Ann’s Fashion Tarot: The Major Arcana is the new black

Unlike other Tarot decks that come with disclaimers about how this is for entertainment purposes only, Ann’s Fashion Tarot is for real. Absolutely guaranteed to improve your style and your life and the world.

Homebound Tarot Card Reading Waitress by Claudia Danielson.

There are some risks. You might get The Empress card and end up cutting off the sleeves of something that was better with sleeves. You might get The Hanging Mannequin card, and accidentally hang upside down too long and pass out before you have a chance to show off your flushed cheeks. You might take the Death card too seriously and over-purge and get rid of things you’ll miss. That’s ok.

It’s all ok.

If you love a black silk blouse, set it free.  If it comes back to you on the black blouse rack at your local Goodwill, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never really looked that good on you.

December 1!

Clear your mind. Maybe clean out your closet. We start soon.

Great mother moments since Bad Mother Music

Lots has happened since Yumiko and I debuted Bad Mother Music last winter. In August, for example, my son came home from camp with a beard.

“Is that a God’s Eye you made in the craft cabin?”
“Yes.”
“Is that a full beard you grew on trail?”
“Yes.”

He started a night class in creative writing and let me edit his first assignment.

“What’s your poem about?”
“A dead opossum.”
“A+!”

Sometimes I ask what’s going on at school, like socially, and he gives me nothing. Recently he told me that every time I do that, I pick at my fingers. That’s how he knows I’m going to ask about his life but I’m going to try to stay cool like the cool mom. This was a great mother moment because it indicated that my son had keen powers of observation.

“I don’t do that.”
“Yes, you do.”

There was the great moment of realizing he could probably handle any crap any woman could throw at him. It was the morning of the biggest gig of my life, and I experimented with hair color. The result was bad. There was no time to fix it. During sound check, the kid, who also wore a band shirt and sold CDs all night, walked back into the cheap seats and caught my eye. He pointed to his hair, and then to me, and then made a thumbs-up. I would say that means he knows how to be a good man.

“…”
“It looks awesome.”

There was the great moment of saving his science grade. He said was getting a D because he didn’t have enough bugs. I said, go to the basement. He said, I already did. There’s nothing. I said, how about the globe from your ceiling fan?

“It’s been like ten years since I cleaned this out.”
“Sweet.”

Right now is the great moment of realizing there are lessons left to teach even though he’s as good as out the door. Recently I was grocery shopping and he was like, can you get ice cream? I said, well, have you broken up with anybody recently? Or has anybody broken up with you? No, he said.

“Ice cream is for breakups.”
“Can’t you just get it anyway?”
“No, honey, ice cream is what makes breakups special.”

Bad Mother Music, reprise
Saturday, Oct. 13, 4-5:30 p.m. at the Women and Spirituality Conference
Centennial Student Union Hearth Lounge
Minnesota State University, Mankato

Conference registration info is here. Or, you can just slip into our session. Subversive walk-ins are welcome. You know who you are.

Pancreas ex vivo part three: what the insulin-dependent are wearing to the candy aisle

Hy-Vee has the seasonal candy out so I thought it would be good to decorate some pancreas ex vivos accordingly. Here’s one to wear right now, when the leaves are perfect.

try to eat colors with your eyes

Here’s one for Halloween.

raw pumpkin = two carbs per ounce

Here’s a more festive and permissive Thanksgiving design.

totally worth a bolus

This is for post-Thanksgiving, during the family arguments.

dry martini got no carbs at all

Here’s one for the jeans-and-a-dressy-top holiday party.

this looks so pretty on you

This is for the rest of winter on the long blue nights that are good for walking.

you gotta walk fast breathe deep in the cold

I mean really good for walking, better than summer. One time I was a research subject in a grad student’s study about weight training and diabetes. He told me if people would exercise outdoors as much in the winter as in the summer, they’d feel great, because your body works harder in the cold. He would say that kind of thing while he handed me barbells and shouted “you can do it!” It was wonderful. He was studying to be a personal trainer. I don’t know where he is now. If he were to get in touch and request a line of stick-on insulin pumps decorated to fire people up for winter walking and healthy holiday eating and responsible martini consumption, and whatever else, for sale at Hy-Vee next to candy corn and Christmas Peeps, I would be game.

Bad Mother Music reprise: Bigger, badder, more spirit-y

My friend Yumiko and I wrote a song cycle about motherhood – about mothering well, mothering horribly, mothering with abandon, mothering while daydreaming about abandonment.

We were delighted to share the songs with good friends one night last winter at Gustavus Adolphus College, where Yumiko is a professor of music.

Our friend Nicole, famous author and not-bad-enough mother of six, wrote a great post about it. Our friend Brenda said we should try to get it into MSU’s Women & Spirituality Conference. So we applied. We got in! We are thrilled to be on a conference schedule with “Ethical Spell-Casting,” “An Introduction to Zuni Fetishes,” “The History of Palestine 1949-2011” and “Daily Practice Sucks.”

Please save the date: Saturday, October 13, 4-5:30 p.m. in the Hearth Room of MSU’s Centennial Student Union. And check out the full lineup. Whether you pay to enjoy the whole conference or sneak in for just our session, we’d love to see you there. Sneaking in actually might be the thing. Bad is the new oxytocin.

Fifty shades of jackboot: A comparison-contrast of Anastasia Steele and German soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge

Rachael and Steph and I were going to write reviews of Fifty Shades of Grey but we’ve all been busy and I haven’t acquired the book. I did read a review on The Atlantic Wire. I also just read The Reich’s Last Gamble: The Ardennes Offensive December 1944, which was available without a waiting list at the Blue Earth County Library. Differences between German soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge and Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey are as follows:

1. Group experience versus one-on-one.

2. Pawns in an overly ambitious political plan, versus pawn in a simple plan with small number of tactics and concrete measures of success.

