Author Archives: Kitta

It was a cold morning in early July 2000. I hadn’t intended on getting up at 5am that morning, but a friend called me the previous night and asked, pleaded, and bribed me, to fill in for her at a runway show the next day. I accepted and dragged myself out of bed.

It was only a small consisting of four shows between 10am and 4pm. I had been told to show up early because there was some concern that the clothes wouldn’t fit me, but lucky my body was a carbon copy of my friends and everything fit perfectly. After trying on the clothes I chatted with the other girls, someone gave me a sample of Lolita Lempicka, a perfume that has been my signature scent ever since I first inhaled its intoxicating scent that day. I knew most of the other models from previous shows – four girls in all – so there were no introductions, just catching up and small talk. It’s a strange job being a model. You find yourself becoming close to strangers in a matter of hours because you’re running around franticly wearing only tan coloured g-string backstage.

Best team building exercise ever.

We ate breakfast (yes, models eating and such, how terribly odd) and chatted some more before touching up our makeup and getting into our first outfit. As I went down the runway during the first show I noticed a guy on my left sitting with his friends, out of the corner of my eye I saw that he was eating a cucumber, now, I don’t mean he had a salad and it was cut into small bits, I mean he had a full cucumber and was biting it with glee, licking it like a lollypop and treating it like his lover. I wanted to laugh, but I managed not to, I knew he was just doing it to make me laugh and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

When I was back in the change room I asked the other girls if they had noticed him, one girl smirked, and another ignored me. I started rambling, calling him a wanker, saying he was married to the cucumber and a carrot was his mistress. I waited for a response. Nothing. I gathered that they hadn’t noticed cucumber guy or were too busy to care. It’s not unusual for someone to act like a complete dildo during public shows. I changed into my next outfit just as the girl who ignored me left to go on the runway, it was then that smirking girl informed me that girl who ignored me was cucumber guy’s girlfriend.

Bugger.

For the rest of the day girl who ignored me kept ignoring me and after the show she gave me a look of death as she left on cucumber guys arm.

I hear they now have cucumber kids and he’s seeing a carrot on the side.

Camp has a bit of a problem lately, this problem comes in the form of doors, glass sliding doors in particular. She seems to run into them quite a bit. When she hears the roller door go up and a car pull in she will become excited, start prancing around and wagging her tail furiously, then she puts her head down and run as fast as her little legs will let her go straight into a closed door. She hits the door which such force that everyone in the house can hear it – that sound – the sound of bone connecting with something hard. I told her it’s not a marathon. One should look up to see if any doors or other obstacles are present in their current running path, but she doesn’t listen.

To rectify the situation I have been contemplating putting some sort of doggy road bump near the door – such as a mat – to at least slow her down a bit, and maybe fashioning her some sort of door helmet and dollying it. She will either stop running into doors and in the process hate me for the rest of her doggy life for putting her in such a lame looking thing or keep running into doors and rejoice that she now has a helmet that she can use to break down said doors.

I’ve been having severe allergic reactions lately which start late at night with my ear lobes swelling, becoming red, hot and itchy, then when I wake in the morning my eyes have swollen up so much I can’t see. My cheeks and throat also swell up sometimes. It’s quite annoying. It takes three days of strong antihistamines or a large dosage of steroids to get the swelling down. Every time this reaction occurs my throat swells up more and more, and I am becoming concerned that my throat will close up. My allergist is perplexed. The first reaction happened after my annual flu needle, so he thought it was the cause, but since then I have had more of these allergic reactions and they are not connected to anything I am allergic to. He thinks the reactions have something to do with my immunity, that the illness I have been through has servery affected the way my body reacts to things (such as; drugs, foods and environmental factors, viruses, etc) and has caused my current allergies (dust mite, pollen, corn, grasses, bottlebrush) to be more virulent.

He wishes to treat me with strong prescription antihistamines. The catch is they all contain lactose and since I’m servery lactose intolerant, I cannot take them. It really aggravates me. Drug companies use lactose as a filler, binder and coating and they use it because it’s cheap. Of course they could use different binders, fillers and coaters (as some lovely drug companies already do), alas, that would be too expensive and they want to make money, not save lives and help people! Don’t be silly… Lives… Does a life let you swim in a pool full of money (or pudding if you swing that way) or let you obtain that fast car so you can finally pick up ladies? Certainly not!

So what now?

