5.30.01

a gallon of regular unleaded gas at any station in boise costs (get ready for this): $1.49 9/10

5.29.01

http://www.myvirtualmodel.com

i am deeply amused. basically, it’s a site where you can build your own look-alike barbie. you answer questions about skin tone, eye shape, height, weight, hair, etc, and it puts together a model who is supposed to look like you. you can name her and then she’ll help you shop for clothing on the internet. click here to see a computer-rendered version of me in my undies.

i think my favorite part is that she lectures you just in case you’ve fibbed a bit about the body measurements. oh, and that my choices for bust type were limited to “small-medium” or “medium-large”. i mean, even swimsuits come in more sizes than that. make no mistake – this is a web site for the average-shaped person. the exceptionally-anything need not apply.

now i have to go build a boy. i wonder what sort of measurements i get to specify for the male models…

5.28.01

wow, 5.28 already. the days are slipping past quickly, in that lazy-summer vacation sort of way. i’m not working terribly hard at the the idaho shakespeare festival yet, so i have a lot of my days free. i’m kind of lonely, but i’m also getting a lot of down time that i really really needed. tasks i’ve assigned myself for the summer:

-study for the GRE so that i can really whomp it when i take it later this summer. sibling rivalry is driving me at least as much as the desire to get into a good graduate program.

-work out a bunch and get back in shape. there were formative years in my life in which i thought of myself as a runner, and that was central to my identity…now i’m only a person who runs, or, lately, not even that. a person who once ran, and is now woefully out of shape. of course, i can blame my balance disorder for side-lining me, but the fact still remains that i’ve grown fat and lazy, like a cat in the sunshine.

-finally learn to play the guitar. i have lessons with the Guitar Nazi on mondays. it’s unfortunate that my nickname for him has stuck, since he probably is a nice man. we just got off on the (very) wrong foot involving some miscommunications about my first lesson, and he turns out to be a deeply anal retentive person about scheduling and billing, not to mention practice schedules. imagine my surprise when i met him and discovered that he actually has a hitler moustache. now there’s no going back; he has become the Guitar Nazi.

-read all those big books i bought in iowa city (see 5.7.01), in order to justify having to drag them all over from iowa to sf to idaho.

-convince nick to go backpack around europe with me in the fall. actually, that part of the plan is pretty much taken care of i think. the more difficult task is figuring out how the hell i’m going to pay for it.

-convince everyone in the bay area (and iowa) to come up to idaho and visit me, because i miss them all terribly already.

5.26.01

it’s a little late to share it now, but miss valya sent me the following link: towel day in honor of the late douglas adams. since towel day was yesterday, all there is to do now is go to the web site and look at lots of pictures of ugly people with their towels. alas, it seems that us douglas adams followers are not the snazziest-looking group of people. actually, the european geeks turn out to be much better looking than their geeky american counterparts.

my father dragged my sorry ass out of bed at the ungodly hour of 7 am this morning to go float-tube fishing. for any of you who don’t know, float-tube fishing is really more about the gear that it is the actual catching of fish. it works thus: you step into a giant pair of neoprene waders that go from your toes up to your armpits, so that you’re impervious to the cold and wet. then you put on flippers, and step into a giant inner tube (a real fancy affair, with a canvas cover, a big tall inflatable back rest, zippered pockets for all your fishing supplies, and a canvas seat to sit on, so that your legs dangle straight down into the water.) then everyone duck-waddles backwards into the lake, and you all paddle around, these truncated fisherman – chest and arms rising up out of a donut floating on the lake’s surface. of course, i don’t actually fish, because i think that catch-and-release fishing is barbaric, so i just paddle around and read a book. my father asked me what i’d say if any of the other fisherman (mostly old crusty idaho rancher-type dudes) asked why i wasn’t fishing. i told him i’d just say i didn’t any arms. or i’d reply in swedish. luckily, they left me alone.

the place we went to was absolutely gorgeous. it’s a big pond formed by a bunch of springs out in the middle of the owyhee desert. owyhee county, which is this giant county that makes up the corner of southwestern idaho, has a population density of 1.1 people/square mile. just to give you a comparison value, san francisco county had a population density of 15,502.1 people/square mile in 1996. this place is empty. which is part of its charm. it’s in a small valley surrounded by the craggy basalt cliffs of the rolling hills. there are virtually no trees, but the sage-covered hills are still green at this time of year. it had the potential to be beastly hot, but by about 11 am a thunderstorm started to roll in. so i just drifted around the lake watching the clouds slowly encroach. all around me giant trout rose to feed on the mayflies, breaking the glassy surface of the lake, disappearing with a little “plop” and leaving concentric circles to mark the spot in the water. two-inch blue dragonflies hovered over the water and did fly-bys on my ears, as did the swallows, who are also feeding on the mayflies. the killdeer dipped and soared overhead, making their strange, high, fleeting call. there were big goose families paddling around the lake with us, as well as an ebullient black lab. over the crest of the hill, i could hear cattle lowing from their grazing area (there’s so little water in the owyhee desert that farming is impossible; but it’s excellent land for ranching).

