happy first day of spring, everybody.

i encountered lots of great signs yesterday. it might have had something to do with the dayquil, but they amused me anyway. the first said ‘WANTED: MEN WITH HAIR LOSS.’ I wanted to steal the sign, but the woman from the neurology desk kept looking at me (perhaps because i’m not a man with hair loss), so i had to leave. i was equally amused/horrified by the white board in front of a restaurant on haight st. that had a cute picture of a fish, with a surprisingly intelligent look in his eyes. next to him it said, “i am a trout! you can eat me for only $9.96! yummy yum yum!”

i have another great sign, but you’ll have to wait until i scan the picture and post it up here.

little shop of horrors: my trip to the musee mecanique

yesterday paul and i took the 38 geary bus all the way to the end of the line, where 47th street meets the ocean. the shore there is lovely, swirls of fog floating through the cypress trees, ocean crashing against rock and further down, a wide sandy beach.

there’s a small commercial strip that wants to be a boardwalk only there are no amusement rides. tucked away in a corner is the musee mecanique. it’s like the kind of evil amusement park one encounters in nightmares, where the room is hot and stuffy and filled with people, weird mechanical displays and games and robots and stuff looming in your face and jumping out to scare you, set to the discordant tunes of a sick player piano. the paint is faded and everything is a relic from the coney island of the 50s. all that was missing from the nightmare experience was the fish-eye lens. the attractions included:

‘laughing sal’ – a 10 ft tall mechanical woman in 19th century dress, with the largest red and white striped bosom imaginable. for 50 cents, she’ll rock back and forth in her plexiglass cage and laugh at you. according to the sign, laughing sal has been delighting adults and frightening children for over fifty years.

there were several types of romance meters. according to the sex meter, i’m passionate. paul scored overrated. after the kissing meter ranked our kiss as clammy, and my romance fortune told me to not to trust him, we decided to leave the romance games alone.

the machine that pleased me most was the typewriter that typed my fortune with ghost hands. here’s all about me (sic):

YOU A RE F ULL OF SY MPATHY FOR SUFFE RING OR MISFORTUNE ,

AND YOU RE SPOND WITH REA DY GE NE ROSTITY TO CHARITABLE

APPE ALS. THIS INSTINCT, OF COURSE , MAKES YOU E ASY

G AME FOR IMPOSTE RS TO TA KE A DVANTA G E OF . YOU ARE

A LSO VE RY CREATIVE, A ND WILL DO WE LL IN SUCH FIE LDS

A S MUSIC, PAINTING , POETRY OR PROSE .

paul insisted on (me) paying for the mechanical opium den; this was about as exciting as you might think. it was a big diorama of a dirty room in which men sat or lay in their opium-induced stupors. putting in a quarter made them rock slowly back and forth, and then the closet door swung open to reveal a skeleton who had been hanging on the door since he had overdosed. i could have given that quarter to a real beggar.

i’m not made for this, i’m not in shape
my heart don’t bend like this, it just breaks
when we bring your bags down to the tracks that take you back

i’m no good at this, don’t know what to do
waiting on this platform, all these people waiting too
i don’t say much ’cause i don’t want to say “stay”

don’t the sun cry fire in the sky every night
when it tries to say goodbye

i curse the train and its shiny steel
when the whistle blows, i curse the wheels
and i curse my heart for the way it feels, oh

don’t the sun cry fire in the sky every night
when it tries to say goodbye

i take the stairs up while everybody comes down
they just got the word on the next train, next town
and i’m pretty sure now you’re gonna come around again

don’t the sun cry fire in the sky every night
when it tries to say goodbye

-catie curtis, from cry fire

so i’m about to purchase a motherboard from these folks, albeit, inc., and this my favorite tip from the tech support web site:

“We will try to do our best to help every customer. Please remember that for many of our technical support team English is a second language, you will have a better chance of getting a helpful answer if your question can be understood in the first place. Be sure to use very, simple, concise language that clearly states the problem, avoid rambling or flowery language and always list your system components.”

i think this translates to call tech support at your own risk.

BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH

X-Received: 11 Mar 2001 05:48:50 GMT
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2001 23:47:24 -0600

These are my salacious flight times:

United Airlines flight 2425, carrying yours truly, will ascend from Reno at 8:10 pm and travel west, powered by thrust and vigor, to land its rigid forceful plane-body on the willing recipient tarmac of SFO at 9:14 pm, when the sun has set and the night-winds of coming spring whisper gentle secrets, lusty and forbidden. That is all.

very little to report from the past two days, other than i learned that lesbians do not carry purses. can anyone corroborate?

more random stickers on my muni ride today: this one somewhat more unsettling. it was a big purple square sticker on the side of a garbage can, which read “KLITLER: We’re Gay”, and below that was a nazi swastika inside the circle of the female symbol with the cross below it. i have no idea what this collision of political ideologies amounts to, but pretty much anything with a swastika sends a chill down my spine. a search for “klitler” on google turned up lots of web pages spouting stuff about the right to bear arms (a theme this week) and bitching about clinton/gore’s administration. huh.

lauren vs. jesus [link lost — 5/17/10]. this never fails to make me giggle, even if i am afraid of being struck by lightening every time i read it.

una noche sin los hombres

the mayor of bogota, colombia, has declared this friday the official ‘night without men.’ apparently, this friday all the men are supposed to stay home and do the baby-sitting and house cleaning so that their wives can go out and party. sounds good to me, particularly in a country where the women’s primary role is still that of the homemaker. go mayor.

in less happy news: the latest shooting spree: a high school in santana, ca. the discussion group on cnn made me so angry that i had to stop reading it (especially b/c the registration page was broken so i couldn’t write back to all these people with their heads up their asses). how can the nra folks sleep at night after something like this happens again . it doesn’t seem like rocket science to me to figure out that guns lead to shootings. it’s obvious that ‘responsible’ licensed gun owners can’t handle their weapons in a responsible fashion, since their kids keep managing to borrow them and shoot each other. how many times does this have to happen? it just makes me feel ill. someone on the cnn discussion group was pointing out that only 1 in 4 violent crimes involve a firearm, so that getting rid of guns wouldn’t really eliminate violent crime. hmm. seems to me that a reduction of 25% of all violent crime wouldn’t be a bad place to start. you can’t deny that it’s psychologically easier to kill someone using a gun than something like a knife or a club. how many of the high school killing sprees would have happened if the perpetrators had had to use knives? besides, how often do killing sprees happen in countries like canada and england – countries in which the police officers don’t even carry guns? seems to me that a lack of guns=lack of death by guns. the thing that i hate the most is the way that people can overlook the fundamental purpose of a gun. a gun is a machine designed to kill things. making them into a work of art is just sick. how can people own guns recreationally? why would you buy a gun if there wasn’t some thought at the back of your mind that you might need it to kill someone? that’s like buying a dish washer and assuring everyone that you’re just going to use it as a coffee table. somewhere, in the back of your mind, you know you have a pile if dirty dishes…and if your wife really gets desperate, well.

i’m fully aware of the 2nd amendment, that our nation was founded on top of this freedom to shoot off our own feet if we damn well please. i just think it’s one of the things wrong with this country. were i queen of everything for a day, my first move would be to get rid of the 2nd amendment. if people feel they need protection, why not non-lethal weapons? since i live in the ‘hood, i carry a vial of pepper spray. it won’t kill anyone, or even do any permanent damage, but it’s a comfort to me to know that i’m a bit safer this way. a few months ago i read this article about this quaker couple who have gotten really involved in the weaponry r&d department at the pentagon. it sounds weird, but they’re these huge experts on non-lethal forms of weaponry. evidently they decided that preaching peace wasn’t going to be enough, so that the next best thing to do was to try and reduce the number of casualties. pretty impressive example of adapting to one’s environment without losing one’s moral stance, i think. wish i could remember their names.

