The Biblio Diva

A fun little story about literature, treasure, and human decomposition for your reading pleasure!

It was January of 2010 and I knew I was opening a bookstore in two and a half months! What I did not yet know is that I would be pregnant when that journey finally started. But in any case, people around me knew that I was in need of books and pretty much didn’t care from where they came. Which is how it came to pass that my friend Kirsten called me one day and informed that her upstairs neighbor…

Hey y'all, I wrote a thing. I may even do it again!

A lot of you may have noticed, and by “a lot of you” I mean my Mom and like the 2 other people who used to read this blog, that I have not written in a looooooong time. I mean, not really written. Nothing of significance in any case. It was difficult to pinpoint why I stopped at first, although now it seems easy. It just stopped being fun. I just felt constantly outraged and I became just another…

This morning, on the Blog’s Facebook page, I got a notification that someone had shared one of my posts. I thought this was curious because it has been, like, 3 to 4 years since I posted any original content worth sharing. I clicked on the notification and was able to see who shared the link and which link it was. It was an old, broken link from before I reconfigured the blog’s new url. The title…

Okay, okay, okay, I swore that the next time I posted it would not be about politics and, come to think of it, that’s probably why I haven’t written anything in like 3 months, because, honestly, what the fuck else is any sane, thinking human being preoccupied with right now?!?!! So I decided to hone my outrage to one specific thing and that thing is motherfucking patriarchy! Specifically the…

MAKE AMERICA PIE AGAIN!!!!

Because by god, don’t we fucking need something we can all agree on at this point??!!?!?!?!?! “This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.”- The Crying of Lot 49 Look, I know, I really do know. I am really feeling it today. Particularly because I am a person who has a vagina. What happened last night has me even questioning whether women are people (and I know this sounds…

Pussy Grabbing, Locker Room Talk and Why Trump’s Comments are Truly Problematic

We get it, men talk about pussy. They do, and they talk about it like that, like it’s a thing having nothing to do with an actual person and while it’s not ideal I think it’s fair to say that it is normal and will continue to be normal until societal norms change, and I am sure they will, slowly, but they will. But until we live in an ideal society where everyone has their own unicorn and all…

Okay, first of all watch this…because I have writer’s block or more appropriately I have writer’s boulder. A boulder that is comprised of mtihril and adamantium. And this video, from those geniuses, Kristen and Jen at imomsohard, kind of takes up a little bit of space on the page and is a fairly accurate representation of my love-hate relationship with Pinterest.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fimomsohard%2Fvideos%2F2256837864456921%2F&show_text=0&width=560

If you have been hanging around here for a while you may beware of the views that I have expressed in the past regarding Pinterest. They have been…unkind. Call me crazy (because why not? I pretty much am) but I don’t think you need to spend $800.00 on craft supplies and 72 man hours of labor to throw your 2 year-old a birthday party…THAT THEY WON’T EVEN REMEMBER! Are you really gonna go through those pictures with your child when they’re in their twenties and explain to them that you loved them so much that you spent three weeks, sleeping only 4 hours each night so that they could have a handmade, hand-dyed, locally sourced, free-range, artisanal unicorn pinata filled with homemade, certified organic, cruelty-free chocolate candies, individually wrapped in compostable rice paper of which you had to make 17 batches before you got the recipe to mold properly? Because if you are going to do that chances are your now twenty-three year-old child probably stopped talking to you 5 years ago and has already moved far, far away from you and may god have mercy on your soul.

But why Pinterest is awful is not why I’m here today, shockingly enough. I wanted to talk about why it’s kind of awesome and sometimes even a lifesaver! Last year, when my now Husband proposed, like many brides-to-be the first thing I did was make a Pinterest board, titled “Holy Crap! I’m Getting Married!!!” so that I might try to keep track of and catalog all the things about which people expected me to have an opinion. And I was expected to have an opinion about EVERYTHING including shit that I had no idea even existed or least of all mattered! People wanted to know dates, colors, theme and I’m like “theme?” I thought the theme of wedding was that it was a fucking wedding! It pretty much comes with its own built-in theme!

But no, people have Disney weddings and 1940s weddings, and superhero weddings and Dr. Who weddings and Star Wars weddings and Pokemon weddings (yes, two people who loved Pokemon enough to have a Pokemon themed wedding have actually found one another and are old enough to legally marry one another without thinking that it’s icky…that has happened, just ask the internet) and Legend of Zelda weddings, Steampunk weddings, Harry Potter weddings, even Walking Dead weddings. These are all things that adults choose to do with their life. I’m not saying I am too cool for fandoms, and little bits and pieces of our own fandoms did make cameo appearances at our wedding, but we chose to just stick with “wedding” as the general theme for the our wedding. And I am pretty sure we saved a ton of money by not having a Star Wars/Avengers/Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Indiana Jones themed wedding cake specially commissioned for the occasion.

