big ol’ titles

Posted in everyday kimli by

Buzzfeed has a lot of silly content, but I really love their Style articles in which a variety of people try out a new trend and report back on their findings. They’ve covered things like the “no makeup” look on men, multiple women styling the same skirt, one outfit on several body types, a plus-sized author wearing things she’d normally stay away from, Victoria’s Secret swimsuits on different bodies, and so many more fun, cute articles that focus on non-media-traditional body types and styles. I dig it. Whenever I come across a piece that I can actually relate to, I do a little dance and dive in.

Last week, they ran an article about bralettes, which are apparently trendy now. As someone with massive fucking titties, I automatically assumed that bralettes were just another frilly pretty thing I could never wear. Big boobs need big support, right? I haven’t been able to wear a bra without an adamantium underwire since the 5th grade. I’m not the only one who’s scoffed at the idea: two Buzzfeed writers with large breasts wore a variety of bralettes for a week, then shared their thoughts.

I’ll let you read their recap, but after I finished the article, I was curious: if THEY could wear bralettes with their large breasts, perhaps I could wear them too! Hopeful and with images of light, delicate, lacy underthings dancing in my head, I hauled out my credit card and ordered myself several different styles (including the strappy style from Torrid they tried in the article).

My order arrived yesterday, and I approached the bras with apprehension: they’re so small. How could these tiny things possibly give me enough chest support? Also, my shoulders are still sunburnt to hell, and all the straps looked to be load bearing. Getting these things on would be painful, in more ways than one. I persevered, though, then put on a dress to see what the bralette did to my boobs.

Oh dear.

This is what my boobs look like in this dress normally:

bra: cacique bold lace plunge bra

bra: cacique bold lace plunge bra

This particular dress shows a lot of boob, so I wear it often. It’s also comfortable and has pockets, so the epic cleavage is just a nice bonus.

Here’s that same dress, wearing a bralette:

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bra: torrid strappy lace bralette

NO. NO NO NO NO NO. Maybe I’ve been wearing nothing but ridiculous plunge bras for far too long, but THIS WILL NOT DO. Instead of lovely globes of soft girl flesh, I’ve got some weird lumpy pancake thing going on here. Nothing about this is natural: when I am topless, my boobs are not sad mushy triangles. Also, there’s a nipple there. That’s weird. I never have nipples, and I don’t want to start now.

The other bralettes were just as bad. They feel okay on, the lack of steel scaffolding is nice, and they’re pretty. That’s where the good times end: on my body, they’re *awful*. I would never wear them in public for fear everyone is staring at the depressed lumps in my clothes. I shared the above pictures with friends, who all agreed with my original assessment and horror: NO. Not ever.

It’s not a total loss, though – I liked the strap detailing. I would totally wear the strappy bralette over my normal bras, and rock me some space hooker boobs.

I’m sad. I tried some boob science, and my findings were not what I hoped. It’s clear that certain types of large boobs can successfully pull off the bralette and look adorable while doing so, but apparently there’s a line somewhere in the sand: big boobs, yes. Ridiculous huge enormous boobs, lol no. These are not for you. Move along. There’s far too much to see here, and none of it is good.

IMG_7954

i’ll always have the space hookers

who run the world

Posted in i'm an astronaut by

GIRLS (as long as we’re dressed appropriately)

Tomorrow at work I’m attending a Lunch n’ Learn for women in the workplace, based on the book “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office“. It’s about the “unconscious mistakes” women make at work that sabotage our careers, which, okay. I get it. There are many women for whom this stuff isn’t second nature. There are women who are shy and unassuming yet still smart and ambitious and want that corner office. There are women who are actively denied raises and promotions because they are women, and that really sucks and must be changed. Millions of young women are entering the workforce, and a lot of the advice in this book are things you pick up after being in the workforce for a few years or more.

But.

