undersecretary of disarray

At last

2010-03-19T17:54:00.000-07:00

I got into graduate school! At the university where I wanted to go. At a program that will teach me things. How strange it feels to have succeeded at what I've been trying to do for the last four years.

2009

2009-12-28T23:14:00.000-08:00

There have been better years, and there will be better years.

2009 was a year of inertia. I stayed at the same job, in the same office, making the same salary. I applied and was rejected from my third grad program at the same school. I took the GRE a second time, applied a fourth time. Now I await my fourth rejection. Do I then shoot for a fifth? I don't know; I haven't decided. 2010 will be a year of deciding.

2009 was a year of loss. I don't have many friends, but one of my closest ones watched her mother die of cancer. In July, my parents and I went to New Mexico with my aging grandfather to visit his cousins, his old friends, the town where he grew up, and the graves of his family. By September, his dementia had become so severe that my grandmother left him in a nursing home; in early October he died of a stroke. It seemed all too fast, and his death brought to light such sorry depths of family dysfunction that I can only begin to relate--

2009 was a year of really discovering what ugliness--disownment, betrayal, repression, hypocrisy, a kind of stoic cruelty--lies so near the heart of my family structure.

2009 was a year of reading not enough books, watching not enough movies, seeing not nearly enough of my friends. It was a year of watching too many TV series and paying too much attention to disturbing sociopolitical trends.

2009 was another year of not writing enough, of observing my writing get shittier and shittier. 2010 will be a year of setting that right. (I never meant to abandon this place, and I haven't, not yet, at least not for ever.)

2009 was not a good year, but there will be worse years. It was another year in a stable and happy relationship (5 years and counting). It was a year of good roommates, good health, steady employment, and relatively stable finances (that is, for a grad student and a lowly office worker living in an absurdly expensive city). It was a year of regular exercise and of a shockingly pleasant first meeting between boyfriend and parents. It was a year of good food and not too many hangovers.

But here's to hoping that 2010 will be better.

And I'll be back in 2010. I kinda sorta promise, I think.

Someone broke our window a while back.

2009-07-12T02:42:00.000-07:00

We didn't even notice for a few days. Damn kids.

The Naruto Effect

2009-07-11T01:27:00.000-07:00

I never meant to give up blogging, but it's starting to look like I did. Well, I didn't give it up. I've just been extremely bad at it.

I've been pretty much alone for the last two weeks. M. is on the East Coast, one of my flatmates has been housesitting, and the other two are working nightly at their restaurant jobs. I'm not used to being alone anymore. Everything feels silent and strange.

At first there were all these grand plans of Getting Stuff Done. I was going to tighten up the whole ship. Develop good sleeping habits, do my math homework, plan for the rest of my life, water the plants regularly, and so forth. But after two weeks alone, I am pretty sure I have accomplished nothing.

I call it the Naruto Effect after the way it struck one of my flatmates a few years back. His wife spent a few weeks in Europe, leaving him to his own devices. During this time we witnessed his devolution. On the rare occasion of his leaving his room, he shuffled about the house in wrinkled shirts. He drank martinis made of cheap gin, ate bowls of cold rice mixed with Prego from the jar, and watched the whole Naruto series on his computer. As far as I know, besides going to work, this was all he did while his wife was away.

Fast-forward to this week. My productivity is shot. It's been deteriorating for a while now, but this week it's nonexistant. I go to work late, come back late, stick a pizza in the oven, shuffle downstairs to watch a TV show. It's Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of Naruto, but the same principle applies. I'm experiencing the Naruto Effect. I finally finished the whole damn series, which should set me free, but will it?

I don't think it's about Buffy any more than my flatmate's catatonia was about Naruto. Now that it's over, I will just find another way to waste time. I wish I could figure out how to focus myself. There's no clarity now. There's just the whooosh sound of the days passing. (Yes, and staccato sentences.)

Maybe in the coming days I will direct my lack of focus (can I say that?) toward blogging. Hah! Well, stranger things have happened.

Blue-laced shoes etc

2009-04-25T03:18:00.000-07:00

It was cold and windy last week. Then it reached 93 degrees, record-breaking temperatures for this time of year, and the whole city turned to mush. Just two days later and we're back to 40-some degrees and windy as fuck, and we don't really know what to do with ourselves.

I'm drinking wine now. M. is playing records. I worked from home today, finishing up a little past midnight. It's been a strange week of sickness or allergies, thoughts of ph-duhs, wearing shorts outside the house for the first time in perhaps ever. Our roommate of over a year is moving out, and we can't find anyone decent to replace her. Yet Craigslist has been overrun by douchebags. Longhaired self-styled gypsies; people who can conceive of no world outside Burning Man; robotic CS types with appallingly firm handshakes. Screw this. I don't think I can do the roommate thing for very much longer.

Secretly, we've been going to open houses. M.'s mom is looking to buy a house here, and we would live in it as tenants. Once, years ago, at the zenith of the housing bubble, we looked through some listings and laughed at the rundown pieces of shit priced at a million dollars. Not so anymore. Now, for half that, you can buy something pretty sweet. Something high up on a nearby hill, protected from roommates and noise, complete with deck and small yard. And--as the boring, snotty academic types we have indeed become--we're seriously looking into it. Let us snatch our schmancy espresso machine, our 1950s crystal, our dutch modern table, and rescue them from your unclean plebian hands!

Recession Liveblog!

2009-03-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

Actual lunchtime conversation with a gray-haired co-worker whose name I still don't know:

Him: Good afternoon. Will this explode if I microwave it?
Me: No idea.
Him: It's made of metal.
Me: In that case, maybe you shouldn't microwave it.
[pause]
Him: Did you know that if you microwave pantyh0se, it catches fire? I read that somewhere.
Me: No, I didn't know that.
Him: So if your pantyh0se are wet for some reason, you shouldn't dry them off in the microwave.
Me: Thanks. I'll keep that in mind.

Wine country biking trip I didn't pay for

The afternoon after the final party

The first cold day of the season

I haven't been blogging much--I see I skipped the entire month of February--but oh, how busy I've been! The tragedy (yes, tragedy) of it is that I've been occupied with such truly bloggable material at work. But I've been too busy working, and I can't blog about work as long as I'm still here, anyway. And given the situation (Stable job + nasty recession + 3-strikes-I'm-out on the masters application process), I expect to remain here for a good long while.

Yes, I did fail for the third consecutive year to get into a grad program. Every year that goes by is another mark in favor of selling out. The older I get, the more I would be willing to trade for the ability to afford a certain standard of living. The less I want to be sharing my living space with people I met on Craigslist, perfectly lovely people they may be. The more I long for middle-class comforts like the ability to go on vacation, maybe once a year, on my own dime without bankrupting myself.

But how to sell out? Is anyone even buying these days? This schmancy degree has got to be worth something, hasn't it?

...
...

Or not. Well, I'm employed!

Christmas in Midwest (didn't pay for this either)

Heatwave 2009

2009-01-15T17:34:00.000-08:00

The weather here is unbelievable. It would almost pass for summer in these parts. It's better than summer, though: in summer, sundown brings cold air and fog rushing down through Dolores Park, making the nights feel colder. I'm in my office now with the window wide open. Soon I will bike to the train in a windbreaker and no gloves. Delightful madness, surely a sign of the end times.

2008: good riddance.

2009, a summary thus far:

1. I arrived from the Midwest with a fresh cold and no luggage.

2. I spent a few days at M.'s stepmom's vacation home on the northern California coast, drinking good wine, eating good food, admiring a beautiful view, writing a terribly stilted application essay, and spending literally hours on a sputtering, echoing, many-times-crossed land line with various airline call-center employees in Mumbai who called me "Madam" while explaining to me that no, they could NOT change the address on my luggage to reflect my actual whereabouts. I don't think I can properly explain how bizarre and disorienting it for someone with a phone phobia (hint: me) to be in this situation: hearing 4 conversations going on at the same time, unsure which person I am actually speaking to; trying to filter the conversation through a constant echo; trying to hear what is being said to me through a constant crackling noise and an infernal beeping many times louder than any voice on the line.

3. I got my luggage 7 days later.

4. I resolved to write in a journal every day, as that's the only way I am going to get the writing practice necessary to making my next experience with an application essay borderline acceptable. So far this year I've managed to do so every day but one.

5. I resolved to drink less and spend less money, but alas, I'm already failing there.

6. I applied to another masters program.

7. I inherited another laptop from M. I'm solidly in the 21st century now, with battery power and wireless.

8. My flatmate's boyfriend was arrested driving *her* car with an expired license and a bunch of marijuana plants in the trunk. I took her out for a much-needed drink last night. (See item 5.)

9. Today I learned that one of my 3 true remaining friends is getting married. She met her now-fiance on a dating website. I remember the circumstances under which she joined: she had just suffered a bitter breakup and had learned that her ex (our flatmate at the time) had joined an online dating site. Largely out of spite, she joined one too, and she responded to the first guy who looked compatible. They got along well, and today there was an invitation to their engagement party in my inbox.

10. M. killed his party as a present to himself and to me.

11. I've been majoring in Las Vegas this week: (a) Leaving Las Vegas, (b) Casino, (c) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (some time to read at last!)

Self-Evaluation

2008-12-12T21:25:00.000-08:00

I've been in the office since 8am, and it looks as if I'll be here until 10pm. I may as well blog some more.

2008's almost over, and I'm going to the Midwest next week, so now is as good a time as any to look back at my new year's resolutions and how well I failed at them.

(1) Clean my room. I cleaned it eventually, but now it's a mess again.
(2) Start a savings account. Success! And it's 25 dollars strong.
(3) Don't get in any serious bike accidents. Well done there.
(4) Change party affiliation so I can vote in Democratic primary. Yes. I'm now an independent, or whatever we're called here. "Decline to State" or something.
(5) Dental appointment. Sadly, no. It involves picking up the phone.
(6) See optometrist. See item (5)
(7) Sign up for more math classes. No. Still finishing up the old one.
(8) Go on one or more camping trips. Yes, two! One was a disaster, but the other was not.
(9) Get into graduate school. Bastards.
(10) Blog at least once a week. Ha!
(11) Drink less. Amazingly, I have! But mostly because I'm too poor to afford drinks.
(12) Save enough money to travel to Iceland this summer. Perhaps Rome. Alas. See items (2) and (11).

Not so bad. Now: back to sitting in my office for the 14th hour straight. Until next year, reader(s?).

The View from My Recession

2008-12-12T11:14:00.000-08:00

We found a new flatmate. He's our thirteenth in three years. Or maybe the fourteenth or fifteenth; I can't keep track anymore. He seems to have two girlfriends. They spend alternating nights at our place, and my first thought was that I must be truly awful at recognizing faces. An ex-addict, current law student, barkeep, and apparently manslut, he does seem interesting, maybe a little too interesting, which is why he wasn't our first choice to begin with. But then, our first choices do keep on disappearing on us--

It's that time of year again; time to apply to yet another masters program that I may as well have picked out of a hat; time to beg profs who don't remember me for letters of recommendation; time to make up a coherent narrative in which I travel smoothly from point A through point B all the way to point C when the true story is much more Lynch than Hollywood; time to ask my boss for money; time for all this merriment, and ah, could it be a more wondrous economic clime?

At least I have a job. A full-time job, with so many people underemployed. I really should not be complaining. My own personal recession could be a lot worse.

I'm late to work all the time now, almost every day. But today I biked to the train at sunrise with brain and body in full revolt, and it was kind of nice. Arriving at the station I felt warm and awake in my windbreaker while everyone else yawned and shivered in their coats. Maybe that's what success feels like.

Screw narrative. This isn't narrative. I don't remember narrative. I don't read novels or stories anymore, I just click through blogs, follow links across the Internet, skim the Economist, apply to three radically different programs in three consecutive years; maybe the lack of narrative is narrative enough. I'm just confusing myself with words now and I think I need another tea. I'll be back again sometime.

Dispatch from Unreal America

2008-11-10T15:06:00.000-08:00

Flux? Glacial, for the most part. I hate writing the kinds of posts where I list what I've been doing, get lost in anecdotes, save a file, return to it days later when it looks like old news, and dispose of it accordingly. So I won't even try this time.

I've never seen anything like the streets of San Francisco on the night of November 4. When I left the election-watching bbq at around 11pm there was a wild street party in front of every open liquor store. I tried to get home but instead ran into almost everyone I know. Old roommates, M.'s friends, the skinny hippie who works at the pie shop where we do our math homework. Someone uncorked a bottle of champagne from a nearby roof and showered us with bubbles. Hundreds of godless liberal unwashed unreal Americans hugged strangers, waved American flags, set off fireworks, and chanted "USA, USA." It was truly bizarre, but it was hard to avoid being swept up in the moment.

Well, it was hard for me anyway. M. was off his meds again and more than willing to temper the celebrations with realism. "That drum circle is annoying." Yes, true. "This street party is lame." Yeah, I suppose it could be better... "All these people are going to hate Obama as soon as he's in office and has to make compromises." True as well, but we can think about that tomorrow.

Another reason for celebration: M. and I were broke by the day of the election, I mean counting-quarters-for-coffee broke. But we had bet actual money on an Obama win on Intrade a while back, at the height of McCain's Palin-Convention bounce, the one time this year when his odds were just shy of 50/50. I don't care if all these SF kids hate him by January 20; we made 500 bucks! Now that's change I can believe in.

Frying Pan --> Fire?

2008-09-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

Everything's in flux. Will report back when it all settles down, most likely to a whole new equilibrium.

Awkward Lodgings

2008-08-15T16:46:00.000-07:00

I followed M. to a conference in Oregon and we made something of a poor man's vacation out of it. Everything was pleasantly green, and the locals were friendly, and the food was cheap (and in Portland, also good), and the weather was warm even through the night. But years from now, I won't remember this trip for being pleasant; I'll remember it for being awkward.

Imagine that you and your boyfriend are staying with your boyfriend's friend Ray in a city that's totally foreign to you. You meet Ray at the restaurant where he works, and as he's driving you back to his house, he lets you know that things aren't going so well at home. In fact, they're downright ugly: he and his live-in girlfriend are constantly fighting. They can't stand each other anymore. Ray has privately decided to flee back to the Midwest, never to see her again. What's more, he had planned to break up with her a week earlier, only to be foiled by your vacation plans. Oops.

"So when are you telling her?" you ask.

"Oh, as soon as you leave," he says.

So you get to his house--in fact, his girlfriend's house, filled with his girlfriend's things--and meet Ray's soon-to-be ex. You get the voyeuristic sense of being witness to something that ought to be private. There's also the discomfiting feeling of walking in the presence of some kind of animated corpse. (And one, I might add, that the girlfriend doesn't realize is dead.) All four of us go out to drinks at a depressing, smoky dive. The resentment between them is palpable, the conversation duly awkward.

To make things slightly better, it was clear that Ray was making the right choice. His girlfriend was abusive, negative, and whiny. She wasn't attractive in any way, physical or otherwise. She lived in a dingy gray house in a dingy gray suburb many miles away from the city center. The house was termite-infested and smelled of rot; its cluttered interior lacked natural light, and the yard was overgrown and filled with trash. Living like this seems mighty depressing. In Ray's place, I would have gone back to the Midwest in a heartbeat.

Being amid the wreckage of a bad relationship made me doubly happy about mine. We bicker sometimes, but we rarely fight. We enjoy being around each other nearly always. We share the same tastes. After almost four years of close proximity, we aren't sick of one another. That has got to count for something.

Meeting Notes

2008-07-25T16:37:00.000-07:00

I suppose I am lucky that I have to attend only one meeting a week. As you can imagine though, I take each meeting very seriously. I always make sure to take detailed notes.

On the topic of work, it was evidently not enough that my boyfriend and I shared an apartment, a daily commute, a checking account, and a boss. So now, M. is moving into an office directly across the hall from me! It is a coincidence, but one that fits nicely with the general process of nauseating attached-at-the-hip-dom. Tune in for next episode, in which M. and I buy a tandem bike and matching outfits. Jeezy.

Adventures with Mace

2008-07-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

The dog has been spared, for now: her health had deteriorated rapidly, but then it improved just as rapidly. Here's to her living to see her 18th birthday.

A few weeks ago, M. threw two parties back-to-back. It was an exhausting weekend. The second party was an underground affair--twice as exhausting, a zillion times as risky, and, it turned out, maybe half as successful as the legal one. The main act canceled at the last second, claiming that it was all M.'s fault for something-or-other. For an hour and a half I "worked" behind the bar selling drink tickets. Having never worked in any sort of retail, I was absolutely useless at making change, and the veteran bartenders happily let go of me once it started getting busy.

The night ended abruptly at perhaps five-thirty. First the smoke machine set off the fire alarm. Then there was a brawl. A nice nerdy hipster kid from Minneapolis was socked in the face, and someone, we don't know who, sprayed his assailant with Mace. Being a warehouse with no ventilation, the place was soon rendered a box of wheezy fiery pain; the partygoers fled, leaving us there with lungs full of spice and boxes and boxes of booze to bring home to our garage. Heed this advice: underground dance parties are NOT worth the bother, and this one lost money, too.

As long as I'm talking about staying up 'til dawn, here are a few of the heat-wave circa-solstice sunrise pictures mentioned in this post:

Notes From a Future Cat Lady

2008-06-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

It's always a little dispiriting to look at the calendar and take note that the solstice has passed; the days are getting shorter again. Already. Neither do I like the way that time, or the way I perceive it, compresses with age. Have three years passed already since graduation, and have I really not moved an inch? I tend toward inertia something awful. If I don't get going I'll still be in this seat twenty years hence, squinting through borrowed contact lenses at, I don't know, Excel spreadsheet holograms, living on the same salary ill-adjusted for inflation, collecting cats and Fassbinder memorabilia in a hovel I wouldn't be able to afford if not for rent control. And that would be capital-L Lame.

The air is thick with smoke from faraway fires. The sky has a bizarre washed-out quality to it; the sun appears filtered through cheesecloth. Setting yesterday it was a dim crimson, like a red dwarf.

I don't remember what I was meaning to blog about but it wasn't this. I blame the lack of sleep. I'm too exhausted even to find myself tea. I don't think I've done a spot of work all day.

Dog

2008-06-25T16:11:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon this link at Andrew Sullivan's website yesterday and it sounds a little too familiar:

There are two general signs that a blog is heading toward extinction. The first is a declining frequency of posting, and the second is a proportional rise in the number of posts about the blog itself. These two don’t always go hand-in-hand; sometimes it’s just one or the other, sometimes you don’t get either warning sign. But when either of the two is spotted it’s reasonable to begin wondering how long that curious internet publication will continue to be updated...
It always seems to be that journals — and blogs — begun with the urgent intensity of someone confident that the simple act of putting their thoughts on paper will clarify or improve them, you soon find that a personal conversation is hard. And whether it’s because you find yourself a poor conversationalist, a slow writer, or an incoherent blabberer the realization generally comes that the results are a little less than magical. The realization dawns that what you’re writing is not really in need of urgent preservation.

