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.

5.12.01

all those junior-high-school-what-if-no-one-comes-to-my-party fears were very nearly realized today, as guests kept calling and canceling or just going MIA. somehow i guess i failed to communicate to the people i invited that this was my going-away-for-an-unspecified-yet-long-period-of-time party, and that it actually meant a lot to me that they came. there were plenty of valid excuses: out of the state/country, stuck in the theatre, theses are due tuesday, and so forth, as well as some that were just plain flaky. but it all adds up to the fact that i’m moving away on wednesday and won’t get to see a lot of these people again for some time. the gang showed up tho, and 7 of us managed to chomp through most of the food i’d made, and we had a very merry time. we watched the KFOG-Kabom fireworks from alma square. fireworks are the only thing in this world that can still make me feel like a child – thrilled and awed and overwhelmed and very very tiny.

as the last of the guests left, i stood on the street and watched them move away as a group, and a voice in my head said, “they are my family now. what am i doing moving away from them?” what i’m really doing of course, is running away. running away mostly from all the bad shit that happened in the past eight months. i realize it’s irrational, but there’s a part of me that imagines that being back in boise will make everthing better, just because life was once easy when i lived there. and i supposed i’m running away from all the un-fun parts of being an adult that the past year entailed, as if leaving san francisco behind will somehow erase all of that. somehow, i just felt like i needed a chance to catch my breath in a place that moves at a slower pace. slightly teary, i walked inside. zeke was waiting for me in his usual place in the front hall, mewing, his mouth open like a baby dinosaur. “guess you’re my family now, babe,” i told him. it sucks when you can’t pack your whole family into the car and take them with you everywhere you go.

5.11.01

in my cd player this week: the murmurs: self-titled album

this morning started with that omigod-they’re-going-to-tow-my-car moment of horror, where i sit straight up in bed and scare the bejeezuses out of the cat. i jumped out of bed and ran outside in my p.j.s, happy to discover that they hadn’t yet got to my part of the street. i moved the car, still in p.j.s. these are the parts of city life that i will not miss at all.

i haven’t been posting because 1) blogger’s been down and 2) my life is boring these days – i supposed the fact that i haven’t had to ride the muni hardly at all this week would account for my lack of interesting news. i’m having a going-away bbq for myself tomorrow, which should be fun but in actuality causes all sorts of “what if no one comes?”-type paranoia, left over from junior high school years in which i didn’t have parties because i didn’t have any friends to invite to said events. i bought a case of corona at safeway today, and the guy didn’t even card me. man, i’m getting old. acquiring the recipes for the guacamole and chicken marinade necessitated several phone calls to england. mari (provider of the magic recipes) was wandering around oxford talking to me on her mobile phone. ohh, envy – i miss oxford. i really really need to marry a british citizen some day so that i can work in england. or just get to be a really really famous director and be so good that everyone wants to hire me regardless of my nationality. yeah, right.

5.9.01

ooh, traumatic day yesterday. started at 5 yesterday morning with the domestic dispute across the street. then i had to take zeke to the vet, which is always as traumatic for me as it is for him. for the first two blocks he howls..then he winds up into his i’m-sick-or-hurt meow, which makes it impossible for me to drive or do anything competently. the drive to idaho is going to be really rough. then, there was a trip to the dentist to have this massive cavity filled, and although it didn’t actually hurt thanks to the anesthetic, i have this theory that general trauma to the body still wears you out as the body tries to cope with the massive hole that was drilled into your tooth. the day got better after that – lauren and i went to the flower market, met joe at work, ate lunch at a cafe downtown, went shopping for ridiculously expensive shoes at macy’s (camper shoes at 50% off are still out of my price range…too bad i cracked and bought them anyway), and then watched buffy and angel. this morning i’m trying to decide whether to return the shoes or not. they’re these neat flat mary-jane style shoe, in a super-shiny dark green patent leather. but i realize that i could buy approximately 10 paris of velvet china flats in china town for the price of these shoes, and the china flats have almost the same shape. i think i’ve just talked myself out of the shoes. well, back to macy’s and china town tomorrow i guess.

5.8.01

i woke up at five this morning to the sound of screams and shouts coming from the street. hooligans, i assumed at first, but it occurred to me that the noises had gone on too long to be jovial. now fully awake, i lay in bed trying to identify what i was hearing. i opened my window and the muffled sounds became sobs. i started to think about calling the police, wondering what i would tell them. i got up and went into the living room and the voices were louder. as i was peering down the street trying to identify where the voices were coming from, two cop cars pulled up – evidently some other neighbor had called first, to my relief. across the street a figure was hugging the lamppost and sobbing – i don’t think i’ve ever heard anyone sob that loud. i could hear her through the closed windows of my room, which is on the backside of the house. the words were mostly unintelligible; the only phrase i did discern was “and then he poured alcohol on me…”. domestic violence sucks. to say that man has an inherently violent nature is a cop-out. it’s time we start evolving into peaceful creatures – by teaching our children alternate ways to solve disputes, by ending the glorification of weapons and violence in the media, and by having a zero tolerance policy for men who beat their wives.

5.7.01

back from prom night in iowa, trying to get this garrish red nail polish off of my toes. about once a year i put nail polish on, and then promptly remember why it is that i never wear it. every time i look down it’s like my toes are bleeding. the things we do in the name of beauty.

aside from prom, the weekend was filled with rain and book-buying and a spontaneous trip to grinnell, iowa. shopping trips through the used bookstore, the new-yet-independant book store, and paul’s own lending-library resulted in a nice, heavy stack of new books for me. the summer reading list now contains:

Love in the Time of Cholera -Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -Dave Eggars
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle -Haruki Murakami
A Room of One’s Own -Virginia Wolf
To the Lighthouse -Virigina Wolf
Sophie’s World -Jostein Gaarder
Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence -Nick Bantock
Galileo’s Daughter -Dava Sobel

naturally, at the time it made sense to acquire all these books in iowa city. later, when i had to carry them all on the plane, it made less sense. i’m particularly pleased about the discovery of the griffin & sabine book – i absolutely adore nick bantock’s books, but usually they are prohibitively expensive. it was half off at the used book store and in nearly-perfect condition. the dedication scribbled into the front page reads, “thank you, lara, for being such a fantastic friend. you have my love, if not my vision, forever. merry x-mas, 1994 -matt”. i feel kinda bad for matt that lara went and sold his christmas present. maybe because he drew little round circles above each of his i’s, and his handwriting was definately girly. and what does it mean that she has his vision forever? did he give her one of his eyes?