April 2002 Archives

Leia has a great idea: she started a separate journal, mostly for her own reference, called frontal lobe, in which she records the minutiae of her days, for future reference.

of course in my case this might get a little difficult -- what with the milk left out on the counter and the car keys in the freezer. i forget more than can be solved by blogging, but if i can figure out a way to implement some bloggy sort of extra memory module, well, that will be cool.

krix has joined us over there at poemgen. people love cmdr taco's poem generator code (see sidebar for details). it rocks, and the more people we get contributing to poemgen, the more words his eloquent algorithms can parse.

Eric rocks. i gave him a copy of that new b2 and by the next day he'd converted his whole site over in lovely standards compliant code. and the thing loads so fast. i'm impressed.

VAspider, handed a fresh copy of MT over there on dot net, dove right into the templates and made them pretty. and the domain has resolved!

speaking of domains resolving, dykewrite.com has its own domain, though there's not a design just yet. that's pending, but since it already hit 25 on blogdex, well, may as well jump on the impatiently linking a not-done site bandwagon! it does have MT, which as you know makes a very nice-running site right out of the box. and yes, i still love MT.

i have two sets of templates to do. i am not sure that they will be done tonight. but i'm off to go try.

oh, and for your enjoyment, the gettysburg powerpoint presentation.

well this was the conclusion we reached last night. he says he's read all this here, and the comments and he knows. i tried to explain that for the most part we (bloggers) kid around alot and in r/l we're probably extremely introverted and reserved and also there's this great tendency for girls to flirt with girls these days, even the straight ones. and of course there's that recent phenomenon of lesbian chic, and all these girls going on about other hot girls. and, well, angelina jolie, ok? and, and, oh, never mind, you get the idea.

he tells me all women are bisexual, except for the ten percent that are completely gay. he claimed that he's personally to blame for that ten percent. i tried to tell him he was not single-dickedly responsible for all lesbianism, but he disagreed.

are you? i am. i'm totally going. even if i have to hitch a ride and sleep on somebody's floor (and it's looking more and more like i will be doing exactly that). it doesn't matter. it's going to be so much fun.

blogcon or bust i say!

oh, did you know that the "what do you look like" thread on the message boards has now been going since january 14, and has 333 replies and 8422 views, as of this writing?

go there, introduce yourself, if you haven't already.

and don't forget we'll be shaving hoopty for charity.

so, onward and homeward. the end of monday? not. i have to do some quick juggling in re: the rather large check i unexpectedly wrote this afternoon. so off on errands, or, no, not yet.

me: kurtwood? we have to go!
him: [mournfully] mommy i pooped.
me: what? you what? is it bad?
him: yeaaaaaah.
[he was so sorry. i wasn't mad. i got the pants off and took care of the asswiping, carried the soiled pok�mon underwear to the trash. they were heavy. i scraped most of the poop off with a paper towel. i only got a little bit on my fingers]

i head off to do errands. last stop, the bank at 5:55. cool. made that on time. but when i get out the bank ... i mean, who parks like this? [note: pausing at this point in the narrative to reinstall the NIC card on my other puter so i can upload ... this picture]. you can't see it that well, but the thing's parked like four inches from my side door and i couldn't back out without ripping off my side mirror. turns out the answer to that question is, a really old feeble guy that shouldn't be driving at all, let alone a big ole SUV.

i am not without perspective. i know people have way worse problems. but these little annoyances were still annoying enough.

'twas a jolly day, as mondays go. unusually good vibes, nothing at all wrong with anything. ahh, but let's not forget, just because it seems like a big fuzzy cuddle-bear, that monday still has razor sharp claws and slavering fangs.

i was too complacent. basking in the hubris of some successful web-type efforts. and the phone rings.

need an antidote for this smug self-satisfaction? here's the recipe:

- forget to pay the electric bill
- for a couple of months
- get frantic phonecall, the lights are off!
- pay bill at seedy check cashing place
- manage to screw up the part where you phone the electric company and input your receipt amount, have to be connected with customer service for guidance
- on the way back realize you have been riding on fumes for too long
- stop for gas. discover that debit card is still back at work, on the desk.
- pay for two dollar's worth of gas. in quarters.

and if that's not enough, then:

- publicly confess all of the above.

a truly humbling experience.

so i was reading pristine's today, and she mentions an overheard conversation, two office workers discussing how you never have to buy rubber bands or paper clips, because they "just mysteriously appear and hang around the office like a bad stench". you know, because you're always getting them with your mail.

and while this is generally true, the fact is, i don't like those plain metal paper clips. i get them with my mail too, so much mail, mostly because of those conferences where i traded my business card for schwag, and now am suffering through years of junk mail, all the bright advertising materials thoughfully clipped together by the office staff. i keep the paper clips and throw the mail in the recycle bin. i use the crappy paper clips, because i don't mind if i never see them again.

this is not to say i don't have my own paper clips. i have a dispenser full of the good ones, the coated, brightly colored ones. i keep them hidden in my desk, because i like them too much to use them to clip, you know, ordinary things together. i use the ones i don't like, because that way i get to keep the nice ones. in my desk drawer. occasionally i take them out and admire them, and then tuck them back in there, safe and sound.

i love office supplies.

go say happy blogiversary to JadedJu. go on now. shoo.

so i was straightening up a bit before chris got home. too much to do, at the last minute, all at once.

got up from writing email, just before one final review before clicking send. in living room, reassembled couch and picked up toys and other four year old detritus. carried some dirty dishes into kitchen and saw milk out on the counter, remembered i was going to give him another cup. turned on the water to rinse the cup and heard the wind rustling the trash bag, remembered it was too full. left water running, took out trash real quick. return to hear son still bouncing around the house, remember i was going to find his shoes so he could go out and play. turn off water. found shoes, tried to get them in the same place as kid long enough to put them on his feet, not immediately successful. sat down, shoes in one hand, clicked send.

ok. now we know i love Movable Type, right? well. well. last night i installed this PHP/MySQL weblogging software called b2. it's the one davezilla uses. i actually did finally get it installed after a lengthy struggle. but i could not login. and i was tired. and it was like three or something, so i went to bed. had a dream that dave barry's wife was pregnant. and i was thinking, my god he'll be 85 when that kid graduates high school. apparently i can't do math in my dreams. he'd only be like seventy-something.

anyway where was i? oh right. so i had this humongous MySQL error so i figured i should go back and read the instructions. nothing about that there. so i went to the boards and surfed the myriad 'login error' posts and lo and behold. my server does not support the md5() command! it was a simple edit that i was able to edit and... it worked! it freakin' worked!

at this point i leapt up from my chair and danced around the kitchen. my son was understandably concerned, and urged me to check out the power rangers site he was surfing instead, since whatever i was doing had me acting so psycho.

i had to take a little walk around the house to catch my breath. i'm still trembling just a little. oh man. that was good.

anyway, plans on world domination now include a MySQL database.

· · ·

ohmygod. i just discovered that b2 works with wapblogger. i could blog from my cell phone. i think i'm going to cry.

and then get to work on installing it for this blog here. god yes.

ok. so i noticed that b2 has this GM import function. so i decided to see if i could do the dreamlog. what the heck, right? so i installed another copy of the b2, and launched the import function.

i put in the paths. i clicked ok.

http://surreally.com/b2dl.

that was beautiful. it was so beautiful. oh my god. it just imported all the authors and the posts and the comments. in like three seconds.

now i need to go compose myself. this was just a bit much.

i installed b2 on this server too. it's at http://surreally.com/b2. if you'd like to have a peek at the interface, go register and email me if you'd like to have posting privs, i can go enable that, so you can see what the posting interface is like. it has such potential for community projects, and of course people can be registered and not post, but have a profile and stuff. too cool.

i'm having too much fun with it. now, on back to the message boards to check out the hacks and stuff. such fun.

new weblog on dot net: paraphernalia. she is in spain, writing mainly in spanish. and also she writes so eloquently in english. and her design, which she wrought with her own hands, out of the bare mt templates i handed her.

paraphernalia.surreally.net

so beautiful. i am a lucky person, having so much wonder on these way cool servers of mine. this is (one of the many) reasons i do this.

oh -- her page title "i've got my mind set on you" -- this song, my daughter loved as a toddler. she would sing the chorus so enthusiastically. i remember this from the days we drove the long drive up to the bay area to visit her grandparents. good memories. george harrison: r.i.p.

news! sheila (in search of a soul) is now up and running at tart.surreally.net. there is something else happening at sheilarene.org, but not yet.

there are still five subdomains left at dot net. it's donation-supported hosting with a running copy of MT installed by yours truly. just in case you are, you know, interested in that sort of thing.

ever type till you ache? well, part of it is that it's friday, and it's been a rather long week. and i ran the errands, and came home to some of those long, long emails, you know the ones. from friends who are wonderfully analytical and between the both of you, you are deconstructing blogland and exchanging the most delightful 'this is between you and me' stuff.

fun part is keeping it that way -- makes for better email conversations in general, you know.

and then of course the talk turns to the latest wild scheme. because if it's one thing bloggers do, it's have ideas. like lucy and ethel always trying to break into show business, we have our wacky plans.

if i'd had any idea when i first signed up for a blogger account and started babbling, that it would come to this -- well, i couldn't have known, and if the idea had been advanced to me i'd have said something like 'pfft. sss. no way.'

anyway, a few aspirins helps the friday of a long week aches, enables me to carry on (mixing metaphors at will here) in much the same way as a lab mouse bent on world domination. wacky fun stuff.

