Total Perspective Vortex
What really happened to Trillian? Theories abound, but you can see what she's really been up to on this blog. If you're looking for white mice, depressed robots, or the occasional Pan Galactic Gargleblaster you might be better served here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/.

Otherwise, hello, and welcome.
Mail Trillian here<




Trillian McMillian
Trillian McMillian
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Women, The Internet and You: Tips for Men Who Use Online Dating Sites
Part I, Your Profile and Email

Part II, Selecting a Potential Date

Part III, Your First Date!

Part IV, After the First Date. Now What?


"50 First Dates"






Don't just sit there angry and ranting, do something constructive.
In the words of Patti Smith (all hail Sister Patti): People have the power.
Contact your elected officials.

Don't be passive = get involved = make a difference.
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Contact The Media
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Words are cool.
The English language is complex, stupid, illogical, confounding, brilliant, beautiful, and fascinating.
Every now and then a word presents itself that typifies all the maddeningly gorgeousness of language. They're the words that give you pause for thought. "Who came up with that word? That's an interesting string of letters." Their beauty doesn't lie in their definition (although that can play a role). It's also not in their onomatopoeia, though that, too, can play a role. Their beauty is in the way their letters combine - the visual poetry of words - and/or the way they sound when spoken. We talk a lot about music we like to hear and art we like to see, so let's all hail the unsung heroes of communication, poetry and life: Words.
Here are some I like. (Not because of their definition.)

Quasar
Hyperbole
Amenable
Taciturn
Ennui
Prophetic
Tawdry
Hubris
Ethereal
Syzygy
Umbrageous
Twerp
Sluice
Omnipotent
Sanctuary
Malevolent
Maelstrom
Luddite
Subterfuge
Akimbo
Hoosegow
Dodecahedron
Visceral
Soupçon
Truculent
Vitriol
Mercurial
Kerfuffle
Sangfroid




























 







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Highlights from the Archives. Some favorite Trillian moments.

Void, Of Course: Eliminating Expectations and Emotions for a Better Way of Life

200i: iPodyssey

Macs Are from Venus, Windows is from Mars Can a relationship survive across platform barriers?
Jerking Off

Get A Job

Office Church Ladies: A Fieldguide

'Cause I'm a Blonde

True? Honestly? I think not.

A Good Day AND Funyuns?

The Easter Boy

Relationship in the Dumpster

Wedding Dress 4 Sale, Never Worn

Got Friends? Are You Sure? Take This Test

What About Class? Take This Test

A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far Far Away, There Was a Really Bad Movie

May Your Alchemical Process be Complete. Rob Roy Recipe

Good Thing She's Not in a Good Mood Very Often (We Knew it Wouldn't Last)

What Do I Have to Do to Put You in this Car Today?

Of Mice and Me (Killer Cat Strikes in Local Woman's Apartment)

Trillian: The Musical (The Holiday Special)

LA Woman (I Love (Hate) LA)

It is my Cultureth
...and it would suit-eth me kindly to speak-eth in such mannered tongue

Slanglish

It's a Little Bit Me, It's a Little Bit You
Blogging a Legacy for Future Generations


Parents Visiting? Use Trillian's Mantra!

Ghosts of Christmas Past: Mod Hair Ken

Caught Blogging by Mom, Boss or Other

2003 Holiday Sho-Lo/Mullet Awards

Crullers, The Beer Store and Other Saintly Places

Come on Out of that Doghouse! It's a Sunshine Day!

"...I had no idea our CEO is actually Paula Abdul in disguise."

Lap Dance of the Cripple

Of Muppets and American Idols
"I said happier place, not crappier place!"

Finally Off Crutches, Trillian is Emancipated

Payless? Trillian? Shoe Confessions

Reality Wednesday: Extremely Local Pub

Reality Wednesday: Backstage Staging Zone (The Sweater Blog)

The Night Secret Agent Man Shot My Dad

To Dream the Impossible Dream: The Office Karaoke Party

Trillian Flies Economy Class (Prisoner, Cell Block H)

Trillian Visits the Village of the Damned, Takes Drugs, Becomes Delusional and Blogs Her Brains Out

Trillian's Parents are Powerless

Striptease for Spiders: A PETA Charity Event (People for the Ethical Treatment of Arachnids)

What's Up with Trillian and the Richard Branson Worship?

"Screw the French and their politics, give me their cheese!"


















 
Mail Trillian here





Trillian's Guide to the Galaxy gives 5 stars to these places in the Universe:
So much more than fun with fonts, this is a daily dose of visual poetry set against a backdrop of historical trivia. (C'mon, how can you not love a site that notes Wolfman Jack's birthday?!)

CellStories

Alliance for the Great Lakes


Hot, so cool, so cool we're hot.

Ig Nobel Awards

And you think YOU have the worst bridesmaid dress?

Coolest Jewelry in the Universe here (trust Trillian, she knows)

Red Tango

If your boss is an idiot, click here.

Evil Cat Full of Loathing.

