other with pages we found: Look! The cheese family! The beer-chan! The what? The hell?

I like that there is much to learn on the San-X site. The character explanations are the best. The freaky genius San-X minds would like you to know that Tomatori was born as a result of a tomato experiment, but “Nobody knows the reason why Tomatori-chan looks like bird though.” Also, nobody knows why Kogepan gets drunk on milk. They’re happy to explain that Koyainu is a strange, square breed of dog with a roof on its back, but “What if taking off the roof!? It’s a secret.” Why are those little miniature cats that live in creampuffs inedible? Nobody know! Who is Aotomatori, and what does he like? Nobody know! It does not matter! Life is mystery! Is okay!

Just wanted to clarify that although this blog is on the front page of the site now, my original journal is still around, and I’ll continue to update it when I can.

If you’ve read me for more than a year or so you’ll know that the journal entries have become longer and more essay-like; they’re now the sort of pieces that I write when I suspect I have something big to say but don’t know what the hell it is yet, and I’ll take a couple of days and more than a thousand words to figure it out. It’s just not the sort of format that lends itself to to frequent updates, and during times when I’ve had a lot of other projects going on (like now, when I have this stuff plus a magazine article to work on), it was like sad tumbleweeds were blowing across the front page of my site. So I decided to redesign in a way that makes more sense. With, you know, my busy, hat-tossing, Mary Tyler Moore sassy gal lifestyle.

At the Meridien Hotel, New Year’s Eve:

We were on the tenth floor. Leigh figured out that the window in the room opened a few inches near the top; you’d turn the latch and the pane tilted in. It was just right, we thought, for dumping out a bag of confetti over the street. We watched the countdown on TV and then got to work.

What we didn’t count on was that the confetti would just slide down the slope of the glass to rest on the windowsill. We closed the window and stared out at the five-inch high pile of confetti sitting there like an abandoned hive. “Oh. Oh, well,” we said. We thought it would blow away in a few minutes.

We toasted everyone a Happy New Year. I’d met up with my friend Kristine and another friend for dinner and then I’d taken the subway two more stops to the hotel and there was champagne and this Frenchy hotel to make fun of and it was a good night. Only the confetti on the windowsill didn’t move. We kept going back over and tapping the glass. Someone opened the window again and we could hear the roar of lakefront air keening between the tall buildings. We closed the window again, hard. The confetti remained inert. I began to get very anxious. We’d wanted the confetti to toss itself gloriously through the wind like the fucking plastic bag in American Beauty, only of course more deliberately so, which I suppose is a very New Year’s Eve kind of concept.

Finally Leigh’s sister had the idea to take the sash off the terrycloth hotel bathrobe and dangle it out the window and drag the end of it back and forth across the windowsill. Most of the confetti was dislodged, and went somewhere else, and yay, that’s how 2003 started.