4.30.01

the sign at work this morning (sic):

this elevator is "out" of order.

the elevator came anyway. there is a ceiling panel missing inside the elevator, so you can look up in the elevator shaft and watch the pulleys and stuff sail by, and a cool elevator-shaft breeze blows down on you if you stand underneath it. the elevator also has these really cool buttons - they look like buttons but they don't actually press in, and when you skin makes contact with the surface of the button, it lights up. but i've discovered that if you get really really close but don't actually touch the surface, a spark will jump from your finger to the button and light it up. look, ma, no hands! i confess to being the person who presses all six floors before getting off the elevator every day.

4.29.01

*yawn* up till 4am + afternoon in the sun + red wine = sleepy jen. good weekend.

4.26.01

so perhaps i'm the last one to have heard of this british film that came out last month, "memento." the only tv channel i can consistantly tune in shows three adverts an hour for "freddy got fingered", but skipped over "memento" completely.

anyway, go look at the web site now. it's by far the coolest intro i've ever encountered. you'll need flash to really appreciate it, and it's pretty interactive so take some time to play with it. spooky. i read some reviews, which all said it was fabulous, but they also spoiled a bunch of the plot surprises, so i wouldn't advise reading the reviews if you think you want to see it. of course, i'm such a weenie about horror movies that i probably can't go see it. but i'd go watch the flash trailer a few more times, it's way cool and free.

also, this is a bit repetitive given that i get most of my traffic from metameat, but Ugly Rooms for the Beautiful People is damn funny, particularly if you have a lot of time to web surf at work, like me.

4.25.01

i have this page-a-day calendar on my desk that offers 5 things to be happy about each day. i didn't really appreciate how nice the calendar is until last year when i departed from my usual happy thoughts and got the shakespearean-insult-a-day calendar. lets just say that after about january 3rd, being insulted first thing in the morning stops being so fun. anyway, today's page (technically, it's monday's page - i'm a bit behind) reads:

vintage posters
tulips and warm breezes
iron kettle soup pots
really thinking something out
savoir faire

first of all, dictionary.com says that savoir-faire can only be spelled with the hyphen. but the really curious part is the pen-and-ink illustration in the corner. it appears to be a vintage poster advertising Le Moulin Rouge. underneath the title it says, "La Goulue", which altavista's babelfish so helpfully translated to "The Goulue" for me. there is the silhouette of a man wearing a top hat, smoking a cigar, and apparently ogling the dancing girl on the stage behind him. she's holding up her petticoats and kicking up her legs with great abandon. the curious part, tho, is that there appear to be doughnuts flying out of her skirt and all over the stage.

when i was 19 and in paris for the first time, callie and i met these guys from jordon who tried to seduce us and take us to the moulin rouge. where, presumably, they would have made us very drunk and then tried to kidnap us or something. they kept bringing up the subject of american visas/passports and the need for american wives in order to obtain such documents. the picnic dinner we were eating was this still-frozen casserole, so callie tried to thaw it by putting it on the hood of a warm truck. when our new friend grew tired of her wacky antics and ordered her to sit down next to him, we knew it was time to make an exit. we lost them somewhere on the metro.

i don't like paris. and more importantly, paris doesn't like me. on one visit it tried to sell me to strange foreign men, on another i was tear-gassed by the french police after stumbling into an anti-american political riot. other adventures include getting lost in the ghetto late at night and being chased by these creepy guys until we bumped into (i kid you not) a group of american boy scouts who escorted us back to the metro. the last time i tried to escape from paris, the eurostar broke down and we were trapped underneath the english channel for several hours. while i was coming down with apocalyptic food poisoning. on my 21st birthday. paris hates me.

4.24.01 - later

i'm feeling slightly better about the world now, since my lunch break consisted of: yummy sandwich at briazz, a walk across union square in the sunshine and get hey baby'ed by some not-so-sketchy sketchy guys (go on, you know you like the ego boost too), go to borders and curl up in an armchair to read the last 30 pages of the book that i misplaced (snow crash, by neal stephenson). then back outside to visit with caroline the cat lady (see february archives) and her new kitties. on the way back to the office nick calls and tries (perhaps sucessfully) to convince me to blow off a job offer i have and go to europe with him next fall. when i get back to the office, miesha gives me a big fat piece of her birthday cheesecake, which i am now wallowing in.

