A Site of Beef by Ann-S-Thesia


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Saturday, January 13, 2001

Now why didn't my permalink work for that post below? Is it that my pages are too full of stuff and that by the time it all gets loaded, it forgets about the anchor? I mean it's not like we have the option of archiving daily, you know. I've really got to change this blog over to CSS and SSI. And it'll alleviate the pervs coming here from Google Search for a while too, with the change in extension name.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 6:11 PM ||


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Well, from the news this weekend, it looks as if I might be very close to winning that death bet. Will have to buy the guys a round of drinks. Stan can drink beer again too...doesn't bother his sinuses anymore. Neither does aspartame. And I can eat bananas and honey without the cold sores they gave me in the early part of my life. Go figure. Yet I digress. Regarding the death bet, you know the only reason he's survived this long is because he's become this Max Headroom creation thanks to Gary Trudeau. Any flesh and blood mortal would've kicked it a long time ago. I don't know...I sort of predict he'll die around the time of the inauguration (I don't know if I spelled that right). I really doubt with this recent development he'll outlast the Pope or Bob Hope.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 5:59 PM ||


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Hmmm...working on the Halloween photos in Photoshop. Convolver is a wonderful tool. I wonder if it is still available? A little desaturation, add some blue tint, brighten it up, and the photos are *almost* passable for real color, but they make a great faded, sepia-toned old timey photos, which work great with the flapper pics.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 4:33 PM ||


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Better late than never, Stan *finally* developed the rolls of film we had kicking around since Halloween.
Halloween 2000 From left to right: Stan as The Old Navy Lady (with Magic the Dog), Me as a Glam Rock Flapper Cabaret Vamp (Sally Bowles meets Mandy Slade?), and Tim as a 17th Century Faggot (*HIS* words, not mine).


As far as picture quality, this one turned out well color wise. It was taken with our cheapo camera at Tim's place. Stan and I took others of ourselves at our place with our better camera, but we needed to use Tungsten lights or something because they turned out too yellow. THIS IS WHY I DECIDED TO GET A DIGITAL CAMERA. No more finding out that the color sucked months after you take the pictures. Despite the disappointing color, the pictures are hilarious. I'll add more as space and time permit.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 12:07 PM ||


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Weird dreams: I had somehow found my way into some office/place of business in Denver. I was looking at a sheet of paper listing job openings. The rates of pay seemed rather good, and although there wasn't a job for an artist, I decided to out of the blue apply for a job, even though that's not why I was there in the first place (I don't know why I was there, but after all, it was a dream). I told the receptionist that I wanted to apply for the touch typist position. She got someone else to talk to me, and I apologized that my nail polish looked bad because I wasn't planning on interviewing for a job. She asked me questions about myself (probably finding out I was overqualified), and told someone else that they had a really interesting person with lots of experience looking for a job. I told her that I'd like to live in Fort Collins, and not Denver. She shook her head and said that they wouldn't be able to arrange that because it was too expensive to live in Fort Collins. Then I told her that it was OK, that I lived in Fort Collins for 17 years. Then I said that if I had a prefrence, could I live in Madison and do the work over the internet. I forgot what happened after that. I woke up and went back to sleep and had another dream where we were putting a bunch of food on the ground, like macaroni and cheese, vegetables, meat, etc. and letting the animals eat it. We thought Plato was going to snarft it all up, but Hieronymus started using his head as a snowplow and plowed up all the macaroni and cheese. He had a bunch of it on his flat little face...it looked really funny.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 9:36 AM ||



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Thursday, January 11, 2001

Last night Stan, Tim and I got on the subject of the weird "human toilet death" searches that bring up my blog and Vladimir's page. I'm #1 on Google and some other search engines, ironically, since my site has nothing to do with that topic. (It was a story about my poor late kitty cat, so go away now, you sick perv, if that's why you're here.) We were trying to figure out just what people searching on that string were in fact looking for. Initially, naive me thought they were looking for stories about humans dying on toilets (I think there was an X-File episode about that....) Then I did a little more searching and find out that there are such things in the perv world known as human toilets. I won't get into that here, and I'll let you use your imagination. But last night we decided to check into it and found some quite disturbingly gross message boards with people looking for...that. And people who are self-described...toilets. Well, let's just say all our naive little minds were just a little blown. And then it hit me...that's why the search string, "human toilet" + "death". Some sick pervs want to know if you can really *die* from it...checking it out...doing research...being ever so thorough before committing themselves (they should be committed). Uh....ever hear the expression "Eat **** and die?" There's a reason that expression exists, and it's not just as something to cuss. Ever hear of E-Coli? Eh, what am I trying to prove? Am I trying to save someone's life who's considering a career of toiletry? As far as I'm concerned, anyone wanting to do that should get a Darwin Award. But the punch line of the night was when we took Tim home to his condo, heaped on a snowdrift by the dumpsters in the parking lot sat...a nice, white, porcelain toilet. We couldn't contain our laughter. It was like a perfect finale, a story wrapped up in a neat little package. It's as if the discarded toilet said to our little search engine saga, "The End." (snort)
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 1:33 PM ||