the other day i heard on the news that america is suffering from a fat epidemic. apparently one in three grade-school-aged children is overweight. i found this hard to believe, unless the fat is unevenly distributed around the country, california not getting it’s fair share. at any rate, it made me wonder.

obviously, we live in a culture that is obsessed with thin. in the united states, approximately 3-4% of all adolescent women suffer from anorexia or bulimia. and these are only the diagnosed, clinical cases. having been an adolescent girl not that long ago, i assure you that the numbers are much higher. healthy eating is a bell curve: not very many fall directly under the center of the arch. we blame these eating disorders on the images of skinny supermodels we’re bombarded with at every magazine rack or hollywood movie. certainly these set up an unobtainable goal for many young women. (yes, i do realize that men and older women suffer from eating disorders as well – by dealing with the largest group – young women – I do not intend to neglect them nor trivialize their suffering). but i started wondering about the impact that these well-intentioned health reports have on women and their expectations. if you tell an 11-year old girl that there is a one in three chance that she’s already overweight, chances are you will frighten her into obsessing about her real or perceived weight and eating habits. a year or two back, i recall the cover of an issue of newsweek magazine. across the bottom in bold letters it said, ‘fat for life?’ and had a picture of a chubby-cheeked boy stuffing his face with an enormous ice cream cone. the article was about the growing rate of obesity in children and how that continues into adulthood. certainly, its a fact that obesity leads to many health problems, and in an ideal world, all of our children would be out playing soccer instead of video games, choosing carrot sticks over brownies, and be healthy and happy.

or course, women are told over and over again to love their bodies as they are. the message is everywhere: britney ain’t real. i sometimes think that maybe women are smart enough to figure out that the skinny-with-insanely-big-tits supermodel body is an silly and unobtainable goal. but what about health reports like the one in newsweek? because of their scientific or medical sources, they carry more weight (no pun intended). how do women handle all these conflicting messages about their relationship to their bodies? how can women learn to love their bodies at the same time that they are bombarded with messages from not only hollywood but also the doctor’s office saying that their bodies are not right? women can’t love their bodies because they’re made to feel guilty that they are not doing enough to reach their ideal weight (whether that be a doctor- or hollywood-prescribed weight). but can women actually be made to feel guilty for failing to love their bodies?

at some point, someone has to speak up for quality of life. its one thing if a weight problem is causing additional health problems that have a negative impact on your way of life. but what about when being overweight is harming your life via the guilty and low-self esteem that it creates? i recall my mother once telling me that she’d been to her doctor for a check-up, and because she’d lost some weight, he put a gold star on her chart. i can’t think of anything more belittling and insulting than doing that to a grown woman (who, btw, is one of the most beautiful, dynamic, intelligent, and kindest role models i’ve ever met – and fifteen pounds is not going to change that). that doctor, because of his medical authority, had the ability to build up or destroy her self confidence. and why? because she lives in a culture that tells her she can’t love her body until everyone else loves her body.

you might think after reading this tirade that i’m overweight. curiously enough, i’m not, and haven’t ever been. but self-loathing isn’t a foreign concept to me. these days, i’m better at regarding my body with respect and awe just because all the muscles and bones work in coordination – it takes me where i want to go, i’m strong and can lift things, can run and walk and dance (okay, not since the vertigo set in, but that’s another story) – but i still do sit-ups because cosmo says i should have a flat tummy; i feel guilty because i never jog as much as i mean to. the thing is, i guess, is that in an ideal world, we would treat our bodies with respect and healthy life styles because we loved and honored our bodies so much. until we love our bodies – as they are – caring for them is an internal battle of guilt and self-loathing. i apologize if this is disorganized and rambling – it’s something i’ve been thinking about lately, but this is the first time i’ve tried to verbalize it.