5.6.01

those free internet terminals in the denver airport are dangerous – not only did i sign on today and promptly get access to the previous user’s email account (i was nice and signed off for him), but then i stayed and played with the terminal and damn near missed my flight. when i got to the gate they were closing the doors after the final boarding call.

so i’m back from my 48-hour trip to iowa. zeke’s pissed off at me for deserting him, and he just left an eight-inch scratch across my forearm to remind me of that fact. the pilot on the denver-to-iowa leg of my trip had this muppet-style puppet named otto (get it? otto the pilot? haha) whom he stuck on his hand and used to greet everyone as we boarded and deplaned, and all of the in-flight announcements from the cockpit came over the loudspeaker in the puppet’s voice. it was a little surreal, i have to say.

gotta go play fetch with my angry kitten.

5.4.01

whee i’m posting from the denver airport’s free internet terminal…just because i can. there’s a reason these things are free, which becomes clear as soon as one tries to do anything useful on them – they suck in a big way. the keyabord is this indestructible hard rubber surface, so you have to really bang on each key, sort of like old fashioned typewriters. and the keys are all in the wrong place, which is agonizing.

left san francisco this morning andit was shaping up to be another clear sunny 80 degree day, of the sort one only gets in may and septembr in sf. landed in denver to the tune of 39 degrees and fog so thick thhe pilot described the visibility as “zero”. there’s something comfortably familiar about the people in denver – some sort of northwest mountain sensibility that is still have lurking deep in my idaho bones. there are far fewer of the scary-overly-made-up woman type that the bay area is crawling with, lots more women in levis and polar flesse vests. a very dear male friend of my recently told me that he finds nothing sexier than a good looking woman in a baseball cap. ah, it warms my heart to know that men like this still exist.

i’m actaully getting elbow strain from pounding on ths keyboard.

UAL flight 1096 Denver to Cedar Rapids, IA. Departs in 20 minutes.

5.2.01 (happy birthday to my brother, matt)

boy, and i thought my first piece of fan mail was exciting – this is even better: my first piece of hate mail. i assume that it’s referencing my notes on paris from 4.25.01.

From: “p arishatesyou” &ltparishatesyou@hotmail.com&gt
To: jgadda@hotmail.com
Subject: Yes it does.
Date: Wed, 02 May 2001 23:51:09 -0000

Vous fille américaine stupide.

of course, as paul pointed out, chances are that this email is actually from someone i know (who is not french). perhaps it’s even paul. but i prefer to think that i actually have french readers, and that i’ve actually managed to incite one of them to create a false email account just to call me, of all things, a stupid american girl. aren’t there better french insults that that? (boy, if that wasn’t an invite for offensive emails, what is?)

more random email for today. since i’m moving to idaho, i’m trying to get rid of all of my furniture (the total replacement cost is less than the cost to rent a u-haul to move the stuff around in). i posted something on craig’s list that said “futon mattress – free if you haul it away” and got this in reply:

From: “Adam Hubenig” &ltadamhubenig@hotmail.com&lt
To: jgadda@hotmail.com
Date: Wed, 02 May 2001 01:23:54 -0400

Still got the bed maing?

if so pass on a n address and i’ll come and grabs it… Im just in town for two mths so.. well.. anyways thanx

adam

i’m not even sure it’s english. what exactly is a “maning”?

5.1.01

cool new anagram for today: American Online = Re: Mail in Ocean. which might explain where all those dead emails are. think of all the potential romances, relationships, human communication – all lost in the electronic blips. i agonize over such things. i had a boyfriend once who said that he thought that the notion of letters getting lost in the mail, molding in some dead-letter office, never to be delivered and irrevocably changing the course of history was romantic. i think that’s the first clue i had that we weren’t meant to be. last year the stanford post office endured a rather embarassing scandal after one of the postal workers was caught throwing out buckets of undelievered mail, presumably because he was too lazy to sort it into individual mail boxes. hey, maybe that’s why my college romances never worked out.

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). &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.