We have decided to treat me with an Immunotherapy called Hyposensitization. This is not new to me. I have previously had this treatment as a child for about 9 years – which is a shockingly long time for even those in the medical profession – my first RAST and skin prick test were off the charts and I was allergic to so many allergens (wheat, pollen, grass, dust mite, you name it, we didn’t play well together) that I needed years of treatment before I saw any change, but it was worth it. I can now eat wheat without my throat closing up, which is a very handy thing indeed. Hyposensitization treatment consists of you having weekly injections of allergen extracts for a period (usually 11 weeks) and re-testing to see if it has made and impact after treatment. In the meantime, whenever I have a reaction I take a large dosage of steroids and/or antihistamines to keep my throat from closing up and take down the swelling. The treatment will start next week, as I am currently not well with a virus that has been going around, I hope that it alleviates the reactions.

So I dyed my hair torridly red and I fucking love it, but I am concerned that the Little Red Monkey has finally started to influence me.

I took my new hair out today to meet the world, the world seemed to like it, as I was buying some more shampoo from a salon the lady serving me commented that my new hair looked fantastic and said, “the hairdresser that dyed your hair did a great job!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I dyed it and ruin the ‘packet dye is evil’ theory.

It is about thirty minutes past three in the morning and this is the fourth night in a row that my lower abdomen has woken me with pain, I give it two more nights and then I am so eBaying it along with my shoes. Who needs internal organs anyway?

Today I moved furniture around. (Yes, aren’t you jealous? Let’s act like you helped and tell NO ONE!) Furniture was moved from room to room and strategically placed so there is now more room in said rooms (room is one of those words that if you say it enough it sounds strange and un-word like). Things are in different places, stuff has a new home and it’s freaking me out a tad because I’m not used to it yet. My bedroom is a complete mess – objects lost have been found and other objects lost in their place – I found my yearbook in amongst the mess, so an hour was spent looking at it. It seems so long ago.

Sometime between dropping a book on my foot and getting rid of the dust bunnies I came to the conclusion that I have too much shit, but then I was humbled by the fact that I know girls whose shit surpasses my own.

I took a photo of my make-up for the ‘what’s in your make-up bag’ Flickr pool, and I was amazed at the amount of beauty products I have in my possession. Granted I don’t use most of it on a daily basis, but I do use most of it on a monthly basis. What’s funny is this is nothing compared to what I dragged around in a big vanity case when I did modelling.

I’m sure when my boyfriend sees the above photo (larger view available on Flickr) he’ll know exactly why it takes me four times longer for me to get ready and it will totally devoid the need for the “why do you need an hour to get ready” conversation from our relationship.

But I’m in good company, other ladies have displayed the contents of their make-up bags in the Flickr pool. I love this one, as one commenter mentioned “it look’s like Barbie’s makeup bag”, so pink and cute, I adore the compacts and pill boxes.

So I thought I would start this into a blogging meme – my first – and infect a few female bloggers with it.

Rules of the meme

• The infected are to dump out the contents of their makeup bag, take a photo of the contents and then post the photo on their blog, and if possible add it to the ‘what’s in your make-up bag’ Flickr pool.
• The infected must pass the meme onto five other female bloggers (or metrosexual men and drag queens).

Those whom I wish to infect

• Renee
• Angelah
• Karen
• Crystal
• Asa

Matt and I were talking about how we met. The true story is we met at a Christmas party, another guy was trying to pour beer down the back of my top and Matt stopped him, I spent the rest of the night safe on Matt’s lap. Alas, Matt thinks that this isn’t a good enough story…

Matt: I’m thinking we need to come up with a really cool story about how we met.
Kitta: Why?
Matt: Because I figure we will have to tell it a lot, and meeting at a christmas party isn’t really very impressive.
Kitta: We met at a Christmas party when you stopped some wanker of a guy from pouring beer down my top, that is impressive.
Matt: Instead of that… I saved you from being bashed by seven drunk guys in an alley trying to bash you.
Kitta: No.
Matt: Fine… We’ll stick with the true story.
Kitta: Dork.
Matt: Hey, it was a good idea, we would have a great story to tell at events!
Kitta: Me being bashed is a good story?
Matt: Noooo, I saved you.
Kitta: Right, from seven guys? Just think about that…
Matt: How about this then… It was at the ski slopes in Aspen, you fell and hurt your ankle and seven wolves were coming towards you, but I fought them off.
Kitta: No.
Matt: Fiiiinnneee.

A few moments later…

Matt: Can I have a pet fox?
Kitta: No sweetie.

