Blue-laced shoes etc

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!

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:

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.

Is Our Lushes Learning? (Answer: No)

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.

The Mittens Affair

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.

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.

Awkward Social Gathering, Version 49012.5

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.

I Hate Fun

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.