Wildlife Works

Detroit Cobras


The Beachwood Reporter is better than not all, but most sex.



Hey! Why not check out some great art and illustration while you're here? Please? It won't hurt and it's free.

Shag

Kii Arens

Tim Biskup

Jeff Soto

Jotto




Get Fuzzy Now!
If you're not getting fuzzy, you should be. All hail Darby Conley. Yes, he's part of the Syndicate. But he's cool.





Who or what is HWNMNBS: (He Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken) Trillian's ex-fiancé. "Issues? What issues?"







Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.


< chicago blogs >





Reading blogs at work? Click to escape to a suitable site!

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Smart Girls
(A Trillian de-composition, to the tune of Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys)

Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
Don’t let them do puzzles and read lots of books
Make ‘em be strippers and dancers and such
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
They’ll never find men and they’re always alone
Even though men claim they want brains

Smart girls ain’t easy to love and they’re above playing games
And they’d rather read a book than subvert themselves
Kafka, Beethoven and foreign movies
And each night alone with her cat
And they won’t understand her and she won’t die young
She’ll probably just wither away

Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
Don’t let them do puzzles and read lots of books
Make ‘em be strippers and dancers and such
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
They’ll never find men and they’re always alone
Even though men claim they want brains

A smart girl loves creaky old libraries and lively debates
Exploring the world and art and witty reparteé
Men who don’t know her won’t like her and those who do
Sometimes won’t know how to take her
She’s rarely wrong but in desperation will play dumb
Because men hate that she’s always right

Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
Don’t let them do puzzles and read lots of books
Make ‘em be strippers and dancers and such
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
They’ll never find men and they’re always alone
Even though men claim they want brains





























Life(?) of Trillian
Single/Zero

 
Monday, August 12, 2013  
So, apparently one of my neighbors woke up a few weeks ago, looked in the mirror and said, "Well, that's it. I'm 64, I'm portly, I have a penchant for young Asian boys...time to start wearing caftans."

I always wondered what sort of man feels caftans are a viable apparel option. I assumed they were men who always had a caftan aficionado lurking in their soul yearning to be free and one day they give in to desire and don the fabled garment.

But now I suspect the transition into caftans is more impromptu.

Since I met him six years ago, every time I've seen my neighbor he's been very nattily dressed: Nicely tailored suits for work, neatly laundered and pressed jeans and polo shirts or sweaters for casual wear. He retired two years ago and since then he's maintained his neat wardrobe, even as his waistline expanded he was always impeccably dressed. No sweats for this guy. On Friday and Saturday nights he goes out with a crisply dry cleaned shirt, sometimes with French cuffs, sometimes with a tie, and jeans or nice dress slacks and Italian loafers. He's often accompanied by young Asian men who dress in ultra skinny jeans and Uniqlo shirts and accessories.

So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago I saw him in the hall wearing a linen caftan. How do you not say something to man who suddenly starts wearing caftans?  Lemme tell ya, it's really difficult to not react. I thought, "Maybe that's what he wears around home and he's just dashing down to pick up the mail." I didn't want to make him feel awkward so I pretended not to notice and kept the conversation to the usual polite neighborly topics. But it was an exceptionally long elevator ride.

And then it got weird.

He held the lobby door for me and followed me outside. He was not just dashing down to pick up his mail. He was standing in front of our building hailing a cab. In a linen caftan.

Then I thought, "Ohhhhh, it's probably some sort of theme party. A caftan party." I imagined him lounging on an oversized pillow sucking on a Hookah with friends also wearing caftans.

And then a couple days later I saw him returning from the library (carrying a library tote full of books) wearing a silk caftan with brocade trim.

The next day I saw him in our local grocery. He was in the cereal aisle reaching for a box of Raisin Bran. Wearing a different linen caftan, it was embroidered around the neck, cuffs and hem.

Huh.

That's something you don't see every day.

Nope. White 64 year old men wearing caftans is not something you see every day in he Midwest. Every now and then I see one of the Ethiopian cab drivers who live in my neighborhood wearing a tribal inspired caftan-like garment, and around Detroit you sometimes see guys at the airport arriving from exotic parts of the world, parts of the world where men wear caftans, but white guys who grew up in the Northshore suburbs of Chicago are not often seen wearing caftans, real caftans, in public.

I thought, "Maybe he just has the thee caftans, maybe one of his young men has a thing for older men in caftans and he's just obliging the whim of a young suitor."

And that might be the case. Love makes you do crazy things.

But.

I've seen him five out of the last seven days and he was wearing a different caftan every time. Linen, silk, trimmed in brocade, embroidered, plain...all manner of caftan. This is not a whim. A whim is one or two caftans. This is a full-blown wardrobe makeover. 

Apparently this is a thing, now. 

I mean, you know, rock on, be who you want to be, wear what you want to wear. I'm not berating or judging him. You wanna wear a caftan, wear a caftan. This is America. People have died fighting for our right to wear caftans.

But.

