Army Kid

Beacon's closet rocks. I don't like stores where an image is already made for you, like F21, Urban Outfitters, Every Clothing Store That Exists In The World, etc...Beacon's is different because there's a huge range of styles and everything's secondhand. I was browsing and saw shirts that would allow you to fit in very well with Laura and Mary and Maw and Paw on Little House On The Prairie, and gold leggings that were being sold at 'AmAppy' last season for ridic. high prices are now $7.95, and crazy old dresses, and this jacket that I knew I must buy the instant I saw the pattern:

It's made out of silk, was only $18.95, and if anyone can click on the image and tell me what the Russian characters mean I will love you for life. I hope they actually mean something so I won't be like those white/black/hispanic people who tattoo chinese characters on themselves that don't mean anything. Those make me chuckle.

I tried on this dress I made a long time ago and which I've worn a grand total of ONCE but Ix-nayed it for being too dark. Oh well, back in the closet on the floor you go.

Then I tried to go brighter and happier (for the Cocorosie show on Wednsday) with this rainbow striped dress from Renegade for a circus-like feel, and a Wonder Woman tank that Linda gave me. I like these a lot...leaning towards Wonder Woman. Let the record show that I am not trying to look cute by putting my hair in pigtails. I'm growing my hair out and it's very scratchy on my sensitive neck and pigtails keep it off of my skin the best.

Wore this to the Brooklyn Bowl show with These Are Powers and The Drums. TAP's performance was weak[er?]. Maybe cuz Anna was wearing High Heels. Her dress and makeup were amazing though. Brooklyn Vegan has good pics but you gotta scroll all the way down to see Anna cuz there were 5 bands. (They also have nice pics from the Whitney show I went to. You can see how differently she's dressed there. Dark vs. bright.)

My Sister:

Linda also gave me/us this dress. It used to go down to our ankles/shins but Diana shortened it by cutting it at the waist and re-sewing. The pattern is really zany and kind of doesn't make sense. There's one line that says 'It's a yellow' so I'm guessing it was made in China or somewhere else where people don't speak English. Looking at the pattern is like being in the mind of a hyperactive schizophrenic little kid who loves to garden.

Whew, outfit hurl over! I can't breathe.

I swear, the next man, be he white, black, spanish, homeless, sane, or mentally unsound who says 'Ni hao ma' to me in a sleazy pickup line kind of way is getting his testicles chopped off, ground up, and fed to a pen of ravenous dirty pigs. How am I going to manage that? I don't know. BUT SERIOUSLY, it's such a no-win situation for me because if I simply ignore them, they chuckle cuz they 'got away with it' and I'm left to stew and fume. If I say something back and show that I'm annoyed/angry/offended, they still 'win' for having gotten under my skin.

So what the heck am I to do?!

I know I can simply Not Care but the problem is I do care. My mom's logic when I was really little was, "never say anything back because THEN they'll pull out a gun and shoot you." Um okay. Then when I got older, SOCIETY/friends/grownups said, "Ignore them because they're below you." But I want to say something back. The one time I did that recently, it felt so good. I got a total adrenaline rush and walked with a bounce in my step. I felt like I won. So I think I will do that from now on.

The Drums

The singer reminds me of Bryce Avary plus my sister dancing when she's in a zany mood.

Last night:

Official:

Just Numbers

Cat Mime & Sad Clown
12" x 9"
Acrylic

Well once again, the final product came out way different from what I originally planned.

A friend's aunt read a book on analyzing peoples' personalities based on a person they draw. It said when the feet are facing opposite directions it means you lack direction and don't know what you want out of life. I find that dubious now. It sounds like newspaper horoscopes; too general and vague. At the time though (10th grade), I believed her. So for years afterwards, whenever I drew people, I tried to remember to point their feet in one direction.

Right now the clown isn't taped or glued down.

Music

THIS IS WHY LIVING IN THE CITY IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN LIVING ON LONG ISLAND.

I feel like all of a sudden I'm hearing about an explosion of things.

The List

Thursday-

These Are Powers

Cymbals Eat Guitars

The Drums

Real Estate

I saw These Are Powers when they were playing with Vivian Girls and loved them.

