correction to my entry of 3.1: winter is never going to end. this was the 4th straight weekend of solid rain. i’m actually happy to go to work on mondays because it relieves the cabin fever of the weekend.

anyway, i saw the strangest thing on the muni today. on the inside wall of the bus, down near the floor, was a yellow sticker. across the top it read “you WILL lose” and then the rest of that corner was torn off. below was a picture of a guy standing near what looks like a big wooden barrel with a hinged lid (open). the man is screaming and has just had his arm torn off at the shoulder. the arm appears to be spinning around inside the barrel thingy, and there is blood spurting everywhere. below the picture are the words, “pancake circus”. what? stay away from the centrifuge? there are monsters in the salt-pork barrel? i have no idea.

at last. winter is coming to an end.

one of my favorite san francisco landmarks is the cat lady. if you’re ever union square you’ll see her – sometimes she sits at the corner of geary & stockton; otherwise it’s powell & post – she seems to be there, rain or shine, every day, altho she’s never there after about five o’ clock. i like to think this is because she has a home to go home to at night. somewhere shabby perhaps, & certainly over run with cats, but with someone to help her & cook her a warm meal. i don’t know that any of this is true – perhaps she goes to a shelter at night. at any rate, her name is caroline. she sits in a wheelchair on her designated street corner, & she’s covered in cats. her lap is a nest of blankets & warm sleepy kittens. on cold days she has one or two tucked down the front of her shirt. when they claw her she curses them out, which can be terribly disconcerting if you’re talking to her & don’t know she’s got kittens hidden down her top. there’s usually a big fat orange cat (we’re talking the hugest cat i’ve ever seen) who sits beside her wheelchair on the street, & sometimes an adult siamese as well. those two are her cats. the rest of the kittens are rescuees from the tenderloin. she gathers these babies, eyes still closed, under-nourished & mewling, & nurses them back to health. adopting one of caroline’s kittens isn’t like adopting a cat from the spca. caroline has very strict criteria for who gets to adopt her kitties.

she doesn’t look very old – maybe mid-fifties, but life has obviously been hard on her. she wears a pink knit hat over a pink polar fleece hat, & her chair is draped in blankets for tucking kitties under. a donation can sits unobtrusively on one arm of her chair; she never asks for handouts, but accepts what people give, spending most of it on cat food. she loves to talk about her cats: their names, their behaviors, habits & temperaments, where she rescued them & who’s going to adopt them.

here’s the part that breaks my heart. they took all her cats away. i don’t know who ‘they’ is – the spca, the central health department, the homeless shelter – it doesn’t really matter. i’m sure whoever did it was well-meaning, & perhaps had good reason. but a cat-lady with out her cats is like, well, there are a million cheesy analogies, but they all boil down to a cat-lady with out her cats is not right. someone made up a petition for her, & she gathered lots of signatures, but it did no good. the confiscated cats are up for adoption at the spca. undoubtedly they’ll get good homes, but not with caroline.

muni freak of the week
this freak is actually from a few weeks back, but the story’s still worth telling. this is the tale of the meanest bus driver ever. so i was at the corner of mission & 24th, & i hopped onto this bus that i hoped would go the direction i wanted to go. i considered asking the driver, but something (fortunately) held me back. the guy behind me evidently didn’t have my finely tuned intuition, because he asked the driver, ‘hey, do you go down to 29th street?’ to which the bus driver roared, ‘WHICH WAY IS THIS BUS POINTING?!? WHAT DOES IT SAY ON THE FRONT OF THIS BUS???’ (here i might add that there was nothing on the front of the bus indicating that it went to 29th street). to which the guy immediately gets this super-injured tone & goes, ‘hey man, i just asked you a question. you don’t have to get so mean about it. i mean, how do i know if you turn before 29th street?’ bus driver: “I AM NOT AUTHORIZED TO TURN BEFORE 29TH STREET!!!’. guy whines: ‘well, how am i supposed to know that?’ the guy sits down & sulks. we go about three blocks before he decides to get off. as he’s leaving he just can’t resist adding one more ‘ i just asked you a question, man.’ the bus driver replies: ‘THANK YOU GOOD NIGHT GET OFF MY BUS.’ as he gets off the guy gets the bus driver’s number & yells ‘i’m gonna report you!’ at this point the bus is starting to move & the guy is pounding on the glass bus door, meanwhile the bus driver is yelling things like ‘YEAH, GO AHEAD & TAKE MY NUMBER. YOU AIN’T GONNA CALL. YOU AIN’T MAN ENOUGH TO CALL’

huh? all of this took place, btw, directly beneath a sign that reads, ‘information gladly given…”.