"Childless women may get turned on by the scent of another woman breast-feeding. Scientists in Chicago asked young mothers to wear pads in their bras and under their armpits. Other women who then sniffed them reported increased sexual desire. Experts say the smell may be an evolutionary signal from one woman to another that it is a good time to reproduce." - ananova

boobies smell nice.

[via quiddity]

for those of you who care so much about the environment that you are willing to remove yourself from it, via a horrific collision with a real car, may i present to you the ford think. just think of what would happen in a think vs. escalade confrontation. yes, it's environmentally friendly (unless you consider how the plastic body will last forever in a landfill after you die in it). and they have charging stations at the mall. what more could you want in a scary sub-golf-cart sized deathrap?

i'm all for the environment. but please. a plastic car?

a fresh look at selfishness, brought to you by pinching judy and my inept transcription skillz:

i'm having a hard time remembering my dreams lately. just scraps here and there, nothing i could actually make sense enough to dreamlog. this morning it was love and racecars, and loss.

i was unaware the power of the dream till later in the day, when i was surfing researching stuff, and i happened upon a fox sports nascar ad, and all of a sudden this sadness came out of nowhere, hit me hard. i had no idea. knocked stuff loose, it seems.

the dream images themselves remain elusive, i have no idea what they meant or why such intensity.

my inbox:

no, 95 are not unread, they just represent the emails that came to me while i was at work, but were not downloaded from the server, 'cause i might miss something. ususally i select all and mark as read, just to mitigate the urgency of looking at my email client in that state. then i forget to go through the 'read' ones to see what should be saved. hence the 1999 messages.

some of those are important, you know. i can't just delete. need to sort and review.

and then there's the fact that something bad happens with this site on IE5 Mac. i don't know what to do about that.

and i have more work, much more, to do for raising hell. and other webprojects, too numerous to even think about right now.

and i learned today what i need to do to burn mp3s off cassettes: first optimize your hard drive. then time the songs to the second. then open a .wav recorder and record empty space that long. then open that up and record the song over it (avoiding the potential irregularities of having the initial recording have to find disk space). then get a nice .wav editor and find the tape hiss in the sound matrix and fix it. and then make it an mp3.

i have four casettes here that need that done to them.

and my linklist is so out of date. have you added yourself to the freerange linklist over -->> there yet? please. i need you help on that. i probably want to add/update your link.

and i have at least a half dozen things itching to get blogged. pictures to upload and have a point posting them.

i'm tired and confused. when i spend evenings accomplishing things, i miss my blogsurfing. when i miss it for too long i get irretrievably behind. what did i miss? ahh, this is hard.

and i love it.

pinching judy song of the moment, 'sound of drowning', follows:

watching the news yesterday morning of the tragic train wreck in orange county, i was struck once again by the difficulties that live newscasting technology causes our anchorpersons. gone are the simple days that their job was to write copy and read it on the air and hope that the support staff got the right graphic up behind them.

these days, the news-viewing public's apparently insatiable appetite for live on the spot helicopter coverage has placed the studio news staff in an incredibly awkward position. instead of just reading a prepared, fact-checked script, they must ad-lib about the images and information they're being fed, no matter how vague or incomplete. and how many words can you find to describe different views of the same scene for ten, twenty, thirty minutes on end? they are forced to suppose, surmise, draw conclusions, add sympathetic commentary, and say the same thing in (ideally) different words, over and over and over...

and there are not too many original thoughts you can have thirty minutes into live video feeds of the same thing. 'well, here we have ... the same thing we've had for the last half hour, we still don't really know what we're seeing, and everybody's giving us different facts, but here it still is ... do we have an expert on the phone? no? ok, so nothing's changed, as far as we can tell, it might have changed, do you think it's changed, roger?'

i used to think on-air news personalities had cool jobs. not anymore.

just a few of the many i found here, at whirled headquarters.

Implufticate: Revolting against your better judgment in a moment of severe personal inflation.

Hyfer: A young cow who just drank way too much coffee.

Holar: Blowing sunshine out your ass.

Astrality: An unexpected death in a family of psychics.

Bullogical: Makes sense to stubborn men.

Precogjestion: Eating now 'cause you might get hungry later.

also see their fine gifts under forty dollars.

i have another song for you.

consider this the bridge in the song that is this story, which will finish up tonight when i get some pictures:

it takes what amounts to a tremendous conceit to write what i've written, thinking someone, anyone will actually read the elebendy kabillion words i've just posted about my ancient history. the formative period of what has come to be my adult life, which did not start until well into my fourth decade.

looking back on that from here, early in my fifth decade, i can say of all the stories to be told of my years, this is one of the most important. it was hard to write. but it did me a world of good.

and i thank those of you who waded through the whole thing, wholeheartedly, for sharing in my this adventure with me.

so don't let them tell you that you can't fight city hall. you can. and you can win, and not have that be the last of your problems by any means.

you can have a business based on a clientele that are easily drawn away by anything cheaper than what you're doing. you can put on great shows and have bands that demand a minimum appearance fee, and be knocked on your ass by a couple keggers across town. you can have a manager that is jealous of your business and out of the blue cannot book a band to save his life.

this manager and some friends of ours (using the term loosely) at some point decided chris was an asshole and they could do better and took it upon themselves to take over the business. i know this for a fact when the landlord told us that offers had been made to rent the place -- by our employees and trusted friends. trust. huh.

but that was not the last straw. that happened when small flies started to swarm out of our smelly little floor sink. turned out that the fifty-something year old pipes under the building, all the way out to the street, had collapsed. would have required digging up the whole sidewalk to make the floor sink work once again.

five grand. did we have five grand? did we even have rent? well, no. we held a benefit, 'save the mayfair', but i will confess to you right now that there was no mayfair-saving possible at that juncture, not unless those nights sold out like mad. they did not. it was more, save chris and karen's ass so they don't become homeless people as a result of this failed venture. it did keep us off the streets.

for the last shows, chris had to stop by when he had a break from driving a taxi. it was hopeless. all was lost.

we closed in may '94.

various interests made proposals to buy/refurbish the mayfair, but none were successful. no financial insitution was willing to trust a business plan that included rebuilding, fighting city hall (again) and making the business work.

for years after the closing, i would see the articles 'so-and-so to take over mayfair'. never happened. they boarded the place up bigtime but the homeless still made their homes there, at one point causing a major water leak that made ruins of most of the projection room and lobby.

about a year ago, before i moved back in with chris, i was out apartement hunting downtown. as i came up to the intersection of santa clara and ash, i saw the yellow police tape around the building. the streets were still wet. there was a firetruck parked up ash street.

i pulled over, or more accurately drifted to the side of the road and stopped the car in a not-quite-parked, stunned way. i got out and walked up to the building, looked through where the front doors had been and saw charred things and sky.

i cried so fucking hard.

so today i went downtown for pictures and my camera batteries were dying. i'll probably go back and get a picture of the front some other day, but as it is, there was a hole in one of the doors -- what you're seeing there is empty space in full daylight -- the outer wall is intact but everything, everything inside is gone.

i'll leave you with another pinching judy song, land on me:

the incident i posted about over here has come to fruition. what i have here in front of me is the entire catalog of music of a band, a local band that almost but not quite made it big, thoughtfully brought to me by the drummer, who has given me permission to put their mp3s on the internet.

