How to Make Your Living Room Look Pinteresting

SEE WHAT I DID THERE?! Anyway, I just used four tags on this post that have previously never been used on my blog EVER. Boy oh boy are you in for a treat.

When Sam and I first moved into our new place, we had some problems agreeing on what should be hung on the wall and where. This led to me scouring Tumblr and Pinterest for ideas and him vetoing all of them which, in turn, led to a big empty wall of nothingness behind our couch.

This feline anatomy scroll was my dream.
A dream that was crushed by a $90 price tag.

I was mostly obsessed with anatomical illustrations of animals, specifically cats and rabbits. I thought maybe if I hung them on the wall, they would serve as a warning to Shadow and House and curb their misbehavior. You'd be horrified to find out just how expensive prints that show animals guts or flower parts are. For small ones it can be anywhere from $30-$100+. I wanted to make a framed photo collage, but I didn't, and still don't, have 1k to spend on stamens and shit. If I did, do you think there'd be ads on this blog?

So I brainstormed and came up with a thrifty solution. You will need the following materials:

♥ This book
♥ An exacto knife
♥ Frames of various shapes and sizes (you can find these at thrift shops)
♥ Colored paper if you'd like to mat the pictures
♥ Hardware for hanging them up
♥ The patience of a saint
♥ Snacks, always snacks

I only had to buy the book because I'm a lucky duck (read: spoiled brat) and my dad has a home-staging business. This means he not only has a ton of thrifted frames just laying around, but he knows how to crop, cut, mat, mount, and frame the hell out of some pictures. You'll want to go through the whole book and pick which pictures you'd like to use. Much to my ecstatic surprise, they had a print of the above cat anatomy scroll. I peed a tiny bit.

Example of the smaller illustrations which can be
cropped to fit into eency weency frames.

Next, take the exacto knife and as precisely as possible, slice those pages out of the book. You'll want to slice as close to the binding as you can. I can't tell you how my dad managed to cut all of the pages out perfectly straight, but he did. I'm also glad he did because just the abstract thought of cutting up that book gave me psychosomatic chest pains. You'll want to crop some of the smaller ones so that they'll fit into tiny frames. You want to have a mix of large, medium, and small frames and the amount you should buy depends on how much space you need to fill. We used ten.

Next, start putting your pictures into the frames. For some of the larger frames, you'll need to use matting so that they don't look dopey. As previously mentioned, I didn't do any of this shit, so here's a tutorial I found with Google. When all of your pages are in their respective frames, find a space on the floor to lay them all out. You don't want to make them too symmetrical, but try to keep the spaces between each picture pretty even. Make the arrangement your own and mess with it for a while. When you find a mock-up that pleases you, start putting them on the wall one at a time (remembering where they were on the floor). To make your life easier, you can take a picture of them on the floor before you start hanging them up so that you can reference the picture throughout the hanging process. For the love of all that is holy, be careful to not start too far right or left so that the collage doesn't make it all the way across the wall and then you have to do it all over again and your boyfriend starts responding sarcastically to everything you say while he pulls nails out of the wall only to rehammer them in two feet from their original spot. HEED MY WARNING.

If you read and followed this vague, discombobulated tutorial, you should end up with something like this:

And my apartment is that much closer to becoming a hipster apothecary.
Sorry for the phone-quality pictures but also, deal with it?

Edited to add: my friend is an amazing and talented artist who is an experienced scientific illustrator. So, if you'd like to support her by purchasing some of her work instead of using that book, that'd be awesome too!

Who I Want to Be When I Grow Up

This was going to be the title of my next post, but I have crippling writer's block, people. I mean, all I had in the body of that post was this:

"A man or Buffy Summers."

What I do when I'm not writing. Don't cross me.

Unacceptable. Some of my other notable and unsuccessful post ideas include "Looking Up Your Middle School Crush On Facebook: A Lesson in Abstinence" and "More About How I Don't Ever Wash My Hair." Now here I am trying to think of an amusing anecdote or anything at all to tell you guys so that I don't become the next Hyperbole and a Half and disappear off of the face of the internet for months at a time. So far this month I've been busy mediating fights between my boyfriend and my mom (to Sam's credit, she said she didn't believe in sexism like it was some sort of whimsical fairy from a children's story), shooting guns, trying to figure out whether Lana Del Rey is incredibly sexy or hideously ugly, getting new eyeglasses, making endless sodas with my new Sodastream, not doing my taxes, and occasionally slut-shaming my cat in a seemingly-friendly voice because she doesn't know the difference and it is HILARIOUS. I guess that explains why I've been so busy (not really though at all).

Watch out, Selleck.

I can't even think of a cool story. That's how useless I am right now. Or maybe I just got distracted because my coworker gave me some squishy foam stuff and I can't stop playing with it/wearing it like a mustache. Remember jamming Gak into its plastic container in order to make farting noises? Oh, the finer things in life. I'm also listening to Edith Piaf on Rdio which makes playing with the foam stuff very dramatic and retro.

