right by the exit, just next to the blues

103 and muggy, with occasional thunderstorms in the area

2009-07-05T13:23:00.000-07:00

right, so.

having landed in the city that care forgot, gotten myself some overalls and other street-urchin gear (next up: these) and fully dedicated myself to the idea of not working at my job for an ENTIRE MONTH, i find myself with - no surprise - a lot of time on my hands.

that is, when i'm (we're) not sleeping through the hot part of the day, which seems to last between approximately 9:30am and 8:00pm, eating delicious snack plates such as this one -

- and trying to convince the dog to stop eating bones people have tossed on the street. with this wealth of time, i have already begun many projects, including one where i allow people to look at some photos i have taken. unfortunately this particular venture has stalled in its infancy because i am easily overwhelmed by photo software.

on the advice of some asshat on the internet, relatively long ago (in a digital age, a month is a lifetime) i downloaded gimp. i do not regret this decision, even though it confuses me quite frequently. i turned off the little tips it gives at start-up (example: when the somethingsomething doesn't appear in bold, it doesn't have an alpha channel, somethingsomething, etc.) because they were making me feel panicky. but when i muddle through, and occasionally i do, i am generally pleased with the results.

that snack plate is another example. hardly sham-gallery material, but still quite a nice effort for someone who has yet actually to decide what to do with her life.

i also, like everyone with these white boxes, and i presume also the people with the silver and gray and black boxes with fruit silhouettes on them, have iphoto. to my novice but decidedly utilitarian eye it seems to suck bigtime. mostly because it appears to create extra files where none are needed. i thought this was a folly reserved solely for PCs and their affiliate manufacturers.

it's not as though i want to really do much with my pictures. so far i like the crop option, the resize option, and the brightness/contrast adjuster thingy, because working together they sometimes pull off the impression that i know more than i do about taking pictures.

maybe i should have stuck with my original plan to write the great american novel.

possibly mentally related to the british term for "sweater"

2009-06-13T20:03:00.000-07:00

here is something i want to know: does anyone actually wear rompers? just the fact that it's called a "romper" makes me think of small british children several generations ago. romping isn't something we do in the modern world. or is it? am i missing out? kim kardashian, famous only for being kim kardashian (and, to a lesser degree, for admitting she has cellulite - gosh how brave! she's such a role model!), wore one recently while rollerblading. i know this because she was pictured doing so in two different tabloids, both of which i purchased at walgreen's on separate occasions this week. but then again, nobody seems to go rollerblading anymore either. so is it just kim kardashian, lone wolf? or do real people also sport tiny jumpsuits?

this is the sort of question i think only a resident of los angeles is qualified to answer, because everywhere else in the country people are too chickenshit or too limited by their climate to take truly bizarre fashion risks.

the new scion xBs are even stranger looking than the original model

2009-06-07T21:09:00.000-07:00

after a three-hour carshare bonanza this morning, during which i made an appearance at not one but two safeways, i acquired a second litterbox. this is because the internet told me that the reason there are "accidents" (although as a potty-training professional i can tell you, cat shit in the bathtub is not an accident, it is a statement) is that the three fuzzy residents of this shoebox i call an apartment don't care to share. i myself don't particularly care for sharing a bathroom either but my social standards are somewhat different from theirs. so now there is a litterbox in the living room as well. it sounds distasteful until you remember two very important facts: 1) no carpet and 2) they hang out in there way more than i do.

i spent a good ten minutes in petco's cat treat and cat toy aisle before i began to get the sinking feeling that i was becoming a crazy cat lady about 50 years too early. so i just hauled the box and a giant bucket of refillable litter to the counter without buying 3 roll-a-treats. which they didn't have anyway. more neon feathers and mouse-shaped objects than you can shake a stick at, but if you did shake a stick at them your cat would probably care more about the stick than the $5.99 wad of fleece dusted with catnip that will end up behind your couch in 48 hours or less.

now that facebook basically = twitter, writing actual paragraphs just seems so time-consuming

2009-05-22T20:22:00.000-07:00

gosh, and you know i actually don't really care for bullet lists these days but our whole lives just changed and there's only so many ways to properly convey that. so anyway:

