Mating Season

It's Spring!

In honor of mating season, I would like to rant at you about a trend in our society that I've noticed and have been thinking a lot about. I haven't come up with a catchy term for it so maybe after you read this you can toss some ideas at me.

I've noticed a role reversal in the male/female mating ritual. In nearly every other species men are the ones who have to win over women. Males perform the dance, males flash their pretty colors, males spar over the females.

One of my favorite videos depicting this is from the BBC's Planet Earth. check it out:

If you're super impatient skip to 2:15 to see the best part.

So how did it come to be that women and girls are now poking and prodding and painting and tucking and pinching and sucking and cutting and folding and lasering and chemical peeling and anti-wrinkling and implanting and generally performing all kinds of modifications and/or preening to get the attention of men?
Ladies, where did we go wrong? When did we allow this shift to happen?
Go ahead and google the words "college girl". Now click on images and see what comes up.


Fake hair, fake skin tone, tons of make up, and posed in a sexual stance. A mating dance. These girls are today's human equivalent of that Bird of Paradise in the video above.


I feel like this image says it all.

There's a bar in West Hollywood (one of the few straight bars) called Crown Bar. I went there once with a friend and was dismayed and appalled at what I saw. Not only were the gender roles reversed, but the women were acting like such childish animals I could hardly believe it. They were talking loudly and giggling even louder. They were getting hammered, or at least pretending to get hammered and dancing around like morons, all the while glancing around the room to see which guy was noticing them. They're clothing hardly covered they're bits and pieces and they were slathered with makeup and fake nails and fake hair. And the worst part was that they all looked the same! All these women were trying to out-do each other with the same technique and the men stood around and drooled and bought the women drinks.

I think what I'm trying to say here, the reason I'm writing this, is because all of this makes me sad. I see so many woman playing this game, doing this mating dance, and it only serves to make us all look shallow.

Ladies, let's let the men go back to trying to impress us, shall we? After all, there are more of them than us so it serves that they should be fighting for our attention and not the other way around.

Oh and the "aren't I so adorably clueless?" technique is most definitely not cute. Cut it out.

Dogs

A friend of mine went out of town this weekend and I watched her dog.
When Lucy and Lily weren't playing loudly they slept so cutely.




Lily was fascinated by the 4th floor view.








The sound of the camera startled her awake.

Shipping Container Home

I want to live in a glass house. I don't mean to say that I want to live exposed to the world or unable to throw stones (I occasionally enjoy a bit of stone throwing). I mean I literally want to live in a house made of glass. Specifically, a house made solely of windows, like this one:How cool is that?

Actually, in an ideal situation, the above building would be a bit more well built, and would serve as my art studio with an add-on divided by a thick plastic curtain for my greenhouse in which I would grow a vast array of rare and beautiful plants that either serve a medicinal purpose, or have gorgeous flowers. I can so clearly picture myself in this place. In one room or the other, going between garden lady covered in dirt and smelling of earth and crazy artist lady covered in a multitude of paints and smelling of paste.
My landscape outside my windows jumps back and forth in my mind from beautiful northern California forest on a hill...
...to lush tropical jungle dotted with fruit trees and a mere 10 minute walk from the ocean (perhaps the Gulf of Mexico?).

So, where would I actually live, you ask? Well, in a converted shipping container of course! No, I'm completely serious. One day, not too long ago, Quinn and I stumbled across a man's blog about how he had an idea to solve his problem of needing a live/work space in various places around the world for relatively short periods of time, ie a year or so. He came up with the idea of converting a shipping container. The idea is, shipping containers are easily and cheaply shipped all around the world. It's the standard for import/export. If you have anything in your home that came from China or Thailand etc, there is a 99% chance it made it's journey to you by shipping container. They are all built standard in order be stacked on ships, or placed on semis quickly and easily. AND they come with hardwood floors! This takes mobile home living WORLDWIDE! Oh, and the possibilities for modification of these things is endless.




When we did more research on this concept we came to understand that they've become a kind of sustainable housing trend over the past few years. People have done some crazy shit with these shipping containers.








You can do all kinds of things with these containers! You can stack them on top of each other for a two story home, you can stack them side by side and connect them with hallways, or even tear down whole sides and stick two together for a double wide, or replace a wall with glass! The possibilities are mindbogglingly endless!

However, for the time being our plan is relatively simple. We want one container that we can fold back up and ship anywhere in the world. We'll roam around looking for cheap land to rent, and then ship our container, unfold it, and voila! Home sweet home! When we've tired of this lifestyle and want to settle in a bit more, we'll find a nice plot of land someplace and plop our container down and perhaps add a couple more, as well as my window-made art studio/greenhouse.

But even the first part of this plan is far off in the distance, and we're just young enough that we wholeheartedly (or foolhardily, you decide) believe that we can make this dream come true for ourselves. Part of the reason we're doing the farming in foreign countries thing is to learn how to grow our own food so that someday we can live primarily off our own land and maybe trade our produce or flowers for chocolate and wine.

Magic City

We spent a week in Miami, my home town.

Miami, is apparently referred to as The Magic City on occasion. Which is odd because in my 18 years of growing up there I had never heard that. Quinn picked up on this, and continued to say things like, "ahh Magic City", or "It's good to be in the Magic City", all week solely because it bugged me (which is ridiculous anyway, so who could blame him). Despite this minor annoyance, we had a pretty nice time. Consult the evidence below for confirmation on this point.


Sunrise on a plane.

How handsome is this guy?

Having grown up very close to the beach, I have to say that sandy feet are my favorite kind of feet to have.

A friend of mine from high school, Alice Motes, (the kind of friend that was at my 16th birthday party and whom I just hung out with three days ago all the way out here in L.A.) grew up on an orchid farm.
Motes Orchids is one of the leaders in Vanda growing and hybridization. They even won some sort of world cup of orchids, or something like that.
The farm is utterly mind blowing (and the Motes' have epic 4th of July parties that I very much miss attending).

You should check out Mary Motes' blog over at Not Just Orchids. She means it, her blog is not just about orchids and it's one of the most interesting blogs out there (and it doesn't even have photos! *Gasp*)

The Motes' also have quite a jungle of a yard aside from the orchids.

This is Melissa and Quinn at Robert Is Here, a fruit stand right outside of the Everglades. Melissa is my wife and would-be life partner if it weren't for the fact that the thought of each other's vaginas makes us both cringe. But I just might love this woman more than any other person on the planet.

This is the Robert Is Here emu.

We rolled through the Everglades......with the sun on our faces......and the wind in our hair.

The tiniest airplant.

P.S. Does anyone know how I could make these photos appear bigger?