i've done at least the first cd, here, and on the bottom of that page, there is a link to where i already had the second cd online. i will be putting more songs online as soon as i figure out the best way of ripping mp3s off of cassettes via a small cable into my soundcard. i will also be putting lyrics online and periodically posting lyric/mp3 combos here.

as an interesting side note, the lead singer of this band is now doing dinner theatre in vegas. i bet he's good at it.

first lyric/mp3 combo follows:

so, in our last episode, our heroes were providing entertainment to the young and disenfranchised who couldn't get into clubs. we were booking great bands, some of them drawing crowds of way over our fire permit numbers, but the fire department worked with us, as did the police. why not? what a favor we were doing them, babysitting 600 adolescents on friday and saturday nights!

of course they weren't too happy about the riot. either greenday or the offspring, i get those two mixed up to this day. all three ventura gangs were well represented. that show never did go on. but when we did have the big shows, with the past-capacity crowds, the energy was incredible. imagine 600 teenagers in one place. the hormones alone would knock you out. we had no heat, but on those nights who cared? it would rain sweat from the fifty foot high ceilings.

and because we catered to the adolescent crowd, every little thing got blamed on us. one time there was a car stolen on the west end of town. a high speed chase ensued, during which the gang-affiliated joyriders fired some shots in the vicinity of the mayfair as they passed by. they were later apprehended on the east end when they crashed the car. the headline? "shooting at mayfair". yeah, it was all our fault.

but, we put out extra security (ten huge guys we paid twenty bucks a head to hang out in t-shirts and look... like huge guys. amazingly effective). the neighbors were mollified, somewhat, but they still bitched. they were neighbors, it was their job.

but that wasn't our biggest problem. our biggest problem was a conditional use permit to use the building in the manner we were using it. it came down to the parking spaces. capacity of 455, parking spaces 14. never mind that the vast majority of our clientele were years from their first driver's license, there were rules! and so we had to fight city hall.

we marched on city hall. we met at the mayfair, and walked up to the big building at the top of california street, some 50 or 60 kids in full mid-90's regalia. we filed in quietly and took our places. before the meeting started, one of the city council members clutched his chest and fell to the floor. (we weren't that scary, i swear it!) in any case, the case was postponed.

in spite of the lost inertia, we managed to get another group to attend the next meeting. the kids were awesome. they had their notes, they stepped up to the podium and kept their speeches within the five minute limit. they spoke of needing a safe place to go, how their parents trusted them when they were going to the mayfair. they were eloquent and to the point. those kids were awesome. i'll never forget that.

we won. we got our permit. the next chapter will be the last one, and it will most likely have to wait till tomorrow, i need to go take some pictures of the mayfair today.

i always wanted to yell out, "play like sinatra":

i wish i'd had a camera in those days. i'd love to be able to show you exactly how strange and wonderful the old insomniac on laurel street was. at first, the rent was an affordable thousand dollars a month. then, abruptly, as we struggled for a health permit to sell the coffee that was our profit margin, the landlord tripled the rent. yes. tripled.

the mayfair theatre was a beautiful building, blueprints dated in 1939. it was huge and pink and had fourteen whole parking spaces. it had been a regular movie theatre, then closed, then was for years was a pussycat theatre, then closed, then re-opened as an art film house. the interior had been somewhat redecorated in the pussycat era -- gold and red-velvet flocked walls and everything. it was ... unique. we had a live-in janitor named RJ who had a deformed hand and was extremely scizophrenic. he lived in the attic, which he decorated with old pussycat theatre paraphernalia. quite gothic, no?

but i'm getting ahead of myself here. when we moved in there, the guys running it, hector and george, were running art films and losing their asses. they had full time jobs and didn't have a lot of time to put into running the place. so we all joined in as partners -- chris (and by this time, me), ben, judy, george, and hector. three pairs of partners each with their own, completely different agenda. can you see potential problems here? heh. yeah, conflict, we had.

ben and judy wanted to have hippie events that made no damn money at all. hector and george had minimums to pay for the films they ran. we wanted to bring in bands.

oh, and we had some bands. we had the mentors. we had pennywise, the offspring, greenday, and no doubt (not all at once). we tore out the first 20 or 30 rows of theatre seats for a mosh pit. it was a great pit, concrete floors with the remnants of seat attachments protruding. dangerous stuff.

ben and judy withdrew first, frustrated and understandably pissed that their visions met so much resistance from the more money-oriented partners. at that point the films were limited to early showings on friday and saturday so there could be bands. fridays at midnight we did the rocky horror picture show. oh, the memories. the young boys in the lingerie, oh my. we had a full cast, including a motorcycle that we let ride down the aisle, across the front, and back up the aisle, for meatloaf's scene. i cannot express to you how much fun rocky nights were.

eventually hector and george withdrew too, and i was able to do their taxes in a way that showed a massive cash loss and resulted in nice tax returns, so they left happy men. i used to be a bookkeeper, have i mentioned that? i was a little too good at it.

so at that point it was just chris and i, left in charge of the place. our focus at that time was to have a place where kids could go and have fun, with no drugs, alcohol, or violence. we searched them fairly well, and watched 'em like we were babysitters (in a sense we were) while they were there. more than once i found myself in the girls bathroom pouring something down the drain as a saddened adolescent looked on. remembering my own adolescence, it made me sad too.

i'm starting to worry that my chronology is going to be really screwey on this. it's something i should have taken my time writing, but i find myself hurrying, wanting to get it all out before the inspiration deserts me.

i will leave you with way gone:

the memories have taken on sepia tones like the nearly ten year old newspapers that make up the most vivid recollection i have of the place. it was 93 and 94 and my god i was young then, for my age. i think i may have thought i was fat, but i wasn't. i think i spent most of my angst and energy stressing on making chris love me, against his will. this might explain how i managed to remain unaware and/or disconnected from much of the goings on at the insomniac coffehouse.

it began when our roommate jay told us about this coffeehouse, and we went. i had my first cappuccino there -- my first cup of coffee costing in excess of two bucks. mmm. addiction.

and so it came to pass that the original owners, ben and judy, took on chris as a partner in the business. and chris is a born boss - has the attitude. has the confidence in his own opinions necessary to inspire others to follow his lead. let's not speculate on whether or not that self-confidence was, at the time, misplaced, ok? thanks.

the insomniac's first incarnation was in a place called the city bakery, but by the time we found it it was in an industrial-type storefront at 255 south laurel street. it was a big, open space, cluttered here and there with not-quite thrift store quality furniture. coffee was sold on a 'donation' basis in hopes of getting around the health laws, since we needed floor sinks or some shit. it worked, after a fashion, for awhile.

there were poetry nights, open mic nights, acoustic music nights, political babble nights, lots of hippie-oriented stuff. well, that's what ben and judy had in mind, chris just isn't your hippie type, and he wanted to find ways that the business could make enough money to pay him a salary. so we started having amplified music and door charges.

the thing that brought all this back to mind so vividly is, of course, the arrival of all this pinching judy music in my life. this story will be continued, but for now i will leave you with the mp3/lyric combo of the day, a catchy tune that represents the first time in my life i ever found myself bouncing down a hallway singing a song that wasn't absorbed out of mainstream popular music.

without further adieu i present, taking you out:

It's about parenting. It's about bad parenting and good parenting and the grey area between. It's about our kids and your kids and our neighbor's kids. It's about sibling rivalry and gum wads under the kitchen table. It's about video games and school concerts and temper tantrums. It's about being parents or knowing parents or wanting to be parents or not wanting to be parents.

what we have here, is miguel (it was his idea), melly, michele, and sheila (who did the design, all i did was wrassle it into templates and stuff).

they have even said that the'll let me contribute an article or two here or there.

so anywhoo, that's where i've been all weekend when i wasn't napping or navelgazing. (it's all launching and stuff and i'm still working on it)

so, i'm on the project. on it i tell you. and it's requiring some creative laziness -- what is the easiest way i can make this easy to do and furthermore easy to update when the inevitable change requests come?

and the more i play with the more advanced features of movable type, the more i am moved to spontaneously say 'i love you' to no one in general and ben and mena trott in particular. and at least once, with nothing else handy to act as the object of my adulation, i leaned forward and gave the monitor, glowing with this templatey goodness, a big wet kiss.

yes, i'm a freak.

i just woke up. what is up with that? repeated, unrepentant acts of napping on my part in spite of the many very pressing things needing done. or maybe because of them, hmm?