* cleaning service: told thanks but no thanks
* my ~~SFL~~ (holla atcha california supreme court! what's it gonna be?): living in new orleans
* said ~~SFL~~: now the proud parent of a dog and a wee kitten, bringing our grand total of animals to five. no, you read that right, five.
* apartment: basically clean because now i live here alone. unlike the last time i lived alone, i no longer have cable. consequently i sleep more.
* work: okay. largely due to my affinity for designing better forms for paperwork, i may become some kind of big deal to the powers-that-be.
* new orleans: dream town. hot though. going there for the entire month of july.
* money: tight.
* morale: teetering.
* semester at sucka free city college: over.
* weekend plans: SLEEP.

allow me to be the last to announce my entrance into the bourgeoisie

2009-03-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

we have hired a cleaning service. in characteristic defensiveness-despite-nobody-batting-an-eyelash, i would like to explain this decision. my sainted grandmother - no, really, except for making me feel fat for eating more than one cookie the woman really ought to be canonized - worked as a housecleaner for, oh, pretty much her entire life. and by that i mean until she retired at eighty because she believed no one of that age should drive a car and thus could not commute because buses in seattle rarely go to fancy neighborhoods. now, there are two categories of professional housecleaners: those whose own homes are actually kind of a wreck, and those who could showcase their living rooms for better homes & gardens given five minutes notice.

my sainted grandmother was of the latter category. i always found it extremely soothing. when i lived by myself i made every effort - and occasionally failed miserably - at keeping house in this fashion. of course, when i lived by myself i could also subsist only on hummus and fuji apples, watch seven hours of law&order a day, and generally do whatever, whenever. it should come as a surprise to no one that ~~married~~ legal-partnership-via-a-legislative-loophole life is different. i mean, holy shit, there's another person here in the apartment! who was not raised on fascist standards of cleanliness! who has her own possessions, some of which are so foreign to me (witness: bike accessories, cooking gizmos, a thousand library books) that i would not know where to begin with organization!

oh, man, and then there's entropy. that shit's the devil. if an object is left alone, not only will it remain in the same spot while a person does things (like work full-time and take two classes at sucka-free city college or teach undergraduates while studying for an immense oral exam) it will begin to gather accessorial grime! horrifying.

i have said for years - and people who have known me that long can attest - that i would never have someone else clean my house. but recently, with the lunatic wisdom of the actually quite young, i have realized that there is very little i would not do to maintain my grip on sanity.

enter sarah pfingsten of in its place, a woman who claims to fall into the former category of housecleaner illustrated above, a fact which already makes me feel less like an utter domestic failure. plus i have never met her - my ~~SFL~~ handles the normal-working-hours business of household maintenance - and am unlikely ever to actually be at home while someone is cleaning my house for me, a situation i believe i would find intolerable. so maybe now i can be at home when not at work or class and do something other than flagellate myself for resting when there are dust bunnies to exterminate. gosh, that'd be great. self-punishment, despite appearances, is not really my jam.

memo to everyone else driving on the 101-S last night around eleven-thirty

2009-03-14T07:47:00.000-07:00

turn off. your brights. seriously brah.

the recessionista triumphs again

2009-03-07T20:34:00.000-08:00

i tell you what, i was dubious about this whole "bike culture" thing. it always seemed so ready-made, with too much of an emphasis on vinyl accessories and toughing out nasty weather. and the fixies, don't get me started on the fixies. i get that they're attractive, all clean lines and no fussing with gears or brakes. at heart i am a minimalist and the charm of the fixie aesthetic is not lost on me. but here in this city of huge unwieldy hills, i have yet to see a hipster actually riding his or her fixie on anything but a gentle incline. you know why? because that shit can't be done! not on a diet of fair-trade coffee, steamed kale and ironic kielbasa, anyway. fucking give it up and buy a bike with some versatility. this is not the great plains of the corn belt, here.

for example, my new bicycle that i purchased today for a stunning $150 at REI - mind you, the MSRP on this sucker is like $520 - has three gears on some kind of mystical internal mechanism that my ~~SFL~~ informs me will prevent the chain from detaching mid-ride. welcome news, because that sort of frightening event is the reason i have so firmly and steadfastly resisted getting a bicycle. and, when a bicycle existed in my midst, why i have refused to actually ride it. but when i saw my new bike sitting there in the clearance room, i thought to myself: yes, this will do quite nicely.

we were allowed to test-drive it in the REI parking lot and my fancy-bike-collecting ~~SFL~~ was boggled because this stellar priced-to-sell contraption requires the rider to sit upright instead of leaning forward. however, this is another reason it is the perfect bike for me, because i do not envision myself clad in neon spandex and struggling up hills. rather, i'd prefer to approximate what's happening about seven seconds into the opening credits of "murder, she wrote."

