Marjie sent me this Franciscan Benediction the other night…this thing messed me up. ERGO…let me mess you up too!

May God bless you with discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships
So that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
So that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war,
So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and
To turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done
To bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

Amen

I love marjie.

I love ikea.

I love blogging.

I love the way little old ladies carry their purses.

ERGO…

My sweedish furniture name:

Who would’ve guessed that I’d be a side table???? Analyze THAT!

Go HERE to get yours!

With my unadulterated fetish for Ikea and their wonderful world of delightful foreign artistry…I serve to indubitably thank marjie for sending this brilliant webcycle generator, which alters my namesake and makes me feel all the more connected to this ravishing amass of affordable, moreover, cheap design!

*****Editor’s addendum*****
Obviously, this post inevitably lead me back to the Ikea site like an emo mom to chanel black polish…thought you’d like a whiff of my most recent mental drippings…fyi, I just redecorated our entire house in less than 15 minutes!

bedroom...

the study...

living room...

the powder room...

the least used room in the house...

With mid-semester encroaching, we are most definitely in need of yet another procrastination post, don’t you think.

When considering the world of procrastination, Margie and I are the diplomats of the land!
Margie recently sent me this link highlighting artist, Johnny Kelly, who’s an active artisan finding humor in eccentricity and spontaneity. This video makes me smile.

In my own desperate attempt to stimulate productivity, I’ve designed my own tool to counter my procrastinating personality…I now create my own deadlines a few weeks prior to the actual cut-off date – Ergo, I procrastinate against my own deadline, and still have the project completed on time.
Now, watch this video and thank me later.

Who’s marjie, you ask??? Well, I understand the desire you are having to meet the real marjie – she’s fantastic!

…unfortunately, all I could get was this incognito photo of her via yearbookyourself.com…

…and in the meantime, I thought yearbookyourself needed a flaughter photo…so, here you go!!!

and my slice…

Like I need more reasons why not to have children in my life right now…my top five reasons are

1. I’d like to finish my ph.d.
2. Mark and I want to be “settled down” [i.e., actually living in the house we own]
3. We need better reasons than cute names, cute hair styles and cute clothes
4. We need to find out if they bottle patience and buy stock in it
5. I’m WAY TOO SELFISH of my time w/ Mark…I don’t want to share!

Now, please be aware that we do love kids and most definitely want some of our own someday…but as Mark says, “we’re on the 5-10 year plan”.

With that said, Marjie sent me this link of 20 Baby Products that are sure to traumatize your children until they have kids of their own…or at least until the stegalls have kids of their own!

Here were my top 5 favorites….

Thudgard Baby Helmet…baby’s first head gear – now, is this for the bumps from taking off the training wheels of crawling or the terrible-two moments where she bangs her head against the wall until she gets her blue’s clues spoon in her cheerios?

Baby Mop – while they’re down there, they might as well be put to good use, right?

Manual Snot Sucker – ok, this actually made me gag. I laughed, but I most definitely gagged.

Baby leash - wasn’t the 9 months of an umbilical cord long enough? The article does give the warning for joggers not to use this product. Nice.

Baby Keeper - seriously, this is my favorite of all the products. I’ve always said that I’m not ready to have kids b/c you still can’t duct tape them to the wall…well, this one is close enough for me! I sure hope they still have this around 5-10 years from now! Can I put this on my Target Baby Registry?

other products worth the honorary mention

• the pee-pee teepee
• Metallica Lullabies [that one's for you, 5th Street]
• Her First Heels
• Baby Toupee & Baby Tattoos
• Man Boobs [for the seinfeld in all of us]

some people take ambien
others take herbs
another may take melatonin
well, the marvelous Marjie suggests this guy…

In elementary school art class, did you ever color an entire paper in black crayon and then scrape off portions of the wax to create a negative design? Alexandre Orion is a graffiti artist in Sao Paulo, Brazil who did just that using the medium of pollution on the walls of a Brazilian tunnel…read the post Marjie sent, [which is fully posted below]…better yet, you can watch the video for the lazy-man’s version and/or added effect to this already poignant tale.
{p.s. this makes me want to bike to work}

Ossario
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Alexandre Orion

 This graffiti was created in reverse – by cleaning grimy city surfaces. It’s sort of a lift-and-scrub technique in which the dark areas are old, crusted pollutants. Authorities didn’t know how to charge the Brazilian graffiti artist responsible, Alexandre Orion:

The authorities were certainly miffed but could find nothing to charge him with. They had no other recourse but to clean the tunnel — but only the parts Alexandre had already cleaned. The artist merely continued his campaign on the other side of traffic. The utterly flummoxed city officials then decided to take drastic action. Not only did they clean the entire tunnel but also every other tunnel in Sao Paulo. (Inhabitat)

Reverse graffiti has been around for years. NPR ran a 2004 story about a UK artist named Moose who used a “shoe brush and water” to execute his street art; clean graffiti has been a medium of protest; Puerto Rican artist Rafael Trelles uses dirty concrete as his canvas. But Orion’s work is clever on so many levels at once. If removing pollution is vandalism, what do you call the act of creating pollution? How many drivers recognized that the medium Orion manipulated to create the graffiti skulls was actually their own contribution – their daily automobile emissions? It’s like involuntary interactive art vandalism!

And the choice of skulls as subject is brilliant – not just because of the cliche “pollution kills,” but because a naked skull has itself been “cleaned” (yes, I personally have boiled skulls to turn them denture-white). The bleached skull is a totem of life’s shocking transience, which we tacitly ignore – just as we tacitly ignore that our current consumer lifestyle is doomed by the impending shortage of fossil fuels. Which are called “fossil fuels” because. . . well, you know all that.

There are so many recursive memento mori themes in a temporary graffiti skull executed in car exhaust, I’m getting a headache. I think that means it’s good art. Right?

You can see a brief video of Orion working and the authorities intervening at his website. You can also view another of Orion’s projects, in which he executed graffiti and then photographed passers-by interacting with it, in alternately hilarious and disturbing ways.

ht: biophemera

sorry cath, couldn’t help it!!
/marjie

 

i bought a print off of this woman’s etsy site. she creates some AMAZING things:
http://elsita.typepad.com
marjie

 

The following pictures are from a baby crying competition in a Tokyo temple this past April. The objective? To bring health and growth by crying the loudest.
In this contest, amateur sumo wresters try to scare the babies into crying. How nice.

Keep in mind as you view these pictures that vicarious and empathetic cries may quite possibly bring you the intended health and growth, so cry, baby, cry! And in your good health and great growth, remember to thank Marjie for sending your prosperity through sumo love!!!

The brilliance of Marjie strikes again! As stated in an earlier post, Marjie’s an internet genius…yeah, Gore, I believe she invented the internet. Marjie can find everything and anything pertinent to life, laughter and the world. I’ve begged her to start blogging, but my blogging evangelism has come up short. So, until she gives in and becomes a blogger herself, I will share her brilliance w/ you via cathistegall.com…so, what’s this week’s treasure?

Procrastination…the best way to get through grad school! Now, to see it illustrated gives yet another reason to put off what actually needs to get done!

be sure to expect seeing more of these “Tales Of Mere Existence” here in the future…I like the way it tickles my funny bone.