So you walk away. You give up. You’ve expelled whatever it was that caused you to create a blog or buy a journal. You’re done with the superfluous recording of everything.

Well, I've been aware for some time that my writing is in no urgent need of preservation. I am not the kind of person to let things die, though. First I let them fade toward a mediocre end so that by the time they're really gone, no one really notices. Not with a bang but a whimper, and so on.

On that note, they're putting down my childhood dog soon. She's nearly eighteen years old now, so she's been with my family for the vast majority of my conscious life. Nearly all of it, in fact--or all, if a third grader is not considered conscious. But I remember the day I brought her home as a puppy. It was January of 1991 and she sat in my lap as we drove her from my grandma's friend's house in the back of the red Nissan pickup truck. My little brother, in Kindergarten at the time, wanted to name her Sally. But she was mine--I'd been heartsick for a dog for years by then--so I named her after a magical cat in a book I'd read recently. Little did I know that I was also naming her after a well-known brand of cat food. Well, we got home and introduced the puppy to my dad, who was lying on the floor reading a newspaper. She promptly peed on his socks. Nevertheless, she was always a great dog.

Here she is in happier times.

And here, a few years ago.

The weather has alternated between furnace and windswept tundra. My life has alternated between dull and frustrating. One night it is too hot to sleep inside, our apartment a greenhouse sweltering even with all the fans turned on. M. is out with the Englishman, phone-less and late enough to worry me all the way to crazytown; I sit out on the roof as the sun comes up, read a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, sip a beer and feel sorry for myself. Granted, I do take some decent pictures. (Not pictured.) Maybe it's the sun's rays that knock some sense into me. By the time M. gets back, I'm not terribly angry, mostly tired. And the next night it's freezing inside. We flick on on the electric yuppie fireplace. I am working on my math homework, making pasta, watching The Wire. I used to watch no television at all, but ever since my bizarre discovery that I can actually get more work done while watching something, I just haven't stopped. Right now it's Arrested Development at work and The Wire at home. But there's also been Dexter, Weeds, Firefly, Heroes, and anything else available online on Netflix or Hulu. I'm worried that I'm becoming too passive a consumer of entertainment.

I'm worried that I'm overcompensating for my lack of posting by writing a novel. A bad novel. Postmodern with a swirl o' vomit. Gbye then.

Old Maui Photos, Part 4

2008-06-23T15:46:00.000-07:00

Old Maui Photos, Part 3

2008-06-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

Old Maui Photos, Part 2

2008-06-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

Old Maui Photos, Part 1

2008-06-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

25

2008-05-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

I've been miserable at posting. But I'm a quarter-century old tomorrow, and I've never failed to wish myself a happy birthday on my blog. So hello, let me re-introduce myself.

This is Penitent speaking. I'm just about 25 years old. I'm a shit blogger. What's worse, I've become only shittier with time, but I probably don't have to tell you that.

For my birthday I would like:

(1) A year's supply of provigil
(2) Another vacation with M. (Death Valley in April was sublime and I don't know when I'll be able to do something like that again.)
(3) To get into grad school, ha-ha.
(4) A new job
(5) Someone to pay off my credit-card debt accumulated over almost a year of M. being in graduate school and the both of us being addicted to food and drink
(6) Less partying like I'm 19 on weeknights, waking up late, sitting through the day in hangover-induced idiocy, because the whole routine has worn out its welcome. (Or will the provigil fix this, too?)

It's ninety-fucking-thousand degrees outside. Tomorrow my age will be a perfect square. I ate lunch at 4:30pm today while watching Netflix on my work computer, after having arrived here at 12:30-- I am a horrendous employee and a worse blogger and an even worse-er writer.

Hap-pee birth-day tooo meeeee....

I was going to link to last year's birthday post but I must have deleted it.

Instead, a San Francisco sunrise.

And Werner Herzog.

2008: Not My Year

2008-03-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

Rejected from grad school #2. I don't know what to do next.

2008 isn't M.'s year either. He's already failed two classes and is on track for failing another.

Revised New Year's resolution: QUIT BEING LOSERS.

I am nursing fantasies of disappearing for the month of August, biking from SF to Vancouver to Denver for the Democratic Convention, but let's see if any of that happens or whether all such fantasies be leveled by penury (as I can only extrapolate they shall).

---

Unrelated photo from last summer:

Speak, Raspberry Ale

2008-03-06T01:07:00.000-08:00

I happened upon the blog of a girl who graduated from my college my year. I never met her, though I knew people who knew her, and I was kind of horrified to read how similar her blog was to mine. She wrote about biking to work, close calls with reckless drivers. She posted not-terribly-remarkable photos of things around her. A few days after New Year's, she lazily jotted down a few resolutions--"getting into grad school" was one--and mentioned that she should blog more often because her writing style is deteriorating: she noted, self-consciously, that she was forsaking structure. She then proceeded to blog sporadically. Just how many of us are there, anyway?

I have things to write about, but perhaps too many. It's 1:25AM and past my (wholly theoretic at this point) bedtime. I should go to bed, but I still have some of this raspberry-flavored beer to drink--a dubious purchase, at best--

M. left at 12:45. He's putting on a show Friday, so there are posters to be stapled to the telephone poles outside bars, flyers to be fanned out on tables inside them. I wonder when he'll be back and whether I'll be able to get to sleep in the meantime.

I know I don't blog often, but I still ought to introduce a few people to my unofficial cast of characters. At least one, for now: Nigel, the Englishman. We didn't even know this guy until 2007, but these days he and M. are inseparable. He rides with us on the train. He meets us for lunch sometimes. We go out together. We have dinner with him more than one night a week, usually just the three of us, but sometimes he brings one of his girlfriends. I think there are three now, or perhaps he's even down to two, but he's never had one at a time. I have heard there is a good explanation for this, but I have not heard the explanation myself.

Nigel is also throwing parties with M., and as I type they're flyering together. I envision M. getting home at an ungodly hour because Nigel is with him, and Nigel is slow.

This is not what I mean about having a lot to write about. It was M.'s birthday on Saturday, and Friday night was one of the wildest nights I can remember. And back to Nigel, I could easily write a book with all the mad, mad stories he's told us, and now that I've introduced him I may decide to spice up this blog with them.

The raspberry beer is gone now, so good-night.

(Addendum) Drinking Close to a Gallon of Sake on a Weeknight: Lesson in Japanese Cuisine or Totally Fucking Stupid?

2008-02-27T21:05:00.001-08:00

Both, actually. It was excellent sake that is evidently hard to find outside of Japan. But mostly I was totally fucking stupid. I took a sick day last Friday not because I didn't "feel like" going to work but because I literally could not lift myself out of bed until 2pm. Upon which I crawled around the room on hands and knees for another hour, nauseated and with a painful headache behind my eyes. When I went back to sleep around 2:30am I still felt like hell. It was an experience I'd rather not repeat.

Backtracking a bit, the Industry couple invited us out to a sushi spot where they are friends with the owner. He brought us food he wanted us to try: sashimi flown in from Japan; delicate salads; fried fish heads and collars. (I ate an eye.) Once the place closed down, he sat with us, going back to the kitchen periodically to bring us rarer and rarer bottles of sake.

It was a great experience up until about midnight, at which point it took a turn toward the majestically stupid.

Craigslist: Lesson in Sociology, or Heart of Darkness?

2008-02-27T20:25:00.000-08:00

I know you are slavering in anticipation of my latest catch-up novella. Here it is; you're welcome!

Sam--bartender flatmate--decided to move out with his girlfriend, causing M. to stop speaking with him for weeks. The Frenchy flatmates can't stand living with us anymore, so they're going back to France early March. To "practice their art" or something. Have I mentioned that the Frenchies and the Sam/girlfriend axis couldn't stand one another either? I can't say I'm devastated to see this particular arrangement reach its end.

Apparently we have no friends left--or none interested in living with us, anyway--because it became clear after a month or so that we would have to resort to Craigslist for the 3rd time. Perhaps we truly are as loathsome as our current housemates would have you think. Anyhow, M. was busy, so the secretarial task of coordinating Craigslist meetings fell to me.

Too bad I am a social disaster. I don't think I can adequately describe how much stress the whole ordeal caused me. I couldn't sleep. At work, I couldn't concentrate on my job. Possibly one hour's worth of work was done in those several days. Instead, I sent or received maybe a hundred emails last week. Then, after the interviews were over and it was time to start dishing out rejections, I began shunning email altogether. Every person we interviewed, save two, emailed me back telling us how great we were, how great the apartment was, how much they loved our cats, how well they sensed we got along with them, and of course, why we ought to choose them as our housemates. One guy attached a picture of his cat. A few offered to pay more in rent if we'd only accept them. How would I reject all these kind people who knew where we lived? What if we saw them around? Do we say we reject you because we find your voice grating, or because we just like someone else better? I couldn't make myself respond to these people. Merely skimming through their emails filled me with a measure of horror. When I did sleep, I had Craigslist nightmares. Finally I caved in and asked M. to respond to the emails for me. He thought I was nuts; he didn't see what the issue was, but he wrote the rejections in a matter of minutes, and lo!--I could sleep again.

Yes, I do have a problem.

Once I get past the feelings of dread, I can appreciate our Craigslist experience as a lesson on social groups. I don't know what it was about the cues we included in our ad--price? likes and dislikes? the way we described ourselves?--but the people we interviewed were a demographically homogenous bunch. All college grads: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford. All white, more or less. Mostly male. Most worked for tech companies or did research.

We interviewed two girls. One of them, it turns out, not only went to our alma mater but also graduated the same year as we did, and lived in my co-op while I was "studying"(ha) in Italy. We even have mutual friends.

As I said, two of the people we interviewed did not write us back begging to live with us. One of these happens to be a post-doc in the department where M.'s a ph.d. candidate. His parents are also faculty here, and he was a high-school classmate of M.'s good friend (the one who is also my boss's daughter).

In sum, I have learned that when you post an ad on Craigslist, the responses you get will be from a random sample of the local population. Further, when we go about picking roommates, how close they are to our social group has nothing to do with our decision.

Which two people do you think we picked?

Re-Resolution

2008-02-15T20:36:00.000-08:00

I'm done applying. Again. For now.

Writing my statement of purpose was once again painful, a belabored reminder of both how much I hate selling myself on paper and how much my writing ability has deteriorated. I sat in a cafe, staring at my laptop screen with my hands limp over the keys, listlessly typing out the flattest sentences imaginable: I want to be in this program because... ugh, delete. I believe that this program would be the best environment for me because... no, delete. Also, I think that... ew, "also"? Delete, delete, delete.

For months and months now I've been writing material for the second grade, so it's no wonder I'm struggling with the adult stuff. And rather than taking classes requiring papers, I've been taking classes requiring problem sets. Then there's the issue of journals: I used to keep journals all the time, from the first grade onward. But ever since I started living with my boyfriend, I've found journal-writing to be nearly impossible. Hence the blogging, but I haven't been doing much of that, either.

I used to have a few friends I would email regularly--a few long emails a month, narratives really, unabridged stories that, if printed, would span five or six single-spaced pages. Whether or not that's desirable (probably not), at least it's writing practice. But I can't remember the last time I sent an email to one of these friends. A year ago, maybe?

I am anyhow awful at writing these days. Solution: blog more. Can I, will I? I think I will try.

Primary Scourge

2008-01-23T17:47:00.001-08:00

I am blowing it with this particular resolution:

- Blog at least once a week.

Actually, now that I look back at it, I'm blowing the whole shebang except for these two:

- Don't get in any serious bike accidents.
- Change party affiliation so I can vote in Democratic primary.

Speaking of the primary, it's probably bad for my health. A few nights ago M. and I stayed up until 2:30am sipping cheap red wine and watching that mudfight of a debate on youtube, woke up late the next morning with a horrible hangover, showed up ostentatiously late to work and have been manically checking and re-checking TPM ever since.

Neither of us care much for Mme. Nixon and are hoping (against reason, perhaps) for an Obama win. I figured I'd do my part by voting, but M. wants to sign us up to make phone calls this weekend. I don't know, wouldn't you be annoyed if some 24-year-old called you up in the middle of dinner/lunch/feeding the dog and tried to get you to support any political cause whatsoever? Consider my extreme phone phobia as well, and I'm audaciously hoping that M. forgets about the whole thing.

Politics, pfft.

On the other hand, Hawaii wasn't so bad.

Newish Year

2008-01-12T22:59:00.000-08:00

It's 2008. New Year's resolution: first of all, to make some New Year's resolutions. I did mean to, but I haven't gotten around to it. In fact I haven't gotten around to much of anything this year. It's clear that 2008 is waiting for me to make some resolutions before it can formally begin.

OK, here's a modest start:
- Clean my room.
- Start a savings account.
- Don't get in any serious bike accidents.
- Change party affiliation so I can vote in Democratic primary.

Somewhat more ambitious:
- Dental appointment.
- See optometrist.
- Sign up for more math classes.
- Go on one or more camping trips.

Very ambitious:
- Get into graduate school.
- Blog at least once a week.
- Drink less.
- Save enough money to travel to Iceland this summer. Perhaps Rome.

---

Monday night, around 11:30, M. and I were walking home from one of our favorite neighborhood restaurants. Just as we turned a corner toward our apartment, we heard gunshots ahead: first a set of three, then six more. They sounded nearby, no more than two blocks from us. So we stopped walking.

"Hmm. I think those are gunshots," I whispered, stating the obvious.

"They're not firecrackers," said M.

"Are there six shots in a round?" I asked. I know almost nothing about guns.

M. is from Wisconsin, so he knows enough. "Nope. Nine," he said. "Maybe we should walk this way instead."

We took a roundabout route back home. Approaching our house from the other side, we watched as a line of police cars raced down Mission Street; and then, just as we reached our front door, a very suspicious-looking car roared down our own street, all its windows rolled down.

"Oh, shit," M. said. "Don't look, don't look." I glanced away, fumbling for my keys.

When we were safely inside, M. wondered whether he should call the cops. "That was probably the guy," he said. "We didn't see much, but we may as well call."

He called. The cops were interested, and called M. back a few times with more questions, but we just didn't have enough information on the car, and it was all circumstantial evidence anyway.

Curious, I looked at the newspaper a few days ago and discovered that it's probably a good thing that we didn't see more than we did:

For the second time in two years, a San Francisco prosecution witness who strayed from witness protection has been killed in the city, authorities said Wednesday.

It occurred to me, moreover, that if we had chosen to walk on Mission Street back home--as we do about half the time--we probably would have become witnesses ourselves. Gulp.

A Post for Year's End

2007-12-15T14:55:00.000-08:00

I'm a terrible blogger.

I was better at it, and enjoyed it more, back when I wrote without thinking about it. Now I think instead of writing; how annoying. Worst of all are these posts after a long absence, in which I feel irrationally obliged to write about everything. I try, run out of time halfway through, and then abandon the post to moulder in blog-limbo for all eternity.

I really ought to be working right now, but I can't make myself do it. I've been wearing other people's contact lenses for at least a year now. I never get enough sleep. The light in my office is dingy and yellow; it flickers or I imagine that it does. I've been late to work every day but one in the past month. I should be writing an English curriculum, but I can hardly form a coherent paragraph. None of these are real excuses for blogging instead of working, but that's all right.

---

Things are good; things are bad.

The bad: Aforementioned sleeplessness. Too much nightlife. Social anxiety disorder, as always. Unable to get my shit together. Money problems. Loser brother. No time to myself. No hobbies or friends. Boyfriend possibly bipolar. Boyfriend's computer died during final exams, so he's monopolizing mine. Choppy fucking sentences. Is this the exhaustion talking?

The good: Job marginally less boring. Good office-mate. The possibility of escaping via grad school. There's an English-language style and usage guide on my desk. Going to Hawaii for the holidays on M.'s mom's dime. M.'s finding some success throwing parties, but this also counts as bad. I'm watching movies again. I even made it to the theater to see No Country for Old Men. Physically healthy and fit. Following the U.S. Presidential race has provided me with constant entertainment.

---

What a discomfiting experience going home has become. My real Thanksgiving bore little similarity to the one I imagined, but I still left San Diego feeling shell-shocked, and I took days just to feel normal again.

I think it used to bother me less because I went down there more often. Things changed more gradually. Now, it's as if everything is changing in snapshots taken a year apart. My mom has twice as many gray hairs as the last time I saw her; my dad's wrinkles are noticeably deeper. My childhood dog, well into her teens, seems exponentially more decrepit with every passing year - and she's been decrepit for a while. Each time I go back, the subdivisions encroaching on my parents' rural enclave have crept a quarter-mile closer.

The old friends who are left down there have changed. The married one bought a condominium with her husband and is talking about having children. Another one has become a fervent evangelical. Kat, the globetrotter whom I expected never to settle down, appears to have settled down in SD and bought a shiny, new downtown apartment. Moreover, after years of flitting noncommittally between men and rejecting relationships in favor of independence, she was thinking about starting a serious relationship. Namely, a serious relationship with my ex-boyfriend, C., whom I dated for five and a half years. I wished her well, and I can't say I was surprised, but I still think the whole situation is more than a little awkward.

Most upsetting, though, was my grandpa, whose mental faculties seem to be deteriorating in a step function. It's not Alzheimer's, and I don't think it's any standard dementia, but Thanksgiving dinner with him was painful. He's been close to deaf for as long as I can remember, but now he has trouble talking as well. My grandma thinks it was a small stroke: he looked frustrated trying to convert thoughts into speech. His sentences trailed off; he rarely formed a complete thought.

He was born in 1920. He's a very old man. Physically he's relatively healthy and active, but I could tell he was thinking about death when he said at the dinner table, "All I want is to see this family back together." He was talking about an old grudge between my grandma and my estranged uncle, Chris. The details are not really important, but they involve money, property, and above all, pride. Chris won't forgive my grandma; she won't forgive him. One result is that my grandpa hasn't seen two of his grandsons since the early nineties. I hear there's another one, a girl, whom none of us has ever seen.

My grandma and dad couldn't have been less understanding. "Why don't you ask Santa Claus? Maybe he can arrange that for you," said my grandma, and my dad snickered. My grandpa looked like he was going to cry. He repeated, "All I want is to see this family back together."

Later, when my dad lay slouched in front of the TV and my mom and grandma putzed about the kitchen, my grandpa moved seats and sat next to me. "I put you in charge," he said. "I can't do it myself. I don't hear so well, so I can't call them on the phone. They moved houses, so I can't drive up and find them. There's nothing I can do." It took him many minutes to get these thoughts out. He whispered, fully aware: "I can't hardly talk no more."

I'm in charge? Shall the social-anxiety poster child succeed as family peacemaker? It's a burden I don't really want, but maybe I'm best suited to it anyhow.

