9 posts from May 2008

On Sunday my friend Chrissy and I headed to the Brooklyn Museum of Art for the good new fashioned craziness that is the Takashi Murakami exhibit.

Oh yes, Meg, it is INDEED true that the Japanese will continue to hand our asses to us on a Hello Kitty silver platter over and over until the end of days.  Teh QTE can't even stay out of their contemporary art scene.  It's like they can't help themselves.

Taken with my camera phone in the stairwell of the exhibit:

Happy Flowers

OMGFLOWERSWITHSMILIEFACESEVERYWHERE!!11!!1!

And I mean EVERYWHERE.  Behold (not my pics, btw):

Murakami wall paper

Murakami ball and painting

Murakamiflowers

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Murakami cosmos

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MurakamiFlowerBall

Some Paintings here (again, not my pics).  And yes, that is the Louis Vuitton emblem you are seeing.   He did a whole line of hand bags with them a couple of years ago:

Fashion_news_bad_boy_art_LV_Murakami

Tan_tan_bo_2

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And meet Ki Ki and Kai Kai, the stars of one of his cartoons which is uber cute.  We watched two of them at ten minutes a piece and they were pretty clever:

Kiki and Kai Kai

Yesterday I met a very lucky bunny.  I was walking to my mate Adam's house to continue with my cat sitting when I came across a teenage Tibetan boy sitting on the sidewalk with a bright yellow twine leash in his hand.  It took me a second to register that the critter on the other end of it was not a dog.  I "SQUEEED" very loudly and asked permission to pet, which was granted.  I squatted down and cooed at the disapproving dark chocolate colored bun whose ears and nose twitched at me.  The boy explained that he had just found the rabbit that very day and they were new friends.  I noticed how soft the bun was and pointed out that surely this was someone's pet - it simply wasn't a wild rabbit.  He insisted it was not, that he had rescued it outside of a meat market and he's pretty sure the bun had escaped from there.  He's a vegetarian and a Buddhist so he could not bring himself to return the rabbit and decided it was a sign that they were to be friends.  I praised him for the decision, got a few more skritches in and headed along my way. 

Meet "Little Tibet"

Little tibet 1

Little tibet 2

[ED - I can't get rid of the underline in the passage below, please ignore it]

Today, msn.com has featured a wonderful piece in Newsweek about bipolar disorder in children.  link here

The author of this piece has profound insight and I encourage anyone who has been curious about this to read it. 

I've never been able to put my finger on exactly what it is about bipolar, specifically, that people cannot understand, even after learning about the symptoms.  But I see now that it's the extreme "happiness" that is the most difficult for folks to wrap their heads around.  It isn't really happiness at all.  Just like the anger and sadness that goes along with this mood disorder isn't "real" either.  The moods are extreme and come from a different place than pure emotion.  The emotions may physically come from the same part of the brain but they are biologically skewed.  There is such a thing as being "too happy".  From the article:

"During a recent appointment at Frazier's office, he [Max, the child featured in this article] went into full-fledged mania. Laughing wildly, he rolled on the floor, then crawled over to his parents and grabbed an empty medication bottle, yelling, "Drugs! I've got drugs! It's child safety!" Richie [his dad] grabbed it back, Max screamed, Richie threw the bottle across the room, as if playing fetch. Max squealed and dove for it, then began to sing into the neck of the bottle: "Booorn to be wiiiiild …" Amy [his mom] rolled her eyes: "Two kids." And then: "It's hard not to laugh."  It was.  And it was hard to look at Max, who has borne so much, and remember that the grin on his face was not a sign of childish goofiness but a symptom of an illness. Sadness and anger can be pathological; anyone can see that. It's harder to see happiness that way."

Eureka!  How can happy be bad?  That is so so so hard to understand.  But, as I said before, it isn't actual happiness.  And this is the type of happy that isn't fun to witness, either.  If you've never witnessed mania personally, you'll just have to trust me on that. If you've seen Tom Wilkinson's performance in the film Michael Clayton then you've seen, at the very least, the best depiction of mania I've ever seen expressed on film.

If you have a minute, read the story.  It's heart breaking but worth it.  It exposes how difficult it is to diagnose mental illness in children and it puts a human face on the problem, as well.  It's better to TRY to treat it than to do nothing at all.  No one asks for their life to be so difficult, it's something out of our control.  And humans are not known for handling things that we cannot control very gracefully.  When it comes to mental illness, we'd rather the problem at hand not exist, as opposed to stopping and taking the time to understand it - until you've been there, that is, for most.  When I hear stories like Max's, I realize that because his parents and he have been through hell and back trying to treat the problem, constantly having to weigh pros and cons of medication, hospitals, schools and therapy, once Max is old enough to TRULY understand what is happening to him, there will be hope.  It's true that this kid will have a rough go at it.  There is no cure for bipolar but there IS treatment.  If his parents had done nothing at all and chose to live in denial and suffer along with him without trying the drugs and therapy, things would be a lot harder for this child.  He'd probably be dead considering his suicide attempt.  From the article:

"There was a night last month when Max was calm, and after he finished his homework, he curled up in an easy chair with Amy. She was reading him a book, and although it was only 7:45 his eyelids were fluttering. Eventually he began to whine, and Amy asked him if he was about to start a fight. "Probably," he said. "Let's just get it over with." But he didn't fight. Instead, he was quiet for a few minutes, then he looked at her and said, "Your heart is the size of the world." What he may not realize now, although he surely will someday, is that it has to be."

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I knew you could do it, David!!  Congrats to my fellow Missourian for bringing home the title of American Idol with a whopping 56% of the vote!!

David cook

Show us the comic strip you read most often.

Well there isn't one, there are several.

I've had many comic strip loves over the years...Calvin & Hobbes being the greatest of all time, imo.

These days it's For Better or For Worse, Get Fuzzy, and the online strip Two Lumps (thanks Theo for introducing me to that one!)

Two lumps

Get fuzzy

I also like this one that Meg posted on CO one day, Not From Concentrate.  It's clever:

223

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I also love me some Mother Goose and Grimm:

Hellokittycomic2

OMGTRASHCANSSHAPEDLIKEICECREAMCONES1!1!!!1

(And Megans - the world would be a much better place with more Megans...)

Ice cream cone trash can

It is with great sadness that I share the news that my folks had to put down the last of their cats yesterday.  Mary Beth Lacey will be greatly missed as she joins her twin litter mate Christine Cagney and my other childhood cat, Ziggy, in the Heavyside Layer.  It's been a ROUGH few years for my parents.  We've lost a beloved dog and now three cats.  ED - not to mention Danny, my aunt's Persian that my parents took care of for a few years.  So make that FOUR cats.  *sigh*  I'm glad they have Lady Day and Walker...but it has been a long time....actually....forever since my parents have not had a cat in the house.  This will be the first time in my life.  It's never been fewer than one cat. 

Big ((((HUGS)))) to Mom and Dad today.   

I'm glad I got to see her one last time in back in April.

Mary Beth