caveat emptor
Letter I sent/received today, in its (almost) entirety. Ahem.
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 17:26:44 -0700
From: “YouCanSave.com - Customer Support”
To: “Freesia Dawn”
Subject: Re: [#147595] Your Order
Hello,
As per your request, we have cancelled your order. We had not yet
charged
your credit card for this order.
Thank you,
Customer Service Staff
YouCanSave.com
http://www.youcansave.com
Unique Products for Less
Original Message Follows:
––––––––
From: “Freesia Dawn”
Subject: RE: Your Order
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 14:45:10 -0700 (PDT)
No, I do not wish to proceed with this order. I am incredibly
frustrated that you OFFER something on your website and then, after
months of stringing me along, tell me that I will have to pay extra
money in order to receive the product that I ordered such a long time
ago in the FIRST place.
{Editor’s note: I ordered this shit in June. About a month and a half later, I tried to track my shipment, and was told it had been sent to Brooklyn. Your guess is as good as mine.}
I feel that in a situation like this, it is the least that the company
can do to eat the difference and send your customer - who has been
patiently waiting for far longer than you advertise. If not, you turn
away one customer who will certainly tell her friends not to shop at
You Can Settle For Less.com
-Freesia
– Support@YouCanSave.com wrote:
> September 30, 2003
>
>
> Hello,
>
> Thank you for your patience with your order with us at
> YouCanSave.com. The
> good news is that we have just received the shipment in our warehouse
> for
> The Firm II product that you had ordered. However the configuration
> of the
> product that we have received from our vendor has now changed.
> You
> will also receive a coupon to order the missing parts
> for
> about $30.00 direct from the manufacturer but they themselves
> are
> not included in our product configuration.
>
> Do you wish to proceed with your order? If you do, please reply back
> to this
> email ASAP and we will ship your order out plus give you a 10%
> discount. If
> you wish to cancel, then please let us know also but we do hope you
> decide
> to receive this wonderful equipment.
>
> We look forward to hearing from you soon,
>
> Thank you,
>
>
Jesus. And I was wondering how they managed to sell this shit for so cheap. Avoid these fraudulent pigfuckers like the plague, would ya? I’d appreciate it.
… and there you have it
|
Another possibility was DJ Vibrating Donkey. Who knew?
In other news, I’ve been cast in …and also fierce! Very exciting. I’ve never gotten to work with Fraulein Direktor in a theatrical capacity, so this should be fun. Let’s just say that the audition/callback process rocked my puny universe, and only strengthened my resolve to go back to my high school and teach an intersession on Performance Art. If six strangers (relatively speaking) can come up with a performance piece incorporating six different stories - containing a movement component - in fifteen minutes, then a class full of high school kids can most definitely come up with something presentable in a week. Not this January, but next January. It’s going to happen. They’re never going to know what hit them.
going out on a school night
So, I went to the Ballard Firehouse tonight and saw Spyplane, since the lead guitar player/backup vocalist is a friend of a friend of a friend. I showed up and was one of only six people there, which was a damn shame because they are a great live band. I got to hang out and have a couple of drinks with them after the show, and they’re pretty cool guys to boot. Apparently they’re having a show in November, and the bass player challenged me to bring ten people. The gauntlet has been thrown, folks. I expect to see all of you there.
{Confidential to Corey - I am eagerly awaiting your sordid news but have been unable to telephone. Please advise.}
feeling … like … death …
Sarah is currently in the shower, and we will be leaving soon for the airport. While she’s in there, here’s another update.
Sarah’s Talk Like a Pirate Day entry
Sarah’s Minnesotan Farmer entry
So, originally - long, long ago - Pwe and I were going to have a party last night. We eventually realized we were too poor to seed a good party. So, we decided to just have some folks over for cocktails. After a highly amusing day involving quite possibly the funniest roll of film EVER, we bought a buttload of stuff and came home to get our drink on. Heather H. showed up, dressed as a sleeping cavalryman who’d gotten shot while in his longjohns. Amandalee came - and brought me cigarettes! - after she finished watching the special features on Waiting for Guffman. After awhile longer, my Eastside posse arrived - Yuki, Jet, Jeremy, and Grunk, with Ravenna in tow. Half an hour later, ZZ stopped over as well. I was reminded, once again, that there is nothing I love more than watching people I know from completely disparate parts of my life hang out and get along. It was wonderful.
If anyone remembers any of the EXTREMELY FUNNY (but now forgotten due to hangover) quotes from last night, please comment them here. Thanks for coming over, you guys. Y’all ROCK.
holy crap salad, batman
Great fucking day. Reasons include:
Sarah is here visiting me from Chicago.