That night, I set to work on Google. There were too many people bearing my uncle's name, and even more with my cousins' names. The search seemed fruitless, so I tried finding the oldest of my uncle's kids on Facebook. Of the ten or so matches to my cousin's name, one was a freshman at my dad's alma mater in LA. It's probably him.

I imagined the message I'd send him - "I think you're my cousin" - and cringed. How should I approach this? "Your grandfather, whom you probably don't remember, wants your dad to make peace with his mother." Or, "Come see grandpa before he goes." Facebook is awkward enough without my using it for such a weighty errand.

I have a calculus final next week. Then, on Friday, I go to Hawaii. I'll think more about this when I get back.

Bracing Myself for Going Home

2007-11-15T17:47:00.000-08:00

I'm going back home for Thanksgiving. I want to see my family, I guess, but anything over 48 hours in my old house verges on the nightmarish: sleeping in the old four-post bed where I used to have panic attacks and nightmares as an adolescent; breathing in the same musty room-smells; waking up to the blare of Michael Medved on the radio--more than two days of this is enough to convince me I'm crazy or depressed.

M. was supposed to come with me, this time--I've already been twice to visit his mom in Wisconsin, after all, and SD is a hell of a lot closer. But he's throwing party #597660 that Friday and probably would have found an excuse out of it anyway. Ordinarily I'd spend most of my time with my one friend from undergrad who got herself trapped in a hell-on-earth grad program down there, but she's (justifiably) taking the opportunity of vacation time to flee elsewhere.

It's kind of sad, but I have hardly any friends left in my hometown. My ex-boyfriend C. un-facebook-friended me, which strikes me as childish enough that I'm justified in ignoring him. My old friend Annika is now married to a douche who apparently guilt-trips her for daring to eat dessert, never mind that she's waifishly thin as is. And she's so thoroughly swallowed the idea of being an extension of her husband--ostentatiously, judgmentally--that I rarely enjoy her company anymore. A few others have become so evangelical that I don't think I could spend time with them without resorting to the sort of self-censorship I ordinarily reserve for conservative family members or young children: "Of course I don't share a bed with my boyfriend!" "Gosh, that movie was shi...I mean, bad."

Holiday schedule:

Wednesday: arrive, go to doctor's appointment, lie in bed thinking about human mortality

Thursday: sleep until 2pm, go to grandparents' house for standard turkey dinner, marvel at all the burned stuff, watch fox news, drive home, try unsuccessfully to call boyfriend, stare at ceiling until sleep comes

Friday: sleep until family wakes me, go to see the dead sea scrolls, listen to mom lecture me about religion, come back home, write depressive whiny blog post, try unsuccessfully to call boyfriend, call annika to make dinner plans, learn that annika needs to cook hubby a meal tonight, stuff self with leftover turkey instead, stare at ceiling feeling sorry for self until sleep comes

Saturday: sleep, stuff self with leftover turkey, get close to vomiting it out with flight anxiety, re-pack, fly home at night and slowly recover from brief episode of induced depression

That should cover it.

In the meantime I am watching movies, exciting to do after a long movie-drought. Recently I've seen Repulsion, Shadow of a Doubt, Dial M for Murder, Pan's Labyrinth, My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, and Tim Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Apparently I have a very dark taste in film.

M. is swamped with yet another publication, yet he doesn't really let up with the manic party-planning. He takes meds for depression, but I'm beginning to suspect he's closer to bipolar spectrum or something similar. And he's once again unmedicated. That said, though, we're getting along well for the most part; three years and counting.

Food

2007-11-08T19:57:00.000-08:00

Ramen. Ramen ramen ramen. RA.MEN. Ramen ramen ramen ramen ramen, ramen ramen ramen ramen.

I've been sitting in my office since 10am (late, yes) and I could eat the universe. But especially ramen.

P.S. My parents' house did not burn down. Maybe next time.

Inferno

2007-10-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

My mom called this morning to tell me that the house may burn down today, and, sure enough, it may. Hell, the whole goddamn county appears to be up in flames.

"Is there anything you want me to take with us when we evacuate?" she asked.

I thought for a moment, then asked her to take my journals, a lifetime's worth stuffed in a cupboard next to the bed I'd slept in since the 6th grade. It's been many years since I've written in them, but I still hesitated for a second, feeling a pang of the adolescent fear that she might read them.

I remember having to evacuate when I was in 8th grade; we fled through unpaved back-roads and stayed at my grandparents' house. Went to school the next day unsure whether I had a house to come back to. It turned out that we did, but the flames had claimed a swath of our land near the top of the hill, singeing the tool shed, turning some of the neighbors' homes into so many piles of charcoal.

This time, I don't know where my parents will go: it seems my grandparents' house is in danger, too. They can't find my brother, but I suspect he's all right--probably in a different evacuation facility with his 16-year-old girlfriend.

Ah, SoCal, what a paradise!

Recommendations

2007-10-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

Movie recommendation of the week: Hot Fuzz

Dessert recommendation of the week: Beer float (we used Chambly Noire, but I think St. Peter's Cream Stout or a good chocolate stout would work best).

SF restaurant recommendation of the week: Gialina Pizzeria

Anti-recommendation of the week: Going to mediocre gay dance parties until 3am on a the Thursday before an undoubtedly hard weekend, then going to work the next day. Ouch.

Anti-recommendation of the year: Ignoring snail mail. There may be a hospital bill or two among all the Capital One junk, and if you ignore those they'll send the debt collectors after you.

Because All the World Needs Is One More Blogger

2007-10-10T17:46:00.000-07:00

Guess who has a new blog?

No, not me - my boyfriend. He joined his mega-ADD friend in starting a group music blog and managed to keep me awake until 3am on Sunday night composing one of his first posts. Nothing could have been better at convincing me that blogging is the devil.

Which doesn't really explain why I haven't been blogging. One real explanation is "math." Another is "work." And a third is "The Industry."

It took us--by which I mean M., of course--only a few months to break into this city's professional hipster elite. Now it's like an exhausting second job for me: oh, I guess we have to go to that party; I suppose we're expected to go to that; etc etc. It's true that we've met interesting people, many of whom can help us get free drinks, free shows, free parties, and DJ jobs and records for M., but ultimately my priorities lie elsewhere because I don't really like people. I loathe small talk. I like shows and parties every so often, but not all throughout the week. I like movies, books, and road trips even better, but I haven't had time for any such amusements. I've had the same 3 Netflix movies for at least 2 months, for instance.

Doubtless I'd be complaining if I were sitting around reading books and never leaving the house. Is it mad to ask for some moderation, though?

It's a big weekend. There'll be a huge college reunion party - M.'s organizing and DJing it, naturally - and there are at least four extra people who will be staying in our apartment in addition to the 5 that are already there. M. may or may not be DJing at a bar tomorrow night. And on Sunday, we're going to a wedding between the reigning King and Queen of the Scenesters. It's one of those everyone-who's-anyone-blah-blah kind of events. I've been broke for months, but I'll have to buy a dress. Then I will still look like crap in that ocean of scenesters because these people are supposed to look good for a living. My living, on the other hand, involves slouching in an ill-fitting office chair and correcting other people's spelling and punctuation errors. Perhaps, in the future, my job will involve something more sexy, such as correcting other people's errors of computation or analysis. But suffice to say, that's a different kind of sexy.

I'm rambling; so what? I've been fixing punctuation errors all day.

In other news, at the end of this month M. and I will have been together for three years. Three years! Just to think, two years ago our relationship was crap and I would've bet a paycheck or two against our staying together for another six months. Then came Wellbutrin. Thanks, Wellbutrin! Now, except for the late-night blogging that keeps me awake all night, things between us could hardly be better.

(This post brought to you by Big Pharma.)

Round Two

2007-09-27T17:05:00.001-07:00

I'm applying to grad school again. Last year I was rejected because I applied to a program I wasn't qualified for. So I asked myself, "Why not do it again, just for fun?"

To which I protested, "No, no, it was too easy last time. This time you need to apply to something for which you are so supremely underqualified that it's laughable--a math program, say."

"I'm skeptical," I said. "I know less math than most high-school seniors."

"Exactly. You will work hard all year to fulfill the requirements, fail to do so, then get rejected again. That'll prepare you for 2009, when you can apply to and get rejected from a Ph.D. program in, say, applied thermodynamics."

"Oh, what the hell."

Which just about summarizes my life right now, with the exception of a multitude of parties. But the parties seem too boring to write about today--even more boring than grad school. So here are some more pictures from Milwaukee and Chicago.

Milwaukee: (gl)asses, because I'm secretly 12 years old

Milwaukee: bored self-portrait while M. rummaged joyfully through someone's record collection

Milwaukee: yum!

Chicago: we're in there somewhere

Chicago: the great rib massacre of '07

Love Letter

2007-09-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

I was starting to write a "real" post, but my browser crashed and it's all gone now.

Instead, here are pictures of a note that M. found tucked into an old record that he bought from an online record dealer somewhere on the other side of the country.

If you're at all squeamish, or don't feel like being a voyeur to a complete stranger's wildly un-sexy effort at a "love" letter, then don't read on:

O'Hare

2007-08-31T17:31:00.001-07:00

Oh, and I like the United Airlines concourse at Chicago O'Hare almost as much as I like the Calatrava.

More Milwaukee

2007-08-31T17:22:00.001-07:00

The Eero Saarinen building next door to the Calatrava holds most of the actual art. I like it too, but it has a definite mid-century fascist feel to it.

As for me--

A jaw problem has restricted me to eating mushy foods.

I am thinking about applying to graduate school again, but I'm getting more creative as to what kind.

I have a monthly gig co-hosting that industry party. The last one went shockingly well.

It appears that I have to spend the weekend sleeping in a tent with hippies and tolerating their folksy Gaia music. No, this has nothing to do with Burning Man.

And we are trying not to get evicted.

Milwaukee

2007-08-31T17:15:00.001-07:00

As I've said before, it has an awesome art museum. The best part about it is the building itself.

First of All

2007-08-31T17:13:00.001-07:00

How creepy is this piece of community art?

Newsreel

2007-08-17T17:32:00.000-07:00

I AM co-hosting that party this weekend. "As co-host, what should I do?" I asked. She said, "Look hot and bring your girlfriends." One small problem: I have three "girlfriends"; two are in New York and the other's a lesbian who likes fleece and kayaking. I have a feeling I will make a lousy host.

**

FLATMATE Sam's girlfriend finally found an apartment after months of searching and practically living in our house. When she first went to see it, she thought it looked familiar. Then she looked around and realized that it was the apartment that M. and I used to live in two years ago. And her room is our old room.

**

I SPENT last weekend in a car with the screaming three-year old kid that my uncle adopted. I would not recommend such a getaway to anyone.

**

I'M OFF to the Midwest on Tuesday to visit M.'s mom. We will drink nothing but good beer and eat nothing but steak sandwiches and second-hand smoke for about a week. I am kind of looking forward to it.

Customer Service

2007-08-09T17:53:00.000-07:00

One of the employees on the train actually pushed my boyfriend, for no discernible reason other than because he (M., that is) happened to be carrying a bicycle. Then, when M. asked him incredulously if he (the train employee, that is) was pushing him, the gentleman responded with a harder shove that almost threw him off-balance. And a muttered threat: "The next stop can be yours if you want it to be." Huh?

In all fairness, a train choked with drunk, screaming Giants fans is "hella" annoying, to borrow the local parlance. Especially when all you're trying to do is read the news or study some calculus after a long, boring day at work.

This weekend I'll be in the Sierras with my parents; Uncle Tomas, his wife, and my two little cousins; and my uncle David, his new partner, and the three-year old kid they just adopted. The last time I saw my uncle, in December, he was single and talking to me about how he doesn't want to have kids. He changed his mind awfully quick.

In the meantime, I have another party to go to tonight. Yawn.

It's a Small World, After All: Internet Edition

2007-08-01T23:55:00.000-07:00

M. and I saw a picture of ourselves on the online advertisements for the Sunday party, so of course we had to go, workweek be damned. And, once there, of course we had to order two Chimays, the appalling state of our finances notwithstanding.

We'd been there for twenty minutes when one of my favorite bloggers appeared at the doorway. "Look, M., there's Moses (not his real name)," I pointed out. The guy is a local celebrity, immediately recognizable, and incredibly good at what he does. But that's not how I know who he is. Not at all. I know about him because I started reading his unbelievably funny blog after I stumbled upon it a few years ago. I found it by following a link from another of my favorite bloggers, whose popular site I also stumbled upon a few years ago. I found her blog, in turn, because it was linked to her boyfriend's blog. And I found her boyfriend's blog fully by chance, by clicking the "next blog" button on Blogger.

Tortuous enough? It gets worse. About a year and a half ago, M. threw a big house-party. Our first really big one, in fact. And it became a big deal by chance: my Boss's Daughter was in town, and M. ditched me for a few nights so he could go out to dance clubs with her and her close friend. At the time, he didn't want to bring me along because she and I were not on speaking terms thanks to a nasty blog-related incident that was my fault entirely. (The awkwardness has dissipated with time; I slept on her futon in NY, for instance.)

So, to get back to the convoluted story, M. went out with the Boss's Daughter and her close friend, Rachel, whom I also disliked at the time. And while out, he met one of Rachel's good friends, a petite gay boy. (I suspect that this "meeting" involved "dancing with at a gay club," but no matter.) This gay boy, "Raul," heard M. talking about our upcoming house party and informed him that he was friends with a DJ--one of the best-known in the city--who would probably be willing to spin at our party for a few hundred bucks. And more, a veritable army of partybot hipsters would arrive in his wake. (I know this sounds like a nightmare, but from a party-promotion standpoint, it's gold.)

When M. told me that he'd hired this DJ to spin in our living room, my natural response--as I hail from a particular demographic for whom this is second nature--was to search for him on Google. And one of the first hits was a link to one of my favorite bloggers, Moses.

Up until this point, I had no idea that Moses was local. I thought he was a Canadian, in fact. But, as I searched some more, creepy-stalker/Silicon-Valley-demographic style, I discovered that this DJ, as well as Raul, were both included in his immediate his social network. As was the DJ's girlfriend, who showed up at our apartment for our house-party that night, along with a posse which included a porn actress and a professional photographer who snapped dozens of pictures in our apartment.

And, to bring this more-or-less full-circle, M. has been working with this DJ semi-professionally, and his girlfriend is the one who's to blame for my half-accidental debut into Internet prOnulation. And for my possible status as reluctant Industry-party host.

(Here's another connection, actually: Rachel has been dating my DJ/Bartender flatmate, Sam, since she moved to SF from NY earlier this year.)

But let's return to Sunday night.

There we were, drinking Chimays we couldn't afford. M. was chatting with a member of a band that happens to be from M. and Sam's home town in the Midwest. (The band also does business with M.'s DJ friend, and it turns out that this guy and M. share some mutual friends back home.This is the chain that never ends.) Left out of the conversation, I watched Moses as he made his way around the bar. Wherever he went,someone would approach him and introduce herself. He exchanged phone numbers with several girls. One guy tried to take a covert camera-phone picture of him. Another posed with him, asking his friend to snap a picture with them together. I thought it funny that these people were treating him as a rock star when I've always known him as a blogger with middling traffic. Not compared to my traffic, obviously, but compared to what he's become famous for, it appears to be frightfully middling.

I buy more Chimays, for me, for M., for the DJ. Now I'm deep in the red, and it's late, and I'm drunk, and the prospects for work tomorrow look increasingly dim. I use the bathroom, hear three people sniffing something in the stall next to mine (gee, I wonder what they were doing?), and returned to the bar to find that M. was talking to Moses. Charmingly (ha!) inebriated, I leaned into the conversation and said (yelled?) something like, "whaddryouguys talking about?"

"My blog," he said. "It's so embarrassing when people tell me they read it. I'm embarrassed."

Uncharacteristically for me, even when drunk, I became halfway hostile. "I read your blog," I snapped, leaning toward him, and, I think, poking my index finger close to his face, which was wearing sunglasses.

"No, no," he fake-lamented, clutching his skull. "Don't tell me that, that's so embarrassing."

"Well, I've been reading your blog before I knew about the other stuff you do, so you should be EXTRA embarrassed."

I don't really remember how he responded--having been sozzled and all--but soon thereafter I know I raised my voice, pointed, and said accusingly, "IF YOU'RE SO EMBARRASSED BY YOUR BLOG, WHY DON'T YOU ERASE IT?"

Wow, what an ass I was; did they spike the Chimay or something?

Then the bartenders told us to get out of the bar, and Moses gestured towards the door. M.
asked if he could finish his drink. Bemusedly, Moses said OK, so M. and I shared it. It
was scotch whiskey, and a delicious specimen at that.

Someone invited us to the afterparty, but we weren't in the mood. Instead we walked home to make ourselves quesadillas. But even before quesadillas, M. sat down to leave a comment on Moses's latest blog entry. It was the first comment in the thread, which had been open for days. The following day, there was a response, posted only seven minutes afterward. (You really do live on the Internet, don't you, Moses?) In it, he described M.--facetiously? I couldn't tell--as "charming" and "handsome." Ha.

Right now I am sitting across from M., who is drinking red wine and crafting a response to that response.

When Blogland and real life collide, only hilarity can result. But if only. I've learned that there are other results, too. For instance: I must be an idiot for posting all of this, for who knows when the gods of Google and dumb chance will team up and surprise me with some far less amusing co-incidence.

"The Industry" and Me

2007-07-23T18:13:00.000-07:00

Things have been interesting--imagine that! Interesting, and not entirely bad.

Not entirely bad, in part, because I asked my boss if I could work a day from home every week, and, shock of shocks, he said yes. It feels as though the tediousness of my workweek just halved. But maybe I'll get over it. Maybe, during my 4 days at the office, the dullness of this space will seem all the duller. Yet one day at home means better coffee, better food, and above all, more sleep. Not even I can put a negative spin on more sleep.

M. and I have been going to the party at that bar, almost every Sunday night. For better or for worse, we're becoming a part of the scene. Probably for the worse. Too much Chimay, etc. M. has scored himself a DJ gig next month, but, goddamn it, I think we've gotten me trapped in a hosting gig. Hosting. I am the most socially inept person on the planet; how am I supposed to host an "industry" party? How am I to show up on a Sunday night, all smiles and legs, and chat up producers, models, fashion designers, alleged attempted murderers(!!!!!!), bodyguards, singers, photographers, pinup girls, drug dealers, and whoever the fuck else passes as "industry," and, most difficult of all, pretend to be interested in--nay, enraptured by--what they are saying? I am a nerd. A misanthropic nerd. I don't even blowdry my hair. I do not belong here.

Speaking of "the industry," Rockstar Friend invited us to go with him to the Philippines later this year. A friend of his, so he says, owns two houses in the environs of Angeles City.

So we did a little research on Angeles City. I emphasize the "little": I typed "Angeles City" into Google, and clicked on the first hit. Don't follow any of the links on the page, unless you are interested in learning more about sex tourism. Yep, apparently Angeles City is "the best vacation destination for single men," and it's tough to find any information for the non-sex-tourist. Hey, Rockstar Friend--what does your friend do for a living, again?

