Archive for May, 2007

causin’ trouble since 1986

May 31, 2007 · Filed under hotbox

me and tashlike every year since i was born, spring comes around and once again its my birthday! may 23rd… what a day to be born, huh? anywho, this year was exceptionally special. nope, it wasn’t my golden birthday (i’m not that old), but on that fateful day this may, i turned the ripe old age of twenty-one. that’s right… i was finally able to taste my first drink of alcohol. i’ve been saving myself. i mean, its illegal to under-age drink. and i’d NEVER do something that my government told me was wrong. that’s my story and i’m stickin’ to it.

anyways… some really awesome stuff happened for this birthday. i did not have a party with condoms in the gift bags, but i guess that can’t happen every year. since last august when we all moved into the hotbox, we’ve been discussing and planning for a hotbox 80s bash in the spring. it just seemed natural to link it up with my birthday party (ya know, ’cause i was born in the 80s). plus, i got to go out to the bars… and to top it all off NATASHA DAWN STEVENS came out to seattle to help me celebrate. my best friend in the whole world… and she was here to watch me get wasted, make out with girls, and cry with me when we got in a fight. oh geez, tannah.

boxeteersso on the saturday before my birthday (may 19th), tasha arrived in the afternoon and by sundown we were ready to party down 80s style with some big hair, cuff bracelets, 4 kegs of cheap beer, and 9 hours (thats right, NINE hours) of tunes straight from the 1980s. that night was crazy… of course we all got completely wasted, playing beer pong and taking shots of tequila with mere and you know who. there had to be hundreds of people at the hotbox (or at least thats what it looked like) including some special guest appearances made by faraz, cousin andrew, and jesus. i also met this really awesome girl named Claire from england. now for those of you who dont know, i love the british… and i’ve always said that i wanted to be british when i grew up. and just chatting it up with her reaffirmed my love for those silly brits. oh, and also, jalyn b(r)ought me a really pretty bowl… it has a little blue frog on it and its super cute. so THANX j-dawg.

drunk meTHEN on to continue my birthday celebration, on tuesday night at midnight we (me, eli, mere, tasha, marie, burton, britt, bookis, rhino, brandon, tyler, and drew) went out to kate’s, a bar up the street from the hotbox and got wasted. people kept buying me shots and by the end, brandon was trying to force me to take “just ONE more shot” for a good 20 minutes but i just couldn’t do it… oh, and i made out with bookis (hehe). luckily i wasn’t too hung over the next morning and was able to go out to breaky with tash and broph, play some disc golf in the springtime sun, and talk to a million people on the phone. after a couple more nights at the bars, i was ready to get out of seattle.

at the cabinso on friday afternoon, we headed up to mt. rainier and my uncle’s cabin. tasha and brandon and i drove up in the afternoon and did some hiking around, fire building, Sorry playing, hotdog roasting, and beer drinking until the boys (eli, drew, and ty) got there at like 9 o’clock. it was great fun, just chillin out, drinking all night long. s’mores and TONS of junk food… made me want to puke, but it was totally worth it. it was really nice to get out of the city and into my natural spiritual element. overall it was a great trip a la montaña.

i also got some really awesome gifts. crystal (my newest lady friend) got me a TMBG dvd, which i was totally blown away by since we had never talked about my undying love for the giants. jess got me the first season of Are You Afraid of the Dark? on dvd. britt got me this awesome kit to make a purse. marie got me Persepolis (which i have wanted to read for quite some time). tasha got me an AWESOME special about the galapagos islands on dvd. i got a new camera from my mom and dad. and my aunt is going to buy me new boots! kick ass. so all in all it was an awesome awseome birthday! it was absolutely amazing to have tasha here and to finally not have to worry about drinking and being left behind when the rest of the Box goes out to the bars. mucho amor.

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“Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight”

May 31, 2007 · Filed under and stuff

african lion kills midgetsso, holy shit. i didn’t know that people were so sure of themselves… and midgets to boot.

now, i’m all about pushing your limits and stepping outside your comfort zone, but when it comes to battling one of mother nature’s more fearsome and ferocious beasts, i try to steer clear. maybe, just maybe, they thought this one didn’t have any courage.

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value village weirdo

May 12, 2007 · Filed under hotbox

speedoso there we were. four boxeteers shopping for the 80s party at our favorite little thirft store, the sandpoint value village. now, sure, you are bound to run into a couple of strange people everytime you visit a value village, but this guy was pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty weird.

as we were sifting through the rows and rows of shoulder-padded jackets and high-waisted cargo shorts, marie informed us that burton was willing to wear a ridiculous speedo if we found one for him. so of course morgen and i rush off to the male swimsuit section to take a look at the selection. on our way there, we were discussing the word “ish” and how only people in the midwest (specifically minnesota) can understand the significance of this word. [ex. "oh, ish! i'm not going to eat that!"] as we were passing the jeans isle, a 20 something guy says “did you guys say minnesota?” and proceeds to name drop a bunch of towns in minnesota and shit about the vikes and whatnot. okay we get it… you’re from minnesota. we laugh awkwardly and then the dynamic of our relationship with this guy took a strange turn. he immediately started talking to us like we were old, dear friends. “hey. do these jeans look good? do you think they are too expensive?” we were polite and gave him advice about the jeans but then he got exponentially weirder. he licked two fingers on his hand and wiped morgen’s face with them, as if he were getting a smudge off or something. a very intimate thing. morgen barely lets me touch her arm, let alone essentially spit on her face, and we’re more than just friends if you know what i mean. with morgen’s very visible, unapproving reaction to this, we quickly walked away, trying to hold in our laughs and freaked out shrieks of “what the hells” and other such phrases until he was out of earshot. and then we let it all out…

and the worst part is… we didn’t even find a speedo for burton. what a waste of a day, huh?

