the hijinks of molly & tara

Really tasty food I’ve made for dinner over the last two days:
• hummus, cheese, garlic, lentils, in a tortilla
• quinoa with onions and black beans

SO GOOD.

If you have 20 minutes to kill, I highly recommend heading over to TED (technology, entertainment, design) talks for some über inspiration.  There are dozens and dozens of 18-22 minute talks (I hesitate to call them lectures, because they’re so engaging and dynamic)…

“We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.”

I just watched this one of Larry Lessig, about the remix culture of the internet, democratic creativity, copyright and creative commons.

I’m a little dissapointed I only just found out about this, but as my bike isn’t single or fixed gear, I wouldn’t have been part of it. The pictures of the event are truly great! Only in London would people dress in tweed to ride bicycles. Sigh.

Though I am off to my first-ever ‘official’ Critical Mass ride tomorrow!

**days later**

Critical Mass is amazing. Apart from a Critical-Mass inspired Palestine solidarity ride in the Valley last spring (see the adorable  shaky vid I made of it here), I’ve never actually been to a full-scale, urban ride. As a London biker, it was empowering to be in the majority for once, forcing traffic to pay attention and make concessions for our speed and size. To be one of two hundred bikes surrounding a single car, rather than the one bike being squeezed off the road by two hundred passing cars was exhilarating – not to mention being able to bike at my own pace, and in the middle of the road, in Leicester Square!

Also, the experience was so much more social than riding in a car can ever be -chatting to other riders, chanting, singing along to the songs played on the bike-mounted sound systems (yeah, they played Aretha Franklin’s RESPECT). Not being enclosed by metal makes you vulnerable in more than the physical sense. I made friends, and smiled at passerby, and learnt how to dance on a bike… it was practically three hours of pedaling before we broke up, a bit chilly and a bit sore, but oh so worth it!

In just over a week, I am headed to London to start my travels with Tara – we are going all over Europe and we are going to have crazy awesome adventures.  Please let us know if there’s anything in particular you think we must see or do while we’re there!  We’re going to be doing this thing called Help Exchange, where we’ll do volunteer work on farms, hostels, lodges, etc in exchange for room and board.  Hooray!

ALSO: check out the rockin’ website I have been working on for my talented friend Shira, who is currently on a national tour.

Here is a list I started working on a long time ago and just recently finished writing:

30 Things to do Before I’m 30
1. go on a cross country circus tour in a bus powered by veggie oil [check]
2. be published in adbusters
3. explore the grand canyon
4. spend one month entirely off the internet and computers
5. go on a flying trapeze
6. design a font
7. intern with mcsweeney’s
8. spontaneously travel with no plan
9. make a feature length documentary
10. write meaningful letters to all the people I admire
11. culture jam mill creek (my hometown)
12. seattle to portland (STP) bike ride
13. learn to juggle (seriously, with all the time I’ve spent around circus people, you might think I would be able to juggle by now, right?  no.)
14. learn a musical instrument
15. design an 826 publication
16. grow my hair out long enough to braid it
17. learn to swing dance
18. build or help build a treehouse
19. design a playground
20. plan a heist
21. make an elaborate meal using only things I’ve grown myself
22. win a baking contest with my muffins
23. teach graphic design with open source software to a community in need
24. design and publish at least 6 issues of a new magazine
25. go camping in the hoh rainforest, the oregon coast, and the redwoods with my friends
26. learn how to design websites well
27. acquire (and use!) a typewriter and a sewing machine
28. spend time in scotland
29. take beautiful portraits of everyone I know
30. open a café/bookstore/circus space/community media center/letterpress printing studio/bike shop/urban garden in seattle with all my friends!

This is from McSweeney’s, and it’s so fantastic I decided to repost in it’s entirety.

WHITE HOUSE STAFF MEMO REGARDING THE TRANSITION ON JANUARY 20
by WENDY MOLYNEUX and MIKE BOYLE

To: allstaff@whitehouse.gov
Re: transition

All,

As you know, the date when we must be out of our offices is fast approaching. Here are a few helpful reminders in preparation for the changeover:

1. As of this morning, the red phone is again routed to the Kremlin, not Domino’s. Please use a regular phone to place your lunch order.