Is Our Lushes Learning? (Answer: No)

2007-07-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

Two Sundays ago, M. and I went out to a nearby bar. M. has been cultivating a business friendship with one of this city's better-known scenester DJs, whose girlfriend hosts a night at this particular place. M. wants to play a monthly deejaying gig at that bar, and she asked him to come along on Sunday so they could discuss it.

Our night went something like this:

11pm -- Leave apartment for bar. "Let's aim to leave by midnight," says M.

11:10pm -- First round of beer. "I only want one drink," says M.

11:45pm -- Second round of beer. It's Chimay, about 9% alcohol."If you're getting yourself another beer, I'll have one, too," says I.

12am -- Conversation with DJ and his girlfriend. DJ gives us complementary glasses of premium scotch whiskey.

12:30am -- Third round of beer. "Sure, why not," says M.

1am -- Fourth round of beer.

1:10am -- DJ's girlfriend cajoles our drunken selves into letting her take lewd pictures of us. (Said photos, regrettably, are now posted on Internet.)

1:15am -- "Uh, I think it's time to go," says M., and I agree.

1:16am -- As we walk out the door, our flatmate Sam walks in. "I'm staying for ten more minutes," announces M. "Ten more minutes, what's the difference?" says I.

1:17am -- Fifth round of beer. Dance, dance, dance.

1:45am -- Last call! Sixth round of beer.

1:50am -- Say goodbye to DJ and girlfriend; meander home singing "Whiskey You're the Devil"

2am -- ???

3am -- Sleep?

7am -- Wake up, simultaneously inebriated and hung over. Exhausted, too. Off to work with me! Narrowly avoid countless bicycle accidents on the way to the train, and so on.

"Never Again!" we vowed.

Well, apparently all the beer and whiskey has destroyed whatever learning capacity we once had, because last night unfolded in the exact same way. One welcome exception was the absence of lewd photos. One unwelcome exception was the result of the DJ's keeping us there after hours: our night didn't end until 4:15. After less than three hours of sleep, I woke up both hung over and unpleasantly drunk. Biking to work was a slow, swervy, terrifying ordeal; and when I sweated, I sweated Chimay.

All of which is a long way of complaining that I feel like crap. And I'm too stupid to do work right now, but not, apparently, too stupid to blog. Or am I? Eh, too late.

Now, July 4 photos.

Now, For Some Perspective

2007-07-05T18:09:00.001-07:00

M. and I were biking to work on Tuesday morning. I was in a hurry, not wanting to miss the train, so I raced down the street on my highest gear, blowing through stop signs like a lunatic. Because I am one, apparently. M. trailed about a block behind me, trying to keep up with my insane maneuverings. (Well, I'm not that crazy: I do look both ways before passing through them, even if I pass through even when I see a car or two.)

So there I was, biking at top speed to catch the second yellow light, when I heard the absolute worst noise I could ever imagine, like the death-yelp of someone being eaten alive by a land-dwelling shark. It took me about a second, in my underslept, bleary state, to register that the sound was coming from roughly a block behind me. In other words, from where my boyfriend was. "Fuck!" I screamed, and, for a few horrible moments, I wondered if I'd killed M. with my reckless resolve to get to the train on time At All Costs.

Wheeling my bike around, I saw M. bent over, screaming and staggering to the opposite curb. His bicycle and the stuff in his backpack were strewn out in the middle of the road, and a man was running to his side. I rode over in a hurry. He was still moaning and screaming, bent over, clasping his arm and gasping for breath.

I guess my first thought should have been to call 911; and if I'd seen blood, I probably would have; but instead I asked, "What happened?"

"He biked into my car door," said the man, who then sat down beside M. and began rubbing his back.

"Don't touch me!" M. spat, amid his wheezing. And, to me: "This wouldn't have happened if you didn't insist on hurrying to the train." Ah, anger--that's when I figured that he'd probably be all right, though, I admit, the possibility crossed my mind that he'd die cursing me.

Luckily, we live in a city, and a city filled with goddamn hippies to boot, so soon we were surrounded with good Samaritans wielding cell phones, eager to help out by moving M.'s things to the sidewalk and calling the ambulance. The police were there in minutes, and the paramedics arrived shortly thereafter.

Upon which there ensued an exciting drama centering around the question of whether or not M. would need an ambulance. M. was too much in pain and too incoherent to decide one way or the other. "I don't need an ambulance," he would protest, and then the paramedics would protest that he was not fit to decide. I would try to talk to him: "Do you want an ambulance? I can drive you to the ER if you give me a few minutes to rent a car," and he would say, "yes, rent a car." Then a gaggle of unhelpful cops would insert themselves between us and ask me, "what's his phone number?", "what's his address?", "what happened?"; and they were redundant to boot; why did four of them need to ask me the same questions? From the top of my eye, over a mass of people, I noticed the paramedics strapping M. onto a board.

"I don't think he wants to go in the ambulance!" I yelled, at the top of my lungs--which is, in my case, not terribly loud.

"Why not? He's obviously hurt," said one cop.

"I can drive him to the ER in a few minutes. His head and spine seem fine, and he doesn't have health insurance," I explained.

"This is SF," the cop countered. "They have provisions for that."

Maybe, but I remember the time when my ex-flatmate Chris 1 got in a terrible bike accident when he was uninsured. He paid several thousand dollars for the ambulance trip alone, and M. does not have several thousand dollars.

"M.!" I screamed over the cops' heads. "Do you want to go in the ambulance, or do you want me to drive you?"

He reached up, with his functional hand, and started removing the straps the paramedics had secured him with. "You changed your mind?" They seemed baffled. "Yeah, she's driving me in a zipcar."

So, to shorten a long and not-particularly-exciting story, I biked like hell back to the apartment, rented a car in half a minute (thanks, zipcar!), sprinted to the zipcar lot a block and a half away, and was back at M.'s side within five minutes of leaving it. I drove him to the ER, thereby saving us thousands of dollars, and waited in the "family room" at the General Hospital while the doctors determined that all of M.'s bones were fine. He was lucky; he got away with nothing but tissue damage, and he was out of the ER in an amazing two hours, x-rays included.

And for me, anyway, the rest of the day was almost pleasant. It was 75 degrees and sunny in the city; I used a sick day to make sure M. was all right; I bought him brunch and we napped all day. Yesterday, for July 4, we went to a barbeque on someone's back porch, drank mojitos, and followed it up with a few hours of watching illegal fireworks in the park.

If M. had not been wearing a helmet, or if he'd struck the door at the same moment as another car was driving by, I'd be dealing with a dead or maimed boyfriend right now--so all things considered, we're doing pretty well.

The Mittens Affair

2007-06-29T17:54:00.001-07:00

I'm reposting something I posted a long time ago, because (1) I'm lazy, (2) I have to work, (3) I'm too tired to come up with anything original, and (4), because I ran into the subject of the subsequent post yesterday. I was eating lunch in the courtyard--with my hands, because I'm a disgusting, uncivilized creature--and someone blond and bearded walked toward me.

He waved. "Hi--is that you, Penitent?" he said.

"Yes...?"

"Do you remember me? From a long, long time ago? Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. I just graduated, and I thought it was so strange that I saw you right before leaving."

Oh, yeah--suddenly, I recognized him:

---

There was a particular period of time near the beginning of my Junior year, when I worked in the Media center of the University Library, during which all the University's forces of Disquiet seemed to be assaulting me at once. There was the shadowy character who derived some enjoyment from speaking to me in affected foreign accents and thereby pretending to be different people in turn; there was the persistent Argentine law student and the desperate Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering, and there was the day that two separate people asked to watch Home Alone within one minute of each other.

But certainly the most memorable of these incidents was the one involving the Nightmare on Elm Street boxed set, a freshman studying philosophy, and a pair of mittens.

Every night I worked for a couple of weeks, a gang of three geeky-looking boys had been coming into the Media department asking for successive installments in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. One was tall and pale, dressed all in black, with white-blond hair and blond eyelashes. The other two were smaller and dark-haired; one wore thick-rimmed, black-framed glasses. Since I found it notable that anyone would care to watch all six of these movies, I began to recognize the boys and chuckled to myself every time they left with yet another Freddy Kreuger movie.

One night, as I handed Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare over the counter to the boys, I was met with a fit of hysterical giggling that I couldn't explain, but I had the distinct feeling that it had something to do with me. I narrowed my eyes at the boys as I asked for an ID card, but their giggling didn't stop. They left with the movie and I continued about my business (probably: working a crossword puzzle clipped from the student newspaper), but at some point I looked up and noticed that one of the little bastards, the tall blond one, was skulking about suspiciously and with no apparent purpose.

"Do you need anything?" I asked rudely in that brusque tone I had cultivated exclusively for library clientele.

The guy moved up to the counter. "I have a question," he asked.

"Yes?"

"Do you like mittens?"

This was not a question I had expected. I blinked.

"What?"

"Do you, like, mittens?" His tone was matter-of-fact, as though he were repeating a routine query that I was so deaf as to mishear.

"I...I don't think I have any particularly strong feelings about mittens, one way or the other," I finally said, extremely wary.

The strange boy nodded. "Okay," he said, and, evidently satisfied, walked out and away.

---

He returned, though, over the following weeks: sometimes alone, sometimes snickering with his conspirators. "So, have you thought about it: do you like mittens?" he persisted. I began to expect his visit. Often he would come in without his friends and, apparently, without intending to check out DVDs at all.

One night I took note of the name on his ID card and searched for him in the University directory. Therein I made the discovery that he was a freshman, a philosophy major, and a resident of a dormitory in which my acquaintance "Laura" worked as a Resident Assistant. The next time I saw Laura I told her about her resident's strange behavior and asked if she could provide an explanation.

"He's a little weird," she said. "Maybe he likes you."

She informed Mittens Boy of our little discussion. Mittens Boy, in turn, told me that she had told him. I told Laura that Mittens Boy had told me that she had told him. So it goes.

---

A lull in the Mittens Affair. And breaking the lull: a party at the co-op in which I lived for three of the four years of my undergraduate career.

It was a good party, I think, or at least a decent one. The party itself, though, is irrelevant to the story at hand. What is not irrelevant is what followed the party--I returned to my room only to find, resting atop my pillow, a pair of blue woolen mittens.

I was actually afraid. To this point I had presumed Mittens Boy to be essentially harmless: a little quirky, perhaps a little creepy, but not worrisomely so. Breaking into my room, though? I felt a bit discomposed. Running to find Laura, I brought her so she could see the unwanted gift. "Did you tell Mittens Boy where to find me?" I asked.

She thought the whole thing was very funny. (I admit that, abstractly, it was.) She claimed no part in the prank. "You keeping the mittens?" she wanted to know. "They're nice mittens."

I told her she could have them.

---

Some time later, yet another night in the basement of the library, Mittens Boy stood in line behind the counter. When he came to the front he was smirking.

"What."

"I heard some creep broke into your room and left a pair of mittens on your bed," he said.

"It's true," I responded. "What kind of a creep would do something like that? Someone really fucking creepy, that's for sure."

He laughed.

"You are very creepy," I insisted redundantly.

He laughed again, and left.

I went to Florence soon thereafter, and didn't see much of Mittens Boy after that.

An Interlude for Navel-Gazing and Self-Diagnosis

2007-06-26T00:12:00.000-07:00

Here I interrupt the scheduled programming (proceeding apace, as it was) to explain my absence.

True, there's been work. Lots of tedious, tedious work.

It's also true that M. has exercised eminent domain on my laptop for the sacred, o'erweening cause of Making Party Flyers On Photoshop.

But mostly, there's been the crazy.

A few weeks ago, for instance, the left side of my torso was going through spells of numbness. I convinced myself I had either a brain tumor or Huntington's Disease, wondered how I'd react when the doctor gave me the news--wondered how I ought to spend the last few months/years of my life. The numbness is mostly gone now; I believe the correct diagnosis is "crazy."

Not enough? My existing pathologies are getting worse. Social anxiety rules my life, more or less. Increasingly these days, I think of the bewildering array of people I might encounter Out There and decide I'm better off staying home. And away from the phone. Away from the email account. Away from the blog, even.

The social anxiety is clear. Upon reading the DSM-IV criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder, it's pretty clear I have that, too-- I think I satisfy every criterion. That's not new, though; all that's new is my self-diagnosis. But since I'm already self-diagnosing, I think I'm moderately depressed as well. And this is new.

I kind of hate fun these days. Isn't that what depression is? "Let us go to a mind-bogglingly fun event," says M. "Holy God, I'd rather die," says I. "Let us be friends," writes potentially cool burlesque dancer in an email. "Eh," says I, and ignore it. Old friends write me emails and I've ignored every one. I think my job is hugely responsible for my unhappiness, but inertia keeps me from looking for another. I paid hundreds of dollars for an online class but haven't had the motivation to fax in the first homework assigment, even though I've completed it. For at least six months I've been wearing borrowed contact lenses with mildly incorrect prescriptions because it's too much trouble to make myself an appointment. The list goes on and on.

One frustrating trouble with social anxiety is that it's a huge obstacle to seeking treatment for itself. "It's easy to find a good, affordable therapist," my friend Zoe told me. "Just call around, and negotiate for prices." Negotiate for prices? If I could do such a thing, I wouldn't need the treatment to begin with.

I need a therapist, I probably need drugs, and I certainly need a new job. These are requisite for not feeling like crap, I think.

Then, there's the boyfriend. Dating (and living with) a workaholic statistician has been hard; dating with a workaholic statistician who is also a Ph.D. student may prove even harder. Yet I cannot imagine that either scenario could bring me any closer to madness than the experience of living with that very same workaholic while he's on a six-month rampage of wanton irresponsibility. And what makes it especially pernicious to this melancholic, perenially exhausted social retard has been the dedication with which he pursues his goal of being manically irresponsible. This is not someone who takes partying lightly. Partying is a serious affair, something to monopolize his (and my?) time and money. I daresay I am not built for this, and Depressive Penitent in particular is built for just its opposite. Depressive Penitent wants to sit in a chair with a glass of wine and some Borges stories. She wants to watch hours and hours of Nick Cave videos with big headphones blocking out all the ambient noises. If she must leave her apartment, she'd prefer to make her way to a good friend's place and sip Belgian beer while watching something directed by Kurosawa or Werner Herzog. Hell, she'd be reasonably content studying calculus. But raucous hipster parties populated by tactically bisexual, strategically anorexic fashion girls with enough black or blond hair dye to muddy the whole Pacific? A million times, no! In reality, though, it's been more like: a million times.

I have the pictures to prove it, but uploading them would be too exhausting.

On Friday M. is throwing another party. It should be a big one, but we'll see. This time M. will be a tactical bisexual, and for the night I'll be officially disowned. The bar prefers gay DJs, see. Couples are no fun anyway. He won't be pretending to be bisexual, at any rate: he is bisexual. Or was. Or is. Or was. I don't know, it's so dizzying; if only I got the sense that anything was real. I'm not mad, or I am, or I'm not. Who knows? Not I, certainly.

I do intend to come back and write about my trip east. It was absurd, really, and was responsible either for driving me batshit insane or for helpfully convincing me that I had already gone batshit insane. Either way, interesting!

Don't worry, though, it's all relative. What's insane for me may be a fucking success story for some folk. Besides, I'm drinking lots of German beer as I type and it's making me frightfully dour.

Eastward Part 1: An Accidental Afternoon

2007-06-08T17:48:00.000-07:00

Our vacation began, as you can probably guess, with a hangover, three hours of sleep between the two of us, and one rather large mishap. We made the best of it, though.

The shuttle came for us at 3:50AM. We'd been awake for about 20 minutes, horrified to find ourselves still drunk and in the early stages of hung over. We sloppily finished packing (forgetting items like toothbrushes, of course), dressed (also sloppily), staggered outside, and, zombie-like, handed our suitcases to the driver.

When the driver dropped us off at the airport, he asked, "where are you going?"

"DC," one of us mumbled.

His smile twisted into a grimace. He shivered and spat, "I hate that city. A hellhole. Absolute worst place in the world." Then we tipped him, and he wished us a good trip to said hellhole.

No restaurants were open in the airport, M. was surly, and everything befuddled us. Yet somehow, we managed to maneuver through the lines, find coffee, and board our plane for Salt Lake City. I hate flying, but this flight was genuinely pleasant. There was nary a jot of turbulence; the sky was vast and clear. The long, slow descent into the airport, over the lake with all its salt and botulism, was like landing on another planet. In a good way.

Hungry and with some time to kill, we sat down for some pizza and a beer. Unfortunately, our exhaustion was such that we saw no problem with watching the clock on M.'s laptop, still stuck in Pacific time. So we missed our connecting flight. It turned out that the next plane for DC was leaving in seven hours.

But as I said, we made the most of it. At an airport bar, we downed several of these beers before deciding to take advantage of a free tour of the Temple Square courtesy of Utah, Salt Lake City, and the Mormon Church. A kindly old couple drove us there, telling us about their time as missionaries in Pakistan many decades ago. They dropped us off in front of the Temple Square, where our tour guides, two awkward, nauseatingly friendly twenty-year-old girls dressed like latter-day Puritans, met us and introduced themselves. One of them was East Asian and spoke very limited English. The other was gangly, long-haired, and slightly bucktoothed--a prototypical American country girl.

"So, you're traveling together?" she asked.

"Yes."

"How nice! Are you friends, or are you brother and sister?"

We looked at each other. "I guess we are friends."

It was a short guided tour past dioramas and through the Tabernacle Choir space, but above all it was evangelism. We sat in a room that was like a planetarium where a gigantic white Jesus statue boomed, from a speaker somewhere, that he is the center of the Universe. As we walked around, the tour guides got their evangelism on, hard-core.

"Do you have a Book of Mormon?" one girl asked M.

"I probably have one somewhere," he said. "My dad's side of the family is Mormon."

"Have you read it?"

"I've looked at it."

"Well, promise me you'll read it, and then you'll see that it contains truth."

We actually did want to see the house of Brigham Young, M.'s ancestor, as well as the genealogy library, but there was no time. We went back to the street, where a van picked us up, along with a lesbian couple. They looked shellshocked, and were.

We introduced ourselves, and it turned out that, remarkably, they came from our city. From our very own neighborhood. In fact, they lived on our street, only a few blocks away.

"This shit is scary," the chubby one whispered, all wide-eyed. "We couldn't stand it. We went to the closest bar. It was in a hotel. We had drink quotas." She seemed legitimately surprised and horrified, like someone who walked into an ice cream store and found instead the Heart of Darkness. Did they not know where they were? M. and I had every expectation of being evangelized to. That girl was not the world's brightest bulb, but her girlfriend seemed all right.

At the airport we sat down for another meal and a beer, and, believe it or not, we almost missed our flight again. But the airline bent their rules for us, and soon we were on our way to DC.