my mother, by the by, looks astonishingly like angela lansbury. don't tell her so, though, because she doesn't care to hear it.

possibly the best part of this whole enterprise is that now, as a fumbling novice in the world of cycling, a whole different realm of accessories is now open to me and my discerning eyes. thank god for the internet, where i can shop unassailed by the frigid superiority of people who know more about urban biking than me, which is pretty much everybody. i am greatly looking forward to - as the young people say - pimping my ride.

a.word.a.day - contumacious

2009-02-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

if green muck emerges when i cough, i stay home from work. the little children have enough to deal with - specifically, that they're stuck in a room with 23 other little children for seven to ten hours without a break - and i don't need to be adding bacterial infection to the mix. this is possibly ironic, if ironic is the word i want - and it might not be, it doesn't seem to like being the word i want - because in all likelihood one of those little vectors of disease in an argyle sweater from the children's place made me sick.

oh but they're so cute and when i don't see them for a few days i get sad. that's how i know it's the right job for me. i don't even mind wiping snot! i thought i would but i don't.

while i wait for the fine people at walgreen's to fill my antibiotics prescription and my self-imposed deadline of nine o'clock to arrive (at which time i have to take a stab at my homework, part 1 of 4) i have been reading O the oprah magazine. my ~~SFL~~ loves this publication and i can see why. in the past month or so, because of the little devils with 2T dresses on, i have been home sick a number of times and have perfected my popular-magazine-reading technique:

1. take it page by page.
2. have the digital oversoul on standby.
3. open a separate browser tab thingy for each item of interest.
4. after the last page, explore the wonders of capitalism, tab by tab.

i have learned a new term from my magazine reading: recessionista. my contribution to the recessionista lifestyle is this time-intensive magazine reading technique. you are guaranteed to get your $4.50 worth of mindless entertainment, especially if you first acquired the magazine in question from the basket in your therapist's waiting room.

"we're always open" = euphemism for "i love you"

2009-01-10T18:47:00.000-08:00

the other day i was walking up market street on the side that jason (the itinerant individual who used to live on the front porch of our former abode) had told me was the "safe side" on my way to what i hoped was an open 7-11 convenience store so i could conveniently purchase my smokes and be on my merry way. unfortunately i encountered something i have never seen before: a closed 7-11. used to be those suckers were always open, and proclaimed as much on their backlit readerboards. i guess the economy really is in the shitter, huh? i mean what does it say about this country when there's no longer a niche market for fritos and gatorade at all hours of the day and night?

sad. but not the point.

the point is that as i walked (dejectedly, inconvenienced) back towards the BART station i passed a long line of gentlement in lawn chairs, wrapped up in blankets and playing cards. they looked prepared to stay the duration. i wanted to know what they were doing but i didn't want to ask them - people with such determined expressions are usually not up for small talk. fortunately for me a tweaker in laceless nikes reeled along up near them and was all, "man what you guys sitting here for?" a man put down his plastic travel mug of coffee and said solemnly, "shoes."

the tweaker and i had a good laugh about that one, let me tell you. him probably for more interesting reasons than me. now what i want to know is: do they release new styles of shoes at midnight, like with harry potter books? is this a different strain of the same consumer madness? or were these dudes prepared to sit there until the SHEIKH store opened at ten o'clock the next morning?

and with that 7-11 closed, they'd be shit out of luck for snacks.

taking off my straw hat for you

2009-01-03T12:51:00.001-08:00

oh my jesus, sometimes i just love the internet. so far today i have wasted many hours that could have been better (?) spent on such activities as: cleaning the apartment, consolidating my debts into one horrifying chase visa balance, scraping out the menagerie's shitbox, and a whole host of other things. how have i done so, you ask? staring at t-shirts and listening to thirty-second clips of music. as a result i have learned two things: 1) a life without a wacom tablet is a life half-lived and 2) antony and the johnsons, where have you been all this time? oh, that's right, in new york. i don't like to spend too much time in new york because it smells like people, and people, as a general rule, don't smell so good.

what? they don't!