the weather forcast for sf:
today: mostly oppressive with showers. current temp: 52
tomorrow: partly oppressive with a slight chance of showers. high: 59
tues feb 27: partly oppressive with a chance of showers. high: 55
wed feb 28: partly oppressive with showers likely. high: 54
thurs mar 1: mostly oppressive. high: 56

i haven’t left the house all weekend (in part, due to the oppressive weather we’ve been having), and i’m starting to feel truly neurotic. plus, i stayed up ridiculously late last night watching ‘dances with wolves’, so this morning i’m feeling oh-so-great about being a faceless white devil. i knew i should have stopped watching at the part where dances with wolves (kevin costner) marries stands with a fist (mary mcdonnell) and they walk off into the sunset.

i’m also grouchy because i spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to install photoshop 5.5 from a cd that has a bad sector, and it kept crashing my computer in horrible sorts of ways. at one point it actually uninstalled both cd drives for me. altho i recognize that this quest is probably futile, the fact that roget managed to get it installed from this cd makes it impossible for me to give up.

after my adventure last week, i’m considering a possible career in cat burglary – that is, if this theatre thing doesn’t work out. or maybe just as a side job. anyway, the story goes thus: sunday, i’m out running errands & i come home with a bunch of groceries, park illegally right in front of my apartment, & go inside to put the groceries away. i think, ‘i’ll just pop upstairs & move the laundry before i put the groceries away.’ so i step out the back door, & ‘bam!’ the instant i yank the door closed i realize that i’m locked out. so here i am, on the back porch on a cold february afternoon (it snowed in the oakland hills later that same day). i have no coat, no keys, no money & no phone. i search my pockets & come up with only a pair of needle nose pliers. i think to myself, ‘i am a resourceful girl. i can figure this out.’ i think of many resources, but none of them pan out – the windows are all locked &/or painted shut, the landlord upstairs & then other tenant downstairs are not home, my friend with the spare keys won’t answer her phone (i have to use the sketchiest payphone ever & bill everything to the only calling card # i can remember, which happens to be my dad’s) the locksmith down the street is closed; i can’t page his emergency number b/c the payphone i’m at doesn’t receive calls; etc. i go home again & circle the house some more. to make matters worse, zeke is pacing the inside of the house with me, peering out & mewing silent mews at me from each window i go to. i consider breaking the small, flimsy-looking pane of glass next to the back door, but it occurs to me that i’ve only seen this done in movies & i’m not at all sure that it will work the same in real life. i have visions of myself & the cat sliced with flying glass & decide to keep looking. as i pace around the house, i see it – bingo! the bathroom window is open. keep in mind, folks, that my bathroom window is on the second story. all i need is a ladder. the garage is full of construction shit, so i paw around there in search of the ladder that i figure must – & is not – there. so i start thinking, what else could i climb on? the window is a good ten feet above me, so i really need more than a chair or two. then it occurs to me: the 8ft length of iron railing, turned on it’s side, would kind of look like a ladder. so i rummage in the garage for tools, unbolt the railing from the wall, & heave it up on it’s side against the wall. this process takes a good half hour; the railing is so heavy that i can’t lift it by myself, i can only heave one end at a time. anyway, i finally get the railing-turned-ladder leaning against the wall & make my way up it. when i get to the top i discover that the screen on the window is jammed, so i have to climb back down (precariously, there’s a lot of slippery mud on my shoes) & get some tools to pry to screen off. the screen comes off, &, standing on the very top rung of my make-shift ladder, i manage to lift myself through the window in cannon-ball form (the window sits quite high above the bathroom floor, so if i tried to go in head first i would have ended up falling 3 feet into the toilet). upon successfully completing my mission in cat-burglary, i put the groceries away (the whole reason i had to break in was that i had 40 dollars worth of groceries melting on the counter that i didn’t want to waste), then go back outside & heave the railing back down & re-bolt it to the wall. unless he notices the muddy footprints up the side of the spindles, my landlord will never be the wiser.