Similarities:

1. Attracted to power.

2. Believe this is the best thing ever to happen to them.

3. Went into it weak. Aside from their superior footwear, the jackboot, German soldiers lacked adequate materials and support, and suffered from fatigue. Anastasia, I don’t know, the book may or may not explain how she got there.

 4. The more uncomfortable it gets, the more important to keep believing or else look stupid.

5. Probably lives not going anywhere.

 6. Granted only minimal freedom of action.

In conclusion:

“The need to be dominated is very personal.”  -Dominique Aury, Story of O

“For an army that was so magnificently equipped as the American, it was surprising…that one of their major casualty producers was not the hand-grenade splinter, but rather the inadequacy of their footwear. Trench foot, caused by the fact that the GIs’ footwear was not anywhere near as good as the German jackboot, accounted for a significant number of casualties.”  -George Forty, The Reich’s Last Gamble: The Ardennes Offensive December 1944

“And history is always an indicator.”  -Jen Doll, The Atlantic Wire

What the hyperglycemic are wearing this summer

Not superhappy with the results of my last big blood test. Thought some color and rhinestones on my pancreas ex vivo might help.

This is my July 6-9 pump after a little wear and tear.

This is July 9-12 right when I put it on, when the marker was fresh. You can’t see the blue-green border but it was beautiful.

This is July 12-15. Every stone stayed in place the whole three days so I think I’m on to something.

This one went on tonight, just now. Bam. Getting used to the staple sound when the needle goes in.

Paint samples part two: Ann’s power animal

My friend Amy and I drove to Minneapolis to have our cards read. On the way, Amy said I was probably like an eagle whose beak had to fall off completely and then grow back. Just like that.

If eagles do that, Amy said. I don’t know. They might not. It doesn’t matter.

The Tarot reader was fantastic. She gave us cucumber water and used an actual fan to fan herself. She said a lot of “I’m just going to tell you this, ok?” Then she laid down some truth.

Eagles didn’t come up in my reading. No birds at all.

Then we walked out of her studio and guess what was on the curb next to Amy’s truck?

Right. The plastic topper from a Fourth of July flag, with a hole at the bottom in case I want to wear him as a pendant.

I told two people about this and they both said, so, the eagle was your power animal before? And I said, well, I don’t know. No.

Obviously it doesn’t matter.

Paint samples part one: Westwood

It’s a tough thing at Menards not to take a sample card in every color, so I did. I took every one (but just the house brand, to be polite). I can’t believe how well 49C-3 goes with Fish Frye’s third set on a summer night at Westwood.

Or how 35C-5 adds mystique to the back room.

Or how 31C-5 makes the grease pop.

Look at 16B-4 paired with actual mustard! You wouldn’t think, but yes.

This 10B-3 is a little too clever for itself but what are you going to do.

It’s late, it’s cooling down. Summer is half over and it’s time to come to terms with the fact that bringing home samples is as far as it’s going to go again this year.

Fish Frye closes out the summer at Westwood Marina on Friday, Aug. 31, 6-10 p.m. You should come.

Rachael’s book should look like Rachael

My friend Rachael is about to get superfamous, and I’m just telling you, it starts with the way she pronounces “memoir.” She says the “r.” Rachael is not one to say “memwah” or to feed you any other type of fluff.

The University of Minnesota Press is publishing her book, We’ll Be The Last Ones to Let You Down, in 2013. It’s about growing up as a gravedigger’s daughter in Waseca, Minnesota. One of the things Rachael did as a kid was take the flowers her family cleaned off of grave sites and use them to play bride. The one rule about cleaning up grave decorations, the book says, was that you didn’t take them off the baby graves. Everything else was fair game. No way that girl’s going to grow up and say “memwah.”

The U of M asked Rachael for a bunch of information to promote the book, like what makes it distinctive and who she can get to blurb it and whether she has any thoughts on what the cover should look like. Obviously happy to help with that part.

The cover should have no fluff, no whining, no winking. No you-go-girl feet in grownup high heels on a Waseca kitchen floor from yesteryear. No pedicured feet kicked up against a gravestone. Really no feet at all. This isn’t about how hard it is to be raised in a cemetery and then finally reach the point of being able to get a pedicure without crying, or whatever. This isn’t that. This is a book by a woman who wears just mascara and two piercings, nose and labret, nothing else on her Ivory soap face.

Because eyeshadow rubs off during the workday and foundation is for fakers.

I’m just getting started here, U of M Press. We all are. The whole Blueroad School is excited for Rachael and can’t wait for the launch party in a cemetery. As depicted above. Right?! Just getting started. You are so welcome.

Carnival part two: I met a woman who had no Fluevogs

Thank God my boots finally fell apart or else I wouldn’t have been up at Misch’s on Madison Avenue where the carnival was set up for the long weekend.

Bootless, I wandered.

It was two pairs that fell apart at the same time, the black Fluevogs with white stitching that I bought right off the feet of my friend Sara Buechmann and my black cowboy boots from the now-defunct RCC in River Hills Mall. Both my black boots at the same time, broken right during the in-between season when boots are key. Have you been outside this week? Boots are key!

Misch’s said the repairs would take two weeks.

I talked to the guy running the carousel. He said the horses are all being repainted this spring. Some are done but some are still in the shop, and some of the newly painted ones are still missing their shoes. He said he was sorry for things not looking quite right, but honestly, if you stick your head far enough inside a carousel like this and you can squint out the parking lot and the construction on Madison Avenue, it’s beautiful. It glistens. I told him everything looked great.

After he walked away and sat back down at the carousel controls, I shot a couple more photos. Then I was like, hey, horses.

I totally feel you.