rock me momma like the wind and the rain

2009-01-01T22:28:00.001-08:00

i totally thought i would come up with ten thousand more words to say on the subject of all the haters trying to make a bad situation worse by nullifying all 18,000 marital unions. or at least something clever about how you don't want to go making ellen degeneres mad, she will dance on your grave in those sneakers of hers. i mean sure, i am a mere civilian but in this day and age you'd think a celebrity's feelings would matter just a little. what if she and her pretty pretty wife want to stay married, huh? what then? if oprah is america's coach, ellen is its mascot, and i ask you: what kind of sick fuck would destroy our mascot's happiness?

anyway as i say one assumes there will be further commentary but then one tries to get to seattle during the snowiest winter in its history, gets waylaid in oakland overnight, spends a week driving one's mother's prius around in six inches of slush, forces one's ~~SFL~~ (ellen, i'm waiting on you here - i mean look what pam anderson has done for PETA! put that celebrity to use!) to meet every reachable important person from one's personal history, hosts texan rollergirls who like to play in the snow, stuffs one's face with cheap mexican food and swedish shortbread cookies and bougie-grocery salad bar ($7.99 a pound?!), takes a day trip to spokane, and fills out no fewer than a dozen celebrity tabloid crossword puzzles. so perhaps one becomes full of other things besides vitriol.

they'll have to get through my teeth to pry it from my hands

2008-12-21T06:37:00.000-08:00

wow, they're totally going to yank-back my marriage! or at least try. i continue to be plagued by visions of hiding in our walk-in closet clutching the pretty pink-and-blue certificate, defending my homo castle against the fed.

hasn't kenneth starr got something better to do? did o.j. simpson's team not offer him enough $$$ to be part of their appeal?

i've said it before, i'll say it again: what about world hunger? no, really.

more later, after i pack my gay suitcase for my gay trip home to seattle with my ~~SFL~~ and my gay sister and her special friend, also gay. don we now our gay apparel, et cetera.

love song from a bird to a fish

2008-12-06T20:40:00.001-08:00

in my ongoing quest to remain an outlier on the axis graph of coolness, i this evening arrived fashionably too late for a zine release party, or so i thought. at a pie shack, no less, which i had no difficulty discerning among its neighboring shops (it's the lighting, the lighting tells you every time) but was prevented from seeing clearly until the cross-traffic of a girl in skinny jeans and a guy on a skateboard had passed by. there was no one there who appeared to be interested in urban sustainable ecology, just assholes like me with their macbooks and little white earbuds. there was an earnest group towards the front of the establishment with for-here mugs and thoughtful expressions, but not a familiar face among them. my social anxiety being what it is - that is to say, a major and unassailable component of my personality - i passed by without inquiring. some pie might have hit the spot just then, but i settled for a veggie super burrito, which ranks slightly higher than pie on the suitable-for-dinner scale.

on my way home i was sauntering along in front of the symphony hall when over the sound of music emanating from my little white earbuds i heard screaming. really, really enthusiastic screaming. at first it appeared to be localized near a reddish glow at the corner of the library, but then it started heading towards me. it was then i encountered what is possibly the most fucked-up idea for a field trip, ever: not one, not three, but FIVE trolley-car open-air buses strung with christmas lights and filled to bursting with youth.

normally i hate the word "youth" but it appropriately conveys who these people were. often when we are on public transportation my ~~SFL~~ will poke me in the side and say, "are those kids in middle school?" pointing at a tight gaggle of them. usually i turn to look and then say sagely, as though i had some eighth sense about such things, "no, high school." alternately, "no, college." in this instance, with no ~~SFL~~ to ask me, i conducted the debate internally and my eighth sense screamed out: tenth grade.

nothing else on the street, not even the third drag queen of my short evening, could quite live up to that. the remainder of the walk home was decidedly boring, and i was overwarm because i am never going to learn to dress correctly for this climate. then of course when i got back into the apartment and checked my little invitation thingy, and by that i mean e-mail, i realized i had violated one of the first lessons of cool: nobody who is truly awesome does events on a weekend. the zine party in question is not till monday, unfortunately at a time when i will be listening to manuel kichi wong, my new favorite teacher, entertain a roomful of early childhood education students, so there will still be no pie for me, let alone the local honey and homemade goodies which were also promised. bummer dude.

christ what is my problem

2008-11-29T20:48:00.000-08:00

why can't i just run like all the other navel-gazers out there? i even have a little outfit all bought, and as those who know me well are painfully aware, i have to have the right outfit for every occasion.

