March birthdays are like blog posts – you wait around for ages and then three come along at once. So here’s a big long birthday postscript-post to make up for the lack of updates lately.
On Sunday I got bagel-coffee-and-cupcaked by my lovely wife, who also further enabled my chart-loving geekitude by getting me this awesome piece of work:
and Sarah’s mom, whose birthday is the day before mine, posted me this amazing Shipping Forecast* t-shirt:
which I wore to bed Sunday night, and may well wear at a gig sometime soon. See, I like all kinds of charts – not just menstrual cycle ones. (I’m also a big fan of the Venn diagram.)
We digested the birthday breakfast and read the charts on the way down to Oxford for the lit fest, where we met this lovely gentleman. (Our mission for the day was to give away free zines, and we ended up working out a trade for some whiskey, so that was awesome, too. Those who know me know I’m always up for zine trades, and now…those who don’t know me know it as well.) Anyway, this kind fellow was working for the festival and I offered him a zine. He thanked me and stuck it in his pocket, with the title showing, which was pretty darn cool. I asked him if he’d mind if I took a picture for my blog, and he said, “I have three daughters. There is nothing about menstruation that freaks me out.”
Word, my friend. Word.
We had fun times all round (most likely due to the zine-whiskey trading) and I had four zines left as we all headed to the train station, so I decided to deposit the last four in various bike baskets among those at the rafts and rafts of awesome bicycles at the station bike racks.
I figured cycles…cycles…whatevs. That was the sum total of my thought process. Sorry. Whiskey.
Anyway, if you received a zine at the festival, or if you found one in your bike basket, hello! I’m Chella, and I’ll be your weird secret zine santa today. Hope you stick around!
In other news, I was lucky enough to have two pieces of my writing published around the internets on my birthday.
Here’s the Menstruation for Sale article at Girlfuture.com (it’s a brand new webzine for right-on teens that happened to have launched on my bday).
And I also had a review up on Feminist Review blog. Speaking of FR, it was also Mandy Van Deven’s birthday this week. She edits Feminist Review, as well as writing like a demon everywhere else that’s cool and feminist. Her birthday appeal goes a long way to explaining what she’s achieved with FR, and I was really psyched when she invited me to write for FR after my zines were reviewed on the site. If you can spare some cash to help them/us out, that’d be grand. More details can be found at the I ♥ FR Campaign.
Today’s link (rather than recaps from earlier in the week like a lame clips episode of your favourite ’80s sitcom) is a shout out to Travel Queeries on a Danish blog that’s new to me and looks pretty cool. Birthe, the editor of Feminine Moments, saw the review on Feminist Review and contacted me to see if she could quote it. So, ya see? Valuable resource right there is all I’m sayin’.
Right, it’s all gone a bit meta so I’m gonna say goodnight. Thanks, as always, for all the support.
xChella
*You can listen to the Shipping Forecast here. It is just as useful a navigational tool if you are literally at sea as if you are metaphorically at sea.
