still life from found objects (well, found in my room).

3D glasses, hot pink nail polish, ice cream zippered pouch

nike hightops, mint-scented bubbles

I have so much random stuff.  I’m often thinking that X kitchen utensil would look nice with Z pair of earrings, and other odd groupings.  Unless both things are clothing items, I usually don’t have an excuse to pair them together.  Now I do.  Group portraits.

What’s in it for you, the reader?  Voyeuristic satisfaction of seeing the random things I have in my room?   Pretty color combos?  I dunno, sure!

Discovered this treasure of a store in Yoyogi Uehara.  It has stationary, books, stuffed figures, and art of Murakami, Yoshimoto Nara, Yayoi Kusuma, Chiho Aoshima, and other Kaikai artists.  I left with a giant puppy king.  You will get to meet him soon.

While my friend Cynthia was here, we went to a kimono and woodblock print museum.  The exhibit at the time was about the clothing from villages in Aomori, the countryside of Japan.  These villages are simple, and poor, and modest, yet the clothing from these villages is so beautiful.

The clothing from Aomori is called Boro.  Because cloth is expensive, pieces of clothing are passed down from generation to generation, and patched wherever and whenever there are holes.  After several generations, the kimono only has bits of its original cloth, instead a beautiful patchwork with pieces of each of the generations before.  Other distinctive clothing items from the villages included fish boots, grass rain coats, and intricately woven aprons.

The clothing from the exhibit was borrowed to film a village scene from Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams” (a really beautiful film by the way).

I was somehow really moved by the exhibit, by the effort these people took to make beautiful clothes to wear while working in the fields; it was reinforcement that fashion isn’t a luxury, fashion is about dressing yourself in things that mean something to you.

i love walking around with nothing but a camera and a few coins to buy a tea or milkshake.  it makes for a very inexpensive and entertaining afternoon.  i do this so often that i have folders and folders of pictures that i haven’t uploaded.  here are a few from a rainy monday in harajuku last year.  can you tell i am restless? i want super self-healing powers so that i can do this again soon.

When I was in the 2nd grade, my best friend and I would have sleepover parties in which we played with Barbies.  We’d have Barbie beauty pageants which mostly were contests of creative styling as all the Barbies were identical in face and body.  Then once, when we asked her dad to be a judge, he asked science questions for the interview portion and the pageant slowly evolved into a science bowl, which if I recall correctly, we were just as excited about.

It’s an oft mentioned topic among feminists and women in the sciences, but I can’t give you much information about how Barbies affect girls’ self image.  Even though I had Barbies growing up and played with them regularly (as described above or as characters in whatever stories I was making up) I’ve never even in my lowest self esteem moments wished I were more blonde, busty, or hourglass-waisted.  I’ve always seen Barbies as representing a certain kind of beauty, among the many kinds of beauty that exist among people.

So when my friend told me to vote online for Barbie’s next career, of course I did!  And of course I voted for computer engineer.  But I was doubtful of how it would be done.  Unlike, say, for a microbiologist, it’s harder to think of props.  A computer?  But everyone uses one.  What’s a computer engineer’s uniform?  Would she wear sweatpants and coffee stained tshirts?

And though yes, Computer Engineer Barbie won (no surprise because it was an online contest) it’s a bit as I feared it would be.  It’s like the time our CS department wanted to start a program for incoming fresh-women and asked one of my friends for advice, dead seriously, “Should we include a shopping trip?”  Apparently Mattel even worked closely with the president of the Soceity for Women Engineers when designing Barbie’s outfit.  So how come Barbie looks like she works as an IT Helpdesk person instead of looking like she just wrote her own video game?  Maybe it’s that terrible bluetooth headset.  Maybe it’s the sparklypants.  Maybe it’s that she’s smiling a little too widely.

So I tried my hand at designing a computer engineer Barbie.  I tried to draw it in the 80’s Barbie art style.  My own version comes with a soldering gun, wire cutters, and a crimper.  She wears a nerdy t-shirt (other contenders were “read the f*cking manual”, “ctrl-z”, and my own favorite “Six Chicks”).  Most importantly, this Barbie looks like she’s thinking.  I’d buy this computer engineer Barbie.  You know, I might even buy the original Mattel computer engineer Barbie.  I appreciate the effort, and it’s ridiculous.  I like ridiculous.

As a last note, moms and dads, it’s nice and all to buy your little girl things to remind her “You can be anything you dream of.”  But don’t stop there.  Be sure to provide her with all the power tools and electronic parts she needs so that she can make anything she dreams of.

My brother’s Christmas wish list was was short– a shirt with the phrase “One does not simply rock into Mordor”.  Being a fan of both rock and Mordor, I wanted to make a design with genuine elements of each.  I whipped something up in Photoshop loosely modeled on a vintage ACDC shirt and was so amused by it that when it came time to print the designs, I made a few extra.  Happily, my brother likes it and even told me that some friends and classmates said they want one too– but entry into the Mordor rock club can’t just be bought!!

There were many failures along the way to creating an actual shirt.  Trial and error taught me these things about printing for an iron-on:

- There are iron-on sheets specifically for dark shirts- using the ones for light shirts will barely show up on a dark shirt.

- The instruction manual for the iron-on sheets suggest not having detailed edges to make cutting out the design easier, but pshh, that’s the kind of rule I don’t follow.  To add a margin of error for cutting though, I added a thick black outline to the design.

- Designs show up better on solid grey than heather grey.  I used American Apparel’s Asphalt color.

black jacket: thrift store in shinjuku
denim skirt: thrift store in shinjuku
tights: jcrew
ring: vivienne westwood

No I most certainly do not own Gimli and Eowyn action figures why do you ask?