of course, a man-made pond created by damming up a bunch of desert springs does not provide much of a place for trout to breed; the guy who owns the ranch stocks the pond with fish every year and charges people for a year’s permit to fish on that pond. i maintain that fishing in a stocked-pond is cheating, as is fishing with one of those sonar devices that tells you exactly where the fish are. my father agrees with me on the latter point, but not on the former. but then again, i mostly come along on these fishing expeditions so that i can irritate him by telling him how barbaric i think the whole sport really is. summed up, my argument is thus: fishing for food is very different from catch-and-release. now, some might say that catch-and-release seems more humane, since it doesn’t kill the fish. i accept that the in the general food chain, some creatures have to die so that others live. humans eat fish. so, while i don’t care for bopping fish on the head myself, i can understand that fishing for food is simply working within the food chain that nature has created. the fish die a quick death and people get to eat them. on the other hand, in the case of catch-and-release, people tempt the fishies with what looks like food, the hungry fish bite, only to discover that they have a steel hook lodged in their cheek. then, the fisherman spends between 10 minutes and a number of hours trying to land the fish by dragging him in via the hook. once the fish has wrestled himself into a state of exhaustion, the fisherman drags him out of the water where he can’t breath, removes the hook (provided it wasn’t gut-hooked, in which case the fish is a goner), poses for a few photos, and then tosses the fish back in, saying, “oh, it’s okay little fish, you have a big hole in your mouth, but go swim and be free and i’ll trick you again on another day.” okay, so maybe i’m putting those words into the fishermen’s mouths, but you get the idea. the whole thing gives me the creeps if i think too hard about it.

5.23.01

signs i know i’m in idaho:

-no buffy channel, not even with cable.

-no sushi (would you eat raw fish that had to be driven here from the nearest ocean? me neither.)

-everything is CLOSED on sundays. i had forgotten what it’s like to live in a mormon-dominated town.

-i only saw two people who weren’t white all day yesterday.

-i actually saw a woman parking her horse in the 7-eleven parking lot last night. i’m not making this up.

it’s quiet here. when i wake up, i lay in bed and hear only the sound of birds chirruping – no traffic noise, no middle-of-the-night domestic disputes, no sirens – just silence and sounds of nature. don’t get me wrong, i live in a suburb, not in the forest or anything, but compared to my apartment in the haight, this is a little haven of green nature.

5.22.01

douglas adams dies, age 49. i read the first five books in the hitch hiker’s guide series in the space of a week when i was 14 or 15, and was never quite the same afterwards. if anything, at fifteen adding the complete hitch hiker’s collection to one’s reading list is like an instant sentence to enternal nerdom. just ask paul – he knows everything about star trek.

5.21.01

yay! internet access at last! more updates soon, now that my computer is no longer incommunicado.

5.19.01

ah, i am just barely resurfacing amid a tower of boxes and suitcases. the road trip from san fran to boise wasn’t as traumatic as i’d expected; after a half hour of frantic meowing, zeke settled down into a pretty decent car cat. some of the trip’s highlights:

-the middle of nevada, somewhere between winnemucca and the oregon border, is the most desolate high-desert country you’ll find. wide open plains dotted with sage brush and tumble weed and cheet grass for a hundred miles in any direction, running up against dusty purple mountains on the horizon. from the freeway, i noticed an old corrugated-metal trailer parked amongst the weeds. it had a hand-painted sign that said “free parking”. perhaps that’s only funny if you’ve just come from the bay area.

-my father asked to borrow a couple of CDs for the trip, since he was driving the other car. i handed him my CD wallet. his selections: the indigo girls, pink floyd and tori amos. keep in mind that this is a man who votes republican for environmental reasons (shudder), thinks lit crit is “hooey” and used to force me to listen to Patsy Cline when we’d go fly fishing in the backwoods of idaho. i can only guess that he didn’t know what he was getting himself in to.

-one last Freak of the Week for my last day in san francisco: my mother dropped me and a few boxes off at the greyhound station so that i could ship them. i told her to hover in the taxi-only parking lane, and to go around the block if she needed to. apparently, while i was inside, this man came up to the car wearing a bicycle tire stretched around his chest, over his arms so that he could only lift them below the elbow, and started screaming “hey lady, this is a taxi-only stand! get the fuck out of the way!” and other such charming things. i guess he was so persistent that my mother began screaming ugly things back at him, and by the time i got back to the car, she had been forced to move it out of fear that he was actually going to attack the car. hehe, it seems my mother had her fill of sf in a very short period of time.

so now i’m back in idaho, and the reality that i’m going to be here for the next five months is starting to sink in. i miss california already, but this is a nice way to vacation. idaho is beautiful in the summer, and life here is just so much easier. well, with the exception of this household. we now have two cats, a bird and a dog in the house, which doesn’t sound like much until you consider the logistics: the younger cat, zeke, wants to eat the bird, but the elder cat, midnight, does not because once the bird cage fell on him and he has been afraid of it ever since. midnight has FIV (feline version of HIV, which is rampant in outdoor housecats), which he could communicate to zeke if they were ever to get in a brawl. serra, the golden retriever, wants to eat both cats. zeke wants to eat the golden retriever. so at this point, we have to keep midnight away from zeke but not the dog or the bird, serra away from zeke and midnight but not the bird, and zeke away from everyone. this will not be a simple task.