but what did i do today? sleep. ALL DAY. the fuck?

i just want to bop around the golden gate panhandle listening to my ipod shuffle and pretending there is no one else in the universe, is that so wrong?

there but for the grace of god

2008-11-09T13:28:00.000-08:00

across from me in a chair on the glued-down persian rug, as i sit here waiting around in the michigan union, is a very earnest girl with a very throaty voice. earlier i saw her flailing around with her luggage, which was a gigantic duffle bag by none other than vera bradley. i know the genuine article when i see it, my sister used to hustle that shit. she was also sporting, among other things, poorly-cared-for tattoos, ear plugs, and a green day hoodie. do people between the ages of twelve and thirty listen to green day? where have i been? now she and this dude with absurd facial hair and those suede slip-on merrell shoes are talking about "problem members" in co-ops and what to do about them.

as time goes by, the more humane and pragmatic dictatorships seem. for serious.

a is for apple, b is for blind

2008-11-08T12:42:00.000-08:00

so, to recap: first black president, gay marriage in political shambles, and we are currently ensconced at sweetwater's in ann arbor during the nasco conference. this morning i was (for me) exceptionally brave and took a bus i'd never taken before into beautiful (and by that i mean leafy and wealthy) downtown and bought $50 worth of winter gear at a store called bivouac, which i had forgotten is one of my favorite words in this messy language of ours. it is cold in michigan, son. the girls behind the counter laughed when i said that but wished me a pleasant stay in their state.

i am drinking tea with honey in the bottom of the cup. this seems entirely fine.

we were also allowed to meet and greet and drink soy hot chocolate with two entirely charming children and their mother maria that my ~~SFL~~ (haters gonna hate) knows. the four-year-old rewarded my attention with a vibrantly scribbled page torn from her coloring book, which i have every intention of putting on the fridge.

so, whither my civil rights? i guess there are people raising hell already, some via lawsuits and some via standing around shouting in public. i'll be honest, voters of california: my feelings are a little hurt here. i hope matt makes a goddammit! video. he's got the footage. you hear me, boy? at the present time our plan is to sit tight and maybe get married in vancouver in december. happy holidays, we're doing it again! it's unclear whether someone is going to manage to nullify all the marriages that took place during that brief beautiful window, but i have my fears. all eighteen thousand of us do. my question is: how exactly are they gonna go about that? i have this vision where the fed breaks into our apartment SWAT-team style and snatches it off the bathroom wall, a la their repossession of elian gonzalez circa 2000. (yeah, remember him? homeboy's a communist now.) probably what would really happen is someone sitting in front of a big computer somewhere would delete the marriages from their records with three clicks of a mouse.

at the present time it looks like i got the last laugh, though. the day before the right to get hitched was pulled out from under us i spent two hours at social security changing my last name, which is now shine. i'm waiting for my new useless piece of blue cardstock to arrive in the mail, after which i will totter on over to the DMV. it might turn out to be a holy pain in the ass to do this changeover but at the moment it appears to be my last recourse. dear conservatives of the state of california, i thumb my nose at you.

and if you're a size four, this is the place to be

2008-11-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

i'm not sure how comfortable i really am with the use of "green" as a verb, but if - as a lifestyle choice - it gets people to recycle i say hey-okay. even though our recycling is mostly shipped to china to be made into those weird square bags. at least we're moving the trash around a little bit, not just dropping it in a heap somewhere. right? bloody hell.

there's an island of rubbish the size of texas somewhere in the ocean where the tides are just so, did you know that? it actually has a name: the great pacific garbage patch, which i think makes it sound innocuous, like a community garden, like someone is out there pulling weeds and trying to grow cucumbers and california poppies from a field of plastic shopping bags.

in any case, as part of my genuine attempt to become less wasteful myself, i have taken on a new habit: thrift store shopping. most of my peers, irrespective of their level of discretionary income, apparently choose this method of clothes shopping. now, you must understand that when i say "my peers" what i actually mean by that is "all those people i know who are way so much cooler than me." bean, for example. how do people manufacture time and energy out of the unceasing void to find good clothes at thrift stores? that has been my question for years now, ever since my first trip to value village as a preadolescent during grunge rock's heyday. which was not so much a heyday as it was a sputter of minor chords fronted by an incessant whine.