($10 plus metrocard = $15)

Friday - Wizard Rock at Phoebe's Cafe in Williamsburg, which gives me a good excuse to also swing by Beacon's. I heard about this from a friend on Facebook. I know MaryBeth from Middle School. Her solo band's called Nagini, and she's playing with Split Seven Ways.

(Free! Just $5 metrocard and whatever I buy at Beacon's.)

For those of you who don't know (it's okay, I didn't find out until last year), Wizard Rock is a modern phenomenon where kids get together and make songs from the perspective of various characters from Harry Potter.

Saturday - A Michael Jackson birthday party by Spike Lee. OK, so this one I can't really see myself going to. I've never listened to any of his songs...except that one short clip in that one movie.

and then next Wednsday is the Cocorosie concert. They haven't toured in like 2 years. Sucks cuz I got into them right around the time when they stopped touring...so I had to go through those years of obsession w/ no chance of seeing them. They were one of those bands that had a big impact on my beliefs and helped me to ~Grow and ~Change as a person.

Stephen Christian introduced them to me on his blog, The Modesty Writers. He wrote how he loved to look at this one artist's tortured & twisted self portraits while listening to Cocorosie. That piqued my interest. I searched and found; listened and loved. Ah! Poetic.

this was the very first thing I saw/heard of them:


I hope your computer/laptop has better sound than mine.

then I listened to Animals (which is on their Myspace) and loved that also.

Obviously, only cool people use toy 'instruments' in their music. And obvz songs where the words don't make any sense literally, but make a lot of sense emotions-wise are the best kind of songs.

But WAIT there's more! Nina (Kevin Barne's wife) tweeted this today :

Ninatwin: Gonna have u paint her nudy body in NYC. Promise to do some serious waxing beforehand :D

about 3 hours ago from TwitterFon

Do you think she's serious???

Detective Dusky Rose, or Dusty

A memory from childhood:

I was in kindergarten or first grade. My dad had received a rectangular paperweight made out of glass. My mom told me it was very important and special. It was a pretty sparkly crystal and I decided to bring it to school to show people. A classmate asked if she could borrow it to show her parents. She swore she'd bring it back the next day. I was unsure but said okay. I told my mom and she yelled at me. I never got it back; the girl said she 'lost' it.

Inspiration: Sherlock Holmes, nicknames, love, sunshine, eyes, Picasso, and monocles.

My sister thinks I'm going to be one of those old people you hear about on the news who dies when it gets too hot.

N.N.N.N.

Went through the weirdest emotional state last night. Don't understand it all but just glad it left with the morning and a cup of tea.

Anyways, I'm feeling really excited about the near future. My sister will be starting school again next week and she'll be in the city too, just a subway ride away. Hope our chickens do okay without her at home.

Really want to make tacos or a nacho salad next week.

I finished a painting based on one of my nicknames and favorite genres - the Mystery.

Read this:

Saw it when I went to the Whitney Museum with Diane and just about dropped dead. Given his reputation, I'd always imagined Mapplethorpe to look something like Karl Lagerfeld. I had no idea he was so good looking. He is also a N.N.N.N. and in the spirit of mystery, I will reveal the roots of that acronym at a later date. Muahaha.

I also finished Sad Clown & Cat Mime painting. Still need to take good photos of that. My scanner's at home so I need to wait for the right lighting and make sure I've got a real steady hand.

I want to make something out of these cardboard shards that were left over when I made the Shredded Stripes Tee. I'm thinking a vase for the fake black leaves hanging in my room? So far I've painted them a glossy black. The hard part now is coming up with an interesting looking design that'll work.

This will probably take me a while.

(Such interesting and nice comments on my last 2 posts!!! I'm glad you guys liked my ideas for the two stories. You people are rad and deserve copious amounts of all your favorite things.)

Le Petit Déviant

by: Yvonne Gao (age 21)

The story behind the story:

I made this last year for my boyfriend. He loved to make up nicknames for me, and while I liked most of the 4796243876 nicknames, the one I really didn't like was 'cupcake'. So I wrote this to try and get him to stop. It worked.

Little Miss Tall

OMG

Mr. Shorty blasted Miss Tall and ... YOWE!

Look what my sister found while cleaning our room. I must've wrote it when I was 5? 6? Have no memory of it.