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Ohmygosh what an idiot I am. I am so stupid sometimes I wonder how I survive. I just checked my referrers and someone found this blog by searching on "walk the dog movie." Me thinks, "What a dope...everyone knows it's "Wag The Dog." So I click on the link to see how high my site is in the rankings, it's pretty high, why? Because I mentioned "Walk The Dog." Not, "Wag The Dog." Sometimes I really embarrass myself. Like when I mentioned Ronald Regan, not Ronald Reagan, or "washing maching" not "washing machine." Just shoot me.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 12:43 PM ||


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What happened? I go from September to December without ONE custom job. Not one. Then all of a sudden, I have three I'm currently working on, and two in the wings. So much for my painting up a storm that I thought I'd be doing in January. I'm not complaining, I need the work, but it's still so odd how this happens, the cliched feast or famine. I guess as they say, nothing lasts forever, including downturns in business.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 12:37 PM ||


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Weird dream (are they ever not weird?) about being at my parent's house and walking around barefoot on the south side of their house and getting my feet dirty, coming inside, and telling someone to get me a towel to clean off my feet before I step onto their carpet. I was cleaning mud out of my toes but it looked like black caviar.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 10:44 AM ||



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Tuesday, January 09, 2001

Weird dreams: I was at my parent's house and was still in college, and gathering up a bunch of backpacks and such to take to class with me...there were several and I didn't know how I could carry them all on my bike, so I figured I'd walk my bike there, possibly with some guy (either Stan or a boyfriend I had pre-Stan) and let him help me carry them and then leave the rest at the art building somewhere. Then the dream morphed into me having to take a plane to Chicago (via way of Detroit and some other eastern city...weird) to meet some woman there, but the airline industry was having some problems and shuffling my flight around, hence the weird circumlocuted way I had to travel there. I was still at my own house (although it didn't look at all like my house) and was packing up my bags (the same backpacks as above) to travel with. I was afraid I was going to be late for my flight. Then I realized Stan had the day off and wondered why we couldn't take the car down to Chicago together. I also remember I was on the second story of some building, and the only way I could get down was to take a ladder outside (I think this part of the dream happened before my airplane dream). There were other people leaving via the way of the ladder, but I was terrified of taking the ladder.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 9:36 AM ||



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Monday, January 08, 2001

One thing that Stan, Tim and I were discussing yesterday is what we were like when we were babies. Both of the guys were really good babies and hardly ever cried, unlike their siblings. I cried *a lot* when I was a very young baby, until I was able to manipulate things with my hands. Then I stopped crying, and after that, my mom said I was the best baby. She attributed it to me being bored, and once I could amuse myself, I wasn't bored anymore. I think these signs were extremely foretelling of how we turned out in adult life. Both Stan and Tim are extremely tolerant, patient, gentle and level-headed (except for when Stan was in his last year of grad school, but those were extenuating circumstances). With me, I am always doing stuff, always working with my hands, always busy. I can't just watch TV or a VCR tape. I have to be working on my iBook, and before I had my iBook, I was making tiles for my paintings, and before I made tiles, I drew. When I go to a party, I get to feeling guilty that I'm not being productive. It can't be the protestant work ethic, it must be creative guilt. Back in my 20s when I was in Colorado, people told me I had done a lot as an artist, but I never felt I've done enough. I keep want to be doing more, accomplishing more. Maybe I've always wanted to be a burnout case, live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. I don't know. But today I thought, "Since I'm waiting on feedback before I can continue on a couple of my freelance jobs, I'll just not do anything, not be productive at all." And I spent all morning playing that bejewelled game that everyone's been talking about. Yeah, I feel guilty. I should've been working on my website. But geez, I spent all new year's day working on my website (not to mention every day of the year practically). How many people can say that? One weird thing about that game is that I'm not supposed to be able to play it because I'm on a Mac, but it works for me. The only thing is that I can't post my score. Weird. But that's one of the reason I always *hated* working at a job-job because I'd be working away and everyone else would be shooting the breeze, not working. They probably are the type who can watch tv slack-jawed without doing anything else. I think I need to learn to relax.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 3:07 PM ||