4.24.01

ah, fortune, thou art a strumpet - now that i've spent the past two months fussing and stressing over finding a new job, finally found one, signed and mailed the contract, and given notice on my apartment, a.c.t. has offered me a permanent position (the woman who was on maternity leave decided not to reclaim her job after all). <plbtht> is all i have to say to that. so now i'm frantically trying to document everything i do here (i know i know, i not much you say - how else would i have all this time to update my blog?) so that whomever they hire, probably after i'm already gone, will have some vague clue. hurumph.

4.23.01

i replaced my stolen car stereo, because just one drive to redwood city and back in silence was murder. without the stereo, i was forced to create music myself, and trust me, there was a reason why my sixth grade choir teacher suggested i try out for band instead. plus, the only CD i have completely memorized is RENT, and when i have to do all the different characters myself, believe me, things get ugly.

so now iÕm just keeping my fingers crossed that no one steals the new stereo between now and when i leave for idaho in three weeks. iÕve come to realize that locking oneÕs car doors slows down a stereo thief by approximately 8 seconds while he jimmies the door open. this makes me feel better, since i actually have a nasty habit of forgetting to lock my car doors at night - what can i say? i'm a small-town girl lost in a big city, i do stupid stuff like that. i also got conned into giving this guy ten bucks and my business card once, because he said he was going to mail me the money just as soon as he got back to his mom's place in sacramento. eight months later, iÕm still checking the empty mailbox for my ten dollars. i want my faith in humanity back, asshole.

4.22.01

slumber party with lauren and val. they gave me this t-shirt for my birthday that has a big strip of velcro running across the chest. it comes with a set of velcro letters so that you can make your own t-shirt message. the evening went:

GIRL DRINK
BRAVE GIRL
DRUNK
HEY JEALOUSY
HANGOVER
STARBUCKS IS LIKE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
JITTERS

okay, i didn't have enough Rs to actually make the one about starbucks, but i would have otherwise.

driving home, i passed the billboard on 101 that always drives me nuts. it says:

NETWORK SUPPORT THE INTEL WAY:
60/60/24/7/365

am i the only one who recognizes the irony in this, given intel's problems with floating-point calculation errors a few years back?

4.21.01

look, this is my neck:




okay, well not really my neck, but the angry red and yellow bars correspond to the kinks in my neck. so now i'm paying some clown in suspenders $150/week to crack my neck in all sorts of "ohmigod he's going to paralyze me!" sorts of ways. can you tell that i'm terrified of chiropractors?

4.20.01

woke up to the wet sound of traffic in rain. cars shusshing by in the frantic morning commute. grey light filtering in through the curtains. i'm inclined to pull a pillow over my head and go back to sleep, in fact that is what i do, but zeke won't leave me alone. that poor animal is ruled by an unearthly body clock, and 7:45 means that it's time to march around the bed going "merrrow!" and attacking anything that moves under the covers. slowly he drags me from unconsciousness.

two hours later i'm at work and it's still raining. i can't hear it now, but peering through my boss's office to the window, i can see it falling straight down in very fine drops. i want coffee, but i know i shouldn't keep wasting $2.50/day just because i like buying coffee from the cute chinese couple at cafe dolci. i actually prefer the process of buying coffee to the actual drinking of it, which leaves me jittery and strung out. linda calls me "miss jennifer", and she and daniel never forget a customer. usually they've got your order half-way made by the time you get to the front of the line. cafe dolci is the smallest cafe ever - there is room for two, maybe three customers to pack into the shop, and behind the counter linda and daniel move around one another in a space the size of an airplane bathroom. you can tell they're married immediately by the way they communicate in half sentences, gestures, a mixture of chinese and english.

4.19.01

no, i didn't fall down a well or get kidnapped by aliens or anything exciting, i've just been a very boring person these past few days, busy doing boring grown-up things like figuring out my new job, where i'm going to live, what to do with my furniture, doing battle (and losing) with the health insurance demons, etc. i made one trip each to the dentist, chiropractor and acupuncturist in the past two days, so i sort of feel like a car that's just been detailed. only i didn't get the lemon scent or the protective wax coating.

the only noteworthy thing that's happened to me recently was at the bus stop this morning. i was sort of checking out this cute alterna girl who was walking by, and above my head was one of those little thought bubbles that said, "i wonder if my hair could do that?" and suddenly she veered toward me and spit her gum on me. what? afterwards, she was terribly embarrassed, particularly when it took us five minutes to locate the gum wad, which had actually flown directly into my jacket pocket. it seems she was aiming for the garbage can, but when she blew the gum out, it few right under that little stand-up cover, out the other side, and into my coat. she thanked me for being so good natured about having gum spat on me. i really should have asked her for some hair tips while i had the upper hand, but just then the bus came along and i was late for work anyway.