The book was first released in 2004. In the grand scheme of someone’s career, 12 years is a very large chunk of time. What may have been seen as a corporate mistake in 2004 is a non-issue today, or at the very least seen through a very different lens. I’m sure that a lot of this book is still valid for “traditional” careers and positions, but as someone who works in tech and has been lucky enough to work with some awesome people who saw past my uterus, a lot of the advice given is baffling. There’s a self assessment worksheet we were asked to do, and some of the questions are making me downright angry:

  • 19. I’ve selected a hairstyle that is appropriate for my age and position.
  • 26. I take care to wear accessories that complement my clothing.
  • 40. I don’t apply lipstick or comb my hair in public.

Why. Why are these things. If someone writes a book for men and how to get ahead, are these questions included? Are ANY questions included beyond “Are you male?” “Are you white?” “Are you rich?” “Here’s your key to the executive bathroom!”

The book probably wasn’t written for women who work in tech, or in any industry where hair and accessories don’t matter. I know not everything can apply to my specific situation. It’s still off-putting, though – and I say this as someone who is actively trying for a promotion to Senior Wizard (my current title is simply “Wizard”, because I’m not the only one who has trouble defining what it is I do). I went about the inquiry in a way that the book doesn’t seem to cover: instead of coyly changing my behaviours to indicate to people that I am ready for more responsibility, I went to my boss and said “yo, promote me”. We had a meeting, talked it out, and now I have a list of direct actions I can take to get that promotion. And not a single item on that list includes “wear appropriate clothing” (thank god), “don’t put on lipstick at your desk”, or “girl you cannot pull off that necklace with that neckline, you are a walking DO NOT right now”.

I’m still attending the session because I’m sure there will be some good information, but I’m also curious to see if those specific things are talked about as valid or dismissed outright (or mentioned at all).

business.

what’s up with that thang?

Posted in adventure, medical anomaly by

Here I go, here I go, here I go again –

Girls, what’s my weakness?

UV Rays.

Yesterday was the first fully glorious day in Actual Summer. The sun was shining, birds were singing, bees were trying to have sex with them (as is my understanding) .. so we went on a boat. We’ve rented wee speed boats in Horseshoe Bay multiple times before, and it’s always an amazing way to spend a few hours. We packed up snacks and drinks and Shan and took off on our usual route, stopping to say hello to seals and dream about living on a tiny island.

It was wonderful.

Less wonderful is how I managed to completely forget that a) the sun is hot and b) there was sunscreen in the snack bag that I really ought to have used. I burned my exposed parts to a deep, crispy red, and they all hurt like hell. According to the internet, I now have seven kinds of skin cancer caused by Sun Poisoning, all of which can be exacerbated by every single medication I’m on. I didn’t know that! Was I supposed to know that? Goddamnit, I don’t have time for this! I’m already broken!

This is why I can’t have nice things, like skin.

sure was pretty, though

sure was pretty out, though

 

 

kimli two shoes

Posted in z.assorted unsorted.z by

Things I did over my birthday weekend:

  • Wore TWO SHOES
  • Got rained out of the horse races
  • Had a last minute tea party instead!
  • Complete with Happy Meals
  • And mutton busting!
  • We told stories, bring Brad up to speed
  • The Big Penis Book came out
  • It was great
  • On Sunday I went to a drag show with my favourite Seattlites
  • Not just any drag show, but a MEGA drag show
  • It was amazing
  • I took a zillion pictures
  • Most of them sucked
  • But some turned out!
  • They are here
  • It was an excellent birthday weekend!

let’s have another round tonight

Posted in angst, fuuuuuuuu, i'm an astronaut by

Like every good tech company, the one I work for has a lot of swag. In addition to the usual range of t-shirts and stickers available to the public, there’s a series of limited edition, staff-only swag that gets handed out from time to time: bottle openers, beer koozies, flasks (so many flasks), growlers, martini shakers, kegs, beer bongs, jugs of moonshine, shot glasses, stomach pumps, etc. There’s a theme. Can you guess what it is?