Eastward, Ho

2007-05-23T22:34:00.000-07:00

My week-long sabbatical from the Internet was bizarre, disorienting, akin to losing one of my senses.

I turned twenty-four. I "celebrated" with an aggressively lackluster night out with M. and Zoe, then spent all of the next day working on boring things.

I went to this restaurant for the first time and liked it. A drunken M. told me I should be taking Wellbutrin.

I got myself into a nasty bike accident on the way to the train; good thing for that clunky helmet. Crossed an intersection at a trillion mph trying to make it past a yellow light; a cab cut me off; still hoping to make the light, I pulled a rather risky move and caught my wheel in a rail track, hit the ground in a serious way. My helmet whacked against the pavement and one of my palms was subjected to a deep scrape. I still have shoulder and neck pain from that incident, plus a broken backpack and a cut-up palm. Awesome. I should probably learn not to barrel down busy streets as fast as I can, but I hate slowness so much--

Since M. isn't taking classes until September, he's become a manic party-planner and promoter. Now he wants to make money from it. He's been doing little else. An unfortunate side-effect of this social-mania has been his newfound obsession with social networking sites, Myspace especially. He treats the incredibly silly business of "getting more friends on Myspace" as a job. For instance: "I can't go to bed until I have ten more friends." Or, "I can't help with dinner because I need to make a party flyer." For a while, he spent all his time looking for hot girls on Myspace to be his friends because, he explained, convincing people that hot girls will be at a party is the best way of advertising it. Like the sleazy clubs in Tijuana, I said (ladies free!). Either I'm substantially less patient than I was a year ago, or M. has become substantially more infuriating. I vote for the latter. As well as the former.

There will be a giant party-to-end-all-parties in early June, a birthday celebration of sorts for Rockstar Friend. Rockstar Friend's band will be playing. And M. will be DJing. Sam will be DJing. One of M. and Rockstar Friend's ex-bandmates will be DJing. Three big local DJs will also be there, as well as some supposedly big blogger from the East coast. And all of this will happen, God help me, on a Sunday, which will also be, since the world hates me, the night after I fly back from ten days' "vacation"* on the East coast. (As soon as we land on that Saturday, we will go see Rockstar Friend's band play at a venue, followed by a party at an after-hours club where M. and Sam will be spinning.)

My flight leaves at six tomorrow morning, it is ten thirty already, and I haven't even thought about packing yet. M. is meanwhile busily Myspacing and party-planning. Christ.

I'll be back once all this insanity is over. Unless, of course, I first burst into flames, which seems increasingly likely.

* I put that in quotation marks because it will be the least relaxing vacation I can imagine. It involves early mornings and late nights, as well as ostensible telecommuting and not-particularly-laid-back cities (DC and NY). Moreover, in NY, we will be staying with one of M.'s friends with whom I have an ugly history and who does not particularly like me. She is close friends with M.'s ex-girlfriend, whom I will probably meet and spend some time with. And so on. Pant; die.

Whiskey You're the Devil

2007-05-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not pleased with the seemingly exponential acceleration of time. There is so much to do, and the last few years have gone where, exactly?

I've been entertaining the notion of taking a one-week hiatus from l'Internet. Beginning tomorrow, tentatively. Clearly I can't abandon email if I am to remain a vaguely productive member of society, but even excepting email, this would be much, much tougher than Sober Month. If I'm feeling particularly radical, maybe I'll take a break from news entirely and abstain from The Economist, too. Perhaps it will be good for me.

Similarly, M. is trying to give up whiskey after waking up on Saturday morning, hung over and having little recollection of what went on the previous night. "The last thing I remember, we were standing at the bar with the DJ and his girlfriend, and then he handed me another Maker's Mark. What happened after that? How did we get home?"

Blacking out is scary. I did it exactly once my senior year of college, roughly a week before I broke up with my then-boyfriend. According to observers I was uncharacteristically loose-lipped, spilling my own secrets as well as somebody else's. Ever since, I've worked hard to avoid such alcohol-induced amnesia, and succeeded. Whiskey causes M. to black out quite frequently, which is, frankly, grounds for concern. So I welcome his decision to avoid the stuff, even if I'm skeptical that he'll succeed.

Here are some unrelated photos.

These are carnitas sopes:

I recently signed up for a car share service and first used it on Sunday, when we drove to one of the peninsular suburbs partly in order to buy pet supplies but mostly as an excuse to eat these exquisite plates of fatty awesomeness. We'd been in withdrawal for more than a year, sadly. The secret to these particular specimens is their crusts, which are made of a thick corn meal that is doubtless held together with plenty of tasty, tasty lard. M. and I order it with spoonfuls of hot salsa, but even that's not masochistic enough for us, so we brought a raw habanero pepper to dice and add on top of them, too.

Here is a plaster goat that Sam's girlfriend gave to us for safekeeping while she searches for an apartment. The (dumber) cat was terribly frightened of it at first and hid downstairs, cringing, for hours.

M.'s shitty phone finally died over the weekend, leaving this artistic-looking pattern permanently on its screen:

A few weekends ago, when the weather was perfect, M. and I went with his dad and stepmom to see this exhibit at one of the city's big museums. The coffee in the cafe was crap, but I rather liked the design of the cafe itself:

The Facebookization of Lameness

2007-05-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Like 99% of people my age, I have a profile on Facebook. I think it's pretty stupid and use it for absolutely nothing besides stalking people I haven't seen in ages (I mean, "keeping track of old friends"), but for that reason alone it's quite useful.

I discovered another use for it yesterday, when it informed me that my ex-boyfriend A., whom I dated for five and a half years, had "de-friended" me. I was aware that my brother plays stupid de-friending games with his zillion underage Myspace ex-girlfriends, but I had assumed that adults who don't still live with their parents don't do that sort of thing. The only person I know who has been de-friended was Zoe, who slept with a crazy acquaintance's boyfriend without knowing they were still together. A crazy acquaintance. Removing someone from a friend list in a social networking site seems a petty, ineffective, and especially silly way of registering one's displeasure.

Thus my ex-boyfriend joins the ranks of my brother's Myspace harem and Zoe's cuckoo acquaintance. The best part is that I don't even know what I did to deserve the dreaded/farcical de-friending treatment. No idea. I have exchanged a few brief emails with him recently, perfectly cordial ones, and that is all. Synopsis: devoid of context, childish, and lame.

---

The weekend was brutal. I almost vomited in the train this morning, but barely managed to suppress it. Maybe I'll write about le weekend later, but now I need to do unimaginably boring things on the computer.

More Fun With Linguistics

2007-05-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the "I'm too tired to write anything vaguely coherent" theme, here's a gee-whiz map showing what parts of the country use what generic term for soft drinks:

It's funny how there are a few islands of "soda" in the Midwestern sea of "pop." I always wondered why M. said "soda" when every other Midwesterner I've known said "pop," but now I can see that eastern Wisconsin, for whatever reason, differs from the rest of the region (save parts of Missouri and Illinois).

I wonder if there's a map showing whether people call a dollar bill a "single." Or whether someone is likely to refer to Interstate 5 as "the 5." (Is that unique to Southern California?) These are all extremely important matters, I know.

Languages

2007-05-09T17:37:00.000-07:00

If you were lucky enough to catch last night's inebriated anti-fun rant, you might guess that I've spent the day drowsy, resentful, and brain-dead. And you'd be right. I am not nearly sharp enough to function passably on three hours of sleep, even if I define "functioning" as "being able to write in a personal blog that hardly anyone reads." Not a particularly high bar, to be sure.

So instead, a few factoids from the exciting world of ethnic/linguistic geography.

- Papua New Guinea alone has at least 830 distinct languages.

- The Lemba tribe of southern Zimbabwe is descended from the Cohen tribe of Israel.

- Maltese is kind of a fusion between Arabic and Italian.

- Hindi and Urdu are close to being the same language, though written in Sanskrit and Arabic characters respectively. The language spoken in most Bollywood films is supposedly closer to Urdu than it is to official Hindi.

- Indonesia chose a version of Malay as its official language because it was easy to learn, not because any significant percentage of Indonesians actually spoke it--they didn't. Javanese was actually the largest language group in Indonesia, but the government considered it unworkable because it was a difficult language to learn.

- Don't be surprised if any of these factoids are somewhat incorrect. I am in no condition for fact-checking.

Bastards

2007-05-08T16:43:00.001-07:00

The weather in the city has been perfect, maybe a little above perfect. Last night, instead of eating out, blogging, learning calculus, cooking, reading, harassing cats, or stalking my brother on Myspace, I sat on the porch with M., eating bread with cheese, olives, and duck pate as slowly as possible like a goddamn French person. The difference being that the French probably don't do so while watching South Park on their laptops, but perhaps I underestimate them.

It was all very relaxing. What was very much not relaxing was being awoken at 4am from a deep sleep by the sound of jackhammers--at 4am!--pounding at the sidewalk outside the building. Actually, since I was still delirious from deep sleep, my first thought was something more like "artillery! I'm going to die!" or "North Korea!" or "wailing and gnashing of teeth!", but regardless, it was certainly enough to jolt me awake. It turned out to be the gas and electric company. They jackhammered away for at least half an hour. Isn't there a law against pseudo-governmental monopolies wielding jackhammers in residential neighborhoods at 4am?

Also not relaxing was M.'s bending his bicycle wheel this morning. Now we are condemned to take the rail to work, which is far and away inferior to cycling.

Jaws

2007-05-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, when I had my wisdom teeth removed, the orthodontist looked through the x-ray machine--or whatever it was; I could be wrong from all that valium--and told me that I had a bad left jaw. "You may not notice it now," he said, "but one day your jaw will start hurting, and you'll live with that chronic pain for the rest of your life."

"The rest of my life? Won't there be something you can do about it?"

"Well, there's radical surgery--but that's risky, and probably not worth it."

Two weeks ago, I woke up with pain in my left jaw. I'm worried because it hasn't gotten much better. Chewing hurts. I can't touch the top molars to the bottom ones without pain. I wonder, is this where the lifelong chronic pain begins?

139

2007-05-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

This post will be as brainless as possible. And that's a promise.

In other words, it will be one of those lame "list of things about me" posts that conveniently requires little thought, effort, or structure, while still sucking up a big chunk of time that could otherwise be used for, say, work or study.

Let the laziness begin.

1. I have no piercings or tattoos.
2. I am 1/8 Chinese and 3/8 "latina," whatever that means.
3. My mother's maiden name would be Li if her grandmother had not been bullied by her racist parents into rejecting her husband's conspicuous foreign surname. (Her family disowned her anyway.)
4. I loathe the feeling of heaters and of clothes fresh out of the dryer.
5. I still have dozens of chicken pox scars.
6. My dad grew up Mormon.
7. I really have no idea what he thinks of religion, but he seems to tolerate my mom's evangelism. He won't go to church, though.
8. My paternal grandmother sued my dad's younger brother for all he was worth. He was so
infuriated that he cut off all contact from the family, to the point that I don't know the name of my only female cousin on my dad's side, and we haven't seen her brothers since they (and I) were little kids.
9. I have never broken or sprained a bone or joint.
10. I have never really "dated" like normal people and I don't think I would be very good at it.
11. My latent OCD emerges when it comes to food.
12. I use my hands to dismember dishes containing questionable ingredients; I admit I am completely disgusting. In particular, I painstakingly remove fat and gristle from meat. (And onions from everything.)
13. I was an Ayn Rand nut in high school.
14. I'm not at all anymore.
15. I'm squishily a libertarian, though. More or less. I think some of the hardcore ones are loony, though.
16. I think my addiction to political news is an illness.
17. I think price theory is fun.
18. I worry that I'll never do anything about my social anxiety disorder because doing so would probably mean going to a psychiatrist and otherwise talking to people.
19. I think grammar, syntax, spelling--all those boring things about language--are fun.
20. I dated my first boyfriend for five and a half years.
21. Two weeks after I broke up with him, I started dating my current boyfriend.
22. I hate people who block the escalator when I'm trying to walk up.
23. I always walk up the escalator, quickly.
24. I have an excellent sense of direction.
25. I always plan walking, driving, or biking routes on the maps that are always in my head.
26. I once considered myself a patient person, but I don't anymore.
27. I think that the question of whether or not I get along with another person is nearly independent of taste or common interest; I almost see it as a "chemical" thing analogous to sexual attraction.
28. Sometimes I wear sunglasses only to avoid having to figure out whether or not to make eye contact with people I pass on the street. Believe it or not, this causes a lot of stress for me.
29. Talking on the phone is enormously stressful, too. I avoid phone calls to the point of handicap.
30. I rarely wear high heels, but I can walk in them when I need to.
31. I was hostile towards the color pink as a child. Reactionary, even.
32. I was also one of those kids who violently abused Barbie dolls and petulantly refused to accept them as gifts.
33. I was a complete loudmouth until puberty.
34. My shoes (today) are all white and fasten with velcro.
35. I'm enormously happy that my boyfriend is not a romantic.
36. In the first grade I nearly gave my teacher a heart attack when I caught a gopher snake during recess and brought it back to my desk. I became righteously angry when she dared to suggest that I had no way of telling whether it was poisonous or not: of course I did.
37. Relatively speaking, I think I peaked in elementary school.
38. I got sick from bad mayonnaise in the 4th grade and haven't been able to touch the stuff since.
39. My dad built the house I grew up in, with help from my grandfather and one of my mom's brothers.
40. I am not a fan of the marijuana.
41. I think the drug war is a disgrace and that most (if not all) drugs should be legal.
42. Flying scares the shit out of me.
43. I recognize this is irrational, however, and don't let it govern my traveling decisions.
44. I can't sleep without earplugs.
45. I also wear one of those dorky sleep masks.
46. I was creepily obsessed with Pink Floyd in early high school.
47. I think I desperately needed obsessions back then because I had no social life.
48. As a freshman I used to keep a journal in which I wrote "letters" addressed to Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.
49. I used to hide my CDs and tastes in music in the same way that my peers would hide their drugs and birth control.
50. My parents met on a blind date.
51. My mom didn't speak much English at the time.
52. I have eight uncles and one aunt by blood.
53. My mom's youngest brother is gay and my grandmother copes with the fact by pretending it isn't true.
54. My mom didn't tell me my uncle was gay until I was, oh, twenty? Not that I hadn't figured it out a long, long time ago.
55. I stopped believing in Santa Claus in first grade, but I kept pretending I believed in him (and the Easter Bunny) until the sixth grade so as not to spoil my mom's illusions.
56. I would be surprised if any of my elementary school teachers did not remember me, even today.
57. I hate shopping for shoes.
58. I get most of my clothes from a thrift store a block from my apartment.
59. The movie The Santa Clause used to give me nightmares.
60. So did Mrs. Doubtfire.
61. I almost cried when Gene Siskel died of brain cancer. I was in eighth grade at the time.
62. I hate to cry in front of other people and very, very rarely do.
63. The one person I had a "fling" with at the beginning of college ended up leaving school for a while in order to spend time in jail for drunk driving.
64. I like to forget about those embarrassing two months.
65. Everyone in my freshman dorm thought I was a snobby bitch. Apparently it didn't occur to anyone that I was just plain shy.
66. Freshman year was probably my worst.
67. I missed one final exam that year because I had to go to the ER as a result of a problem that I had a roughly 0.001 % chance of developing. Maybe less.
68. Once, I missed a final exam because I was under the impression that it was actually being held the following day, so I slept in that morning on purpose.
69. I grew up bilingual.

Here I am with my brother, back when we were cute, bilingual, and living in a trailer on the homestead.

70. I don't think I'm particularly bilingual anymore.
71. Sometimes I wonder whether I would never have been accepted to my alma mater if not for affirmative action.
72. I don't own a televison or want one.
73. I would like to have a projector in order to watch movies, though.
74. Paper mail stresses me out and I tend to ignore it. Late fees for medical bills, etc. often result.
75. I always carry a water bottle.
76. I enjoy punishing myself with spicy peppers.
77. I hate bell peppers, however.
78. I frequently make enemies by accident.
79. Lately I've begun to seriously doubt the idea of "free will."
80. This doubt is kind of upsetting to me.
81. If I could do it over, I would have studied something far more technical in college.
82. I am a chronic procrastinator.
83. I am chronically a few minutes late to just about everything.
84. Hardly a day goes by that I don't need to run somewhere. Usually in order to catch public transportation.
85. I am tired of most of the music in my itunes library, since I listen to it all day at work.
86. Some of the songs currently on my playlist are:
- "Mutiny in Heaven" (The Birthday Party)
- "Baby's on Fire" (Brian Eno)
- "Is This Thing On?" (!!!)
- "Pepper-Tree" (Cocteau Twins)
- "Diplo Rhythm" (Diplo)
- "I Love a Man in Uniform" (Gang of Four)
- "And I Was a Boy from School" (Hot Chip)
- "Gimme Danger" (Iggy and the Stooges)
- "Computer Love" (Kraftwerk)
- "Someone Great" (LCD Soundsystem)
- "Chelsea Hotel" (Leonard Cohen)
- "The Mystery of Love" (Marianne Faithfull)
- "Lose My Breath" (My Bloody Valentine)
- "The Ballad of Robert Moore and Betty Coltrane" (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
- "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (Roxy Music)
- "I'll Be by Your Side" (Sally Shapiro)
- "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" (Talking Heads)
87. I love sushi, especially the weird stuff that most people steer clear of.
88. I spend an absurd portion of my income on food. Maybe as much as half.
89. I own a credit card, but I have never used it because I don't trust myself to pay the bills on time.
90. The last time I cut my hair above my shoulders, I was in third grade. I kind of want shorter hair now, but I don't like the idea of visiting a hair salon.
91. I clip my keys to my belt so I don't lose them.
92. I spend more than two hours every day commuting to work and back.
93. The first time my boyfriend heard of me, his friend was describing me to him as "a girl who dresses like a kid in a JC-Penney ad." In the context of making fun of me, presumably. This was five or six years ago, and I don't dress like that anymore.
94. I have a bad hay allergy. Being around hay makes me miserable.
95. I have been writing about myself on the Internet, on and off, since 2000.
96. I was far more public about it in 2000 than I am now. (For example, I attached my full name to my website.)
97. My best friend from elementary school and my best friend from high school are both cancer survivors.
98. I don't talk to my elementary school best friend anymore.
99. The high school best friend is very close with my ex-boyfriend these days, which can make talking to her rather awkward. We exchange emails on occasion, but I haven't seen her for years.
100. Once, when she was angry at me, she convinced my ex-boyfriend that I was bulimic, even though that was not remotely true. An "intervention" ensued. This, in retrospect, is kind of hilarious.
101. I don't think I want kids.
102. I spend far too much time reading kooks' websites. It's really hard to stop. My "favorites" are the unapologetic misogynists and the Biblical hyper-literalists who believe, for example, that no woman should ever work outside the home or attend college. There's actually quite a bit of overlap there, but probably not in ways that either side would readily admit.
103. I'm a big fan of David Lynch.
104. Once during finals I watched the entire second season of Twin Peaks at the library instead
of studying.
105. In ninth grade, when I read A Tale of Two Cities, I developed a bizarre lit-crush on the pathetic character Sydney Carton.
106. The only vacations I ever took as a child were road/camping trips, with the exception of trips to Mexico to see family.
107. I have a vague memory of riding in a plane to Mexico when I was nine months old. I am not sure whether the memory is false. (The second time I rode in a plane, I was sixteen: not easily mistaken.)
108. Many of my memories from childhood and adolescence are still very, very vivid.
109. The most vivid memories are visual/spatial ones, e.g., where in a class I was sitting and who was sitting around me.
110. In high school I always performed well on multiple choice history exams because I could remember the location of the information within the text and then picture what the answer was.
110a. Relatedly, I have difficulty processing auditory information unless I write it down. A corollary: I am notoriously bad at understanding song lyrics, and when I sing along to them, I do so in gibberish.
111. My long-term memory seems to be far better than my short-term memory.
112. I did acid a few days before graduating from college. My experience was 100% positive.
113. Being disoriented is upsetting to me. I tend to avoid elevators because they make me disoriented.
114. In elementary school I was the district-wide long jump champion for two years in a row.
115. I was also widely recognized as the most athletic girl in school.
116. I hate watching sports.
117. My ex-boyfriend is unhealthily obsessed with pro basketball. I don't think he ever realized what a turn-off that was.
118. I wake up less than half an hour before leaving the apartment every morning.
119. I have never blow dried my hair. I don't think I would even know how.
120. I cannot begin to describe how much I despise all things cutesy.
121. Couples baby-talking each other make me want to vomit.
122. Frankly, it bothers me when people baby-talk babies, too.
123. I lost all contact with most people from my past when I stopped signing on to aim.
124. I routinely stalk people on the Internet, however.
125. I think I'm pretty good at it.
126. Perhaps I'd make a decent private detective?
127. I bike dangerously fast through the city sometimes, passing cars left and right. I probably shouldn't, but moving slowly would drive me crazy. At least I wear a helmet.
128. I'm almost always tired.
129. I like drinking Clamato, preferably with lime and habanero salsa.
130. I never needed braces. My teeth grew in remarkably straight all by themselves.
131. I suspect I am genetically programmed to reject religion.
132. I've sunbathed topless in Europe. (I'm not terribly shy about nudity, so long as I'm not alone.)
133. As a passenger, I get carsick if I don't watch the road, and I compulsively check over my shoulder every time the driver changes lanes.
134. I keep my nails short and don't paint them. I don't really wear makeup, either.
135. I think feet are disgusting. I kind of wish no one wore sandals. This is one of many aversions that I share with my boyfriend.
136. Never again do I want to live in my hometown.
137. No one I know in real life knows I have this blog, and I'd like to keep it that way.
138. I liked my old blog better.
139. I think I'm done with this list. Arbitrarily it ends at item #139.