so it was the other evening that i found myself standing in awe of the goodwill flagship store. in awe because that mofo is HUGE. also, considering it was six-thirty on a weekday shortly before halloween, it was in remarkably tidy condition. the point of this venture into the unknown - which, for the curious, smells vaguely of tide with colorsafe bleach and other people - was purely to scope out the available goods. end result: green fuzzy cardigan, pink sheer cardigan, tan corduroy "blazer", pink linen skirt, red floral skirt, a pink collar for grandma moses, ten school folders, and jenga! for thirty bucks.

unfortunately i was unprepared (midsize purse) for this level of success and so was given a plastic bag to carry my purchases home. a bag which in all likelihood i will fill with cat shit and send to a landfill somewhere. oh why does anybody even get out of bed anymore.

this fibromyalgia business is for the birds

2008-10-29T22:19:00.000-07:00

when morale is low, paint your toenails french tip white.

hell is full of folding chairs

2008-10-25T19:55:00.000-07:00

today i was compelled to leave the house at the atrocious hour of seven-fifteen in order to ride in my coworker's scooty little black car all the way to milpitas. which is in the south bay, which is a short distance beyond nowhere worth going. all the ground is the same color brown, and all the buildings are huge and square and empty and seem to be made entirely of glass.

the reason for this disaster of a saturday was regional employee orientation (known colloquially as arr-eeh-oh), followed by a short meat-and-cheese meal break, followed by three hours of diversity training. i do not know whether i am any more culturally aware than i was when i left the house at seven-fifteen this morning and began this absurd journey. i do know i am spent. plumb tuckered out. i should be at a celebratory bat mitzvah dinner for my SFL's (remember that? spouse for life?) drash mentee. i should be eating high-end kosher goodness, and instead i'm flat out with grandma moses, eating leftover hummus with my index finger.

grandma moses, by the way, is the loudest cat in the world. our most recent theory is that she ended up at animal control because her person companion, also presumably quite aged, shook loose this mortal coil. and perhaps in that companion's later years the old ears weren't working quite as well, so grandma moses had to shout to make herself understood. she doesn't seem to comprehend - in spite of my careful and logical explanations - that my hearing is in fact quite acute. i will wake up to lift her onto the bed (she can't jump that high, we're assembling a stepladder, i don't want to talk about it) at the sound of a mere squeak; none of this yowling business is really called for.

having dispatched the hummus, and full to the brim on a day's worth of lettuce sandwiches and snickerdoodles and therefore convinced i will never eat again, i was at a bit of a loss. my usual favored distraction was not turning up any winners, either. it was too early for decent folks to go to bed, at least if they want to stay asleep past two in the morning. so i made some art. embroidered cardboard, to be exact. i credit my sudden loss of performance anxiety with our attendance at a talk (plus slides!) given by one hilary price, the mind behind rhymes with orange. she pointed out (and everyone has said this to me before also but never so succintly) that the good work doesn't happen right away, that you gotta mess around for a while. specifically, she said, "it's impossible to turn out something perfectly formed and beautiful on the first try. unless you're a cat, and that's a hairball."

grandma moses does not have hairballs. thank gourd for small favors.

we named her grandma moses

2008-10-23T22:12:00.000-07:00

and she is perfect. okay and now i have to go figure out how to give her subcutaneous fluids for that kidney problem of hers.

what! seriously i'm in love.

shit shit shit

2008-10-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

this is what happens when i stay home from work with an earache. i do damn fool things like look at the spca website.

please, internet, i'm begging you: convince me that i do not need to rush right out and get this cat this very moment. WE HAVE TWO ALREADY.

AGGHHH BUT SHE IS SIXTEEN! help.

firebombing my system with vitamin c and other daily endeavors

2008-10-22T18:40:00.000-07:00

one of the cruel injustices of working with tiny children - and there are only a few - is that the childhood diseases one normally escapes by entering the quote-unquote adult world where people are quote-unquote mature - those sicknesses rear their ugly little heads again. and, left without the superhuman immune systems common to tiny children, adults such as myself end up on the bus home at two in the afternoon with a stabbing pain in the left ear.

this pain repeats its little dance on my eardrum about every fifteen seconds or so. it especially likes to sneak up on me when i haven't thought about it for a little while, and give me a really good poke.