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love your mom

May 10, 2007 · Filed under and stuff

momi got this email from my mom (that’s her –>) the other day with this story. as much as i dont really like it when my mom forwards silly things to me that her friends have forwarded to her, this one was pretty good.

someone i graduated from high school with died on friday. since i heard about it, i’ve been reevaluating some shit and trying to remember that things happen in my life for a reason. i think that this has given me the opportunity to really appreciate the people in my life and reminded me that i always want to tell people how i feel, never holding back because of what someone might think or how they might react, because there will come a time in everyone’s lives when the opportunity to tell someone you love them is just moments too late. i never want to feel like that.

so i guess this just gave me a chance to see, yet again, how much my mom means to me and how much she has done for me. i am forever grateful for the love, affection, and undivided attention she has given me for the last 21 years. so… on sunday, call your mom and tell her you love her. even if you and your mom dont get along, let her know that you appreciate the unbelievable act of birth that she performed in order to give you life (i hear it hurts like the dickens). i love you, mom.

and here’s that thing. its sort of long and, ya know, its from my mom so…:

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost- adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, have all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations –what they taught me, was that they couldn’t really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton’s wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China . Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, “Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame.” The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, “What did you get wrong?”. (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald’s drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. Even today I’m not sure what worked and what didn’t, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I’d done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That’s what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.

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the kittens and nude photos

May 5, 2007 · Filed under hotbox

slater's cone oh the kittens sure have been through alot lately. first of all, after several unsuccessful tries at getting them spayed, they finally got those little kitty ovaries taken out. although in the end it worked out just fine, there were several bumps and forced detours to the finish line. on the early morning of their appointment, britt and i took a wrong, high turn and ended up way off course… but we made it there just in time, and i didn’t even cry when the lady took them away. everything was great for the first couple of days. i mean, the crazy babies were barely phased by the surgery. but then, because of the all the climbing and jumping that she does, slater’s stitches popped out and there was a large, open hole on her shaved belly. it was really pretty gross looking and made me cry everytime i looked at it. because i had class and work (and my unemployed friends are jerks and never do anything for me) bookis was totally awesome and nice enough to drive slater back to the vet to get it restitched. but slater is just a little jerk and wouldnt stop licking it… so a couple days later, back to the vet! for the next week or so, she had to wear a cone around her little kitten head and take medicine twice a day. oh man, she was so sad and cute, running into walls and getting stuck in places. oh, geez.

slater in a treethe point of all this nonsense was to allow the kittens to play outside. i mean, i didnt want them getting preggers out there. the last time one of my kittens got knocked up, she had to get a kitty abortion. i want the next abortion i have to pay for to be for myself… come on. so about a week ago, i set them free into the outside world, and geezus, they fucking love it. i was nervous, sure, but it makes me so happy to see them out there and rockin it. plus, rumi loves having them out there! and they are sooo good. they dont go down the second set of stairs out onto the sidewalk/street. they are making friends with the local tomcats, and they just tell us when they want to come inside. its working out beautifully. i’m so proud!
urchin in a tree

naked city and now, the second part of the title. i know this is what you’ve all been waiting for. its nudey magazine day!! my photographer friend, chris grunder, is at a photo workshop in palm springs this week and he needed some, ya know, artsy-fartsy nude photos for his portfolio (i think this one is my favorite). and of fucking course i agreed to that shit. hah. it was actually really empowering and a lot of fun. i had been a “model” of sorts for some friends in high school, but this was obviously completely different. britt came along to distract me, and we went to this seattle-hip studio on capital hill. chris was totally professional, and it really wasnt awkward at all. i guess i assumed that it would be… but no. i’d totally do it again. if you want to check out the photos, you can click through some of chris’s favorites here. and here’s one with my face.

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so here we are

May 5, 2007 · Filed under europe

wow, you guys. this is it. my very own blog. it actually is a lot of pressure if you think about it. people to please. memories to capture. i hope i can do myself justice and provide you with an accurate virtual journal of the life and times of hannah merner duke, esq. … so be prepared, be enthusiastic, and leave your bullshit attitudes at the door ’cause we don’t need ‘em! hey, you guys, listen up! (anyone? anyone?)

my plan is to start blogging this summer (aka now) and use this primarily to document the adventures of my upcoming trip to europe. i plan to leave sept 1 to backpack across europe with my favorite, jessica brophy, and then participate in a study abroad program in granada, spain until december. i cannot fucking wait.

so read up. enjoy… and love.

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