i am ever so glad i didn't go to the mugu airshow today. i considered it, taking my son to see the airplanes, the big planes, the fast planes, the really old planes. he likes planes. always pointing up at them in the sky and stuff. truth is, i flaked -- napped and lagged and didn't do much at all. so, we missed the plane crash.

this makes my inner lazy wench leap up in an uncharacteristic display of energy and cry, aHA! see? see? slacking pays off, doesn't it? uh-huh. then she slouches back down and stares sullenly at the computer screen before sighing and (finally) getting around to the task at hand.

i stood outside lastnight in the chill of the spring night, late, and looked up at a lemonslice moon and an alignment of planets, and felt as connected as i ever have to ... this.

feet bare, tingling cold in the short hard grass, i lifted these eyes and saw an imperfect and/or incomplete vision (as seen from here in the lighted wilds of suburbia). however, i did see. and i did connect.

later that evening the moon did disappear behind the lowslung ranch homes i'm stranded within, but a few bright things (planets, stars, planes, whatever) remained there with me. i watched the light sky in the middle of the night, and it was a good thing. a good thing.

and how was your night?

have you ever been so tired you lay down and that very second felt the waves of drowsy physically move through you? settled into the sofa so fast it felt like destiny as you released your grasp of what's real? moments later a sound directed right at you (child perched on arm of couch, leaning over precariously to observe your reaction as he asks if you're asleep) actually tickles? have you ever been tickled (almost but not quite) out of unconsciousness by a small voice?

i have. happened today around seventhirtyish. mostly (brain)dead all day, then that sudden gravity storm just laid me out. i just got heavy and went right out, well mostly out, living room naps are what they are, in between the nickelodeon on tv on one end and the flash/shockwave computer game going on the other. i tuned out the audio portion of the multimedia and focused on the child fingers clicking and tapping keys. i know i was half dreaming (or hallucinating) but without continuity, so no memory could emerge intact from it. i was quite literally out of my head. and it was just lovely.

i'm much better now.

i am wearing a hat, so i don't have to deal with my hair.

i have been such a lump today.

i have been surfing though:

humminahummina is wonderful.

i'm just now finishing up the day's work -- actually, it's some of tomorrow's work too. i like to think of it not a long thursday, but as an early friday. but in between the feeling of freedom i get, being able to do my job from home when necessary and the delight of the time-and-a-half in the kitchen, i found room to complain -- allergies, aches, the numbness of ass asscoma i get from this bad chair i have. my friend and colleague listened to my complaints, offered sympathy, and then stated in response, 'i buried my friend today'.

oh.

you could have knocked me over with a spork. in a later conversation he told me that he'd gone to work after the service expecting to put in a few hours, then go home and grieve with his friends. that conversation took place at midnight, he was still in his office.

so i sit here in my kitchen, actually rather enjoying feeling a little achey and sniffly. yes. this is good.

· · ·

public service announcement: seat belts. my friend's friend was not wearing one. thank god Eric was, or we wouldn't have our mr. mischief to kick around anymore. get better soon and enjoy the drugs, Eric!

where are my car keys? you know, don't you. and you're not telling me because ... why? is this fun for you? you're enjoying yourselves, aren't you?

fine then. i see how it is.

· · ·

in the news, fifty year old bird clocks five million miles.

in honor of my new random tagline: 'it's an ill wind that blows my skirt up', i present this out of context:

� i went on to inform her that i'm sure she farts 10 times more than i do. but then she pointed out that if i farted 3 times, that would mean she farted 30 times and that's just not right. � - nick

�P.S. I'm feeling a little better now. But I have gas. You want me now, don't you...� - jamie

�I make small talk and butter her up in the hope of less feces in the salad. � - choire

props to batgrl, for the idea, which, while it may be a meme, is a good meme.

oh - and (on an unrelated note) please go harass visit the godofmischief and insist we see pictures of his shaved head.

i'm, umm, wow. (*waves* to wander-lust visitors)

hi! come on in, have a look around, there's beer in the fridge and pizza's on the way. feel free to put your feet up on the furniture. the cat's only slightly insane.

i feel their tender tentacles exploring the luscious curves of my scalp, undulating with gentle menace as they part my hair, sucking, sucking, intent on evacuating the contents of my cranium. i offer little resistance, bemused as i am by the whole parasitic paradigm. eep. did i just say paradigm?

they got me.

i got nothin'.

no, that's not true. i do have something, and this, apparently, is what i have.

words aren't free anymore -- a poet/artist plays with google. google is not amused.

conversation, in the car as he drove me to work:

him: [steps on gas, car makes pretty v6 sound and goes fast]
me: isn't that bad for it?
him: [defensively] it's just the secondaries opening up
me: it doesn't have secondaries. it's...
him: second gear then, it went into second gear
him: and it desperately needs an oil change
me: no it doesn't. look at the sticker. we have five hundred miles to go
him: [flustered] well it needs...
me: i was just asking because i do it all the time
me: and i wanted to know if it was bad.
him: [relaxing] oh.

so whenever the backpatting gets too much, i have to remind you i can be quite the bitch too. here's a for-instance:

you know those meme thingys, the [insert day here] [insert number or theme here]? i don't like them. i think sullivan was going to say something about this, and i'd have been happy to vent in his comments, but no. so i had to say something myself. it's time.

i hold nothing against these memes -- no wait i do, otherwise what's my point? i hold nothing against the people who participate in them. the idea itself, well, it's probably quite cool. however, it's entirely possible an entire blog's content could be generated just coming up with answers to these questions. and, this is not my vision of blogging.

and i'll confess here that no matter how much i dig your blog, if i see one of these as an entry, i skim quickly or not at all and surf on. no offense. i'd rather read what you are thinking about, the spontaneous contents of your own mind, and how you answer your own questions. a great example of this is 'one hundred things about me' - 100 independent thoughts. i love those. (still working on thinking about doing that myself)

i only ever answered one of these things -- it was the asian bastard's, and it had a question about have you ever pooped your pants as an adult, and for some reason i felt the need to share that. i answered in his comments, and that was that.

so you see i'm not all that nice. i'm a picky bitch, infact. and now you know.

not.

stayed up way late with the melly, making it happen over at ordinarymorning.net. newness out of the old, and a fresh start. stylesheets and templates, reconstructed out of not much. there was collaboration, there was cohesiveness, there was connection. she did lots of it, she's good. she hopped right on into the templatey goodness and together we made it mostly as it was. and now, there is melly back online. far from fixed, of course, but it is on its way. subsidiary pages will give you some broken links, but the basic blog is bloggable.

we may be born alone, and die alone, but we can live together. we can.

today, spontaneously and without much aforethought (i am not making this up), i intoned in an uncharacteristically majestic voice, to my son: �obey me, or feel my wrath�.

it just slipped out.

(it worked)

yes. really.

i almost made it. i drove a little bit fast as the light faded, remembered the restaurant with the view on san jon road. zipped up the steep, wide driveway, stopped the car at the dead end of the street and hopped out (there she is, still running, with 'my woman from tokyo' blasting out of the open door). and here is the sky, not quite what i'd hoped to capture, the brilliant pinks barely visible (see the teeny moon-sliver?).

i had forgotten about the restaurant on the hill -- usually i go all the way downtown, and sunsets can be missed just dealing with parking.

i'll remember that deadend road, next time i'm out chasing me some sky.

· · ·

those of you yearning for the melly may find here here, with a rousing account of her wild night out last night.

first, Jessica and i were discussing parents and pets*, and thenOgGogBeBog was talking issues with parents and pets that itch their asses on the rug. reminded me:

i used to have a poodle that did that dragging-the-anus-across-the-carpet for relief thingy. charlie, to me. charles maurice of touch�, to the rest of you. son of ch. mister of touch� and mignionette XVI, thank you very much. but he was just my doggie.

turns out it was a glandular thing. medication could help, but it required surgery to correct. that poodle was my best friend during my turbulent adolescence. he knew me like no human ever even tried to. he understood. i could tell you stories of charlie's brightness. he could take himself for walks, which was good, because the yard could not hold him.

i moved out at nineteen or twenty or something and while i was gone, they decided the dog needed that surgery. at the same time, their seventy-six vw superbeetle needed work. they fixed the car and had the dog put to sleep.

i'd have put the car to sleep. or i'd have paid for the surgery. but they didn't call me to ask. i was selling electroluxes in san jose at the time, i'd have made people buy expensive vacuums that suck real hard to pay for my dog's surgery. but no.

parents. can't live with 'em, wouldn't have been born without 'em.

actually, i was adopted, so i got born kind of on my own, but still. parents. huh.