4.13.01
it can't be a good thing when friday the thirteenth coincides with good friday. it sounds like a formula for a horror movie, doesn't it? something with lots of catholic iconography and the dead rising from their graves. well, in honor of paraskavedekatria - a compendium of the weird things i saw that amused me this week:

monday: i was walking down fillmore street on the way to the bus when i passed this pg&e worker guy whose shovel was on fire. he was standing there, kinda laconically poking at the rubble which used to be a street before JackHammer Man got to it, and all the while there were big flames shooting up off the metal scoop of his shovel. further down the street i passed another idle worker whose shovel had gone out, but was still smoking. he didnÕt seem terribly concerned about the matter, either.

tuesday: Òsex is naked shopping; never trust bed moneyÓ Ð- thereÕs this toy at work that consists of eight wooden blocks that have a different word printed each of their six sides, and you can rearrange and rotate the blocks to make eight-word phrases. it's sort of like magnetic poetry, only more limiting. given the word choices, its hard not to make sentences about sex.

wednesday: one of the category signs that hangs over the isles at walgreen's reads Òcloset needs.Ó i love the idea of a section of the store devoted to all the things that people do in secretÉyou could find dirty magazines, big bags of chocolate, bloody mary mix, work out videos (see entry for thursday), soap opera reruns, --insert your closet habit here--, and so forth.

thursday: nude yoga and tai chi on dvd. i was browsing around amazon.com yesterday and happened upon the dvd section, and one of the recommended picks was nude yoga. i donÕt know how i feel about this, since amazon supposedly bases their recommendations on what you have purchased previously. i guess iÕve been buying too many cyberpunk/sci-fi/teenage boy books or something. of course, innocent little me clicked on the link, thinking, Òmaybe itÕs some sort of liberating nudist-colony sort of thing, only you get to practice it in the privacy of your own home.Ó most of the reviews read like this (sic):

ÒI find this DVD to be very relaxing. The models are hot and very naked...which is why one would purchase this DVD to beging with. I am calm and at peace with the universe watching this. Freeze frame and zoom can give an extra kick, howerver it is not really necessary. Light a candle, smoke something, and enjoy. Shaving certain hair is so very proper. Go to sleep or wake up to this one and your dreams or your day will go a lot better.Ó

ÒI found this approach to yoga professional and motivating. My husband seems to like it too. I'm glad we bought it.Ó

yeah. what husband wouldnÕt want his wife to indulge in nude yoga videos? the irritating thing is now that iÕve clicked on the link to see it, the link is marked in a different color so that anyone looking over my shoulder can see what iÕve been looking at. iÕm not really a nude-workout-video pervert, i just have nudist tendencies that fight with my catholic tendencies.

friday: todayÕs weirdness was the muni freak of the week. he managed to hijack our bus at the corner of market and 9th by stepping halfway into the bus and hanging halfway out so that the driver couldnÕt shut the door. he was offering up various medicines in a hotdog-at-the-ballpark fashion: Òherbal vitamins, tylenol, zinc. i got ginseng, thatÕs right folks, IÕve got ginseng! get yer herbal vitamins today!Ó he was wearing a ski hat, the kind with ear flaps, pulled down low over his brow, and carried a mcdonaldÕs cup that he jingled everywhere. (he didnÕt appear to have any vitamins with him). oh, and all the exposed skin on his body was painted silver.

4.12.01
today's dilemma: buying a domain name. the two best contenders are:

www.slithytove.org
www.slithy-tove.net

some yahoo from berkeley went and registered www.slithytove.com and www.slithytove.net and of course isn't using them for anything good, he's just sitting on them until they expire next year. domain name parking sucks.
which should it be? send me your vote.

ooh, attack of the afternoon sleepies. i struggle bravely foward, trying to do SOMETHING useful at work today.