2. The Monday Night Football Room has been converted back into the War Room. That is why the president is crying.

3. If Mr. Cheney has killed one or more members of your family, kindly recall that we gave you a Wii in exchange for your continued silence.

4. All staff is requested to sweep the residential rooms for hidden Bacardi bottles. Please give these bottles to the president, as he would like to throw them away personally.

5. So as to appear frugal, we will be burning $100 bills instead of $1,000 bills in the fireplaces.

6. Going forward, if you experience problems with the Xerox machine, please summon a technician—not a demon.

7. When the first lady is in her werewolf state, please do not let her out of her cage.

8. If Obama staff are in the White House prior to the transition, please refrain from eating babies in front of them.

9. Please remove skulls, scalps, and human bones from common areas.

10. A construction team will be closing up the hellmouth in the Oval Office. Please pardon our dust.

11. Please take home any leftovers from the fridge.

mittens are warm, whimsical, and wonderful. but i think the traditional mitten pattern could use alittle updating.

there are now fingerless gloves with mitten caps, like this, but usually the thumb is enclosed. what about an optional thumb cap, an opening just over the pad of your thumb with overlapping edges? it would be pretty easy to make it so you could just slip the tip of your thumb out of the opening. (no phallic references, please.) i just thought of it the other day, when i had to take off my whole gloves just to operate the clickpad on my iPod. iPods and cellphones would be much easier to operate in the cold if you had mittens like that…

also: traditionally, bikers wear fingerless gloves, which in my opinion are just about as cold as bare hands when you’ve got the added windchill of pedal-coasting. mittens, however, are out of the question, as it’s nearly impossible to hold onto the handlebars *and* operate the brakes  when you’re wearing them. but mittens that had a split in between the middle finger and ring finger would be perfect! they’d look awfully odd, like you had three chunky fingers, but your fingers could huddle together for warmth, happily enclosed.

and finally (because this post would be incomplete without it) a link to the youtube clip of the Jason Webley-Professor Science-CFU-Mod 90 collaboration, ‘The Mitten Opera.’

Amazing photos of frozen bubbles.

I might actually try doing this.  It’s certainly cold enough here to attempt…

I have been gone from this blog for a while.  I’m not sure why, I just sort of stopped updating.  But one of my informal new year’s resolutions is to write more often, and to fulfill this goal I will:

1.  Write once sentence every day in my journal, about my day, or something I thought about or observed.  I was inspired by a project Shira started last summer where every single day she filled a 1×1 inch square with art, drawings, paintings, or collage.  When I come up with a really good sentence, I might post it here.

2.  Update this blog at least once a week.  This might change a bit when I go traveling in february, because I don’t know quite what my internet situation will be.  But!  I will be traveling with Tara, so we will be able to do true joint updates – exciting!

So here are some New Things I have been into lately:

• Hot Chocolate – I am both a Tea and Coffee person, I drink a few cups of both every day.  But I have never been that excited by hot chocolate.  Tara, on the other hand, is a hot chocolate fiend.  Well, a few days ago I decided to give it a try… and oh MAN, with a drop of vanilla extract and a few pinches of pumpkin pie spice, this stuff is a real winner.

• Sewing is fun, constructive, and not really as hard as I thought it would be.  For Christmas I made a scarf with pockets for my mom, and I’m making one for my self too.  Maybe I’ll post pictures soon when I finish it!

• Wearing matching socks - This comes as a surprise to anyone who knows me.  I have not really worn matching socks since I could dress myself.  In high school, I conducted a study called Karma Socks, in which for six months I recorded  which sock I was wearing on which foot and a 1-10 rating of my morning, afternoon, and evening and average for the day, in order to figure out which socks gave me the best Karma.

Lately, though, this weird thing started happening.  It began in late October, when Sarah and I took our lunch break to go to the surplus store and get wool socks.  It was incredible, I didn’t take them until they started to smell two weeks later.  These socks saved my feet from stupidly cold Massachusetts weather.  I had no idea socks could be so warm.  Obviously I could not pair these with my threadbare, holey, colorful socks from high school.  Thus, I have opted for practical.  But, come summer, I will revitalize my sock collection and things will get back to normal.