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). &ltplbtht&gt 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.