*no, you're not going crazy, i did edit that. you may still be going crazy, but don't blame me, ok?

mignionette XVI. we called her 'minnie'. and she was beautiful. brown poodle, large for a 'toy' size. and she was smart.

we got minnie in kind of an animal rescue. she'd been kept in a cage by a college student that didn't have time for a pet. she had issues.

she (like her son charlie, my friend, who came after) could take herself for walks. she loved to go to the schoolyard. she could climb the ladder on a ten foot high slide, just to slide down. not as a trick we trained her to do, just for fun.

but she was a terror. leave her at home, she'd go through all the dog-level cupboards, drag out every container of food, rip it to shreds, and grind it into the livingroom carpet.

so we made a doggy door in the laundry room, but kept the door to the rest of the house shut. she almost clawed through the wooden door. we put a sheet of metal on the door. she clawed up the linoleum trying to dig under the door.

we thought if we bred her, she'd calm down. we made a deal with an a.k.c. breeder for pick of the litter in lieu of stud fees, and so she came to be big with litter from ch. mister of touch�. the day she went into labor, she went under the patio. we were ready to rip up the patio to get her out, but we managed to coax her out.

it was late spring, nineteen seventy. early june? something like that. school was still in, i remember getting to stay home from school. i watched the puppies being born (charlie was among them).

motherhood did not settle her down; minnie continued to have issues. my parents decided we couldn't keep her. i think i've blocked what happened. good home? green rolling hills, room to run? sitting on pillows being hand-fed bits of steak and bacon? something like that.

it's going to take awhile to get all these things worked out. maybe a day, maybe two. in the meantime, without the melly to read, we might want to take time to reflect on how much we love to read her words, how many times we were deeply affected by her words.

this is rough for her. i say we stage a good old-fashioned love-in, either here in my comments, or blog about it and send me the link, i'll keep a list here.

people who have blogged the love-in: mike of tripleB · jessica of peace dividend · let me know if you've done so, or, join in here...

melly rocks! discuss:

last night, melly mailed me about getting her site moved off her servers that had suddenly ceased to work. it was late, i was tired. we were going to do it in the morning.

so i get up to three emails with instructions on ftp'ing, and i open my ftp client.

-host not found [authoritative]
-unable to connect to littleginsu.net within 3 attempts

can you say panic? i was thinking, what if it's all gone. what if all melly's writing is gone. i was ready to go fling myself into a wall like a four year old.

turns out she HAS BACKUPS. and she has her graphics, and i have her old layout from when we did that birthday thing where bunch of us switched our layout to hers.

it's all in pieces but we can put it back together. we have the technology.

moral of this story:

go make backups. make them right now.

and here's some irony for you: today, her blog is featured prominently in her local paper. and the site is not there. (no backups could have prevented that, and, she's taking it well.)

No, I did not off myself, but I did cry on the way home from Walmart. By the time I got home I started wondering what sort of person cries over the loss of a blog? Better yet, what sort of person cries over the abrupt loss of a blog the day she is mentioned in the newspaper of one of the largest cities in the United States of America?

This bitch right here.

I was perfectly normal with kd. I even sounded quite put together to Gordon. Ohhh, I think that for whatever reason, maybe the blog wasn't meant to be seen by someone who would have picked up that paper. I have to trust God's ultimate purpose. Then for about half an hour I complained to my mom, who didn't have a fucking clue what I was talking about. Blog? What's a blog? Can't you just mail the essays? I don't get it. Blog? What's a blog?

There are three important lessons I have learned today:

1. The blog has meant far more to me than I even knew. I had no idea how much of myself came out in it. I had no idea how much of a release it has been for me. I had no idea what a comfort it is waking up to daily sardonicism.

2. It's just a blog. You can begin a new blog and a new place that you own yourself, which is what I'm in the process of doing. Well, kd is in the process of doing. It's just a blog. You can still breath. You can still write. Your son still shits his diaper and cries when his mobile stops.

3. No golden opportunity just falls into your lap. Not if you are me anyways. When things don't work out as your little heart had so wanted them to, it's not a good idea to feel sorry for yourself for too long. It is however, good to follow my mom's advice, which was,"You just need to learn to get out there and kick some ass!"

They say a blog will never make you famous. Mine almost did. Does that count? Do I get a cookie? Do I get a golden ticket to New York City where I'll wear knee boots and buy glasses without lenses because I don't need them? Will I ever wear pencils in my hair? Do lunch? Talk about penile implants with Patrick Swayze when he's in his 60's?

Not without my blog I won't.

i told her she could borrow my blog while hers is in the shop. so, since i'll be busy, this will work out well.

my son is in the next room. i haven't gone to look just recently, but from the sounds of things he's running really fast across the room and launching himself at the wall. i'm afraid to ask.

ahh, well, he just told his father: 'i'm trying to put a hole in the wall'. no more power rangers for that kid.

i've worked harder on this project today than i have on anything for a long time. even work. i've struggled with it, but i'm past most of the major hurdles and have only a few more things to do. if only i could give you a link to it, it might make up for the lack of content, eh?

it's been a lovely day in the land of MT templates, though. exploring the features of this software -- just good fun. (back to work with me now)

so. this started out, me escaping fleeing (something away) from surreally dot com. playing. i was just playing with movable type. this was supposed to be my 'obscure personl journal'. honest. and ... and ... it grew and stuff and then, the last few weeks or so, comments have gone all mad wonderful, and traffic ... unheard-of levels. the last few days or so i've beat surreally main site in traffic. by a significant amount. this was never my intention as i studied the block before me and made the first cut. no wait that's a quote.

so it is. and so it goes. i am amazed by what's happened here.

that's all.

and thanks.

i was going to not get the beer and write something clever about how, this week, i discovered to my delight that cleansing my system had a strange effect on me, lowering a different subset of my inhibitions. all manner of heretofore unforseen wackyness happening.

but then i realized my mindset when i tried thinking this through -- the self-denial, the broken self-promise. the lack of selfishness, which i'll tell anyone who'll listen is far, far underrated. anyway as we all learned from watching risky business, sometimes you just got to say... what the fuck.

enough with the language! for shame!

in other news, chris's quirky family is at it again. seen here in happier, but still chaotic times (last t-day), we have john, chris's brother, and tami, his girlfriend or wife depending on who you believe (john is a pathological liar - incapable of telling the truth even if it doesn't matter). so, (again depending on who you believe) tonight tami is in jail for attempted manslaughter on john. something about hitting a car he was in with her car.

knowing john as i do, i'd say he probably had it coming if this actually happened. that is not to say tami isn't significantly psychotic herself, it's just, well, they deserve each other. in the grand scheme of relationships, these two hit karma jackpot.

maybe i'm biased, but i've seen john wail on (whale on? wale on? what is the proper slang spelling here?) previous girlfriends. even if he is (depending on who you believe) 'working and doing good' now, however unlikely that is, i still think he had it coming.

'may you live in interesting times'

the fifteen or twenty minutes it takes the coffee to brew are the worst minutes of the day. damn slow coffemaker. proof that if you try to do many things, you will not do them as well as you could -- the combination of coffee, espresso, and cappuccino foamer, well, it's a bit much i suppose.

what feels even worse is, if you are drawn (as a good 'net junkie ought to be) to check your email first thing, and you hear the bathroom door close behind the other occupant of the house (who takes a long, long time in there and makes it uninhabitable afterward).

that did not happen this morning. i'm just not focused on this post just yet and i needed to put something so all that bad language isn't right at the top. so, i go to clean things up, and end up posting about the potty anyway.

i think living with a four year old boy gets to you after awhile. everything's about the poopy, or the peepee. and you know, since he got into playing computer games, incidents involving him bouncing around the house hollering about 'poop' are way down, while incidents of actual poop are way up -- he loves his computer so much, and these online games don't seem to have pause buttons? or maybe my kid doesn't have a pause function built in him? because, his potty training's gone down the tubes. well, not the plumbing tubes. no.

i'm working on it. limited success (at least when he does it he's scared, 'cause he knows no more puter for however long). but i need it to stop. he's going to be five in june. i need the poop to stop.