I think I modeled it after myself because my last name (Gao) in Mandarin means Tall or Big. But I was never especially tall. Though I do like to eat a lot.

This is totally going on my sidebar along with Blogger Meetup and Bento cooking.

Oh yes and my Chinese name is Yifan. It means average person. My parents decided on that due to some old superstition that whatever you name your child, they'll wind up being the opposite of. (So if you want a pretty daughter, name her Ugly.)

I changed my name to Yvonne in Middle School.

Author Zadie Smith also did that. (Her name used to be Sadie)

I had a friend named Harriet in Middle School, and when I randomly saw her again a few years later, she was going by 'Jennifer'.

So the kids on the Internet say

Heyho!

for once I feel like I have too much to blog about. One thing at a time. I went to my friend Kazi's graduation party. We took the train to school together. He majored in Pharmacology, then switched to Bio and is now working with the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). I made him this card two hours before I left based on some of his facebook pics.

It looks like him to the extent that he has brown skin, dark hair, and glasses. Drawing realistically is not my strong point hehe.

We had yummy Indian food at The World's Fair Marina in Queens.

(I didn't know where to look cuz there were two people with cameras. )

I'm wearing the shredded stripes tee! =D

Majors from right to left, starting with me cuz I'm most important:

Psychology, Theatre Arts, Biology, undeclared, BioChem, Pharmacology, Pharmacology, and unknown.

I have about 2 weeks off from work because I work at a preschool and it's their summer vacation. This is good and bad. Bad for the obvious reason that I won't make any money, and good because I have more time to do things. So far, I've finished a small painting, and read a new book.

The Dead Ant

This is a scheduled post.



macro of my windowsill



Black A-line skirt, handmade by sister.


Sometimes I feel bad squashing an ant. It's crawling along, livin life and minding its own business and suddenly hard tissue paper crushes the little body and tears it apart. (Thank goodness I've only had to kill tiny ants here. With the bigger ones, you can actually feel/hear the crunch.) Then again, ants are like little machines or computers with few commands built in: find food, feed colony, serve Queen. That's it. One is completely interchangeable with another.

Ant Facts:

- the word comes from West Germany and means 'The Biter'
- Myrmecologists are people who study ants
- ant colonies can have more than one queen, or no queen
- Drones are winged males. Worker ants are females.
-Ants mate in the air and it's called Nuptial flight. (sounds pretty!)
- Females can reproduce asexually, and one species of ant is all Female
- Ants do not have 'hive minds' or group minds

- The queens can live for up to 30 years, and workers live from 1 to 3 years. Males are more transitory, and survive only a few weeks.

- The Chinese character for ant (蟻/蚁) means "insect (虫) which behaves properly (義/义)". The Japanese character for ant (蟻) also shares this etymology.

- In some parts of the world (mainly Africa and South America), large ants, especially army ants, are used as surgical sutures. The wound is pressed together and ants are applied along it. The ant seizes the edges of the wound in its mandibles and locks in place. The body is then cut off and the head and mandibles remain in place to close the wound.

Ew.

The Daring Dash

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The famous DIY (Shredded Stripes)

Remember?




Modeled after :




Became -




As you can see from the first pic, all you need to make this is any old tee, a sharp blade, and a thick piece of cardboard. I had to fold mine in half because it was too thin. It's cool, comfy, and I've been wearing it 3 times a week.

If you decide to make this, show me! and be sure to give credit for the original idea to Ben.

A few more pics on my Flickr.

The pervasive stink of Kant. Why?

I need a new blog post. Stop staring at me Violet. Violent Violet sounds so cool. Isn't there a band called that or something? Violent Violetta...? Too lazy too google. There is.

I love Kevin's blog. Reading it, you'd never guess that he was the lead singer / creative person behind one of the most awesome bands to exist right now.

Some of his posts are random and border on boring. Others are a special treat. His own interesting and honest thoughts, which are rare to get from celebrities and regular folks alike! And which, for the record, are no 'better' or 'worse' than anyone else's interesting and honest thoughts. And that is the beauty of it.

And also for the record, Interesting and Honest go together because any honest thought is automatically interesting.