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I forgot to mention this regarding our Southeastern Wisconsin trip yesterday. Tim wanted to go to Nelsons, a sort of old time variety store on north Douglass Avenue that held some sort of fond childhood memories for him (I don't think I ever went out there with my mom because the bus system didn't go that far and she didn't drive). I didn't want to go in, because I'm pretty broke right now, but it turned out well anyway because I found some stupid office supplies that I really needed and couldn't find in Madison, oddly enough (don't ask). Stan, Tim and I are wandering around the store and cracking jokes at all the odd junk that they sell there, not rudely, but joking nonetheless. An elderly woman who was working there said "it sure seems like you folks are enjoying yourselves." Now given my bad history of always being suspect for NOT DOING ANYTHING, I was afraid she would think we were shoplifting or something, just by the virtue that my faux leopard spot coat is rather large and loose fitting. I just get paranoid for no reason when workers in a store approach me because of my one bad experience when I was a teen and my bad experience on the US border when I was in my 20s (innocent on both accounts...I truly have never shoplifted or bought contraband). But it was nothing like that. She just wanted to know how tall Tim was (this really must get tedious for Tim...it happens every time we're with him for some art function, even though it may not necessarily happen at the gallery, but someplace else afterward). The cashiers must have had some betting pool going as to whether he was 6 foot 6 or 6 foot 7, like it really matters. Maybe Stan and I just accentuate Tim's tallness. Maybe if he was in the company of other people over 6 feet, he wouldn't look so tall. I don't know. It was odd. Then when Stan and I were checking out (Tim had gone out for a smoke), I asked if they take out of town checks, and the naive young clerk checking me out didn't know, stared at me vacantly in a "don't get too many out of towners coming through here" sort of look. The older woman stepped in and told me out of town was OK, marvelled at the fact I lived in Madison (Why do people do that? It's only Madison...not Moscow) and called me "Honey." Somehow I knew I could not escape Nelson's without being called "Honey." If I ever ever call someone my junior "Honey" just shoot me, OK? Then the elderly woman said, "You've been in here not so long ago, right?" I told her that it's been several years, and she was in disbelief, "I could swear I saw that guy (meaning Tim) in here just the other week." "Oh you know those tall people all look the same," I told her. Then she asked me if he was my husband (snicker). I pointed to Stan and said, "No, he is." "Oh." She said, in what seemed sort of a taken aback voice. What, tall guy is like some god and chick magnet (little do they know Tim's more of a guy magnet....snicker) but short guy is just a nobody? Grrr. Then she thanked us for shopping there and said we were all a bunch of pleasant folk. Now that's a first...to be called "pleasant folk." I've been called worse.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 11:18 AM ||


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Can't remember too much of my dreams, although I know I had a bunch when I woke up around 5 this morning before I went back to sleep. I remember that Stan and I tied ourselves together sort of like our Siamese Twin Costume from Halloween several years ago. We were talking to some people who were marvelling at some art things we did, but they kept talking to Stan, and not to me, even though I had a much bigger hand in creating the art thing (can't remember what it was). Finally, I shouted at the person and chewed them out because they wouldn't talk to me about it. (hmmmm...sort of like how Stan and I will get equal billing for the upcoming Biota CD surface, although Stan's only contribution are the bug dingbats I used and I busted my butt [and computer...it crashed all the time working with a file that large] working on that image. But I'm not bitter.)
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 11:14 AM ||



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Sunday, January 07, 2001


We went down to Kenosha with Tim today to pick up some art Stan and I had on exhibit at the Winter Juried show at The Anderson Art Center. Unfortunately, the battery was running low in the digital camera and there was a lot of snow on the side of the roads, so I couldn't take as many pictures as I originally wanted, but snapped a few anyway. This is the front facade of the Anderson Art Center, a beautiful mansion on lake Michigan. I couldn't fit the whole thing in the picture...maybe sometime when snow isn't blocking me from getting across the street to get a wider view--the place is enormous. This is the place that Stan, Tim and I want to meet at after we're all dead.