Sober Month Is Dead; Long Live Sober Month

2007-05-03T17:39:00.000-07:00

My married flatmates are breaking the lease and moving away soon; apparently our after-midnight carryings-on are too crazy for them. I rather enjoy their company (childish tantrum aside), but so it goes. When we do find another flatmate, he or she will be my tenth in less than two years. I wonder, is this normal for city folk?

---

Sober Month died on May Day. I celebrated, appropriately enough, by drinking vodka.

On Tuesday, M. and I got home at 11pm. Fifteen minutes later, we flagged a cab to a DJ set/dance party in the rather creepy warehouse district where these things usually take place. Our cabbie complained about boorish, fratty baseball fans, and then, without any transition at all, regaled us with a story about being threatened at gunpoint by a couple of thugs downtown. Note to self: even if desperate, never work as a cab driver.

I have never been to a show at this particular venue without M. drinking too much whiskey and doing something completely ridiculous.

First, there was the time that he took off his shoe and handed it to the DJ, over the DJ table, for an autograph. After the show, he wrote his email address on a ten-dollar bill and gave it to the DJ, asking him to spin a party at our apartment. (By the way, the DJ in question is widely recognized as a joke.)

Then, there was the time that the stage was roped off but M. decided to dance on it anyway. When the DJ flipped out and an army of security guards swooped down on us, M. was so infuriated that he quit the dance floor and stood outside, chain-smoking and talking shit about the DJ. Later, M. spotted the DJ fleeing the venue and promptly rushed over to block his path. My first thought was: my God, a fist fight? I watched as the DJ--a small, effete man whom M. positively dwarfed--cringed with fright and summoned security. As it turned out, M. merely griped over the roped-off stage, but his body language looked mighty aggressive at the time.

This time, M. decided it was a good idea to lean into the ticket booth and swipe the venue's stamp pad on our way out the door. Apparently the whiskey told him to do it. We were in bed by 3am. Waking up was brutal.

---

I finished the project, but the project finished off my brain. Writing, even in a blog post, suddenly seems close to impossible.

Screw transitions. Here are some pictures of an America-themed barbecue that my soon-to-be-ex-flatmates arranged for the benefit of their French visitors.

A giant platter of freedom fries:

Burgers and beer-cooked sausages:

A very special hat:

Bad beer and good beer, none of which I touched as it was still Sober Month at the time:

This is not from the barbecue; it is a gratuitous picture of cats:

Birth/School/Work/Death

2007-05-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

I have been on the "home stretch" of this cursed project for about a week now. When I'm truly done with it, I will print out every one of its cutesy, punny pages, light them on fire, and then dance upon their ashes.

It is therapeutic to express anger toward inanimate objects.

There's yet another show tonight, set to last far into the AM. Sober Month is over; God help me.

A Tantrum

2007-04-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

Last night's show was good fun, and didn't go as late as I thought it would. And when M. offered to buy me a glass of million-dollar concert whiskey, I declined because Sober Month isn't over yet. "Sure it's over, I already sent in the May rent check," he said. "I follow the spirit of the law, you follow the letter of the law. I'm more of a Christian, you're a Jew."

"Fine. But I'm not drinking."

The lead singer of the band was a spastic, 'fro-sporting, incredibly entertaining performer who reminded me of a cross between Jim Morrison and Mickey Aval0n, if that makes any sense. Or even if it doesn't. I think it was the first time since my freshman year of college that I danced without the aid of alcohol.

Then we returned home at midnight to a rather unfortunate incident. Sam's new girlfriend yelled at M., something about a burrito. M. yelled back. Apparently this was enough to awaken and utterly infuriate our French flatmate, who advertised her displeasure by slamming her door a number of times, hitting cushions as loudly as she could on the couch downstairs, and then stalking upstairs to do a load of laundry and make as much noise as was humanly possible in the process.

There's probably nothing in the world that M. disrespects more than passive aggression, and causing him to disrespect you is the best way to ensure that he makes your life miserable. So his response to our flatmate's temper tantrum was first to laugh, then to (drunkenly) talk about how babyish he finds her, and then to desire to keep her up later by watching South Park until 1am in our room next door.

I hate this crap, and should have nothing to do with it, but I'm sure I'm already presumed guilty through association. Because M. and I are the same, or something. Coming home tonight will doubtless be interesting.

Sunday

2007-04-29T17:55:00.000-07:00

Some guy yelled at me on the street because I didn't respond to him the first time. Charming.

We're going to a show tonight. This will be a bad idea.

Awkward Social Gathering, Version 49012.5

2007-04-28T23:20:00.001-07:00

My boyfriend takes party-planning very seriously, so when they don't go as planned, he tends to stew. He distracts himself for days analyzing what went wrong, pinning blame accordingly. For instance, few people danced at our last one because Sam brought in a third DJ who played nothing but un-danceable music-snob techno fare. M. considers this a disaster.

"Disaster" is too strong, but I do prefer dance parties. This is half because I like to dance, and half because dancing gives me an excuse to avoid awkward conversation. If someone tries to talk to me, I can say, "I can't talk, I'm dancing." If the room is littered with acquaintances with whom I ought to make small-talk, I can get away with a quick "hi" without seeming completely rude.

At the party last Saturday, I tried to dance, but felt a little awkward when everyone else chose instead to hover around at a six-foot radius and gawk. Later in the evening, a couple of jaw-droppingly intoxicated second-rate hipsters with questionable hygeine gyrated forth, asking me to dance with/kiss/date them. When I pointed out my boyfriend behind the turntables, two of these guys actually brought me their own girlfriends as some kind of evidence in their favor. Wha? This actually happens to me often. Do I systematically attract swingers, or do they systematically swing at everybody?

As the clock struck four I longed for bed, but was instead held hostage by one of the two hipster-swingers and his meandering, utterly nonsensical, yet weirdly insistent attempts at drunken conversation. Could I please sit down and talk to him, since he was having such a bad day? Reluctantly, I stayed and tried to make sense of his bizarre ravings about the "cuteness" of my boyfriend's name, an obscure indie band I'd never heard of, his girlfriend, and, you know, life. The zenith/nadir came when he decided to coo me a "free form" love poem to the tune of a song M. was playing a few feet away. After hearing three clumsy similes for my eyes I'd had more than enough, so I stood up and hid behind the DJ table.

On another note, I am proud of myself for not having vomited, passed out, or otherwise truly hurt myself with alcohol since 2007 began. Moreover, I have succeeded in keeping April a sober month (with the planned exception of the party). Self, hurrah!

I took pictures.

Here is our fridge stocked with cheap hipster-scum beer:

Here is Sam playing a pre-party game of ghost pool:

M. plays ghost pool with Sam, watched by creepy Chinese propaganda:

I don't know any of the people in this picture. The guy in black with the mysterious facial trauma was one of the swingers, but not the "free-form poetry" guy:

And here's a pile of random hipsters I don't know.

M. thinks we ought to slap a cover charge on all these goddamned strangers next time.

In case you were wondering, today was a beautiful Saturday and I spent it doing work.

Gender and Writing

2007-04-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, this website uses an algorithm to predict whether text was written by a man or a woman.

I fed it three blog entries. The first was deemed overwhelmingly female, the second overwhelmingly male, and the third just barely female.

I gave it a piece on Sputnik and DARPA that I wrote for work, for which I was determined to be very male. Then I gave it a paragraph on the health risks of trans fats, which was apparently very female. A term paper on neoconservatism was slightly female. Another term paper, on intelligence reform, was way, way male.

Looking at the keywords, it seems that the algorithm is designed to detect gendered topics rather than the sex of the writer. Or perhaps to detect the sex of the writer through the gender of the topic. Pronouns like I, me, your, she, hers, we, and myself are supposedly female--so if you're writing mostly about yourself and other people, you're a girl. (Livejournal is overwhelmingly female, I hear.) So is "was," which might be used to talk about recent events. Prepositions like "with," "where" and "when" are female, too. (E.g., "I was with so-and-so when we ran into so-and-so in the bar where I met so-and-so.")

The male keywords contain more spatial prepositions (below, above, at, to, around) and present forms of be (are, is). Non-gendered and indefinite pronouns--like it, what, who, these, and many--are male as well. Articles (a, the) too. So if you write about objects and the concrete realities of the world as it is now, you're a guy.

I may be completely wrong, but suspect that if this algorithm works on most people, it's because of topics. You're not going to find much room for "I" "me," "hers," or "myself" in a paper about intelligence reform.

---

I think that something profoundly stupid will happen this weekend. Maybe several somethings.

These Kids Will Need Prozac

2007-04-26T21:38:00.000-07:00

They have me writing kids' stuff at work these days, and I'm just plain deplorable at it. I mean really, really bad. When left alone I tend toward long, complex sentences with too many clauses; I have to force myself in order to write otherwise. Having to write in a cutesy, punny manner does not come naturally to me at all, so everything I type comes out sounding stilted and utterly insincere.

And my mood's been dark, so most of the topics I can come up with are frightfully dreary. For instance--AIDS in Africa, mercury poisoning, the disappearance of girls in China, pollution in Mexico City, genocide, droughts, skin cancer, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, polio, Huntington's disease, the Great Depression. Some rather heavy stuff. The few topics that aren't dreary are probably just plain boring for any half-normal kid. What ten year old is interested in William Wilberforce or erosion mechanisms? Certainly no ten year old I would have wanted to be seen with at that age, and I was a total dork.

Since I'm slow at kid-writing I've had to work on it at home, too. Doubleplusuncool.

I promise to blog about work every day so that within a month no one reads this at all.

I Hate Fun

2007-04-25T22:22:00.000-07:00

I am a social fuck-up, no doubt at all. My boyfriend invited a bunch of people over, people I've known for years, and they're all out on the porch barbeque-ing and drinking and smoking and so on, and I just can't tolerate going out there. I'm not drinking and I want no part in this "social" stuff. When they were eating outside I stood awkwardly inside by myself and ate everything with my hands and then scuttled right back to the computer. I've been among people for almost twenty-four years and I still have no idea how to deal with them. It's awesome. Almost unrelatedly, I think I really hate fun.

My new idea is to write small posts every day instead of long ones sporadically. Let's see how that goes.

Epiphany of the Week

2007-04-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

Evidently, I am being paid to work, not to screw around on the Internet.

Crazy Sarcastic Rant

2007-04-20T00:51:00.000-07:00

Why won't they heat my office? It's cold in here, at least as cold as it is outside, hovering in the low 50s. Thanks, bureaucratic powers-that-be, for an office where it is possible to shiver in a down jacket and a scratchy scarf wrapped several times around the neck. My feet are cold through my shoes; as for my hands, I have to take breaks from typing every few minutes to sit on them lest I get the hypothermy.

Since I am currently in the business of insincerely thanking faceless entities, I thank "fate," "Them," "the Man," etc, for this job I need in order to pay the bills, and for a few reasons besides; and which, I am fake-happy to report, I believe has actively made me dumber, gutted my formerly active imagination, and turned me into a crap writer. And thank you, job, for recently requiring my attentions during my already meager "free" time, which ought to be spent learning calculus.

Thanks, genes + environment = predetermination, or whatever you are, for my being somebody who cannot stomach risk, whose mind goes blank in the company of conspecifics, someone avoidant almost to the point of total crazy.

Thanks, whatever-you-are, for my few friends. I had dinner with Annika, her mom, and her stepdad yesterday. It was the first time we'd seen each other since her wedding last year. She would hardly eat because her husband wouldn't be "proud" of her if she did. His name is Tyler, and I've known him for years, but she insisted on calling him "my husband," ad nauseam. Unsolicited, she talked on and on about how she didn't need friends, didn't I understand? She needed only her husband, his family, and his friends. She exists only in his [enlightened] penumbra and is perfectly happy about it, so what sort of bigot wouldn't respect this? I was her only friend, the only one, whom she had invited to her wedding. She brought this up, with no provocation, no bridge. The rest of them were simply not worth her time.

It sounded like pre-emptive defensiveness. A part of me wanted to suggest that maybe her ex-friends were "flaky" because she had already made clear to them that they were extraneous. But that part of me never learned to talk, so I kept quiet. M. would call me a traitor for doing so, and maybe I am.

So thank you, frontal lobe, for enabling my treason. And thanks, Femininity Imperative, genes + upbringing, or whatever-you-may-be, for convincing one of my last remaining friends that she ought to function as her husband's appendage.

Why stop at thanking abstractions? Thank you, M., for [censored] and [censored] and [censored] and [censored].

(And thank Google for making this censorship necessary.)

I won't limit this rant to petty, personal complaints, so let us not forget to thank the world for things like this and this and this and, well, you get the idea.

You're welcome for all the negativity. I think the cold is freezing my brain.

I Live in Venezuela?

2007-04-14T00:39:00.000-07:00

Photo 1, through a shop window in my neighborhood:

Photo two, from a BBC report on "Venezuela's informal economy," which I stumbled upon by chance the following day:

The last few days at work have been a banal hell of endless typing, staring at Excel documents until the contact lenses fuse to the eyeballs, shivering in an inexplicably air-conditioned room when the ambient air is damn well cold enough, explaining simple processes step-by-step to well-meaning but cripplingly unimaginitive middle management, slouching in a hard seat hour upon hour until the back aches, and a few of the other things that make office work so rapturously sweet that I wish I could keep doing it for ever and ever. I'm off to a good start---

The Greatest Dinner of All

2007-04-06T12:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Greatest Dinner of All: March 29, 2007.

M.'s dad and stepmom collected us at work a few hours early, and from there we drove for almost two and a half hours across two and a half counties. It was a beautiful, temperate spring day.

Here we are, driving across the bridge:

Here is a view of the city from the north of the bay:

A field of mustard grass:

M.'s stepmom talking about the punk-rock aesthetic, whilst M. and I try to listen instead of drooling stupidly like cavepeople and fantasizing about dinner:

Napa vineyards:

2007-04-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

Finally, we arrived in Y-ville, drove down a quaint, unassuming road, and parked in front of this rather modest-looking restaurant. Across from it there was this field, which contains a small vegetable garden. We were theorizing that the F.L. people grow some ingredients there; I suppose it's possible.

Here three of us are, grinning like idiots.

The sign is pretty much the only way you can tell what kind of establishment you're walking into. Otherwise, I would have guessed it was a Mexican-American War Re-enactment Society or something of the kind.

We walked around to the side of the restaurant, where there was a small courtyard and a cluster of small buildings--the restaurant itself, the kitchen (or was that an extension of the main building?), and the wine cellar. I wanted to walk around the courtyard for a few moments, but one of the staff must have been peeping through the window and waiting for people to arrive, because the hostess opened the door and invited us inside right away.

We followed the hostess upstairs, past a very small, very classy anteroom, and to our table. Our table was in a small side-room containing one table of four (ours) and two tables of two.

Here is the fancy napkin with its napkin-holder (I'm sure there's some kind of pretentious French name for it). This was for keeping. The restaurant's phone number is helpfully printed in back, you know, for last-minute reservations or something.

And here's the unspoilt bread-plate with a bread/butter knife:

2007-04-06T12:09:00.000-07:00

This flower arrangement was on our table.

Here's the menu, or, more accurately, the chef's tasting menu. There was also a lighter, more vegetable-based menu, but I didn't take a picture of it and didn't order it. We had to choose one or the other. From there what we ate was basically fixed, except where there was a pair of dishes between the line breaks and we had to choose between them. If you look at the bigger version of the photo, you'll notice how whoever writes the menu (Keller?) is seriously infatuated with quotation marks.

This ridiculous, imported water was "complimentary." I do admit it tasted unusually refreshing.

First, the waiter--a friendly, extremely professional, grey-haired man--served us two "amuse-bouches" to begin our meal. I didn't get any pictures of these, but I'll link to other pictures on the web. The first was a small bowl (one each) of gruyere "gougères." Not bad. The second was a "cornet" of salmon tartare. Tragically, the cornets were filled with red onion-infused freme fraiche, so I reluctantly donated mine to M.