Quality time at the Garage drawing cartoons on napkins with Sarah and Pwe.
Just got done drinking with Pwe and Sarah and Andrew White.
Let’s face it, Andrew’s take on most life situations just makes everything better… i.e. my lungs are “half full” of tar, as opposed to “half empty”.
Saw a really good fringe show tonight - directed by MA, starring Sparky and J.Faulk and Roberta.
Got to kiss a couple of stars of said show.
Got an email from a dude I’ve been … courting an email from.
Ate a lot of awesome food.
Feeling really good about “I’m difficult” situation b/c of excellent phone conversation with “Joe” last night.
Currently wearing smallest pants since high school.
People have been saying really nice things about the new tattoo all day.
These are just starters. At some point I am going to post some of the pictures we’ve taken so far … heh. heh. heh. If I were you all, I would be waiting with baited breath.
Time to go to sleep, so that I can audition for Ida in the morning. Oy.
would you like to touch my monkey?
More pictures from the file - thanks to the generosity of that one friend of mine who not only has a digital camera, but lets me have his pictures. (You know who you are.)
1. Waiting for pizza makes me glow
2. Apparently, it has the same effect on Gene
3. Wow, we must have been a cute couple back in 1995
4. A certain someone passes the time Vogue-ing
5. Jet catches me really enjoying my ice water
6. Me and my new punk-rock anarchist monkey friend
In that last one, you can kind of see my tattoo. One of these days I’ll put up some actual pictures of it.
Okay. Back to my kids!
quote of the day
Grunk to Jet: Would anyone like some ice cream?
Jet to Grunk: Sure. I’ll eat anything you give me! ….. except cum.
end of an era
I am out drinking with Eli and Amandalee and Marc and Lauren when I get the phone call. The movie screen in my brain starts playing this scene:
We have a really nice conversation. When I finally hang up my phone and go back inside, everything looks a little fuzzy around the edges. Nothing seems quite real. My friends and I all agree that this is far preferable news to the bad mojo I was expecting, given the serious “I need to talk to you right away. It’s important.” voicemail I’d gotten. An hour or so later, I get in my car, and the radio is playing this song:
Congratulations, DtD. I hope you two will be very happy. Although, for the record, there is something that still needs to be said. After all those years you gave me shit for being a Midwesterner, I just find it amusing that you are thinking of settling down in my home state. (It seemed noteworthy.)
P.S. Thank you, Ramon, for reminding me that you and I do not live in one dimension. Sometimes I forget. (You’re right. You’re right. I know you’re right.)
it looks just a little like this
So, the tattoo saga. Here we are.
A long time ago, I decided that I wanted text from The Secret History on my body. My friends and I all read it in high school, and it’s one of those books that just changed my life. (Please imagine that being said aloud in a whiny teenagery sort of way.) There was an excerpt from that book that went as follows:
“The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism.” [Julian] looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. “Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human beings.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
There is more (500 pages or so) but that will do. Perfectly enough, the only place I could find this full text online is a quote page of another student who went to my high school and presumably read this book while taking the same class I did. We also read Native Son and The Bacchae, and then we went in a big yellow schoolbus to see Natural Born Killers. Best fucking class I’ve ever taken.
ANYWAY. There are several different ways the text “Beauty is Terror” could be interpreted. There is the explanation from the book, of course, and that’s definitely part of it. The whole reason I got into acting in the first place was as a way to get out of myself for awhile. Of course, along the way I realized that there is far more benefit to staying present and not letting myself be lost, but that inclination has never gone away. The other side of the coin is this - in order to get where you really want to be, you have to do some scary shit. If you want to know who you are and what you are capable of, and if you want to live a life of any immediacy or meaning, you have to walk through the fire. This text combined all the previous ideas I’d had into one neat little package.
So, the first thing I did was research the UW Classics department online. I sent an email to the secretary asking for direction to a professor who could help me translate the concept I wanted into ancient Greek. “Not modern Greek?” the professor asked. “Definitely not”, I responded. He sent back several different options, and I picked.
Next, I started researching fonts. I was having a HELL of a time when my pal Sarah came to the rescue and started sending me cool ones she’d found online. Instantly, I found one I loved - called Milan - and typed out what I wanted several times to see how it looked. Bold? No. Italic? No. It was fine just the way it was.
