Awkward Lodgings

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

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

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:

Speak, Raspberry Ale

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.

Bracing Myself for Going Home

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.

Because All the World Needs Is One More Blogger

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.)

Customer Service

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

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

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?

Now, For Some Perspective

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.

An Interlude for Navel-Gazing and Self-Diagnosis

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

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

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

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:

Sober Month Is Dead; Long Live Sober Month

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:

A Tantrum

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.

Quickpost

"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

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.

Party Like It's 1987

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

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.