The first course was probably the most perfect of them all:

"Oysters and Pearls": "Sabayon" of Pearl Tapioca with Beau Soleil Oysters and White Sturgeon Caviar

It's pretty much impossible to describe how awesome this dish was. I'd never tasted sturgeon caviar before, but I can see why it's so expensive. The oysters were about a zillion times tastier than any I'd ever eaten, small and delicate and almost buttery. The tapioca was a perfect pairing. Pure genius. This dish was so good, in fact, that I scraped every last bit from the bowl, even though the tapioca had chives in it. Chives and onions are typically deal-breakers for me, so this pretty much constitutes objective proof of the appetizer's flawlessness.

I think this bread arrived after the oysters. Once again, the bread was perfect. It came along with two kinds of butter (you can see one in the background): one was a fatty, unsalted, French butter; the other was a salted variety produced on a farm in Vermont that has only seven cows. (We definitely appreciated the over-the-top storytelling that accompanied the food.)

2007-04-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

Beginning about now, I started taking pictures on a camera setting that produced speckled and discolored images. I tried to fix them in photoshop, but some of them are just crap photos that no amount of editing can save. Just to warn you.

The second course of the evening was foie gras terrine with cashew butter and brioche. We had to pay a hefty supplement for it, but given where we were, why the hell not. Along with it, we also ordered a half-bottle of dry Hungarian Tokaji (upper right of photo below), which was, unsurprisingly, delicious. The brioche was thick but airy as hell, and after I'd consumed half of it, the waiter whisked it away and replaced it with another because it was "getting cold."

The foie portion was actually quite large, and the terrine went along well with the cashews. Again, this was not shocking.

Moulard Duck "Foie Gras en Terrine": Cara Cara Orange "Supremes," Roasted Cashew Butter, Celery Branch and Toasted "Brioche"

Here is a closer, but still discolored shot of the foie gras:

The foie came along with a platter of three salts, so we could try all of them and choose whichever best "suited our palates." The one on the upper right was a coarse salt mined in Brittany. The one on the upper left was found at the depths of a copper mine in Montana. The one on the bottom was extracted from the waters of the Sea of Japan. A+ for storytelling!

The third course was a raw hamachi (yellowtail) dish with dungeness crab and vegetables. Very, very good. Soft, buttery hamachi; great crab; great rice; the "yuzu emulsion" sauce was tasty, too. Of everything on there, though, I thought the asparagus was the most perfect. This picture came out particularly discolored:

"Sashimi" of Japanese "Hamachi": Dungeness Crab, Sacramento Delta Green Asparagus, "Akita Komachi" Rice and Yuzu Emulsion

M.'s stepmom ordered the halibut instead; I didn't taste it, so I can't say anything about it. My guess is that it was good.

Fillet of Atlantic Halibut "Poche au Lait": Steelhead Trout Roe, Crispy Potatoes, Dill "Creme Fraiche," Pickled Red Onions and Watercress Puree

More is coming later; there's no way I'm finishing this today.

2007-04-06T12:07:00.000-07:00

After the foie gras came the lobster with bacon, pureed truffle, and black truffle medallions. I don't think I need to convince anyone how delicious this was, so just look at it:

Sweet Butter-poached Maine Lobster Tail: Applewood-smoked Bacon, Black Truffle Puree and "Coulis de Pimente d'Espelette"

And here's the wine we drank with most of the meal, a Californian pinot produced on a tiny vineyard of only a few acres:

The next course was the least outstanding, which is not to say that it would not have been the most outstanding at almost any other restaurant. It was a rabbit dish, and the rabbit itself was drier and less flavorful than I would have liked. However, the gravy and accompanying vegetables were fantastic.

Surloin of Devil's Gulch Ranch Rabbit: Baby Globe Artichokes, Spring Garlic, Sweet Carrots and "Sauce Barigoule"

Next came the primary (or so I think) main course, beef (or, rather, "boeuf") with chanterelles. I've posted two pictures of this because each is inadequate in its own special way.

Snake River Farm "Calotte de Boeuf Grillee": Hen-of-the-Woods Mushrooms, Swiss Chard and Dijon Mustard "Croutons"

My two criticisms of this dish are matters of personal taste. First, the croutons contained chives so I had to donate them to M. Second, mustard is not my favorite flavor and I found that if I put too much on the beef (and especially the mushrooms and chard) it was overpowering. However, these criticisms are minor beside the perfection of the beef. The cows that it came from were hybrids of American Angus and Japanese Kobe animals; the treatment of the cows and, later, of the meat, was likewise a hybrid between those of Angus and Kobe beefs. The result was a slice of meat that was delicately marbled, tender yet slightly gamey at the same time.

2007-04-06T12:05:00.000-07:00

Then, a cheese dish:Jasper Hill "Winnemere": "Choucroute," Granny Smith Apples and Blis Maple Syrup

Here is a link to a blog post whose author thinks this cheese is the "best [s/he's] tasted in years." I think the so-called Choucroute is the fancy sauerkraut above the cheese. The Winnemere was indeed very good, reminding me perhaps of a high-end Camembert (with the caveat that I've only eaten Camembert a couple of times, so I may be completely off). The maple syrup, so our waiter informed us, was aged in whiskey barrels somewhere in New England. The best single item on this plate, though, was the slice of Granny Smith apple, which was about twice as tasty as I'd ever expected an apple to be capable of.

Here is some French bread that arrived between courses:

Now, for the first of several desserts--not a sorbet or a sherbert, but a sherbet.

Field Rhubarb Sherbet: Cardamom-scented "Frangipane" and Cream Yogurt

The sherbet was the second-best dessert, and considering the absolute best (which I'll get to soon), that's high praise. It was both tangy, in a sweet-and-sour sort of way, and creamy-thick.

After the sherbet, the waiter asked if we wanted any coffee or tea. I thought it was odd that they offered us coffee before bringing out the bulk of the desserts; maybe it's a high-end thing. Anyway, I asked for espresso. Thus I violated two of my personal taboos: no caffeine at night, since I'm kind of an insomniac without the help of stimulants; and no plain coffee, because I find the taste so strong that I need to temper it with milk and sugar (i.e., I'm a huge pussy who orders hazelnut lattes). But once again, I reminded myself of where I was. So I ordered the espresso anyway.

It came in a dainty white cup that sat atop a "floating" saucer.

As I never drink espresso plain, I can't really compare this one with other espressos. But since I was capable of drinking it, and even enjoying it, I would guess that it compares quite favorably.

2007-04-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

Next came the final dessert that is listed on the menu, a creative chocolate-white chocolate-pistachio-passion fruit thingamajig:

"Pave de Chocolat Blanc au the Vert": Pistachio "Pain de Genes," Passion Fruit Jelly and Bitter Chocolate Sauce

I confess that by now, I was utterly full. As a result, I probably appreciated dishes this late in the dinner a little less than I should have. That said, I still think this dessert tasted less exciting than it looked. Which is not to say that it did not taste exciting, or that my taste buds didn't enjoy it in defiance of my stomach, which was growing increasingly uncomfortable.

I think I was also plagued by a grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side-of-the-table mentality, given that everyone else had chosen something else (a substitution off the vegetarian menu) that involved far more chocolate. Real, not white, chocolate. And chocolate cake cooked in Cabernet. I tasted a bit, too, and indeed I preferred it to my own dish. Here's an oblique picture of M.'s dessert, but I won't write its bequestionmarked name underneath since I don't have a photo of the vegetarian menu:

But that wasn't all! At this point a few servers whisked away our plates and brought us a new round of sex-segregated desserts. The "ladies" each got a small lavender-infused creme brulee:

And the "gentlemen" each got this Meyer lemon pot de creme:

Of course M. and I switched at mid-dessert so we could try both. And holy shit, the creme brulee was good, but it paled in comparison to the pot de creme. This was the second undeniably perfect dish of the evening. Desserts aren't supposed to be this good, certainly not desserts as plain-looking as this one. I'm not even going to write any more about it, lest I tarnish its perfection with my words.

2007-04-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

Yes, there's more.

In spite of my fullness, I bravely kept eating as the waiters brought out what seemed like an endless line of small desserts. First, chocolate-and-caramel-covered macadamia nuts:

These were great, but sadly I only ate one before the waiter took them away. Second, a tower of candies:

And here's M.'s dad looking amused that I'm taking a picture of him eating candies.

While at the restaurant I had a chance to eat only one of these candies, a chocolate bonbon from the bottom "level." Don't worry, though--for a moment I gave my inner tackiness free rein and dumped all of the uneaten (as opposed to the eaten?) wrapped candies into my purse. I ate them the following day. The lemon candy, in the center "level," was pleasantly reminiscent of the pot de creme. Which is to say, it was phenomenal.

Here was another tidbit; I want to say it was called tulle:

Finally, the waiter came around with a platter of chocolates arranged in rows according to type. As full as I was, I did the right thing and made sure to take one of each. Was this undecorous? Probably, and both the waiter and M.'s dad laughed at me. M. then emulated me, however, not wanting to miss out.

If I remember correctly, the flavors of the chocolates were: caramel, dark chocolate, peanut butter, banana, coffee, white chocolate, and praline. I can't recall which was which, though. I remember only that the banana and the caramel were the best.

2007-04-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

Finally, they didn't let us leave without giving us a bag of gourmet shortbread cookies. For later, of course--there was no way any of us could eat them after all those chocolates. When I came home from work the following day and found that a cat (the dumber one) had pulled it down from the counter, ripped the plastic open, and munched on a few of the cookies, leaving his disease-ridden cat slobber on it, I nearly strangled him. But instead I threw him out of the room and ate most of the cookies, anyway.

Finally, the end. Now it's 3:30am, and this took a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would. If this were a restaurant review, I'd recommend this place heartily. But in this case I don't think a recommendation is necessary. FL will do fine without it.

April Is the Soberest Month

2007-04-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

That's the idea, anyway. No alcohol all month, and no dining out. Exceptions will be made (a) if M. throws a tax-themed party around tax day, which is possible, and (b) if someone offers to take us to a fine dinner, which we could never refuse in good conscience. If all goes as planned, we will end the month slimmer, healthier, and with many extra dollars in our bank accounts.

Last weekend I was looking for jeans at a thrift store and a girl approached me. She was a hair stylist at a posh salon, and asked me to be a model for a "hair show" previewing this season's new cuts. Or something. I'm not sure if I should do it; on the one hand, it's a free fancy haircut; on the other hand, I'd have to strut around on a stage and make a fool of myself, probably trip, fall, etc. And everyone I know (admittedly, only a handful of souls) would make fun of me for being a hair model. Probably for the rest of my life.

I scanned the New York Times headlines one day last week and noticed that one of the op-eds was written by someone I know. Someone whom I'd almost, but not quite, label a friend. We used to talk frequently in the last year before college graduation. We played dozens of games of pool, laughed at Craigslist posts, and devised a rather mean-spirited Craigslist experiment involving a false identity and the "Casual Encounters" section. (I blogged about it afterwards, in fact, but that blog is long gone.) When graduation approached and I hadn't yet found a job, he offered to help find me one. But then I found this job, he moved east, and I haven't talked to him since. It was kind of surprising to see him on the op-ed page--but not that surprising.

I told Zoe about it on our fortnightly yuppie lunch date. "We went to a top school. We're going to be seeing stuff like that more and more often as we get older," she said. Indeed, I can already imagine my classmates in government, on the Supreme Court, as public intellectuals, as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Nobel laureates. They're well on their way. They're in Harvard Law and the Kennedy School and the Brookings Institution; they're working for Senators; some, like M., are getting phds in the sciences and will go on to cure Alzheimer's or write algorithms that revolutionize computing. Meanwhile I am in this floodlit box, blogging about how I am in this floodlit box. But most importantly, I may be a hair model, how exciting! My education is, like, totally paying off.

Here is my advice to past-me, who, regrettably, will not be reading this anytime soon:

Take calculus in high school. Don't make that idiotic pledge to avoid college math at all costs. Don't muck around in archaeology and romance languages and "poetics" and "observational astronomy"; and, by God, find a job outside of the library's media basement. Do research. Don't worry too much about specializing, much less finding a "calling," just yet, but take rigorous classes and pick up real skills. Don't be a dabbler in the arts when you don't intend to be an artist. Don't maintain a long-term, long-distance relationship with a demanding boyfriend who won't tolerate your finding summer jobs in other cities, and whom, it turns out, you aren't so crazy about, anyway.

And, as for present/future-me:

Quit being a social-anxiety poster child and do things. Sometimes this will involve talking to people, and it will be awful. Suck it up. Moreover, you will have to stop reading The Economist cover-to-cover every week, and instead read things that seem--at least at the outset--less fun. Textbooks on statistics or econometrics, for example. And statistical-software primers. At home, instead of following the minutiae of the moment's political debates (these are my soap operas, my sports-fandom), you should enter data onto Excel spreadsheets. In theory, you and your boyfriend will soon use these for independent research. The articles, when they are published, will be your Silver Bullet; the best schools will compete for your talents and you will live happily ever after. (I don't really believe that, but a publication or two certainly can't hurt.)

Anyway.

Restaurant pictures are forthcoming.

Cancer

2007-03-27T16:58:00.000-07:00

Cancer sure seems a big winner lately. It killed Cathy Seipp; now Elizabeth Edwards has it in her bones and Tony Snow, in his liver. Last week, the day Cathy Seipp died, M. sent a how-are-you text message to an old friend--an ex of sorts--and she replied that her dad had died of bone cancer that afternoon. M. called her that night, but she was too drunk and grief-stricken to talk.

The news was a bit of a shock to me, especially because I'd actually met the guy about a year and a half ago, back when he didn't have an inkling of his disease. He was a big, jovial, extremely likeable man who'd (barely) survived one or two Yugoslavian civil wars before getting his family out of there and safely to the US. Last fall, M.'s friend got into a terrible car accident and broke her neck. She was in a body cast for months. The very day she was released from the body cast and let out of the hospital, she learned her father was dying. That was four months ago.

I'm reminded that my mother was about this girl's age when she learned her dad was dying of lung cancer. She was in the US at the time, and he was in Mexico, and the cancer was so progressive she didn't have time to see him before he died.

Life can be so fucking depressing; it's no wonder people have religion.

Here are some pictures now. My next post, I hope, will be about puppies and rainbows.

No, I take that back--M.'s dad and stepmom are taking us to what is possibly the best restaurant in the United States later this week. So I think I'll write about that. Amazing food is even better than puppies and rainbows. And far, far better than cancer.

2007-03-27T16:57:00.000-07:00

Woe Is Me

2007-03-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

Remember how I said, not too long ago, that I would soon find out what I would be doing with the next two years of my life? Well, I oversimplified. The idea was that, if I were admitted to the masters program I applied to, my next two years would be spent going to school. And, between the confidence of my boss and my boyfriend--and the program's relative obscurity--and the perceived non-shoddiness of my application--I thought I would be admitted. But I wasn't.

Now, what to do? I don't know. I have few ideas, fewer that sound easy and none that sound both easy and appealing.

I could stay at this job, and stay bored and mediocre (but comfortable!) for the rest of my life--but on second thought, I really couldn't. Another year, in fact, would be unbearable.

I could consider, in the future, applying to graduate schools in other parts of the country, knowing that accepting an (as yet hypothetical) offer from a faraway school would mean leaving someone with whom I can easily imagine spending a non-trivial portion of my life. (This is the secular skeptic's bet-hedging, anti-romantic, ultra-cautious version of "He's the One 4-ever! *gush*", I think). As far as options go, this one falls halfway between unattractive and unthinkable.

More appealingly, I could strengthen my candidacy and reapply. But I obviously didn't cut it the first time, and how much can really change in nine months?

M.'s answer is always the same: self-teach and publish. And then, go for a Ph.D.

I'll try, but I don't exactly have high expecations.

Part of my trouble is that my interests are a poor match with my temperament. My classes in college overrepresented certain populations: the frats, the sororities, and, more generally, the social types. My classmates were the kinds of people who studied politics because they wanted to be in politics, who studied international relations because they were interested in being international lawyers or businesspeople or diplomats or advocates for various causes. Such was my perception, at least. These kids spoke up in class, and participated in debate, and many of them went off to law or business school after they graduated. Those who decided to pursue politics spent their college years in a networking frenzy. They worked for their local Representatives, or at the Department of State. Meanwhile, I don't like politicians; I don't even think I like people who like politicians. I rarely like businesspeople. Hell, I don't even really like people.

I became interested in politics and IR from a theoretical, strategic, and ultimately, descriptive (as opposed to normative) perspective. I like studying, I like writing, and I like empiricism. M. says that for these reasons he thinks I am better off going into academia. But academia in the "softer" social sciences seems more political and more hierarchical than the harder sciences. And getting into an acceptable Ph.D. program would be so terribly, extremely difficult--much more difficult than the program that just rejected me.

Maybe I should look into developing new interests.

Or, if anyone reading this happens to be the editor of The Economist, I've read your Style Guide about a dozen times and I think I'd make a decent assistant copy editor.

---

At least I can't complain that it hasn't been a gorgeous winter.

2007-03-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

Die, SUV Driver

2007-03-15T17:51:00.000-07:00

While biking to work yesterday I was crowded off the road by a jagoff in a white Lexus SUV. Said jagoff was consulting a map or somesuch and couldn't be bothered to watch the road, and so I was given a second's choice between the SUV and the curbside. The curbside looked better (softer?), so I hit it, flipped over my bike, and landed on the ground. It wasn't so bad--I got away with a few scrapes on the hands, a few bruises on the legs, and a renewed hatred for these shitty suburban drivers who, I bet, have absolutely no need for an SUV, and no clue how to drive one. Biking in the city is like maneuvering through an obstacle course, but at least the drivers there have learned how to watch the road. I've had more close calls in the suburbs, by far.

Oh, and I saw the SUV slow down for a moment, as though the driver saw me eat it, but then it sped up through the intersection once he/she/it saw I wasn't dead. Thanks, dude!

On a completely different note, my cat looks somewhat like Falcore from The Neverending Story.

Quickpost

2007-03-09T17:45:00.000-08:00

"Let's Party" brand prepared crab snacks: yum!

In other news--

(1) I just spent an hour and a half organizing pictures on flickr
(2) My flatmate is an alcoholic
(3) A hoodlum in a low rider and a tophat rolled down his window while I was biking up a steep hill to ask if I had any Grey Poupon
(4) M. and I will spend most of this weekend entertaining his mother and her boyfriend

and

(5) Within the next few weeks I will probably learn what I'm going to do with the next two years of my life.

Sunrise

2007-03-01T22:49:00.000-08:00

I wanted so badly to watch Apocalypse Now and go to bed early last Friday, but instead we danced all night and stayed up to watch the sunrise, pictured here doing its best imitation of a nuclear explosion.