according to our friends at webmd dot com, in whom we have placed our collective trust for reasons unclear to me, symptoms of an ear infection in a pre-verbal child include excessive fussiness and tugging on the earlobe. thank gourd i can talk, otherwise i'd look like i had an ear infection most of the time. when i was a tiny child myself i had them so often that by the age of three i could wake up in the middle of the night, pad around to my mother's side of their bed, shake her out of slumberland and say, "mamma, i have a ear infection and i need moxie-silling."

true to form, that is what my mother suggested when i called her and excessively fussed over the phone just now. no thank you. since becoming a quote-unquote adult i have developed a deep loathing of antibiotics. since exposing my highly suggestible brain to the wisdom of skinny bitch, that fear has only increased, concurrent with a daymare on a loop about a pig which i think safely guarantees i will never eat pork again. but i still hear the siren song of beef carpaccio, and some small part of me weeps at it loss.

damn you, vegan ladies. how you have made me want to be one of you. but i will say this for the skinny minds behind the media empire: the follow your heart brand vegan cheese is actually not totally horrible. so thanks for that.

like seeing grandma in a mosh pit

2008-10-08T19:48:00.000-07:00

yesterday after work i took the accursed 43 masonic through the presidio back towards home. i was comfortably sandwiched between a dude reading sci-fi and a dude with too many bags when suddenly at the stop after mine my friend who is four got on the bus with her dad. she is in our pre-k classroom and usually has two pigtails. she was carrying a small stuffed poodle. they sat down right across from me and i winked at her but didn't say anything. by the time we lurched out of the presidio and into the richmond she had tugged on her dad and whispered to him who i was. he smiled at me in the manner of all lucasfilm employees. they're a jolly bunch. they got off the bus a few stops before me, but for that whole ride she had this mystified look on her face, which i couldn't quite place until i remembered this one time i saw my kindergarten teacher at the grocery store.

...wait, you live somewhere? you eat? food?

it's mind-boggling to a four-year-old that people move about in space like that, unsupervised, because four-year-olds never do. oh it's so charming i could just bust.

so sure enough today i was called upon by the weather and my superiors to slather all the children with sunscreen. this is an absurd process involving a different pair of latex (or latex free, or powdered latex, or powdered latex free) gloves for each child. the amount of waste produced by a single daycare program in one day would knock your eyelashes off. so there i was in the pre-k room on a kid-sized chair with a growing pile of latex-free gloves at my feet, and my little friend from the bus comes careening towards me yelling: "teacher britta teacher britta i saw you on the bus!" big smile. pigtails falling out.

later she said i could come over to her house and play because she has a lot of stuffed animals. i said all right.

if you haven't got anything intelligent to say, go sit by our girl lizzie

2008-10-07T21:34:00.001-07:00

dear elisabeth hasselbeck,

nobody likes you. please go away under a rock or something. and lay off the eyeliner, you look like a gosh-darned raccoon.

love,
britta

p.s. actually, you know what? why don't you go keep ann coulter company. i bet she needs a friend.

because sometimes there's nowhere to put the piano you've been carrying around all day

2008-10-06T22:46:00.000-07:00

(by this guy matt)

less like cat feet and more like lion paws

2008-10-06T22:02:00.001-07:00

this fine evening i had a midterm exam (! how did we get here so fast !) at school. when i got off my all-time favorite mode of transportation - BART - in balboa park there were great gusts of fog coming in off the water. is it proper to say a gust of fog? they were like giant grey curtains under the streetlights. after my five-question midterm (for which i was expected to bring in two pages of notes), which took me all of eighty minutes (and mostly because i had to draw a picture or two and i am persnickety about my diagrams) it was quite dark indeed. but the fog was still gusting in, if gusting is the word i want.

another person might call it unpleasant, but yours truly grew up in the great pacific northwest where if it ain't got damp in it, it's hardly air. it even had the decency to smell like the beach just a little, where it didn't smell like the bus or the desperation of campaign workers handing out pamphlets. which i recycled, thank you so much! i love the earth too ok?

i am reading skinny bitch. i am unsure whether this was a wise decision but it certainly makes the time pass waiting for that dublin/pleasanton train to show up. for the record, i am a savvy girl but i already look passably fabulous about half the time. lessons learned so far: my aspartame tummyaches are not all in my head; fruit is great; and meat will rot in you, so stop eating it.

hmmm. even chicken-apple sausage on christmas? that's gonna be a hard sell.

yes yes y'all

2008-09-30T21:34:00.001-07:00

Stop8.org - Jacqui and Britta from Stop8.org on Vimeo.

i'm a goddamn movie star!