As a matter of fact, thanks to Pinterest, we did not have a wedding cake at all, we had wedding Cannoli! And it was excellent, inexpensive and actually got eaten unlike most wedding cakes which are obscenely expensive and crafted largely to look good and don’t really taste that great. And that sort of sums up my feeling about wedding planning in general; I’m not about to do something just because that’s the way it’s always been done. I’m going to do something because it’s cheap, easy and seemingly practical because I am incredibly lazy and incredibly poor.

That being said I also found Pinterest very helpful because I did not have to remember anything or explain things to people. People would start asking me things like what I was going to do with my hair and usually my words would start to fail me, mostly due to the insanity creeping up on me because I was getting married in a matter of weeks but sometimes, admittedly, due to the fact that my mouth was full of Lucky Charms, and instead of having to respond to them with a coherent description using not-made-up vocabulary like a normal adult would have, I was able to just pull a picture up on my phone and shove it in their face. It worked like a motherfucking charm! And seriously, how does my spell check not have “motherfucking” in its dictionary by now? I swear to actual god!

I never thought I’d actually say this but, in this case, Pinterest was kind of a life saver. It was there when I needed cheap or free decorating ideas, inspiration for what to do with all those damn mason jars and white Christmas lights my Mom kept buying, and there when I needed to figure out what to do with my unimpressive hair whence it was given over to an actual professional stylist (who, by the way, worked miracles, that’s Christine at 1630 Hair Artisans in Renton and I am not just giving her a plug because she stood up with me, I’m doing it because she did an amazing job on my hair and my makeup and she deserves it, also she’s super nice, like a My Little Pony, but not Rainbow Dash…Christine is like Fluttershy). Because I had Pinterest to catalogue my thoughts, my thoughts seemed less like incoherent nonsense and just a little bit more like coherent sense which is what I need everyday….obviously you knew that if you made it this far into this post.

Someone should totally invent an app that makes me less crazy and totally capable of doing things like waking up to my first alarm , keeping the bathroom clean and the sink empty of dishes, folding the laundry, and not drinking too many margaritas and gorging myself on empanadas. I want my best people on this shit, right away!

This post was supposed to have a bunch of side-by-side photographic examples of all the Pinterest-y (I could literally not bring myself to use the word “Pinteresting”) ideas that were actually employed at my wedding but, let’s be honest, that’s something you might expect from someone who has a modicum of their shit together. And we all know, that ain’t me. Love you guys! Thanks for hanging out and wasting some time with me! XOXO

And just for shits and giggles, here are a couple pics from the wedding:

I am not sure how Josh ended up wearing two different hats and just so we’re clear, no one got around to taking a picture of the cannoli before it started to get eaten so in that picture it is in a state of actively being devoured. It was fucking delicious!

P.S. Also, I would like to formally request that people who have never played Scrabble in their life stop making cutesy wedding crafts out of Scrabble tiles, it’s insulting to the real nerds, it’s nerd-cultural appropriation and it needs to stop, thank you.

54 Times Comics Were Totally Inappropriate

I have to do something…to say something, anything, just so that my not saying anything doesn’t go on for any longer. I miss saying things. I miss having something to say. I miss feeling like it was okay for me to say those somethings. I miss all of you. I miss me. I will find me, soon with any luck, and I will be back. XOXO In the meantime here’s this: 54 Times Comics Were Totally Inappropes,…

I feel like Norman Vincent Peale would support this kind of blatant self-aggrandizement.

*Originally Published as “I am an Achiever” which was a thinly veiled Big Lebowski reference ACTUALLY I wrote this over a ago and it was first published on May 17th, 2015. I did, however, add some things to the list so there are a few new/updated bits! Enjoy! I wrote this a few weeks ago and read it at the live reading we did at the beginning of the month, but even if you came to the reading…

How I Didn’t Die at the Pool! Go Me!!!

I have been meaning to relink/republish some older posts that were deleted in the website reboot. I figure since I am too damn busy getting ready to get married in two weeks to actually write anything, now is the perfect time to repost some old shit that I have already written and pass it off as new…or not, since the jig is clearly up. Why can I not just keep my fat mouth shut? Anyhow, this was…

@thehuntinground #StanfordRape #brockturner #aaronpersky @Stanford

So (drink), last week a rapist named Brock Allen Turner was sentenced to 6 months in jail, of which he will most likely only serve three, because the judge thought that a stiffer penalty would have “too severe effect on his young life”. Since the rapist’s slap on the wrist sentence was handed down and the judge’s comments as to why, were made public this case has gotten a lot of media attention.…

Just STOP being confused and START being AWESOME!!! Just like Barney Stinson says....

or the accidental mantra of young women in the workplace I don’t make it a secret that the job that I have now is the first “real job” I have ever had. Before now I had never worked in an office before and there are some things I have noticed that are….different. I work in a creative profession and in an office that is largely made up of women, albeit women who are, for the most part, quite a bit…