4.11.01
there are some deficiencies in the english language that have really been bugging me lately. in particular, it's the shortage of pronouns that bothers me: we lack a non-gender specific third-person singular pronoun. and it's not like we don't need it. take a look at yesterday's entry. i wrote the whole thing using the ambiguous "they" to refer to the person who broke into my car, then decided that it sounded ridiculous and changed it all to "he". but how do i know it was a guy who broke into my car? of course, one can always revert to "s/he" or "he or she", but try keeping that up for more than a sentence or two and it gets pretty weighty. the romance languages handle this ambiguity by making the masculine version of the third-person pronoun the default term when gender is uncertain. this isn't ideal, though, since it exposes the inherent patriarchy embedded into the very structure of the language. so i think we need a whole new pronoun just for cases like this.

we're also lacking a second-person plural pronoun. the phrase "you guys" is gaining acceptance as an actual pronoun. never mind how tacky it sounds (and don't get me wrong, for lack of a better word, i use it constantly myself), what happens when you want to make it possessive? "you guyses"? using "you" and "your" for both singular and pluar needs just isn't cutting it any more. there are lots of times when you need to differentiate.

if english is a growing language, why doesn't it grow something useful, like some pronouns, instead of just appending more phrases like 'wazzzup!"? if a star fish needs a new arm, it grows another arm, rather than getting some flashy neon lights or something installed. really, i think this tells us that in matters of practicality, prehistoric sea creatures are showing us up. at least they have exoskeletons. wouldn't that be cool?

4.10.01
i've been having these excessively vivid dreams lately. sort of like dreaming in technicolor and surround-sound after spending 22 years dreaming in black-and-white stereo or something. i blame the chinese herbs my acupuncturist makes me take. last night i dreamt i was somewhere outdoors, like a park, with my younger brother matt. he had just thrown his pepsi can on the ground and walked away and i was furious at him for littering. i began to yell at him, drill-sergeant style, to PICK IT UP NOW! i'm frustrated b/c i'm powerless to control his actions, and i know this, and it makes me yell even more forcefully. finally matt gets tired of my hissy fit and he goes over to this girl who's having a picnic, takes her pepsi, opens it, empties it onto the ground, and throws it away with a "are you happy new?" look at me. now i'm horrendously embarrassed that i have to walk over to her, give her 75 cents, and explain to her that my brother stole her pepsi when she wasn't looking.

while i don't really buy into the jungian sort of dream interpretation, i do think that dreams reflect what our brains have been chewing on lately. i'm sure there's something in there about being frustrated at my own lack of power/control, yet i feel burdened with a constant sense of responsibility. yeah, that kinda sounds like me.

someone broke into my car over the weekend. as near as i can tell, he didn't steal anything except the change in the ash tray, and he was even finicky enough to throw back all the british coins that were mixed in. the glove box (the contents of which were strewn across the driver's seat) contained 5 years worth of oil-change receipts, expired registration cards, a disposable razor, some carly simon cassette tapes, a spoon, some packets of ketchup, a honda manual, and absolutely nothing of significant value. the only shitty part is that he removed the face-plate of my stereo. this is shitty because the my stereo doesn't have a removable face plate. so after snapping off all the plastic tabs and connectors on the face plate, he tried to pull the guts out, succeeding only in bending all the metal parts. he left the dead face plate on the floor of the car, all those delicate gold connectors wallowing in the gritty carpet. well poo to you, i say. i don't think i'm capable of driving my car without music.

the real question is: is fate trying to tell me something? i spent all weekend in idaho trying to decide if i wanted to move there for a while or stick around sf. well, idaho was nice and familiar and safe and cold, and then i got back to downtown sf and i looked around at all the bustle and sunshine and chaos, and was like, "i can't leave this behind!" well, at least i'll have to leave my car stereo behind. hmm. more soul-searching to be done.

4.9.01
hannah writes to offer another poetic example of men comparing women to cars. or, in this case, i think it's comparing cars to women. but who can tell, since it's e.e. cummings?

she being Brand

-new; and you
know consequently a
little stiff i was
careful of her and (having

thoroughly oiled the universal
joint tested my gas felt of
her radiator made sure her springs were O.

K.) i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her

up,slipped the
clutch (and then somehow got into reverse she
kicked what
the hell) next
minute i was back in neutral tried and

again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing (my

lev-er Right-
oh and her gears being in
A 1 shape passed
from low through
second-in-to-high like
greasedlightning) just as we turned the corner of Divinity

avenue i touched the accelerator and give

her the juice,good

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ ÊÊ ÊÊÊÊ(it
was the first ride and believe i we was
happy to see how nice she acted right up to
the last minute coming back down by the Public
Gardens i slammed on

the
internalexpanding
&
externalcontracting
brakes Bothatonce and

brought allof her tremB
-ling
to a:dead
stand-
;Still)
Ê Ê ÊÊÊÊÊ-e.e.cummings

today's bit of wisdom also comes from hannah, since i'm so dead tired that i'm completely devoid of my own gems: "...mr. cummings is easily blameable for a lot of really pretentiously line-broken high school poetry... but where would the world be without pretentious high school kids?"

exaCtly,
Ê Ê Ê I:say-

4.6.01
i'm off to the wilds of idaho (no internet access - how primative!) for the next three days, so in the mean time, you'll have to entertain yourself by reading more about the whole man-is-inherently-bad thing. here>, some very smart friends of mine consider the issue of anonymous behavior on the internet.