Then, I went to Laughing Buddha and had a consultation with a tattoo artist named Marci. She was supposed to do a drawing for me - it never happened. I think maybe she forgot, and I think maybe I want my $20 back. Seriously, dude. Anyway, I finally got tired of waiting for her to get back to me, so I went back in and scheduled a consultation with Anji. This consult actually happened while Corey was here, and as soon as I started talking to her I FREAKED OUT. She looks a great deal like Aimee, and their speech patterns and laugh are eerily similar. There was one piece in her portfolio that I connected with, and she felt confident that we could replicate the style on me. I felt at home with her right away, so we scheduled the appointment for a week later.
Fast forward to yesterday at three. When I arrive, I am feeling sort of high. I couldn’t sleep last night and I’ve been preoccupied all day. I walk in the door, and Anji is sitting behind the counter knitting a scarf. Busta Rhymes is playing overhead. Both of these things seem like good omens to me. We go out front to smoke a cigarette, and she grills me for a bit about exactly why I am getting this tattoo, and what I want it to be.
We go upstairs and she starts drawing on me with magic marker, talking about how you can tell what kind of day she’s having by what colors of marker she uses. (Mine are pink and yellow.) She puts on this crazy music that mixes all these different songs together - one song is Midnight Oil simultaneously with Metallica. Later on, there is a clip from Sesame Street Gold that I recognize - it’s Oscar saying “When is this album going to be over? I’m tired of everybody.” This transitions directly into an old Seekers song that was on another record I listened to constantly as a child. She has me flex my arm muscles three different ways, and then she designs the tattoo specifically to flatter the contours of each muscle. I feel a bit like Ah-nold. She says “You’ve got nice muscle tone.” I feel like maybe all the pumping iron has paid off. Once it’s drawn, she begins “sketching” the outlines with gray ink, so that if the marker rubs off the design would still be there. When she starts, I am shocked at how little it hurts. My first tattoo experience, as some of you might know, was unpleasant to the extreme. My second one was a breeze, so I had no idea what to expect here. She finishes the sketch and does the text, and then we take another smoke break. By this point, I have been upstairs for over an hour.
Outside, she tells me that most people can only sit for a couple of hours, and that her own personal limit is four hours at a time. (This should mean something, as about 75% - if not more - of her body is covered in ink.) She tells me that the body knows when it needs to quit, and it will tell you. Since I am scheduled for a good three hours under the needle, this bit of information is a little unsettling.
Back upstairs, she starts the top side of the design. A few minutes in, one of the other artists pops her head in and says “You have a visitor.” It’s Pwe, who’d promised to come check in on me. She goes out and gets me a Red Bean Bubble Tea smoothie from Broadway Market, and when she comes back we give her a sneak peek of how things are going. (For the record, nobody takes care of me like my Pwe. I hope I can bring her drinks when she gets her tattoo.)
The music has cycled from the bizarre mixmaster to Sonic Youth. I am slurping down the smoothie as Anji gets closer and closer to my underarm. When she originally drew the design there, she laughed. Our conversation went like this.
Her: “Oh, boy. You’re going to hate me.”
Me: “What?”
Her: “This swirl right here.” (she points to a swirl right in the fold.) “You’re going to cry.”
Me: “No, I’m not.”
Her: “We’ll see.”
I have my token scary moment right about then - according to Anji, you have to have one during every session. She is scratch-scratch-scratching away at particularly tender skin, on top of which I have been drinking my smoothie WAY too fast and have given myself the chills pretty hardcore. My pain sensors are wigging, I am shivering uncontrollably, and all of a sudden the lead singer of Sonic Youth begins SCREAMING. One of the other artists shouts up from downstairs “Hey, you guys are scaring me!” and I can’t do anything but laugh. We stop for a smoke break - it’s been another hour.
People keep stopping by to look at the work in progress and ask questions. One hippie girl recognizes that the part of Anji’s tattoo that’s where her Adam’s Apple would be is a specific type of fractal. We have a shockingly dorky conversation about high-level math, and we go back in. I feel better, and am wearing half of my sweater to keep warm. She suggests that we can stop and do the rest later if my body is freaking out, and I say no. I explain that I get the shivers at the drop of a hat under normal circumstances, and that she shouldn’t worry about me. We go back to work.
She finishes the last little bits of the top and moves on to the bottom section. Now, we are listening to Beck - singing along to Loser and trying not to giggle so much that we screw up what she’s doing. I had never listened to that CD all the way through, and some of the stories that she tells about her personal life connection to certain songs have me in stitches. Every time he yelps something high-pitched in the background of a song, we both lose it.