As someone who doesn’t have an apparent drinking problem, I’m confused and annoyed by all the drinking-related items. To be fair, I’m confused and annoyed by almost everything – but honestly, it’s awkward being a non-drinker surrounded by a culture of binge drinking. I don’t get it. And I’m nearly always left out, because every event or celebration is centred around alcohol. Hit a milestone? Shotgun a beer! Building camaraderie? Ice someone! Team events? To the bar! Company outings? Booze is provided! And thirteen orders of fries, is that it here? WINE AND BEER!

That’s why, when I found a piece of company swag that I could actually use, I was excited. It’s a little reusable pouch with a first aid kit in it, and and someone who is frequently injured in stupid ways, I was happy to have a cute little safety kit to throw in my bag if I was feeling particularly perilous that day. During a fundraiser last week, the kits were available to purchase, so I bought a bunch to give to my friends and share my glee over having cute, usable swag.

I am so adorably naive!

Each kit contains:

  • Bandages! (super useful!)
  • An antibacterial wipe! (clean them germs!)
  • A vial of Blistex! (dry, chapped lips are unpleasant!)
  • Aspirin! (cures what ails ya!)
  • Breath mints! (not exactly medical, but thanks for thinking of my breath!)
  • A packet of Vitamin C drink powder (wait a second ..)

They’re not first aid kits. They’re hangover cure kits.

*sigh* At least the pouch it comes in is cute. If I find out you can dissolve the pouch in water to make emergency wine, though, I quit.

I promise I’m not straightedge, a teetotaler, or some freaky booze-eschewing evangelist. Drinking is fine. I even do it sometimes – in fact, just last month I had an alcohol. I don’t care if people drink. I’m simply struggling to find my place in a job that revolves around booze, and feel more left out than usual because I can’t relate. It’s by far the most difficult scenario I face in the tech world: not trying to navigate all that technology in spite of my uterus, but trying to advance in a culture that I can’t partake of.

pictured: one alcohol.

pictured: one alcohol.

in short

Posted in everyday kimli by
  • Ed’s birthday. Storm Crow Ale House. Critical Miss AND Critical Hit. Drunk!
  • Astronautalis show in Seattle. 10th one! Maaaaaay have done additional damage to my foot while dancing my tits off. Oops.
  • Excellent weekend in Seattle. Saw a play. With nudity! Bush AND dong. What a time to be alive.
  • Obsessed (like, Rent-style obsessed) with Hamilton. Spent last week learning about American revolution history. Cross-referenced soundtrack with Trouble Hunters (Astronautalis song about the Battle of Trenton, which is something I apparently now know about). Need to bone up on my Canadian history to balance out all this knowledge.
  • Ultrasound today. Heart exists, moves and stuff. Good?
  • Forthcoming birthday weekend shaping up to be insane for reasons that have nothing to do with my birthday.
  • Desire for drastic shake up has me in a funk. Compromises are being discussed.
  • Lola needs an engine rebuild. No idea where I’m going to get it done or how much it’ll cost. Bummed out.
  • Bought tickets to see the Book of Mormon in Vancouver in September with friends. Fun!
  • Accidentally bought an Xbox One. Not sure what to play on it.
  • Haven’t ruled out travel beyond October, but have started planning for the next two years out. Who needs to stay home? Not me.

Mostly content. Forget how to write in complete sentences. Tired of having a broken foot. Desperately need a haircut. Other than that, things are good.

FullSizeRender

new york things

Posted in adventure, international kimli by

I survived New York, broken foot and all!

I wasn’t able to update while we were gone because a) there was no free wifi at the hotel and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $70 for an essential service and b) too busy Doing Things to stop and write about them. We’re home now, so it’s time to play catch up.

Excluding travel time, we had four full days in New York to do whatever we wanted. I had a small but significant list of things I wanted to do, and we got through most of it – we’d have done more, but we were pretty seriously hampered by my broken bones. That being said, I was surprisingly mobile in that stupid boot, and it even came in handy several times.