It would be a lot easier if there was some sort of protocol for what to say, or not, when someone you know starts wearing caftans. It would be even easier if he just acknowledged it, opened the conversation. Just a simple, "Oh, by the way, I wear caftans, now. I'll be wearing them to pick up the mail, to hail taxis, to the library, when buying breakfast cereal, and so on." That would be an all clear signal indicating caftans are an open topic of conversation.

Then you could say, "Yes! I noticed! They're lovely. Where does one find caftans in Chicago?" Or something like that. Maybe a, "My, that's a lovely caftan you're wearing today, Mr. Neighbor," on subsequent elevator rides.

But he's acting as if he's wearing his usual suits or fine casual wear. I suppose that's the proper attitude required for pulling off the look. The caftan look. You have to commit. And this guy has. Rock on.

But.

Today I saw him in a light blue silk caftan. It was a little more snug on him than the others. Which struck me as odd because I thought the whole point of caftans was a loose flowing garment that swooshes around the body creating a cooling breeze underneath, offering a bit of cooling comfort to the wearer. This caftan was too tight to swoosh. I doubt there was any cooling comfort.

And.

It called attention to something I heretofore had not thought about. What do men wear under their caftans? Well, I don't know about all caftan-wearing men, but my neighbor was either wearing a very thin banana hammock or nothing at all under his caftan. I know this because his buttocks and front-ocks were straining against the tight silk.

As his neighbor do I have any obligation to inform him that his junk is showing? This never happened when he wore finely tailored suits and natty casual attire. These caftans have catapulted me, and us, into an entirely new and uncharted area of neighbor relations. 

And it caused me to ponder about the source of the caftans. Where does he acquire them? Could it be that he's been collecting them for years and has just now decided to wear them? Perhaps the tighter caftan was acquired in his thinner days and he's still trying to squeeze into it. Or maybe he inherited a collection of caftans and that was the only ill-fitting one.

Caftans are one (albeit odd) thing, but an ill-fitting, tight, body revealing caftan is another matter entirely. He has heretofore exhibited refined taste, so I have to believe he's aware that all his stuff was on display through the thin, tight silk. You might think it's similar to a guy wearing really tight jeans. A little off-putting but no big deal. Uh-uh. This was nothing like that. This was borderline perverted and the whole visage was: Creepy old man. Or: Guy who escaped from the psych ward and robbed a thin Sheik and stole his caftan. There's just a Theater of the Strange quality to his appearance in the tight caftan.

Up to now, my stoner metalhead neighbor has been the worst thing I've had to deal with neighbor-wise in my building. And Caftan Man has been fighting that battle with me. Turns out he's been calling the cops on our stoner neighbor for years, long before I moved into the building, because our association board merely slaps a nuisance fine on the stoner and as long as they get their money, they won't do anything more about it. Caftan Man and I think the board likes having him in the building because it's a regular source of income for the association. As long as he keeps smoking putrid weed and listening to Metallica at wall-shaking volume, they get a nuisance fine payment. Caftan Man and I became allies in trying to handle the headbanging pot smoking a-hole on our floor. So, there's an established camaraderie between us, hence my conflicted feelings about whether or not I should say something about the peek-a-boo caftan. "Excuse me, neighbor, I don't quite know how to tell you this, but if it were me I'd want to know...your, erm, caftan is wedged into your butt cheeks." (Yes, this is something new I learned about caftans...I wouldn't have thought it possible to get a wedgie from a caftan, but if it's too tight apparently it'll wedge its way right in there.) And no, caftans are not worse than putrid pot-smoking metalheads, but since the tight-silk junk revealing caftan incident I am not exactly eager to see what Caftan Man will wear next. There's awkwardness where before there was none.

Maybe it's his goal caftan and when the scale said he dropped a few pounds and he thought he could squeeze into his smaller caftan. I find myself oddly intent on coming up with excuses for the ill-fitting caftan because I don't want to think of him as the creepy guy who lives down the hall.

I find myself yearning for the halcyon days of the other caftans, the looser caftans, back when I was merely trying to adjust to seeing him in caftans. Now the tight caftan hugging his body and offering me a good assessment of what's under the caftan is the image burned into my brain. If he turns up at our next tenant meeting in that thing...well...let's just say there are a few older, conservative tenants who have been quite vocal about his predilection for young Asian boys. This caftan thing, especially the tight, revealing caftan, will be more fuel to their fire. And their fire is that he's a pervert running a gay brothel. (I'm quite certain that's not the case. Frankly, he's too much of a rule-citing fussbudget himself to do anything illicit like running a brothel. The man has a library card and eats Raisin Bran. He's not exactly the madam/pimp type. Then again...maybe that's his cover...)

Bottom line, this caftan thing is causing me far more concern than it should. So if you decide to all of a sudden start wearing caftans, do your friends and neighbors a favor by having a frank conversation about it. Explain why you want to wear caftans and assure them you are not creepy. Be open to their comments and questions, build a bridge to understanding. Don't make them silently wonder and cringe and worry over you and the caftans.

10:16 PM

 
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