Mythological Holiday Creatures

Because I'm the type of person who takes on way more projects and freelance work than I can handle, of course I insisted on making some kind of video Christmas card this year. And with my filmmaker husband's assistance, we did. Merry Christmas from the Cardons. Sorry for the puns. Oh wait, no I'm no...

Experiment: Laser Tag

First of all, the place smells like bad pizza.A pizza cooked days ago, kept lukewarm under a heatlamp. Like worse than a Hot-n-Ready smell. A sweaty, public pool pizza.This is because they have one of these pizzas (pepperoni) under a sallow heatlamp, sitting next to the cash-register. From the looks, a consumer-grade heatlamp. You might buy something similar from SkyMall, to accompany the Old Fashioned Looking Popcorn Machine you keep in your "game den." And the $2.50-a-slice pizza looks completely desaturated. Ninja Turtles would cry.Speaking of Ninja Turtles, the whole place is actually sort of sewerlike. The walls are black and foamy with low ceilings. Accents of neon...

Experiment: BLT TIME

Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato- Texturally complex- Salty and Tangy- Good on many breads- Lettuce is an under-performerBearnaise, Lettuce, Tomato- Memorable, for all the wrong reasonsBacon, Lamb, Tomato- Lamb adds a nice substance- Bacon is still dominant flavor- Tomato succeedsBacon, Lettuce, Tomato Juice- Tomato Juice does not work the same as au jus- MushyBacon, Lettuce, Turkey Bacon- Dare to be gre...

Experiment: Raccoon Handling

Is it wrong to pick a favorite married couple?Because Paul and Jamie from Mad About You are so it.Oh hey, Leah & Brandon. What are you two doing in this blog post about favorite married couples? Weird.

 . .Leah's the kind of girl who will crack an egg over the shower curtain (and onto your head) when you are taking a shower and then come back minutes later to toss over a piece of toast. Buttered. She will coerce you to try some new "candy" that turns out to be turtle food. Leah calls her English mom “the Juice Box,” and her dad invented the Snickers Ice Cream Bar. The Snickers Ice Cream Bar.And Brandon? Brandon is the Werner Herzog to her Klaus Kinski. He also, I recently...

Haikus for famous people

Mr. Howard KeelBless your beautiful hide andYour mustache of youthSir Larry DavidI'll eat your jokes for dessertSurly curmudgeonHey Dolly PartonI'm thinking of a numberBetween 9 and 5Sad times Chris de BurghFame dying, lady blushingMight even say redGilded Betty WhiteJust die already so folkswill stop exploiting you. Iron...

Theory: Soccer as Virtual Reality

Tomorrow sees the kickoff of the 19th FIFA World Cup, which, in a way, is a homecoming.I am at home now, on this field. Belly-down on green shag carpeting, the smell of clean, perfectly clean dirt – cleaner than any kitchen cleanser. The light quiet. Muted hustling of feet. How is this not my home?I am a soccer player. Meaning?It’s strange the way identities pull themselves together and, to a degree, how little we are consulted in that decision process. We can fake interests all we like, try on new hats, explore new options in the form of recreation and career and calling, but the things that truly come to denote our lives, those things come in search of us. We can accept...

Color Winners

Really guys? I expected much weirder of you. HAha joking joking. Really. You were all so superbly superb.The race was so close it took me a MONTH to determine the winners! (<---lie)I got distracted by life. You know how it goes. The foibles and follies of L I F E. (<---half lie)I got distracted by thinking about Babies. (<---truth)To Trevor/Sherry who wooed me with 2 of the 5, I present this gift:A sweet little Iranian film about someone who never could have won this contest (he is blind). It's stunningly beautiful. A gem.To the three runner ups, but only because In Living Color: Season 1 was too expensive.Please send your most current mailing address to my email...

Theory: I Should Work for Ikea

Branding means constantly thinking about and defending your color choices. What will communicate Authority? What will evoke Friendly Political Discourse? Rootsy yet Technologically Forward? Delicious? It’s lots of fun to sell by color. (And even more fun to sell by music because you get to use words that make you sound ridiculously effete in normal conversations: modal, percussive, etc. Even I make myself sick sometimes. Also, since when do I write about work so much?) It’s so interesting what colors communicate. It constantly surprises me how differently they’re seen. For my synesthete allies, it’s expected. We all make connections between colors and items and moods without...

Experiment: Make a Web App

The Food Nanny is in beta! Go test it out.In particular, check out the Nanny App - it's an online meal-planning tool with tons of recipes, the ability to add your own, the ability to customize how many people you're cooking for, and at the end it CALCULATES ALL THE FRACTIONS FOR YOU. (I cook for 2 usually, not 6, and I hate having to figure out what 3/4 of 1.5 cups is. MATH.)And yeah, The Food Nanny is one of my babies - from branding and design strategy to app architecture and production. I usually don't talk much about work, but I'm particularly happy about this 9-month project and I think it's one I will use time and again.Look how far I've come.(Don't try to win. You...

Experiment: Diorama

There's a large subset of people I know who've had a terrible time giving up their childhood. They're paralyzed at the thought of having full time "adult" jobs. Responsibility. See adulthood as some lesser, unfun land of death and debt and taxes. Not seeing the liberty in it all. Call me naive, but I love the liberty of adulthood. I love that I can still enjoy the things I did when I was young, and in addition I can afford to do things that are even more fun, like go to Dave & Busters. HAHHAH. I love that joke. You can still make dioramas. Dioramas never get old. Still total fun. And so empowering to make a miniature world. The characters are bound by your laws, your...