“They Don’t Call it Hero-lose”

A while ago Saturday Night Live aired a sketch about the growing heroin problem in America. The trouble was America was not laughing. Heroin use, abuse, and deaths have been steadily on the rise for the last 15 years and increasing at an alarming rate since 2010*. The politicians are calling it an epidemic. The headlines are calling it an epidemic. It kind of seems like heroin is everywhere. But…

As a graphic designer (which I still think is kind of a silly thing to call myself…we should go with “as a person who likes to make pretty pictures and sometimes silly pictures of otters and barbarian teddy bears and extra fancy hamsters”) I was really excited about making the invitations. And I got them back last Thursday and I was super pleased. The next step was collecting everyone’s addresses.

I messaged my friend Jon to get his address and the conversation that we had about how OUT OF FUCKING HAND wedding invitations had gotten was kind of funny:

Me:

Need your address…for I plan to stalk you….or send you a wedding invitation. One of those.

Jon:

B) I thought you already got married. Life is gonna suck if I start having FB hallucinations.

A) was supposed to be “congratulations” but, thumbs.

Congratulations!

Me:

Thanks, no…I got engaged about a year ago. Marrying comes next.

Jon:

C?D?) [ADDRESS REDACTED]

Conformist.

Me:

I deserve that.

Jon:

Is there a date what to save?

Me:

June 25th, I chose not to send save the date cards and am just sending you an invitation. Because I did not need one MORE thing to do.

Jon:

Also, it is the goddam 21st century. You can use the internets.

People may call it lazy, I call it saving the fucking planet.

Me:

There are certain protocols that I (read my mother) will not see shirked.

Jon:

A friend got married a few years ago & there was a fucking sheaf of paper & also glossy photos involved. It hurt me so to have to recycle all that.

Understood.

Me:

Yeah, people’s invitations are totally out of control. They send them in boxes and shit! Some have live butterflies in them that fly out when you open the aforementioned box. Frankly, I wouldn’t really want a box of mostly dead butterflies and their poop. 

Jon:

Oh! And ribbons!

Me:

SO MANY FUCKING RIBBONS!!!!

Jon:

You should tie ribbons on the necks of condors & ship them with every invite.

Do not forget to punch holes in the lids.

Me:

So you would go with condors? Because I had planned on doves but I see your point….

Jon:

Compromise= barn owls. The recipients can use them for pest control.

Me:

BRILLIANT!

Jon:

We have solved wedding invites!

Me:

And controlling pests!

Jon:

The world really should thank us by sending money.

Me:

I wouldn’t say “no” to a Nobel prize.

Jon:

You have my permission to blog about this. I will be your silent (read 50%) partner.

Me:

Noted.

Jon:

This was probably the most productive meeting I never attended.

Me:

You’re welcome!

I, on the other hand, opted out of all that craziness. There’s enough outlandish shit on which we are expected to spend money where weddings are concerned. I was not about to spring for the postage to send people an invitation that had to be housed in a goddamn box that plays music upon their opening it and also contains a legit, goddamn bird’s nest!

Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t like anyone enough to want to make them feel this important. 

My invitations were a very simple, 5 by 7, single-sided card with instructions to RSVP via email or phone call. I was determined NOT to have to pay more than 47 cents per envelope to send those bitches. Here’s a copy because I think they’re pretty!

I left out the address, because I know the types of folks who hang around here and I don’t want you miscreants crashing my wedding. Also, I try to avoid being embroiled in assassination plots whenever possible. And yes, I am JUST DELUSIONAL ENOUGH to consider my murder, which will probably be the result of the ill-timed use of sarcasm on my part, an assassination! I am not going to say that I have never wondered exactly how important one must be in order for their murder to be considered an assassination but I feel that I, somehow or another, pass the muster. Also, refer back to previous statements about my delusions.

I did, however, include the registry information, just in case anyone is feeling generous, or drunk or both of those things.

Also, in case you’re drunk, and/or had no idea just how out of fucking hand wedding invitations had gotten, here are some pics of some ridiculous shit! Enjoy!

IT IS A GODDAMN BOARD GAME!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!

It’s a Viewmaster, and the little slide wheel has pictures of the happy couple! If you legitimately think anyone cares about you enough to think that you and your fiancee deserve this much fanfare your delusions of grandeur are like, Kanye epic.

What the shit is this? I bet this cost more than my wedding dress!

Does anyone else think that including a tiny noose in your wedding invitation is just a little too dark…even if it is in cyrillic?

I am so done with making people work for the information you’ve included in your wedding invitation. If I have to use a key or a decoder ring or a map to figure out to what I have been invited, you can bet your ass that I will expend no further energy on your ridiculousness and will probably boycott your wedding on general principle.

I forgot to include special glasses in the list of shit that I want no part of. Consider them added now.

Go fuck yourself.

XOXO!!!!