At first staying up until daybreak sounded like a bad idea. Then, when I was up on the roof looking east, it looked like a good idea; but on Saturday, when I woke up at 6:12pm and the sun was setting and my head was still pounding, it felt like a very, very bad idea all over again.

Best photo of my flatmate ever taken, best Leffe ad ever made, both, or neither?

I don't understand how M. was comfortable with a(nother) weekend of hard partying right before his Ph.D. interviews. Methinks he's made of much sturdier stuff than I.

Correction: Party Like It's 1997

2007-02-23T16:49:00.000-08:00

It was the high-school party weekend I never had. Namely, it would have been much cooler and more appropriate ten years ago; and besides, I feel way too old for this stuff now.

First, our big raucous house party was shut down by the cops. The cops! Policemen with flashlights! We think they were looking for drugs, since it was fairly early Friday evening in a youthful neighborhood, making their "noise complaint" justification ring somewhat false. Or maybe they were trolling for seventeen-year-olds sneaking shots of Jagermeister. Regardless, we clearly weren't doing anything illegal, but they stormed through anyway and ordered us all to go home.

Amusingly, hardly anyone listened to them. People held their ground and stared back dumbly. From what I heard, the cops resorted to threatening the apartment's residents: "We're going to wait outside in the car, and if we hear the music come back on we reserve the right to arrest everyone in the building!"

It was equally amusing how Sam (bartender flatmate) and some of the other party-throwers reacted to the shutdown: they turned off the music and smoked weed instead. Take that, power-tripping agents of state coersion.

Earlier in the party, before the cops, I actually ran into someone I knew in high school. And not only someone who went to school with me, but my old nemesis, my first-ever true enemy: the only person, as far as I know, who has called me a "frigid bitch." The guy had his reasons--I readily admit that he was the inspiration of an unflattering comic I drew for over three years. He was outraged when he found out about it. So, talking to him now, 500 miles and six years removed from high school, was jarring. And creepily reminiscent of the "best" days of my life. (Those are supposed to be high school, right?)

Also, this being a Valentine's Day party, I was hit on by:
1. A friend's forty-year old boss
2. A thuggish-looking white stoner who invited my boyfriend to "do some doses" in the park the following day
3. A nondescript drunk who called me "Darling" and then asked to kiss me
while my boyfriend was standing less than two feet away
4. One friendly and mostly agreeable person. What amused me was the following exchange:

Him: Will you give me your number?
Me: I have a boyfriend.
Him: So what? I have a girlfriend.
Me: Sorry, I don't have a number.

---

The following day, Saturday, consisted of varying levels of stupor. M. and Rockstar Friend woke up painfully early to get bloody marys at this place. I slept in. By late afternoon, though, we were all out at this bar for a barleywine festival (note: barleywine is far stronger than beer), followed by dinner at one of our favorite local sushi bars.

This dinner was notable because Rockstar Friend came along. Rockstar Friend, beyond being accident-prone, is a huge sack of neuroses. One of his many lifelong obsessions has been strict veganism. His veganism was not based on any ethical decision, but instead on a control-freak fastidiousness and, from what I've gleaned from M., an odd compulsion to inconvenience himself and others as much as possible. But in a rather charming way, if that makes any sense.

Rockstar Friend had been vegan since early childhood. But last weekend, for whatever reason, he decided that it was time for him to try sushi. Raw fish, of all things! We sat agog and watched him eat: uni (sea urchin gonads) with a raw quail egg; monkfish liver; toro (fatty tuna belly); fatty salmon belly; fatty hamachi (yellowtail) belly; dungeness crab; and albacore. He said he loved everything except the crab and egg.

From there, we continued to our ex-flatmate Hans's birthday celebration at an after hours club where M., Sam, and Rockstar Friend were scheduled to DJ the opening set. I've been to several of these after-hours clubs--a.k.a. speakeasies--in the last six months, and they always make me think of supply and demand. This is a young, childless town, and there are always thousands of people willing to pay lots of money for the chance to drink and dance 'til dawn. And it's clear that on the other end, there are plenty of people willing to buy space in old office buildings, pad the walls, seal the windows, and trade risk for good money. I wonder how many speakeasy owners pay off the police in exchange for being left alone. In my opinion, such regulations are moronic as well as draconian. (Today's theme: fuck da po-lice! rah-rah-rah!)

In a continuation of today's other theme, "high school party weekend I never had," our next stop was an honest-to-god RAVE. I had nothing to do with it; Rockstar Friend's younger sister led us there. While I suspect that the previous after-hours club had made some arrangements with the local authorities, this place clearly had no such deal. The taxi dropped us off at a freeway underpass with nothing in sight. It was a bad neighborhood, and no one was around. We walked cautiously along a dark, eerily quiet road with no sidewalk, and eventually came upon a cluster of ramshackle, graffitoed, seemingly abandoned industrial buildings. Walking closer, we heard the boom-boom-boom of heavy bass coming from inside.

The doormen--or door-boys, more like--crouched nervously in the entrance. They were uncomfortable about letting us in. Maybe we were too clean, looked too much like narcs. When they finally did open the door, they warned us to slip in quickly and not let too much noise leak out.

The kids at the door were high out of their minds on something. "Ten dollars each," they said. "Or seven."

M. was much bigger than them. "There are a bunch of us here. How about you charge us a group rate?"

"Um, whaddya got?"

There were six of us. We counted the money in our pockets. "Twenty-four bucks."

"All right, that's fine."

It's hard to describe how silly this rave was; sadly, my camera was dead at the time, so there are no pictures. But there were crazy hippies of all ages running around on various kinds of drugs. Punky high school kids mingled with fat, topless, dreadlocked, middle-aged flower children. The "music" in the main room was unbelievably bad, and the drugged-out dancing was even more so. At least there was cheap, decent, home-brewed beer.

While M. stood in line for the beer, I leaned back on a table. One of the hippies immediately saw me and wagged her finger.

"Please don't sit on the table. I spent HOURS arranging all the leaflets and flyers on there and I don't want to have to fix it up again."

I stood up. "Sorry. I didn't realize there was anything on the table."

"Yeah, I mean, I would really appreciate it if people would keep off."

"Ok. I understand."

"It just took SO much time and effort to set it up like that."

"Ok."

Once the hippie left me alone I turned around to see what was on the table. It was piles and piles of graphic vegan propaganda. And it could not have taken more than a few minutes to arrange. Then again, who knows what drugs she was on.

Later, a small, teenage Chinese girl with limited English skills started hitting on Rockstar Friend. "I like music," she told him. "I like boys." That's when he decided it was time to go, so we all walked back to the quiet underpass to try our luck with passing cabs. The first cabbie refused to pick us up, apparently suspecting we were up to no good. But the second one happily took the fare, and we were home by an easy 5 o'clock. In bed probably by 6.

---

Unfortunately, Rockstar Friend decided to wake us up at 11 the next morning for bloody marys and brunch. I don't understand why he hates sleep so much, but I went along grumbling.

Randomly-chosen morals of the story:
1. High-school party weekends can be fun, but mostly I prefer moderation
2. Vegans are usually lame, except for Rockstar Friend
3. Paternalistic regulation sucks
4. Some people still live in the '90s
5. Fuck da po-lice
6. There will always be hippies in this city
7. Bloody marys are best made with horseradish, habanero peppers, limes, and olives
8. Not mentioned in the post, but one secret to a really good grilled cheese sandwich is to sprinkle parmesan cheese on the bread before frying it in butter.

Forgive me for this meandering novella of a post. I can't concentrate on work, and I badly need a break from reading about politics.

I think I will follow this with pictures. I have a glut of them; I took 500 over the weekend.

Party Like It's 1987

2007-02-16T14:22:00.000-08:00

M. and Bartender/DJ Flatmate are throwing a Valentine's Day party tonight with the help of M.'s Rockstar Friend from LA. The last time that Rockstar Friend drove up from LA, his bicycle was run over and smashed to bits by a crazy uninsured driver, his car's transmission blew up so the car was junked, and he ended up sleeping on our couch for an extra, unplanned week. As a result, I didn't sleep for seven days, came to work late every morning, and picked up a nasty, lingering cold. Whenever I ask myself, "Since when am I a disgusting vector for pestilence, a shitty delinquent worker, and a brainless underslept zombie?" I can only answer, "Oh, yeah--ever since the time Rockstar Friend drove up from LA."

So I am bracing myself for the worst. Rockstar Friend is particularly accident- and crazy-prone--he is, for example, the only person I know who has been stabbed--so every possibility is game. He is borrowing a car this time; will it be jacked or get into a wreck? Will he inadvertently bring us a mosquito carrying the West Nile virus? Or will he get us in trouble with the Feds, or the Russian mafia?

Less of an open question is whether my sleep and health will suffer. I answer that now with a confident probably.

The picture above is the flyer M. made for the party. He was going for a corny, smutty, eighties softcore fantasy-mythology look, which I think he accomplished quite well. Art courtesy of this guy.

I Have Become a Blogger Reactionary

2007-02-15T17:00:00.001-08:00

They made me change to New Blogger, but not without a fight. I expect that New Blogger will suck--maybe even more than Old Blogger. Maybe I will move to Wordpress.

M. and I had a lavish Valentine's Day dinner last night, and not because either of us cares a whit about Valentine's Day. My French flatmate left for France this morning, so she and her husband shared a good-bye dinner last night, monopolizing the common space. M. is a spendthrift, so he saw this as a convenient excuse to make a last-minute reservation at a Japanese restaurant. (To him, almost everything is an excuse to make a reservation at a Japanese restaurant.) And it turned out to be a great dinner involving a lot of daiginjo sake.

We came home shortly before midnight, drunk on sake, which is in my opinion the best kind of drunk.

"Let's watch some South Park and go to bed," I proposed. My sleep has been atrocious recently--erratic, restless, and insufficient. I have been showing up to work hours late and tired, too: not exactly a recipe for health and happiness. Or for continued employment, for that matter. So, the thought of going to bed at a reasonable hour was quite appealing.

"No, first I need to play records for a while," M. said, and did.

Clearly vetoed, I sat down at the computer and decided to write in this blog. I am not sure what I would have written last night--only that it would have been highly incoherent and neurotic and maybe even entertaining--but alas! My blogging ambitions were quashed by New Blogger's stubborn insistence that I switch over, the intricacies of said switch-over being hopelessly confusing at the time. Upon which I gave up, roved mindlessly around the Internet, and stumbled upon this video clip of what is possibly the worst TV programming that I have ever seen.

The moral of this story is that New Blogger kills dreams.

But since I am stuck with it now I may as well use it to tag my posts with stupid labels.

Reflections Upon Returning Home From a Bad Party, Having Walked Through Rain to Get There, and Then Going From the Bad Party to Somebody's Apartment,

2007-02-10T04:11:00.000-08:00

Whereupon a Group of Friends and Acquaintances Sat Around a TV Smoking Weed and Watching Music Videos and Eating Cheetos--Except for Me Because I Don't Like Weed or TV and am Generally Anti-Fun--Until I Convinced My Boyfriend to Walk Home With Me in the Rain, Yet Could Not Convince Him to Go to Bed Because He Was/Is High and off His Meds and Wants to Play Records Until at Least 5 Ayem Regardless of What Anyone Thinks, Which Annoys Me Because I Am Too Neurotic to Sleep Before He Does:

Tonight was boring and pointless. This post is boring and pointless. These events are intimately related.

Spies and Whiskey

2007-02-09T17:19:00.000-08:00

Somehow, on Friday night, 4am, I find myself on a balcony in the warehouse district, standing between 1 portly Englishman who used to be a spy for the MI6 and 1 nervous American man who used to be a spy for the NSA. My boyfriend stands across from me, drunk on cheap whiskey, jabbering loudly at a million bpm.

I've barely slept in a week and I feel a cold coming. 75% of me wants nothing more than to go home and sleep. Enough excitement already, or pseudo-excitement as it were. Three hours of failed napping (on accounta my being anxious to the point of handicap); an empty dance floor at a giant local venue; a self-indulgent loft party thrown by and for the techno-DJ underground; and I am more than ready to call it a night.

"You want to stay and talk to these people," says M. "I think you'll be interested." Indeed, I am interested. Interested enough to ignore my exhaustion for the time being and stand outside in the cold, breathing lungfuls of other people's cigarette smoke.

I listen as the ex-spies talk about war with Iran, and intelligence failures, and Iraq, and the 2008 presidential race, and how they came to work as spies, and they thereby keep me interested. So far, so good.

Regrettably, though, whiskey makes a first-class asshole out of my boyfriend. A loud, arrogant asshole who cannot stop talking to save his life. For instance.

NSA Guy: I think this is important because--

M.: No, no, NO! You're wrong and I'll tell you why. [insert long, pedantic speech on a political, scientific, mathematical, linguistic, musical or other topic].

NSA Guy: I understand, but I still disagree with you because--

M.: Well, I think I have some credibility here because I just got published in [prestigious science journal]. Anyway, as I was saying, [insert interminable speech].

MI6 Guy: I agree with NSA here, I think--

M.: Well, *I* think [insert position] and that's legitimate because I'm smart and my girlfriend told me something to that effect, and my girlfriend reads The Economist and blogs.

Me: (embarrassed) I do read The Economist and blogs, but that hardly makes me an expert. I think we should at least listen to what these guys have to say since they have way more experience than I do.

Yet it is nearly impossible to do any such thing. M. keeps talking. It is six AM now, and he keeps talking. I am a zombie at this point and our new acquaintances are rubbing their eyes.

If I could, I would hereby ban M. from whiskey for ever.

The necessary disclaimer here--for M., if he ever reads this--is that he does not typically act in this way. My guess is that his rantings were a product of (a) too much whiskey, as I've already said; (b) a very, very long time off his meds; and (c) the euphoria of getting his work published. Moreover, this is the only example that comes to mind of my boyfriend having seriously embarrassed me as opposed to the reverse.

---

Bonus round--the intelligence guys predicted the following.
(1) A McCain presidency
(2) No war with Iran

I do, however, take their predictions with "a grain of salt" as they say: on (1) because they were experts in international not domestic affairs, and on (2) because both retired from their government jobs during the Clinton years, presumably giving them little insiders' insight into the workings of the current administration.

Kauai 1

2007-02-02T17:50:00.000-08:00

Kauai 2

2007-02-02T17:45:00.000-08:00

Kauai 3

2007-02-02T17:44:00.000-08:00

Kauai 4

2007-02-02T17:43:00.000-08:00

Kauai 5

2007-02-02T17:42:00.000-08:00

Kauai 6

2007-02-02T17:41:00.000-08:00

Kauai 7

2007-02-02T17:40:00.000-08:00

Kauai 8

2007-02-02T17:19:00.000-08:00

Kauai

2007-02-02T16:11:00.000-08:00

In a word, unreal.

In more words, by our second day there we were already scheming to find a way back. Now, a tentative plan:

1. Achieve academic success in a variety of fields
2. Acquire capital
3. Over decades, build an empire
4. Do not retire; instead, expand empire
5. Steer ample progeny into strategic industries
6. Buy holiday mansion on beautiful tropical island
7. Remodel mansion on beautiful tropical island
8. Paradise

At least, that's what our boss has done. And how it's worked out for him.

I have never known a truer capitalist, a truer empire-builder--a truer American, really--than my octogenarian boss. And I mean that in the best possible way. I wish I could tell his story here, as it's remarkable on a million dimensions, but the last time I wrote too freely of my boss I earned myself a list of brand-new enemies.

Somehow, the man himself was conspiculously absent from that list. I still wonder whether that's because old men have no use for grudges; or, more plausibly, whether something peculiar to his character made my sins seem irrelevant to him.

I am someone who keeps grudges, who takes offense and who is often slow to forgive. I'd rather not be, but so I am. Yet I'm still young, with relatively few experiences: compared with my boss, I exist in a small space. Maybe I have no sense of perspective. Such petty blights as grudges could very well recede to insignificance against the background of a long, full life.

---

Soon there will be pictures.

Science and Debauchery

2007-01-19T17:53:00.000-08:00

Apparently being a published scientist involves scheduling interviews and otherwise acting as your own PR agent. Who knew? M. has been running around trying to manage what looks to me like a science-media frenzy. But as I told him yesterday, unless his stuff ends up in the science section of The Economist I will remain unimpressed. Well--that's not strictly true, but an article in my favorite news magazine would definitely win me over for life.

On Monday, unsuspecting, I went to a workplace holiday party with Bartender Flatmate as his date. The restaurant he works at rented a swank downtown bar for the occasion, but we got kicked out a few hours too early when an irate co-worker mooned the audience during the gift exchange, I QUIT written on his ass. Restaurant workers are a rowdy bunch, and soon the whole inebriated lot surged into the quiet street and into an empty, ill-prepared bar.

Sober I wasn't, but still I think I was the most sober person there. Strangers approached me and drawled all sorts of nonsensical things. Bartender Flatemate pointed out his workplace crushes one by one and, later, smoking on the street, confessed to his "#1" that he liked her. One girl, who acted as though she was on speed but was probably just maximally "type A," was talking to me about one thing or another when a raving drunk came up to us, pressed us together and shouted, "Two of my favorite girls. TOPLESS FOR THIRTY DOLLARS?"

"Come on, you ain't got thirty dollars," the girl said.

"Hehe, I'm BROKE," the guy admitted. "Free, then?" I think he was looking at my face for at least ten seconds before he realized he'd never met me before.

Maybe the high point of the evening--though there were so many high points--was being hit on by a self-loathing loser while Bartender Flatmate was talking to his crush #1 outside. The guy had long, unkempt hair, equally unkempt facial hair, a long flannel shirt, pot belly, and a bitterly self-conscious way of talking.

Loser: Are you calling someone on the phone?

Me: I'm sending a text message.

Loser: I don't know how to send a text message.

Me: I can show you if you want. It's not that hard.

Loser: No, I don't need text messages. I don't have any friends.

Me: I don't either, but if you send a text message you don't have to talk on the phone.

Loser: So, are you here to pick up somebody? Everyone's here to pick up somebody.

Me: No, I'm not. I'm here with my roommate for his work party.

Loser: Sure, uh huh. I believe you.

Me: Ok, fine, don't believe me.

Exit Loser; enter Bartender Flatmate. But later, Loser returned.

Loser: (Taps me on shoulder) Do you think that guy is cuter than me?

Me: This guy? He's my roommate. I don't know.

Loser: So should I just give up then? Just like every time?

Me: I have a boyfriend. I'm not looking for a date.

Loser: Sure. Well, I have a girlfriend.

Me: Ok. Well, you're welcome to hang around if you want.

Loser: Fine. I'll go. It's clear I'm just not cool enough for you.

After that, I was fully ready to escape. We got back to the apartment at around the same time that M. was arriving from the airport. He was in New York for a three-day uber-bender and his friends' ultra-extravagant wedding. The bride was the Boss's daughter, whose father is taking us to Hawaii next week. I haven't had anything resembling a vacation since March. I am looking forward to it.