Experiment: Scouting

Guess who's the new Cub Scout Den Leader!It's like someone just knew how khaki-crazed I am. A premonition.I need some help though. The Wolves just won't really listen to me. 8 year-old boys! Delightfully strange creatures! How do I get them to be obedient?I feel mislea...

Experiment: 30 Day Purge

No sweat.I got rid of so much stuff in the last 30 days. Motorola pagerDora the Explorer pillowcase set (unopened)Pretty Together by Sloan (CD)photos of Tory L.a knockoff Chanel bagA bunch of ticketmaster stubs I'd been keeping for TEN YEARS including Live, Remy Zero, Travis, JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMPlike 2 years worth of Wired and J.Crew catalogsa few dozen wedding announcements I've been holding onto for some reason, including hers - they were sitting in a giant bird's nest. Incredible. I guess I feel bad about throwing away photographs.Motorola bluetooth earclip. Used once.9 pairs of soccer socks (kept 3)Doc Martins sandals circa 1999 (not the exact model, but close)2 pairs...

Experiment: Meat Packing

It's 5:45 am and I am in the parking lot of the Deseret Meat Packing Facility in Spanish Fork, Utah.It's dark, starless. I am finishing up my Luna bar and tying my tennis shoes. Jared is rubbing sleep from his eyes. At 6:00, about the same time we have finally gotten warm, we leave the car to enter the plant. It is still dark outside, but inside it is weirdly bright, Pantone 1215. Tall tropical plants, gold nameplates, chairs that don't really get sat in much. The waiting room kind of looks like a mid-90's dentist office. Or it's what we presume is the waiting room, no one is waiting on anyone. "Hello?" we ask. Nada. Then comes a woman, Joan, who is the volunteer coordinator....

Experiment: 30 Day Purge

Day 14Death to Smoochy, Full-screen edition.There are some comedies that stand the test of time.This movie is not one of the...

Experiment: "Leisure" Cards

When Jared and I got married a few months ago, we vowed to do what we hadn't done during the social exclusivity of our engaged relationship--actually get to know our neighbors.I was thinking aloud one night about how quickly We are to disclose our interests, tastes, feelings, photos to a wide digital audience (friends, family, secret blog readers, Facebook acquaintances) but rarely broadcast these same interests to our "analog neighbors" (if you'll allow me the liberty of using that term).The past 3 places I've lived I've barely known the names of my neighbors, let alone their interests or occupations. (It was only when I had to knock on my Morningside Heights neighbor's...

Experiment: 30 Day Purge

Day 4Tory.Most women in their twenties who keep photos of 17-year old boys are called Harry Potter fans.I am called. A total creep.I swiped these out of the yearbook room my senior year of high school. Don't let the androgynous name fool you. As you can see, Tory was all man. Or more likely, I suppose accurately, all teenage boy. And I crushed upon him for a few hot months. The full-bred Italian, the soccer star. The man of the mane.It makes sense - if you abide by a similarly skewed moral logic - for an 18-year old to possess such souvenirs. But I'm pretty sure I had plenty of chances to throw these away since then. And yet, I didn't.Packrat at heart.Packrat of the heart?I...

Experiment: 30 Day Purge

Not exactly Hollywood Juice Diet Style. More like A&E Hoarders style. It's not quite so bad as to be like a mental/compulsive disorder, it's just I honestly can't be convinced to throw anything away. This hasn't been problematic, really, because I don't buy a lot of things to begin with. But even so, little trinkets manage to build up after the years, the few things I've purchased, things I've acquired, been given. Things just amass. Moral of, don't buy me gifts. Unless edible.Action.Each day for a month I will be forced (mutinously! by my own brain and hand!) to just get rid of something. Can it. Chuck it. Throw it the way of Nick Nolte. Currently, all my ephemera is...

negligence

how could i forget? getting married to Jared. He's the best!*Did you know his webseries got some love from the New York Times?And New TeeVee? And he was totally a cover-boy?Here is a teaser trailer for Season 2, but you can go see all of The Book of Jer3miah at the LDS Film Festival this week.I am lucky he married me. Stay tuned for many good things from Team Cardon.*said like Toad in M...

SCIENCE.Who saw this coming.Formalized science in high school is like the academic equivalent of waterboarding for 99 percent of rightbrains, who'd rather be writing A-grade book reports on novels they've merely skimmed. I guess it wasn't just the teenage rightbrains, it was really everyone, except for that one kid. You know the kind, who bleeds ambition and whose constant handraising irritated you mucho.Irregardless of this, the total insufferable tedium of high school science, I always performed at/above capacity. I just never took any real pleasure from it. Sure, dissecting fetal pigs was smelly fun, but, as a rule I found the concept of scientific absolutes and rules...

Get a good look at this face. This is the jerk who sucked away my 2009.I first heard mention of David Foster Wallace in my MFA orientation (I guess something good came out of that whole sham). He died about a month after I started reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, in November of 2008. I was surprised how sad this made me. The saddest 'lil girl in Utah.It's just that when you find a new author you love, you change. That sounds totally trite, I know, but it's the truth. You think differently. You speak differently (especially with an author who's got such a psycho vocabulary you are sure he is just making up words at will). You write differently. You just want to...

Supergroup city!So much sheet swapping in 2009. Monsters of Folk, Volcano Choir, and Vetiver all put out decent albums. I'm not going to discuss them here. No, I've decided that music journalism is one of the kinds of writing I most despise. Not because I think articulating the feel of music is impossible (it is challenging) or because I think it undeserving of critique. None of that. (As a teen I spent hours upon hours in Borders soaking up Q and NME, or paste before it went hacky. I used to love it.) It's just lately I have barely read anything that hasn't felt kind of showy/indulgent/pitchforky. Instead, a musing.I oft times like to wonder what it would be like if I...