went to see my friend stephanie get married yesterday. she married this wonderful british chap named simon, and all the american groomsman had begun acquiring british accents by the end of the party. the wedding was pretty much picture-perfect, and the reception was held in the boise depot, which is this classy old train station up on a hill with a fabulous view of the boise front (the mountains that wrap around the north-west side of the valley). there were lots of people i haven’t seen since high school there, so the party took on a sort of high school reunion feel to it. did you know that it’s environmentally unsound to throw rice at weddings now? apparently the birds eat the rice and then it swells up in their tummies and can kill them. so the proper choices are birdseed or bubbles. we blew lots of soap bubbles into the wind whilst stephanie and simon ran out the steps of the church and were whisked away in a horse-drawn carriage.

i have the house to myself tonight. so what am i planning? i’m going to blockbuster to rent the last four tapes of the BBC pride and prejudice, since i only managed to see the first two at carolyn’s pride and prejudice party last week. pride and prejudice happen to be the names of the breasts of a friend of mine, who probably prefers that i not name her. mine are named sense and sensibility. the left one is sense and the right is sensibility. i’d like to blame alcohol for this, but i think that would be a lie.

5.15.01

hehe, it seems that libraries are finding the most-frequently stolen book to be the bible. go figure – those gideons must be getting slack on the job or something. courtesy of the san francisco chronicle:

“In Salt Lake City, Carson City, and Jacksonville, Fla., copies of the Bible tend to walk out of public libraries and never return. Never mind that “Thou Shalt Not steal” stuff. In Fremont, it’s exam-preparation books to become a police officer. “Gives one pause,” a librarian in that East Bay city said. In Benicia, books about “the occult, car repair and sexuality” disappear regularly, while in Oakland, it’s anything about how to grow pot at home, pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.”

my car is in the shop today, so i’m back to riding the muni, so…that means it’s time for the Muni Freak of the Week: today’s freak was this young man, about my age, walking down market st between 8th and 9th. he was carrying a bunch of flowers, all wrapped up in paper like he’d come straight from the flower market, and was wearing a crash helmet like the sort that serious skateboarders wear. in his right hand, he held a rope which was connected to what looked like giant, cylindrical stone, about two feet wide and maybe a foot in diameter. there was a hole drilled through the middle so that the rope came out each end of the column, and he was rolling it down the street like you might walk a dog. it couldn’t have been stone, because it didn’t look very heavy, but it otherwise looked just like one of the wheels of a flintstones vehicle.

5.13.01

ah, yes, i apologize for allowing the gin to post last night. gin never writes things that are untrue; it just doesn’t check with me first. i have no idea when this post’ll actually go up since blogger has been about as reliable as aol lately. my impending move is finally real: the bookcases are empty and i’m surrounded by towers of boxes. damn, i have a lot of books. how did this happen? i always tell myself that i ought to start getting books from libraries, but the truth is, i love owning books. after i finish a book, it’s like a little trophy for me to put on the shelf and occasionally refer to or loan out. and the paperbacks are so pretty, compared to ugly old bound library editions. i have a moral (well, financial, really) obligation not to purchase hard cover books because they are just too expensive not to mention heavy and large. but that doesn’t mean that i won’t spend double to get the nice paperback edition rather than the cheap super-market edition if there is a choice. in college i’d always opt for the new books if the used ones actually looked used and had other people’s insipid notes in the margins.

right now i’m wading through neal stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. i just read his earlier book, Snow Crash, and really enjoyed it but i’m having a tougher time with Cryptonomicon. i think that it’s not a book that you can read in short 10 minute bursts, which is the way that i get a lot of my reading done, on bus stops and such, plus it’s about world war II, which i didn’t know before i’d started it. and i have a rule not to read literature or watch films about war, basically because contemplating how shitty humanity can be really gets me down. unfortunately i also have a rule that i always have to finish a book once i’ve started it, so i have to read it. same thing happened to me with martin amis’s Time’s Arrow the other day. an ex-boyfriend recommended it to me, and i picked it up at a used bookstore without actually knowing what it was about. now that i’ve read it, i suspect that he suggested it out of some sort of vindictive ex thing. incidentally, time’s arrow is actually an amazing book, just in that terrible sort of way. the basic premise is that it tells the store of a man, Tod T. Friendly who once was a doctor in a nazi concentration camp, who later moved to america, changed his identity, and spent the rest of his life living out the guilt of what he’d done. but here’s the hook: the story is narrated by this doppelganger, this alternate being with a separate consciousness but no physical presence, who is trapped inside Tod T. Friend’s head, condemned to live out every moment of Tod’s life backwards. as in, the book starts the moment when Tod dies, and moves backwards through life (“everyday when we finish the paper, we take it to the store”) until the moment when Tod is born. weird, upsetting shit. but there’s no doubt that martin amis’s got talent. it just might be talent that i can do without, squeamish as i am.