· · ·

forty-nine came out rather well.

that's right -- i'm a mofo sexy bloggah:

because bran-O-phelia says so, that's why!

first of all the boss gets back from london. business trip, all work and no play, yet still he manages to annoy me with how much fun i'd have had. how nice it is to fly first class and stay in a five star hotel and help yourself to the honor bar and the company pays all the bills. i believe the words lap of luxury were used.

and most normal people, for instance the other boss that was on the trip with him, both of them working the 24 and 48 hour shifts to do the impossible, would take a day or so off. and he doesn't even work here, he's a retired owner and right now he's sitting here behind me with his goddamn feet up on the fucking desk, reading the stupid newspaper. rustling the pages. why? oh. he missed me. great. on to lunch then.

on the way to get stuffed jalape�os and tacos, this bitch in front of me has a license plate frame 'out of my way i'm on my way to n.a.' and i thought, how stupid and pointless. it's on the fucking back of the car. even if it was also on the front, which i doubt, you wouldn't be able to read it to know she wanted you out of the way. maybe she'd drive badly instead? and is going to n.a. a reason to have this attitude? should i respect this? if i don't get out of her way, what's she gonna do, break out her crack pipe? and this will be my fault somehow? i wanted to let her know how idiotic the whole thing was, but the only way i could think of to do it was to put the buick in first gear (for the torque) and see how well her acura's crumple zones worked.

and then god bless KLOS, they played the real 'i can't drive 55', and i thought why on earth did sammy remake the song to adjust for the change in the speed limit? it was (whether this is good or bad) a slice-of-life bit of americana that invokes nostalgia, and it was totally ruined in the process of being updated to reflect current laws on the books.

and you know what? the whole not smoking thing hasn't made me all that fussy, really. i'm more like this (a bitch) than i like to admit. mostly i keep this to myself, but since i have this excuse, well, here it is.

i've been looking over the last, oh, week or so here, and noticed an alarming trend towards the use of the f word. you know, fuck. one of, if not the most versatile words in the english language, but it is generally considered coarse for a lady woman chick broad person to use in polite ... whatever this is.

so screw politeness. no! that's not what i meant. fuck it. i'm having a fling with the f word. i'm sure i'll resume the thinly veiled usages of friggin' or freakin' or effing, someday, unless that's just silly.

people are asking what's real and what's not (i won't point fingers), and concluding the web's not. okay fine. some of this arose out of a certain april fool's prank (again, no finger pointing) that folks fell for. my advice to everyone is get over it already. it's as real as you want it to be. it's as silly as your sense of humor allows it to be. and there's a certain detachment, but then there isn't. the feelings are real, even if they are grown in a rather hothouse environment -- the immediacy and intimacy of blogging.

blogging is a very efficient way of communicating. in blogging, or more accurately journaling, you distill the essence of your days and memories into a few paragraphs, which can then be perused at will -- it's no wonder friendships develop so well here. you can meet someone, cruise through their archives, and know more about them in a shorter period of time, than getting to know someone face to face. we get personal in these logs of ours.

so is this instant intimacy, just add bandwidth, real? sure it is. it's not like spending years getting to know someone in real life, how could it be? but these days, how often do you get the chance to do that? life has taken away many of our chances at forging the longlasting bonds we formed back when we were likely never to leave our home town, work for the same company all our lives.

life has isolated many of us, with time constraints and the necessary mobility. the internet has offered us a way to connect that transcends these limitations. no, it's not like it was in the olden days. nothing is.

so all this, 'it isn't real' -- well, whatever. and if any of you not-realers would like to step up and hand me a fucking cigarette, then nobody gets hurt. no, what i meant is, i'm open to debate. really.

but i don't think you can prove to me that these friendships aren't real.

i'm sorry to drag you nice people through this with me (again), but i really have to write about it.

it's been thirty-six hours, give or take, since i've had a cigarette. that's the longest i've gone in awhile, even the day i was in the e.r. for the asthma. yeah. i know. anyway, this conversation, this morning:

me: how many cigarettes do we have left?
him: two
me: oh
him: [comes into kitchen, tosses pack on computer table]
me: why are you doing that to me?
him: [takes back the pack]
me: what's in there?
him: [opens pack so i can see] it's the last cigarette.
me: i haven't had a cigarette in 36 hours.
him: well, this is the last one. either you smoke it or i will. we aren't buying any more.

everything went all fuzzy after that.

this is not what i had in mind. not commitments or even declarations of intent, and certainly not a pact. no. i was just procrastinating it. i was going to get to it eventually.

oh. i let him have that last one. i don't like that kind anyway.

i'm not really quitting. those little vanilla cigar type things that come in the plastic tubes? i'm going to smoke those outside on the back porch when i have beers on the weekends. that's the plan, k?

oh, and i wanted you to notice -- how i asked a non-specific question designed to elicit a cigarette from him, and when it worked, i got all fussy about it. that's just life with me.

not here! oh. alright then. here: so what if between my ears it's one long denis leary routine? so what if i'm salivating? i wish i had permalinks in my comments. i bet i could do that if i tried hard enough. but priorities. i have things i've had to do for months. miguel, i have not forgotten you. if i could just slow down with the (here's where the comments permalinks would come in handy, i'm about to quote myself) thoughts swarming like rabid mice on meth all throughout the maze of my brain, if i could just focus.

wouldn't it be great if the shoe project were reborn by morning? morning, in austria? i have a few hours and a fierce case of ... umm ... let's just say my tummy feels funny. as does my head, but my head doesn't smell ...

never mind.

'i'm looking for pecker', 'do you have pecker?', 'i'm having a hard time finding pecker' and 'i can't believe how hard it is to locate pecker in this town!', i finally gave up. it was just too hard.
looks like i am just gonna have to buy pecker. - undertoad
· · ·
What's Russell Crowe got that Joan Cusak hasn't got? I'll tell you what: a penis. - scott
· · ·
everything's right as rain. hehe, and it bakes my noodle. - bran-O-phelia
· · ·
I know more than I want to about those gooey, sugar encrusted demons. (However I don't mind seeing them smoke themselves to death.) - batgrl
· · ·
Power hates to be whined at. Power will make concessions just to get you out of its office, if you whine long enough. - sal

Sal, the first person to sign on for surreally dot net, has got her blog going. she's new to this, go say hi! ethereal from surreally dot com has something in the works, we'll know more soon. other possiblities include paraphenalia, which is written in several languages, and also a group of korean students. (and yes, those last two are pending me setting them up, i'm .... i'm getting there)

i'm big on procrastination these days -- bigger than usual. umm, but i do have more for you. later. really.

ok, now, you're probably not surprised to hear that i talk to myself. almost constantly, especially when i'm on the computer, and i am on the computer pretty much all the time. i'm considerate, i try to keep it down, but still. as i'm tapping at the keys, i'm generally nattering away. it helps me focus and whatnot.

and as you know, i blog, and i surf and comment on blogs. i do this quite a lot, and in doing so, i have had to adapt certain speech mannerisms into the written word.

so i suppose it's the perfectly natural and logical progression of things, that i was reading a blog just now and i said, out loud, [sigh]. with the brackets and everything. instead of actually sighing.

i'm ok. really.

so, i was standing in carl's jr, waiting for the food, and thinking about the olden days. i do have vague distant memories of working fast food, way back when i was 17, at sam's superburgers on 105th avenue and east 14th street in san leandro, a few blocks from the oakland border. it was a drive thru, with two car windows and one walkup window. busy meant one car at each window and two more cars at speakers behind each car, total of six car orders in process, and however many were standing at the other window. no cash registers. the manager, who'd been doing it for years and years, considered you weak if you wrote down orders on paper sacks -- the only order recording system available. there were three of us: i had one window, and made drinks and fries. the manager worked the grill in the middle, and his wife worked the other side, the corndogs and tacos and such. and we had to take the orders, remember them, add them up, figure tax, charge the customer, make change, and make the food for all the orders, which we shouted back and forth to each other.

you know, i'm going to sound like a curmudgeon when i say, it was good for us. my god, i could do math in my head like you couldn't believe, and my memory, in contstant use, was amazing considering my natural ditz tendencies. and the bookkeeping system, based on how many containers and burger buns were used at the end of the day, was surprisingly accurate. we did it all in our heads, dammit, i'll be saying to my grandkids when they get their first jobs at these burger joints with the newfangled touch screens, with the orders on the computers and the headsets and the one order at a time from the drive thru. these kids today, they have it so easy.

lets not even get into my first office job, when we had to type on five part invoices without making mistakes, or else use multiple colors of the relatively new innovation, liquid paper, on all the carbons. the invoices were numbered! you had to type them! if you voided too many, you got in trouble!

why, we didn't even have post-it notes! we had to walk miles through the snow and paperclip small pieces of paper to other pieces of paper! and it was good for us! yes it was!