409

A few things I'm proud of, slash happy with, from this weekend:

An open-faced sandwich my sister made.

-Scrambled egg
-4 slices of tomato
-portabella mushrooms
-basil leaves
-salt & pepper
-olive oil (drizzled on at end)




Drew this quickly one night when I was feeling unhappy. I think it came out looking like Violet Baudelaire.


-Crayon and Pen
-Unedited


I also finally made this shirt. It came out good so I'm really happy about that. I'll post about it later when I have time to take photos of me wearing it. (ok it's not really about having time, but being in the mood. This weekend, my nose was chapped and dry from near constant blowing, and I needed a shower bad so I didn't feel very model-y.)



I went to a small organic/health food store with my sister, not to buy anything cuz the prices there are even higher than Trader Joe's, but to show her their pet robin. Just as I hoped, the man invited us to the back room to see the bird. Him and his wife rescued it on the 4th of July, 2 years ago, after a huge rain storm. They tried setting it free twice, but it always came back. I held out my arm and in barely a minute or two, it flew onto me! The man said that was remarkably quick and that usually the bird goes through a series of checking-you-out actions before it lands on you. That made me feel flattered. The robin's name is Obin. I will go back next weekend and try to get some photos.

They're so proud of the bird and love it a lot. They're Taiwanese, and when he found out that my sister and I were Chinese, he started telling us how when he was young, you could get killed, imprisoned, or beaten for "talking about China". You mean talking bad about China? No, anything.

Live in darkness, dress bright.

My favorite outfit at the moment. Thermal shirt was purchased a few years ago at a store called Daffy's. It makes me so happy when I finally find a good way to wear something. I hate when clothing goes to waste just cuz I don't know how to wear it in a way that works. I'm not buying anything new from now on. Instead gonna figure out how to make what I already have work. Shorts from Beacon's, Bag and sandals were each $1 and from Old Navy.




An update on how the painting is coming along ...




I was talking with a friend today and you know what, it is hard to have my first full time job while also living on my own for the first time. I get so caught up with analyzing possible deep causes of my feelings that I miss the obvious. It's an adjustment and it's only been a month. Sure it has its perks. I get to go to interesting places in the city more often. I can paint and stay online without being nagged to clean the kitchen, or be guilt-tripped for doing something so vain and frivolous as taking pictures of myself wearing clothes. At the same time, all of a sudden, I feel so ON MY OWN. If crap happens *and it does*, I have to deal with it and make it work out. There's just no one to rely on besides myself.

Certain people and animals are far away and inaccessible.

So yes, even though the pics in this post are bright and happy, I'm feeling the opposite right now.

But it's okay cuz Linda just handed me a menu stuffed in our mail slot of a crepe restaurant. Crepes are one of those foods that I've never had and which makes my mouth water just thinking about it. I am cheered by the thought that the Crepe n' Tearia is so close and that one day soon I will go and indulge myself perhaps on a peach, ice cream, and whipped cream crepe, or a CHICKEN TERIYAKI CREPE?! Lol and omg they serve "Trendy Bubble Tea". Not just regular bubble tea, but trendy! Now I MUST have some.

And I'm dying to write, aka complain, about work here, but I won't lest I go the way of this woman.

There's also a 'Mexican Crepe' which sounds incredibly odd to me, but hey I like Mexican food and I like Crepes.

I hope I didn't sound too needy in this post. I like my alone time! I do! I like even more to have my alone time with someone in the background.

Kay, that's it for tonight. My hair's just about dry now so I can go to bed without having a bulbous head tomorrow. Lately it's been really fun and relaxing to blog; like I need to. Thanks for reading you!

You make me feel real

Interesting concepts with lots of neat surprises.



I've recently started painting again. Almost done. Just need some glue.



I think the first shirt that was photoshopped looks better than the second (real) one. Owls and bikes are two very cliched prints. It was a gift from a friend though, so I don't care.



So damn pretty -





September 2nd they'll be in NYC. My first time seeing them. Look for me there. I'll be the girl trailing Bianca and kissing the ground she walks upon.

Original content. Ever see an awesome blog title or Facebook status and think, wow the person who came up with this is amazing and I want to be their friend, then find out it's lyrics?

"I'm not inside you, you're all around me."
- Facebook status