In no particular order, here are the things we did:

  • Hung out in Times Square (which is really more of a rhombus) like gaping tourists, and quickly tired of dodging selfie sticks and people asking if we liked comedy
  • Went up the Empire State Building and took ten thousand pictures of a rainy New York at night
  • Thoroughly enjoyed the VIP experience at the ESB – seriously, we were fawned over. It was hilarious and expensive but I’m so glad I sprung for the no-lines pass.
  • Went to Rockerfeller Center and looked at it; ditto Radio City Music Hall
  • Snuck into the Metropolitan Museum of Art – we had stopped in to pee and look in the shops (museum shops are my favourite), and Ed found a back entrance into Egypt so we wandered around and saw awesome things. Normally I would feel bad about this, but the Met has a suggested donation of $25 per adult. You can pay less if you like, even if that isn’t acknowledged anywhere. And I spent more than that in the shop anyway, so it’s not like we saw art for free. It was just .. discounted.
  • Enjoyed street meat! I had the BEST HOT DOG EVER outside the Met.
  • Walked through Central Park multiple times! Our hotel was on the Upper West Side, just three blocks from the park. It was really nice out for park walkin’, and we hunted down a few statues I wanted to see. It’s very beautiful in there, and I named all the turtles I met. That is likely the reason our walks took a long time (as opposed to my slow hobbling), as there were a lot of turtles.
  • In addition to being close to the park, our hotel was also two blocks from a Shake Shack. Many shakes were shacked.
  • We walked half of Brooklyn Bridge and it was awesome
  • All the bus tours! Correctly guessing that I wouldn’t be able to walk as much as I normally do on vacation, I purchased 3-day bus tours for us. We did almost every tour (some more than once), including the boat cruise which was AMAZING. Neither of us had any idea how close it got to the Statue of Liberty and that it went under the Brooklyn Bridge, so we super enjoyed the cruise. The staff were fantastic, too – seeing that we were at the tail end of a full boatload and not wanting to have to stand at the railing with hundreds of others, they let Ed and I get on at the very start of the next sailing so we could snag railside seats at the front of the boat.
  • Someone suggested that we do the NBC Studio Tour, but we don’t really watch TV or have any kind of yearning for NBC programming. Instead, we paid to go to the top of Rockerfeller Center and marvel at the daytime views.
  • Due to my great distrust of stopovers in Toronto, we both traveled carry-on only. It was trying at times, and due to the lack of free space I decided not to visit the Nintendo Store. That will be saved for next time.
  • Many delicious meals with surprisingly sensible portion sizes, except for one meal that simply did not end (there were so many shrimp my stomach hurts just thinking about it)
  • The one yucky weather day was the day we decided to do the Empire State Building at 11pm, and it is cold as all heck when you are 86 floors above the city. I bought what I THOUGHT were leggings at Macy’s to protect my frosty box, but they turned out to be stupid pants instead. I wore one pair that evening, but returned them the next day. No pants for me, America. Nice try.
  • Took the night tour through Brooklyn, as narrated by a crazy man
  • Very briefly visited MoMA – they closed at 5:30 and we arrived after 4:30, so instead of paying $50USD to see art for an hour we looked at what wasn’t behind Art Guards and put it at the top of the list for next time
  • Ditto the Guggenheim – on my own I could spend days in museums, but they’re not Ed’s cup of tea (especially when they come with a giant price tag: we love you, London). Plus, they’re doing mega construction in the Guggenheim so half the place was closed off. Will go next time.

Observations about New York:

  • I don’t think I could live there
  • It’s nice to know a place exists that is more expensive than London
  • I would definitely visit again
  • I enjoyed the city and like it a lot, but I don’t like like it
  • So that’s good to know – I really do love London, and am not fickle
  • American Airlines blows
  • I took a lot of pictures
  • Feel free to browse through them
  • I’ll inevitably post some when I run out of things to say
  • I am glad to be home

eat a dick, gravity

Posted in broken kimli by

Accident-Free for 0 Days

I fell off Lola this morning. No real damage done to anything other than my ego, but I’m a wee bit bloody and will start to bruise soon. Poor Lola has some shiny new scratches on her right side, which one of the worst parts of all of this. If I were the kind of person who equated owning things with motherhood, I would say that I am a bad scooter mom. Fortunately, I am not that kind of person.