*ahem* where was i?

oh, i'm enjoying the peace and quiet of my modern, mostly cushy, techy job very much, thank you. and i don't wish the old days were back, not one bit.

last night, in a fit of whimsy, i posted a link to metafilter. and, it worked out rather well, proving, anything can happen.

also, batgrl and i made ourselves at home at Jon's place, and we only set a little fire.

it was a good night.

i'm not quite awake yet, but then again my body probably still thinks it's an hour ago, so, no complaints.

and how is your monday?

· · ·

The technology behind Google's great results PigeonRank�

this isn't self-inflicted (though i'm sure i have some of that). i've been this way all my life. strange little quirks that i've had to learn to deal with. over time, it gets easier, repetition of the thought process enables me to run through it almost as fast as not having to process the thoughts. but i still process.

what i have trouble with, is anything that comes in sets: bo and luke duke. port and starboard. larry curly and moe. what i have to do is assign some sort of mnemonic to the set, and then call that up and apply it before i know which one's which. i know curly is the bald guy because that's the joke, but the other two? not sure. port and starboard? easy. left and right, in alphabetical order, apply in that order to port and starboard, and you have port=left and starboard=right. now, left and right it took me years to master. as a child, i know i was right-handed, so i would make a little eating motion with my right hand. as i got older, i was able to just make the eating motion in my mind, so people wouldn't look at me funny.

and daylight savings time drives me nuts. last night i was laying on the couch as the benadryl kicked in, trying to figure out if we were 'gaining' or 'losing' an hour, because one is good and the other is bad. so i'm thinking, of course, spring forward in the spring which means we add an hour which means we're gaining, which is good right? then i thought no, because that's not gaining an hour, it's skipping an hour which is losing. but i went back and forth a couple of times (it would have been the same without the benadryl, but it would have kept me awake longer). finally, i concluded that it was a lost hour, and so mornings are going to feel... earlier? right. it's going to feel earlier than it is. or is it later? mornings are going to be worse, right?

on the bright side, if i'm ever going for an insanity defense and they ask me if i know right from wrong, i'll just make a little eating motion with my right hand and look confused.

are you a procrastinator? do you want to meet others like yourself? then, may i suggest, returning your videos to blockbuster at 11:53 am on a sunday. there were a lot of us, a surprising number, scampering across the busy parking lot from hurriedly parked cars, more bare feet and uncombed hair and strange fashion choices than i'd seen in one place in a long time.

i'm not alone! i feel almost normal.

you know, the blogathon, right? well, not only did they at one time propose that BlogCon 2002 be sort of an afterparty for the 'thon, but they also support some great causes. each blogger chooses a cause.

if i were to blogathon (i.e., post an entry every half hour for 24 hours starting 28 jul 02), i would do so in support of the electronic frontier foundation, because they are fighting for our freedom, and they oppose some very wealthy bad things.

so, if, say, i were to sign up, would anybody be willing to sponsor me?

it's just a thought.

batgrl made me do it.

i stuffed two vons bags in my purse and headed off to the beach. as i drove downtown, i rehearsed in my mind how i was going to pull off the heist liberation -- just stroll casually down the beach, intently searching, find it, pick it up, and walk off as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do.

fortunately, there was a family already there, climbing around the rocks, adding to their collection. the wife smiled at me and said, �nice rocks�. at this point i found mine, yes i found one specific rock on the whole beach, which i then held up and said �i saw this yesterday and i had to come back for it�. the rock-hunting family didn't seem to think this was weird at all. i bagged the rock and was off.

so, success. the rock rode shotgun on the ride home. and here it is, in its rightful place on my porch with the other beachanalia.

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and in the everybody's doing it department, i have joined both michele and miguel in teaching my child to do this.

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in the news, adults find their inner sponge. spongebob rocks my world.

earlier this evening, i was sitting here at the computer, engrossed in the reading of emails, with the back door open to let in the breeze. the first thing i heard was the rattling of tags, which i didn't really process until the very large yellow lab walked right in the door. now, there was nothing at all threatening about this dog's manner, but the truth is he startled me pretty badly and i screamed. poor fella took off like a shot, and i felt so bad afterward, i mean, he was probably having a really bad day, and there i went and made it worse. i should have invited him in for a snack and checked his tags, maybe called his owner or at least gave him a place to hang out while i tried to find who he belonged to. i wish i wasn't such a spazz like that.

ok, so i have some beach/kid pictures, it was a beautiful day. here's my son scaring his mommy. he was very serious about crawling in the sand. here he goes, up the slide. and there was an interesting rock.

[sigh] i just keep feeling sorry for that poor, friendly doggie that i scared so badly. i hope he's ok.

i sat in the rising light of a long night and held what was left of my youthful face in my hands, and tried to cry for what i've lost, what might have been and never was, and also for what most certainly will be ... aging. oldness. if this is when it's over, well then, let it be. and let me be in peace, let me live like this. older. no.

wait. i am not old just yet. shit. no. i may not have my youth but i have my damnable immaturity and so what? so bite me. so fuck this. i'm not getting old yet. it's still early. it's still early.

lately the dsl has been crazy, and by lately i mean, the last several days. flicker flicker flicker, yellow-green-yellow-etc-etc. flicker flicker from mediocre to slow like bad dialup. driving me to distraction (like that's hard to do).

but anyway. so i thought, it's been a long time since i've cycled the power to the dsl modem. so i turn off puters, unplug modem, go pee, let it sit, come back, crack a brewski, replug, reboot -- solid green. fast-ass internet, once again.

geez, is that all it was? all those days? i'm rolling my eyes again, you feel this?

melly is maybe coming to california.

forty-four rocks.

add your link because the freerange linkist is just good fun. i have already found interesting sites that i might not otherwise have found. those, and also bookcrossing.com, a kind of where's george with books, i thought the top bookcrosser, harriet, had a fascinating story.

that is all for now, i do have more for later: things, plans, ideas. stuff. more stuff. and things. things & stuff.

my first real troll was a doozy. it was such great fun, albeit somewhat annoying. it had some strenuous objections to my use of my own, personal website to express my own, liberal opinion. you know, supporting freedom of expression, that can be mighty offensive to some people.

i'm just a girl with a weblog. and freedom of speech. if you don't like it, don't read it. and if you post comments in disagreement, try to do so more coherently, and leave your name and an email. anonymous flaming is just so tacky.

this was all about the naughty boat. so, i've sent a message to robert turobiner, hoping i can talk to him in a little more depth, get some more details. sadly, his first amendment case has run aground due to the terms of his lease, so he's looking elsewhere for a place to dock his boat. yes, the marina has the right to terminate his lease for any reason. however, it's the equivalent of someone renting a home to me and then revoking my tenancy because he didn't like the bumper stickers on my car.

it's at the landlord's discretion. i would hope my landlord would believe in freedom of expression -- this is not hardcore porn we're talking about here. they are mermaids. their lips are not quite touching. his website sells sex-themed novelties. ooooh. novelties.

this is not sex we're talking about. it's innuendo. it's a painting of two mythical creatures with human-looking breasts. human breasts. paintings of them. c'mon. it's a URL, which is a play on words from a movie, with a suggestive twist.

oh, and it's 'i learned from lesbians'. can you say rabid homophobia? sure you can.

it's a boat, folks, or rather, an article about said boat in the local paper, entitled 'marina wants to send salty sailboat back to sea'. turns out this fellow, robert turobiner, brought his boat to the ventura harbor, and all the stuffyass yachty types are all agog about the name of the boat -- 'i learned from lesbians' and his own original artwork which depicts two topless mermaids kissing. you can just see the kiss in the picture, it looks quite chaste to me. he also has a website, the url of which is apparently quite naughty. the picture is taken to deliberately obscure the url -- all that's visible is 'hemtheywi' though i'm not sure about that last 'i', and the next letter could possibly be 'l'. it's a long url, i'm thinking ifyou____themtheywill__.com. it's so naughty, the paper doesn't reveal it. the article itself is not in their online version. i have googled 'robert turobiner' and 'i learned from lesbians' which is also the title of his second CD, an acoustic CD. i have looked on mp3.com for his name. my not inconsiderable search skills have failed me.

the website is supposedly naughty in title only, turobiner is quoted as saying it 'doesn't live up to its name'. and i can't find a damn thing online. it's a mystery. but i'm on it. if need be, i shall travel to the damn harbor myself with my digicam and delve further into this. i must know.

