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: Ã’sex 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 Ã’closet 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):

Ã’I 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

Ã’I 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.

4.10.01
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.

4.11.01
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?

4.9.01
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-