The bruises and scrapes are bad, but I feel pretty awful about this for a lot of other reasons that I will now list for you here:

  • It vindicates the people who told me I couldn’t ride my scooter with a broken foot, even though it totally doesn’t. I drove to work one day last week, and it fucking sucked – the Minibator is standard, and operating the clutch with my broken booted foot was just a terrible idea all over the place. When riding my scooter and not falling off it, my left foot doesn’t touch the ground. Lola is automatic AND I’ve always used my right foot as my balancing foot. Today’s fall was a stupid miscalculation on my part that would have happened even if I wasn’t broken.
  • I’m on vacation as of 5pm. I’ve been working from home a lot lately because of the aforementioned broken foot, but I had planned on being in the office today to take care of some things and put in some face time before I take off on international adventures.
  • I had a hot dinner date tonight that I now have to postpone because sore and broken and generally out of sorts and sad
  • There were two important errands I wanted to run today
  • I am a walking disaster

I’m very excited about adventure, but today is made of suck.

Oh well. At least my bandages are cute.

 

when she was good

Posted in everyday kimli by

I am trying REALLY HARD to be good. Seriously! I wear my stupid boot (which is a whole universe better than the stupid cast) all the time, except when I’m sleeping. The doctor* said “stay off your foot”, so I am – using my stupid crutches as much as possible, beseeching Ed to fetch me things, and just generally being prone and pathetic at all times. It is tiring.

Unfortunately, Ed’s out of town for the next few days, so I’m on my own. While I’m still wearing my stupid boot, I’ve set the crutches aside because I can’t carry things while using them, and I need my hands to feed the cats and myself and get Diet Coke and ice cubes. I’ve been carefully stumping about the house, trying very hard not to break myself any further for ulterior reasons.

Did I ever tell you about the last time I had to wear an aircast? I probably did, because I tell the internet everything – but to make a long story short, I gave myself a stress fracture in Dallas and had to wear an aircast to heal it up, which then caused a stress fracture in my other foot so I had to switch the boot for a while which re-fucked my other foot and so on. It was a fun time for all, what with my being constantly broken. Had we stayed in Alberta, I would have eventually had surgery to replace my broken bones with steel rods of foot justice, but we moved to BC and the new foot doctor fucked me up in a hundred shiny new ways instead.

The tiny bit of walking around yesterday with the aircast on my left foot made my right foot hurt in a horribly familiar way.

I have a bad feeling about this.

I’m still going to wear my boot, but I have to remember to wear a shoe on my right foot to balance me out a little. Hopefully, if I can keep this unsanitary game (the carpets hate me which is fine because I hate them) up for a while longer, my bones will be okay enough to handle New York in eight days. I’m arranging for the majority of our time there to be spent on tour buses, will wear my boot and rest when I need to, and when I get home I will sit in one spot and not move until September.

Yes I’m justifying this all in my head and I know it’s dumb, but I’ve got an Adventure planned and no mere broken bone will keep me from Adventure. I’ll just have to be careful, and dial it back a little – maybe skip the midnight run through Central Park. Maybe.

Tomorrow I am going to Leave the House. I’ve been cooped up in here for what feels like months, so I am going to shower and put on clothes and go to the office like a normal person and it’s going to be weird and exhausting but I’m starting to go all Gollum here, so it’s time.

Plus, there may or may not be three whole mails waiting for me.

*Every doctor I’ve seen at the Lions Gate Hospital has been this swarthy dreamboat soap opera person – what’s up with that. It’s weird. Stop being so handsome.