and as for the harbor management and the fussyass yachtspersons who object to a couple topless mermaids smooching on a boat, well, all i can do is heave a heavy sigh. yeah, like suggestive boat names and mermaid boobies are a shocking new development in maritime lore. two other boats in the harbor, the 'horny hooker' and the 'tail chaser' aren't being kicked out -- i suppose corny double entendres involving fishing imagery are ok then.

can you just feel me rolling my eyes?

the damn kid stays up late. he loves the computer, i am a pushover. five more minuteses turn into half hours, it's going on eleven-ish. i get him into his bed, which has evolved into a livingroom campout, path of least parental resistance. i camp there too on the couch, it's hard to say don't do as i do. i am at least guilty of this, permissiveness. at least.

he's settled into his place, rented goofy movie running. all's well, right? i used to consider my staying up late as my time of peace in the house, my me time, blogsurfing and emailing and fun. not last night.

midnight-ish:

me: [listening to mp3s on headphones]
[thump]
me: [in denial]
[thump. thumpthumpthump. thump]
me: [gets up, stalks into living room, where kid is has turned on the light and the fan, and is bouncing around] lay DOWN go to SLEEP
kid: [giggles]
me: [menacingly, in his face] i MEAN IT. i do NOT want to spank you.
kid: [quiets down]

later...

[thump] [giggle]
me: [rushes into living room] dammit i MEAN IT.
kid: [giggles]
me: [makes motions as if i'm really going to spank him] I MEAN IT.
kid: whine, whine, whine [quiets down]

later...

[giggle] [thump]

it was an ungodly hour when i got him to sleep, and there was no peace for me last night. there rarely ever is these days.

yeah, i know, bedtime routines, stories, tucking in, we do that. the routine also includes him manipulating me with requests for movies, water, peeled apples, protection from monsters, etc. he's relentless. someday i'll figure this out, and when i do we will feel so much better in the morning.

as it is, we're so tired.

i just registered surreally.net. put it on the same hosting plan as dot com (at a lower cost, because, i'm reselling. to myself. damn, i'm a good customer.)

so, i'm going to go lie down on the couch for a moment and contemplate this folly. those in need of webhosting can see surreally main site for more details.

i was recently reminded of this (damn, i forget where), this recurring dream i had for a good twenty years. i'm back at school, usually high school. i don't know where i'm supposed to go, or i've forgotten where my locker is, or i show up to class utterly unprepared -- i know nothing! and there is a test! in most of these dreams, i've also forgotten some vital item of clothing, pants for instance, or sometimes i'm totally nude, trying to cover up with whatever unlikely thing was handy: bushes, books, scraps of things. naked in school! again and again.

twenty years of this. and i end up in an internship program through the local community college, almost three years ago. taking a couple classes, visual basic and intro computer science, and working as an apprentice webmistress at the company i'm still working for.

my life was a mess, i was a complete and utter flake, and it's a miracle i still have this job, but i digress. in any case, i knew when the first day of school was, and i should have gotten decent sleep that night, but did not. i woke up late, leapt into my clothes, and headed to the campus, hoping i'd somehow find my way around, using only the odd memory abilities i've developed over years of disorganization. i tend to remember images of things, not photographic, but something like that. maybe like a visually phonetic memory. works better than you'd think, with exceptions, of course.

yes, it was only a community college, but the freakin' campus was enormous, much bigger than i'd imagined even though i've lived in this area forever and i know, i know how huge it is. big. i'd hoped i'd see something that would would ring the mnemonic bell in my mind, but no. so, i was lost. and i'd forgotten my paper of what classes i was in, hell, i didn't even have a pen let alone a notebook. thank goodness i remembered to wear pants. i was actually rather well dressed for the occasion, i looked like i belonged there, just a little older than most of the others, but still. i had the fashion aspect down.

but i was lost. and i panicked. i found the admissions office. it was late august, i had just walked several miles in circles, hyperventilating. i'm sure the stench of fear was upon me. in hysterical, hiccuping breaths i babbled to the first person behind the first desk �i've had this dream a thousand times, i go back to school and i don't know where i'm supposed to be and i don't even have a pen and...�

the nice lady didn't call the psychiatric assesment team, didn't hit the security emergency button, didn't make light of my predicament. in calm tones, she assured me that it would, indeed, be ok, and looked up my schedule on the computer. she handed me a printout, and when i went on about the no paper/not even a pen issue, she assured me that first days were not heavy on note-taking, but still handed me a nice legal pad and a pen. she gave me directions to the building i was already supposed to be in class in, and off i went.

i was so late at that point that my i missed my first day of my first class. it got better after that, thankfully.

and i never had the dream again.

stop it. just. just. stop it. enough! it's a phone. phones do not sing, they ring. let them ring!

i don't care if you want to be sophisticated with a few tinny lines of beethoven, or prove your coolness with the latest downloaded snippet of tool or radiohead, or be quirky with the theme from the muppets. it's bad enough out in public, but then you have the officemates with their phones constantly bursting into the same song. over. and over. stop it.

my phone is cool. it plays four note chords and actually sounds rather pretty. but do i annoy you constantly with some stupid song that then gets stuck in your head, just a few notes on repeat? no! i do not. my phone can do anything your phone can do. my phone could announce callers by name in my voice, but that's just silly. sometimes, the reason 'because it can' is not good enough.

well, i take that back. my phone does not download ringtones. i did not want it to, i wanted it to be a functional phone. to do phone things. like ring. phones ring. they should not sing. make them stop.

consider yourselves warned. and if that's not enough, let me tell you, your phone will make a damned uncomfortable suppository.

been awhile since i did the batgrl's out of context thingy. it's so time for this:

�As hungry for a new juicy bit of news to share with her friends as she often was, it's doubtful Aunt Lilo wanted to see what she saw that day. Edna and Grandmother sprawled out in the bed doing..well.. what they wanted to do.� - lynn

�I close my eyes, inhale, and I can let my spirit swim slowly through the glory that is Shiner Bock Beer Bread. I will prepare some soup a little later on so that when the bread has cooled off, I shall dine.� - file13

�On a completely unrelated note, did you know the number for the Poison Control Center is 1-800-8-POISON? Say that out loud with me, huh? One eight hundred ATE POISON.� - tara

�Look out for the mutant space penguins, they're headed your way. A pox on your chickens!� - jonsullivan.com's comments

�Unfortunately for us both he chose one where the singer came half naked to my place of work and proceeded to make a spectacle of us both.� - sarah

yes that's right, it's time for your meds. yay, tracy's back!

technoerotica.net is a great site. the name alone... but it's so much more than that. thanks to Rick's generous nature and general all around code-godliness, i have added a feature to the sidebar that will let you add your own linkys to the list. i'm keeping the old one around for now, it's totally in need of serious work, and so i invite you to test out my implementation of these cool cgi's -- over there, in the sidebar --> go now, add yourself. just for fun, even if you're in the old-school list, and especially if you're not.

c'mon, add your link.

here's the plan: i reveal entirely too much, then we all move on, k? see, my anomosity towards aprilfoolishness is deeper than not getting the jokes, it's really 1984 that's been my problem this monday. and it was worse than usual this year, i'm otherwise somewhat strong, sort of. well, trying anyway.

i have questionable motivation for posting this, this too much information. it's as i explained to two of the people that were doing damp-shoulder duty with me today: sometimes, you need to tell people that you really did have a real reason for the whining. like, if you got hurt and everybody called you a whiner till you swaggered out of the emergency room triumphantly waving a cast, crowing, it's going to need surgery (true story, btw).

shit, that made almost no sense. and nobody called me a whiner except me.

i won't tell or re-tell the story. i'll only include a poem about the healing.

historically this is a very bad day for me. oh, i've always been gullible, and i would always forget what day it is or fail to get the jokes but that's not it. this day, for the last eighteen years of my personal history, is a bad one.

honestly, i was trying to get into the spirit of things, and just now i'm deciding that's not going to happen.

we will return to regularly scheduled going along with things tomorrow, or maybe later today, (i tend to be rather resilient, anything's possible) i'm just saying, if i'm not giggling along with y'all, there's a reason.

i made it through the work part of this day, at least. i had a crew of friends, some listening to me whine, some keeping me busy and occupied doing good. something to be said for barely being able to keep up with the emails, all day long. that something might be, jeez, did i do no work at all today?

still a little wrecked. be patient with me?