I can’t take it anymore and have to go have a bathroom break. The “keyring” is a huge spatula. Rion tells me it’s because I have to “stir it up before [I] use it”.
The end of the Beck album has some songs on it that are very slow. I call one of them “What happens when the Gregorian Monks sing stoned”. There is also a couple minutes of INCREDIBLY ANNOYING hidden track at the end, and then we move on to Leonard Cohen - the really old stuff. It’s mellow and melancholy and fits our mood perfectly. We have moved on to the last part - the fairly sizeable section that’s all on the underside of my arm, starting about a third of the way up from my elbow and going all the way up. This is by far the most intense pain of the process, and is even harder to deal with than the part of the tattoo that was right on my shoulderbone. Significantly harder. For that section, my bones were vibrating. I could feel the ripples heading out through my bones and into my teeth - but that was a very palpable sort of pain. One you can set your will against. This is completely different. Thankfully, by this point I am exhausted. My adrenaline and endorphins have been running high for several hours, and my skin is sort of used to what’s happening to it. I am glad we’ve saved this part for last, because if we’d started here I don’t know that I would have made it through the whole thing. I am breathing, breathing, breathing. Using my diaphragm. Staring at that same point on the light on the ceiling above me - which, when I sit up again, will make me see huge black splotches for several minutes.
We have another cigarette break, as it’s been another hour. She talks about what she did before becoming a tattoo artist. We talk about how draining this process is for her, because of how much emotional support she gives to the people she tattooes. Plus, there’s a huge level of artistic concentration necessary which just wears her out. I know the feeling. I have been concentrating with all my might to stay present throughout this process. To breathe through the discomfort. I want to remember the entire experience later, but first I need to complete it. We are both really dragging as we go back upstairs. We are almost done.
Anji starts the “Icy blue glow of death”, as she calls it. We are back on the outer side of my arm again, and compared to what I’ve just experienced this is a breeze. However, at one point I hear her say “Oh, no.” This is never reassuring in this type of situation. “What?”, I say. “Well,” she responds, “your skin is starting to reject the ink. I’m putting it in, and it’s spitting it back out. You might be okay mentally with going on, but your body is calling it quits.” This, as you might imagine, pisses me off. I am all about the mind over matter, and am frankly pretty thrilled with myself for what I’ve just accomplished. Fortunately, she is VERY close to done. “Tell you what,” she says. “When you come back for your touch-up session in three weeks, I’ll finish it off for free. I could do it in fifteen minutes, but I’m not going to put ink in there if it isn’t going to stay.” I think this is a great idea. We cover me in Saran Wrap and paper towels and tape. “I feel like a piece of leftover meat,” I say. She laughs. Finally, at long last, we go downstairs.
I have been there for five hours. “You sat really, really well,” she says. “Your mind won out over your body. You did a great job.” This makes me feel really good, especially considering what she told me earlier about how long people can stand to be tattooed for. (For the record, I did not cry. Not once. I did not even come close.) Generously, she only charges me for three and a half hours of ink time, even though I am certain it’s been more than that. She tells me to come back the next day so we can take some pictures when I am no longer gooey and bleeding, and I say that sounds great. I hand over the cash I had gotten during my lunch hour, I grab my bottle of Provon (that she gives me for free,) and I walk to my car.
I am so pumped that I feel like my brain is going to explode. The whole ride home in the car I am more thrilled than I have ever been about anything in my life. I know this is mostly due to the insane amount of chemicals my body had created, but I don’t care. It’s an amazing, exhilirating feeling, and it reminds me why I enjoy this so much. I have just lived through something I will never forget - and while it was a bit terrifying, it was also absolutely beautiful. I have come full circle.
I get home and sit down in my comfy chair with my dog, some Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and a bottle of Scotch. I now have a great big piece of one-of-a-kind art on my body. Life, at the moment, is really fucking good.
let’s try that again, shall we?
So, here’s the ironic thing. In telling a story about how someone said something that I misinterpreted, I created a veritable breeding ground for further potential misunderstandings. I archived the post, because I want to keep it, but I don’t feel like I need to create the same situation that I was writing about in the first place. I needed to vent - I didn’t need to piss people off. Right.
In other news, Corey was here, and now apparently he has safely arrived at his destination. I had a week of teacher in-service, culminating tonight with a tremendously long workday and “Meet the Teacher” night. I am finally getting my tattoo next week. Life is fucked-up and exhausting and mostly pretty good. Right now, I am going to sleep.
Oh, by the way. Pwe made a Vodka-Gatorade tonight, and it was damn tasty.