Anyway, I don't really have much more to say but I didn't want you guys to think I had forgotten that I have a blog so here's this half-assed, uninspired post. I'm going to end it by posting pictures of the dresses I decided to buy from ASOS and Forever 21. In my defense, they were having a sale and so all 11 of these dresses were under $200. I'm not sure why I needed a dress in every color of the rainbow, BUT I DID (except orange, please help me find a cute orange dress). I guess this is how you can look like a Zooey Deschanel/Charlotte Charles/The Wiggles hybrid on a budget? Also, have I ever told you guys my aspirations of becoming the 5th Wiggle? It's about time they had a lady Wiggle, if you ask me. Consider this my audition, you colorful Aussie magicians.

TV Censorship: Are You For Monkeyfighting Real?

Last week, as those of you who know me in the real world are already aware, I was bed-ridden with what can only be described as the black lung my body entering a Guinness World Record competition for the most mucous produced in the shortest time span. Coupled with a sore throat, blinding sinus pressure, and a fever, I could have also probably won the Guinness World Record for grumpiest lady on a couch who hasn't showered in three days.

Naturally, I had to find a way to occupy myself that didn't involve speaking, moving, or leaving the apartment (or showering, as mentioned above). I resolved to spend my time watching y-rate horror movies that I had DVR-ed, much to Sam's chagrin, while eating countless granny smith apples and forcing my cat to stand upright so that I could play

Don't judge me. This movie rules.

her belly pouch like a guitar and make whammy noises with my mouth. You see, I'm plagued with this problem where if I see a movie that I love when surfing the cable guide, I just have to record it. This explains why I had "Aladdin," "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,"  "Twister," "Hocus Pocus," and "Powder" on the DVR list, about 2% space left to record shit, and a very frustrated boyfriend who tried to explain downloading to me over and over again. Recently I had DVR-ed two really stupid horror movies simply because I hadn't seen them and I knew there would be a time. That time came last week.

The two movies were Boogeyman 2 (because the first one was so amazing AMIRITE?) and My Bloody Valentine (feel free to click the links and get a synopsis). They originally aired on the Sci-Fi Channel during what must've been some type of worst-horror-movies-of-the-past-five-years marathon and I figured if I watched them, that'd be two less DVR-ed movies for Sam to brood about. They didn't scare me in the slightest and were both pretty much on target with what I expected from them: a recycled plotline, a killer that has superhuman strength and unparalleled disappearing skills, and a lead chick who's helplessly and frantically running about as fast as her mascara is. What did scare me was the Sci-Fi Channel's use and disuse of censorship (which, I'm sure, also applies to most other television channels).

You see, while I was watching these movies I mostly forgot that they were recorded off of live television. With such imagery as a girl having her face split in half horizontally with a shovel, a guy drinking chemical floor cleaner and then foaming from the mouth while the corrosive liquid eats through his neck, and another girl with an eating disorder having tubes stuck in her veins, mouth, and stomach and being pumped full of her own vomit until she explodes, I thought that I surely must be watching some unrated, back-alley, Netflix Instant version of the films. Nope. I was not. And how was my memory refreshed? Because when the killer was discovered and tried to say "God Damnit!" all I heard was "...Damnit!"

I mean, don't get me wrong. Sometimes censorship is HILARIOUS. Take this TV-censored version of the famous "Snakes on a Plane" quote, for instance:

But this time, not so much. I'm still confused on whether censorship is a government-sanctioned parental control so that children don't accidentally see something too inappropriate or if it's adults censoring themselves as to not create a class of subhuman, violent, cursing, TV demons. Either way, what sort of message is censorship really sending out? Violent, brutal murder involving puke and gardening tools is perfectly acceptable but don't even think about using God's name in vain when you're caught. I mean WHAT? What kind of moral code is that to follow? Personally, I'd rather have language like Debra Morgan's be aired consistently on prime-time TV then have movies like the ones I watched go completely uncut. Also, it's so Judeo-Christian-centric to assume that the whole of the United States (and maybe the world, I'm not certain how global TV censorship works) finds it offensive to hear cursing that involves God, Jesus, Noah and his arc, etc. If you're going to censor based on what's offensive to religious groups, then you need to do so for EVERY RELIGIOUS GROUP. You got me? Also, murder is a sin/part of the Ten Commandments too and yet you still air that edit-free on TV. Explain.

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is that censorship is pretty much monkeyfighting useless. You can't censor children or adults from the scariest shit out there: real life. The news will give them gruesome murder, peers will curse in front of them, and yes, non-religious folk will let the Lord fucking have it. If it were up to me, everything would just air on TV in its original state: curses, shovels, and all. But it's not up to me (unfortunately...there'd be so much more cheese, avocados, and cats if I ruled the world) and there will continue to be misplaced censorship as long as parents keep convincing themselves that the cursing on the tube transformed their kid into Ted Bundy and not their horrible, abusive parenting. Go figure.