4.5.01
paul completes what i was trying to say yesterday, only with more eloquence. that's why he's the writer, and i do things like catch severed heads for a living.

have i ever told that story? well, probably, but that's too bad because this is my blog and i'll cry if i want to. anyway, one summer during college i worked as an assistant stage manager at the idaho shakespeare festival. there's a scene in cymbeline where the two brothers cut off cloten's head and say that they're going to go throw it in the creek. so the actor chucks the head over the back of the set where, i, the lowly, underpaid asm, am waiting to catch it. by the end of the season we had a regular football game going back there. when i wasn't catching severed heads, i was either making fake blood or schlepping around an entire moose carcass. at least i'm rarely bored with this line of work.

4.4.01
they're rioting in tucson. the photographer gets some serious kudos - he must have been right in the middle of the mob. paul says he takes some sort of perverse pride in this; i have to say i think it sucks. take a look at the picture of the burned-out shell of a motor home. that trailer used to house a family with a nine-month old baby who sold hotdogs on the street corner for a living. so some angry basketball fans decided that destroying these people's home would make them feel better? what? seriously, mob mentality is a freaky thing. it's horrifying the way that personal responsibility vanishes in the midst of a mob scene, and ordinary people do extraordinarily bad things. it makes you wonder about human nature - do we all have a destructive, violent nature lurking just beneath the surface, waiting for a moment of anonymity to free it? is the threat of social reprimand the only thing that keeps us in line?

4.3.01

i've been asked to the prom.

given that like half my friends from high school are either married or are getting married this spring, this really makes me feel much better. while they're all fussing over where the relatives are going to stay, morgage rates, and whether little timmy can go to advanced pre-school this year, i can skim the pages of seventeen magazine picking out the perfect prom hair. nevermind the fact that the prom is paul's graduate program's end-of-year formal, and that most of the writers will be there with their spouses anyway, i'm still enjoying feeling young for once. ah, the burden of being fiscally responsible is such a difficult one.

this is the story of my search for a summer position with the idaho shakespeare festival:

december: the artistic director, charlie fee, comes to a.c.t. to hold auditions. i give up my saturday to be his casting assistant. halfway thru the day i drop a little hint - would love to come back to idaho and stage manage for the fesival again this year. he says, send me a resume.
january: i send a resume.
february: i call. no answer. i leave a polite message.
february: no one ever calls back. i send resumes to 15 other theaters.
march: i call. no answer. i keep calling until there is an answer. charlie says he's still hiring stage managers, he has my resume in front of him, he confirms that i'm available for all the required dates. he says he'll be making his mind up and calling early next week.
april: i wait three weeks, and call again. no answer. i call until there is an answer. charlie says he's still hring stage managers, he has my resume in front of him, he confirms that i'm available for all the required dates. he says he'll be making his mind up and calling early next week.

needless to say, as of today, i'm still unemployed.

4.2.01

I have three words for yesterday: too much wine.

meisha and her gang of foul-mouthed but thoroughly delightful friends kidnapped me and took me wine tasting. only, no one told me until we'd been on the road for an hour that we weren't going to napa, we were going to medocino, which, for those of you non-california types, is three hours north of san francsico. so there were six of us crammed into a subaru wagon, plus six hours of driving, plus four wineries, 2 crates of wine purchased, some strange cheeses and bread hastily consumed in the car between wineries, and then sushi upon returning to the city. at the first winery, there were eight wines to sample, which we went through in a leisurely manner (we stopped to feed the baby goats a bottle of milk). at the second, there were just three, plus the family golden lab to play with. at the third stop, we blitzed through about six wines before moving 100 yards down the road to the fourth winery. i knew i was in trouble when we walked in and the tasting list had 16 wines on it. fortunately, i had charged meisha with preventing me from puchasing more than one bottle of wine, since i had a hunch that my perspective on my current economic position might change once i'd sampled a few wines. somehow i found myself arriving home at 10:30 last night with a tummy full of sushi, a bottle of sweet reisling under one arm, and a jar of gourmet mustard under the other. what? i don't even like mustard. i have no idea.

4.1.01

Lord, what fools these mortals be!