The picture of Lake Michigan through the trees can be seen from one of the upstairs windows. I would give my eye teeth for a view like this. I love large bodies of water. I love gazing out into them and not seeing a shore on the other side. I love gazing out into nothingness. I'm thankful that when Mrs. Anderson died, she donated the house to the city of Kenosha for all to enjoy. The room below with us goofing off is Stan's and my favorite room. It's like a little powder room, closet area, changing room off the bathroom. It's just filled floor to ceiling with drawers and cabinets. Although they have since removed a couple chairs from it (to discourage us loiterers?), Stan and I would frequently hang out there at openings and talk, with lake Michigan in the background.




Stan as "The Death of Marat."


No essential clothing was removed by Tim during this photo shoot.


Don't *even* ask about this picture.

We went back through Racine, the city that Tim and I were born in. I wanted to shoot pictures of these unique little houses that Stan and I discovered the other year when we had to drive down for another art errand. They look like they were constructed around the turn of the century or at least circa WWI. According to Tim, houses constructed during wars were made without porches, so these would seem to fit that theory. What's odd about them is that although it's hard to tell from this photo, they all appear the same when first viewing them from the street. It's like tract housing from WWI! It's sort of creepy, like something I'd nightmare about. In a way they're sort of charming though, although I think they'd be more charming if they were constructed with something other than Chicago Brick, a sort of yellow-coloured brick I've only seen in Southeastern Wisconsin. (Eh, I should talk...our frame house would be much more charming if we could eventually remove all that *fake* brick that some "modernizer" from the Depression or WWII era put up on the outside. We're eventually restoring the original wood siding [no vinyl siding for us, thank you], although it's a time-consuming, expensive process).

We decided on this trip that I could be Tim's sister/he could be my brother. Tim's always wanted a NICE sister that he could talk to (he has two sisters, but...I've heard things). I've always wanted a brother. And since we were both born at St. Mary's Hospital, I've decided Tim is my brother. Isn't it weird that I lived in 5 different states from Massachusetts to Colorado (all before I was 11) but end up coming back to the state I was born in and being such good friends with someone born in the same hospital. Weird.

The last house I photographed (the white one on the corner with the big Catalpa tree in the front) was my grandparent's house. My mother was literally born in this house and lived there until she married my dad. It was built around 1910, I think. Not sure if my grandfather's parents built it or not...will have to ask my mom. I remember visiting here every year when I was a kid. I never got to see what was in the upstairs attic, though. It looks kind of cool with those large dormers. I think that's why I have reoccurring dreams about going to the upstairs in houses a lot...sort of an architectural version of unrequited love.

posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 9:36 PM ||


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It's funny how some people and some human chew toys think that my name is "Ann S. Thesia" where everywhere it appears on my site it is either Ann-S-Thesia (domain name) or as Ann Stretton (my real name). I guess I can't be too hard on them...after all, if Stan and I were 20 years younger and happened to meet on the net (I know this is hard to picture, self, but just try), he'd probably be equally confused, having never been that good with the nitpicky specifics of language. That's not to equate Stan in any way, shape, or form with Human Chew Toy. No, not at all. Stan knows that he can't design a web page. (snort).
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 8:59 AM ||


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Strange dreams. Stan and I were visiting Lamya and Russ in Boulder, but they weren't there for part of the time, but they let us use their house to stay in anyway (sort of like with Kay and Tom when we went to Arizona). It didn't look like their house...it was all on one level. For some reason, Stan was staying somewhere else, so I had to stay there alone. I remember walking through the house turning off all the lights before I went to bed. Hieronymus had gone to sleep in one of their kids rooms, and was sleeping on a little bed like a baby. Then they came home and they were with some other people I didn't know, but there was a teenage guy that Russ introduced as his younger brother (was young enough to be a son, actually). Lamya didn't look like herself. Then I was playing with some very strange computer-aided landscape-building software that was 3-D, but not computer 3-D, real 3-D that I could hold in my hands. It was made out of craft material like felt and that spongy stuff that they make fake trees out of for model train sets. I could ask it to make a tsunami, and it would warp this landscape I was holding in my hands to simulate the effect a tsunami would have on the strata of this slice of earth I was holding. Very Odd. Then I was staring at it, and visualizing a landscape like the one I have in dreams a lot where it's all lush and green and hilly, and there's a pond with fish and frogs, and I was actually able to switch my dream over to that landscape and become part of it.
posted by Ann-S-Thesia at 8:33 AM ||



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