2008-09-27T21:27:00.000-07:00

California, Please Vote No On Proposition 8 from Stop8.org on Vimeo.

another clean day

2008-09-24T22:21:00.001-07:00

one of the things i like best today is the soapy spray we got for the kitchen because it's the same soapy spray my sister had in her kitchen when she lived by herself and so it smells familiar in there all the time. i mean that's nice.

the beer i like is called brother david. there is no other beer i iike.

2008-09-23T21:54:00.001-07:00

oh man, i just learned the greatest thing. i went to gestalt haus, the only bar in the world that has both beer i like and kielbasa under one roof, with bean. it was nice and quiet like married folks like and we sat in the soft chairs by the window. but here's the thing: the thing is, i was all set to apologize for being lame and going to a bar on a weeknight when nobody goes to a bar because i can actually hear myself talk (about my brilliant linocut career and how bean should start an underground sauerkraut market) let alone think. but i was reassured that going to a neighborhood bar on a weeknight actually makes me hip.

whaaaaaat!

that and the layered skirts, you'd think i was trying or something. ain't no effort, just comes natural.

1. roll bottom to top 2. roll back 3. tilt slightly 4. poo in a drawer!

2008-09-22T18:24:00.000-07:00

i was attempting to express to my therapist just this afternoon how messy this apartment is right now but i don't think it can be captured in mere language. i think this level of disorganization begins where human communication ends. everything (except obvious, vital things like the bed and the stove) is in the wrong room. not only is it in the wrong room, it is buried deep under a pile of things i no longer wish to possess inside a plastic tub from the container store.

thank god for the rolling litter box, or all would truly be lost. best dollars i've ever sent someone else out to spend. initially i was tempted to demand the top-entry model, but my own personal cat is not the brightest creature jesus ever placed on the green earth, and i feared disaster. the design may be clever, but daftness in a cat can supersede the best efforts of even the most aerodynamic shitbox.

aslksajjjjdgihghhhh.

2008-09-20T20:44:00.001-07:00

two and a quarter hours in and i'm already having buyer's remorse about this free web service. what if i picked the wrong venue for my mind vomit? i don't even like the color orange! that little squarey thing in the navigation bar doesn't look like a B to me, and i know from B!

alas.

direct to you from fulton street

2008-09-20T18:31:00.000-07:00

so we moved. the important lesson i have learned from this experience is: never, ever move those big heavy things yourself when you could pay a nice troupe of irish lads a nominal fee to move them for you. especially up five flights of stairs in a building where the elevator, though present, is by no means a standard size and will not fit something as simple as a queen-size box spring.

now we are surrounded by many mountains of our own things, wondering what possessed us to want any of them in the first place. where is it all going to go? and of course today my solution to that problem was to go out and buy more things to keep in this house. perusal of two art supply stores, one ride on the F train in front of a dude rolling a fat one, and my linocut blockprinting career is off to a great start there in that plastic bag heaped on the end of the bed. i feel a sense of distinctly american accomplishment: i have made this mess, and now i will stare at it openmouthed.

my spouse for life (hereafter SFL, thank you, state of california) took on the kitchen a few days ago. it's very attractive now. our little salt cellar and the ice-crusher we got for $2 at some weirdo's garage sale on valencia look quite fetching there on the counter together.

i don't think i can make the living room or the bedroom or the bathroom or the walk-in closet nearly so attractive but i believe that is my duty. however at the moment i'm not up to it. not up to anything, matter of fact. right promptly after we moved everything in, i fell ill - kerplunk - with some kind of dread virus. last night everything escaped me in a blaze of vomitous glory. that's not supposed to happen to a woman of my mettle.

i am weak as a newborn kitten. i tried shoving a bookcase around the room just now and i am plumb tuckered out, though it may be in part due to my spongy, proteinless diet. since the dawn of my malaise (approx. wednesday) i have been subsisting on rice and toast. our acupuncturist - of course we share an acupuncturist, what kind of parlor trick do you think this is? - won't let me have fruit. not even juice. of course it's all i want. i who scorn o.j. (simpson and fresh-squeezed) on my better days would crawl on my hands and knees for a teacup of the pulpy farmstand-style good stuff right now.

what a nasty beginning for my internet diary: i moved house, then i got sick. here is the kind of sick i am. tune in again next time, folks. this could get real interesting.