On Augst 25th 2002 I posted the below photo of a girl being duct tapped to a ceiling in this blog post and asked the question, “How the hell did they get her up there?”

Today, years later, I got my question answered via an email from John who organised the event, it reads…

We piled a whole bunch of mattresses under her and four or six (I can’t remember… it was back in 1992) guys held her up, while a bunch of folks taped her. After we had a bunch of tape on her, then we reduced the number of folks holding her, but didn’t pull most of the mattresses out until we were done. She was a volunteer and the whole thing was a lot of fun — she said that she’d happily do it again, though we didn’t.

John
Organizer of the duct taping in Loose Hall, Grinnell College, 1992 (Iowa, USA)

He also sent me this narrative he wrote about the events and included a few more photos…

It was one of those persistent college myths. We’d all heard it over the years: You’d wake up one morning and drag yourself down to the cafeteria for breakfast, only to find some poor sucker duct taped to the ceiling of the waiting area outside of the cafeteria. Usually it was some obnoxious guy who had been unwillingly carried down there, held to the ceiling, and taped in place… to spend the night waiting for the morning breakfast crowd to find and free him.

My friend, Steve, and I got curious about this. No one we’d ever talked to had ACTUALLY SEEN a person duct taped to a ceiling. Everyone had heard the stories, but… no proof. Was it just one of those urban myths? Or could someone actually be duct taped to a ceiling? Steve and I were trouble. Don’t get me wrong: we were both very good students, both nice guys (he much more so than I), neither of us getting into literal trouble, but… we liked to organize things. And we liked to have fun. We’d done the obligatory test of how many people you could fit into a phone booth. Twelve in this case, although we really weren’t all that crowded in there.

Now we needed to find out about duct tape and ceilings… We got ourselves a volunteer. Yes, in all of the stories, the duct tapee was not a volunteer. But, like I said, Steve and I weren’t that much trouble. Little Tammy – a fairly spirited freshman who lived near us and, most importantly, a fairly SMALL woman – volunteered. Steve and I spread the word: we’re going to duct tape Tammy to the ceiling in Loose Hall. This kind of word spreads quickly! The appointed hour arrived and Steve and I found ourselves with what may have been the largest Loose Hall event for that year, completely unofficially! More than fifty people came to help us duct tape little Tammy to the ceiling. We dragged a bunch of mattresses out into the hallway to lay beneath her, and got one bunch of guys to hold her up while another bunch of guys taped her in place. Should anyone get any ideas, the very large pile of mattresses is key. Also important is that she wear long-sleeved clothing (pants and top), so the duct tape doesn’t stick directly to her.

We used four of the mongo duct tape rolls. I remain convinced that two large rolls, or less, would have held her. But we were being conservative. Eventually, we had to let go of her and find out if the duct tape held. It did. She didn’t move one bit. We left her up there for 10 or 15 minutes, with much joking about all of us walking away. Of course, we did not. After a bit, we took her down, expecting to remove most of the paint from the ceiling in the process. (We’d already told the RA that we would pay to repair the ceiling.) Much to our surprise, only one very small piece of paint came off with her. In case you’re wondering, Tammy had a great time. She even volunteered to do it again.

So there you have it internet, the mystery is solved, we all now know how to duct tape a girl to the ceiling.

Some of you may have noticed that the header image has changed (Ctrl-F5 to force refresh if you can’t see it), the rolling hills where the Little Red Monkey once ranted and raved have been replaced with a rainbow, and coloured Easter eggs can be found scattered among the foliage. The Little Red Monkey was tired of ranting day in day out at Kitta.net, so he has taken a holiday down south over the Easter break and has asked the Little Red Bunny to take over while he’s gone.
Same rules apply; no feeding or spanking.

I hope you all have a safe and happy Easter. 😉

I purchased a new phone, a sexy Nokia 7370, a bit of an expensive phone outright, but I have been saving up for a while and I haven’t had any cool gadgets to play with in quite some time. I have to say, it has surpassed my expectations. I thought the swivel design might be a bit dodgy, it’s not, and it is quite visually stunning with its leather-inspired backing and metal surfaces. The navigation is simple (unlike my old LG phone that had so many categories that I could never find the sections I wanted) and the video ring tones are quite cool. I less than three this phone.

Kitta: My old phone looks so crappy next to my new one, my new one is all “you suck LG”, my old phone retorts with a plea of “but, but, I have infrared!” and my new phone replies “hah, I have bluetooth bitch!”
Matt: I can just imagine you, like, playing with them on the desk and putting on little voices for each one.