i’m beginning to see that jetlag could turn into a psychosomatic disease i could suffer from for months if i’m not careful. this morning, i offer you some of my favorite differences between the united states and england (as i have experienced them):

usa: food is always advertized as ‘low fat’ or ‘fat free’. even high fat foods try to conceal the amount of fat they have, boasting ‘low sodium’ or ‘high in fiber’.
england: british foods, on the other hand, go out of their way to boast their fat content: my ‘buttery taste spread’ boasted it was ‘now 69% fat!’. really, the brits might be on to something here: fat tastes good.

usa: wwf smackdown.
england: a reenactment of the battle for york between the vikings and the saxons, complete with ten-foot long spears and shields and helmets and stuff. i’m not sure which one is more cultured, really.

usa: everyone buys their own beer, unless they’re hitting on you.
england: everyone buys a round. it’s a small difference really, but it’s nice. and, if you’re with a lot of friends, you have to drink more.

i fully realize, my dear reader(s), that i ought to be recounting my adventures in england here, but the truth is, i still just feel like bitching about how jetlagged i am. it didn’t help that last night was the opening of ‘goodnight children, everywhere’ at a.c.t., thus i was compelled to get dressed up, go to the show, & make an appearance at the opening night party afterward. very glamorous: lots of people wearing black, drinking red wine & eating chocolate covered strawberries. the dj was actually playing fabulous 80’s dance hits, but i couldn’t get anyone to dance with me. i guess cast parties are really only fun when you’re in college. so now i’m here in the office, & it’s deadly quiet, since i guess i’m the only one who dragged my sorry ass out of bed in time to arrive before ten. did i mention that i’m grouchy & jetlagged?

incongruously, five things that i love:

-watery sunlight falling through storm clouds
-the feeling of grass on my bare feet
-a purring cat
-getting up for breakfast, then crawling back into bed with a book
-ancient stone ruins

got in late last night, sans luggage, which apparently hopped a direct manchester-to-tahiti flight. american airlines promises it’ll turn up soon. the in-flight movie was ‘meet the parents’, with ben stiller. while i didn’t actually watch the film, this was one of those movies where you can get the gist of it even without the headphones. anyway, one of the gags is that this poor guy goes to visit his girlfriend’s parents & the airline loses his luggage – then they keep delivering the wrong suitcase, one filled with s&m sex toys & such. eventually, the correct suit case arrives just as ben stiller is leaving. the irony is, the airline featured in the movie was american airlines. isn’t odd that they’d show a movie on all of their planes in which they are the shitty-ass airline that keeps losing people’s luggage? but, true to advertising, my luggage went one way, & i another.

this whole weekend was an experiment in sleep deprivation – ‘jet lag’ doesn’t even approximate the something-ugly-the-cat-dragged-in feeling i’ve got this morning. seriously, i think there’s something to be said for the belief that the spirit doesn’t travel as fast as the body – too much international travel & the spirit seems to lag behind for a few days, leaving a sensation of being stretched out too thin. or maybe that’s just the caffeine i unwisely consumed this morning. either way, entertaining stories of northern yorkshire will have to wait until tomorrow.

impulsive international travel, yay! i’m off to cold rainy northern england for the next six days. in the meant time, i’ll leave you to ponder one of the great mysteries of british cuisine:

thornton’s original special toffee. made in the traditional way since 1925. ingredients: sugar, glucose syrup, sweetened condensed milk, butter, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, margarine, humectant (sorbitol), partially inverted cane syrup, salt, flavouring.

the food of the gods.