11.29.01 you just don't feel it deep enough


one finds out such exciting things when one's e-mailing goes to pot! not unlike the gossip you hear at slumber parties when you pretend you're asleep.


a list of mood album suggestions for

washing dishes: american III: solitary man, johnny cash
the bay bridge: some girls, the rolling stones
the battleship potemkin: how we quit the forest, rasputina
falling asleep: the boxed life, henry rollins
scrabble: if you're feeling sinister, belle and sebastian
house party with relative strangers: spiral scratch, the buzzcocks
filling diltiazem capsules: let's get it on, marvin gaye

11.28.01 that lucky old sun


as i have no work to do, i checked out popex per alsolauren. like fantasy football, but with music! as i know nothing about fantasy football, i was unprepared for a faux stock market game. stocks scare the bejesus out of me, so i bought'n'sold 100 shares of robbie williams and ran away. i did appreciate the discussion boards - good ideas for driving games ('songs that could double as curries', &c). paul and i get a lot of mileage out of that sort of thing (a pirate's favorite britpop album...?).


now a haircut, rental movies, dinner shopping. joe is making me buy turkey and sausage: this is some twenty-first century mutation of making one's boyfriend buy tampons. i'm a sensitive bronze-age vegetarian.


the pilot light is out, and we can see our breath in the apartment. not actually so uncomfortable; in california, though, this feels stupid. i'm thinking my fish will die.

11.27.01 my little ace reporter


oh, and thanksgiving was nice. joe made dinner, mom made dessert, i chopped and washed things. i'm finally unashamed of my food prep shortcomings: other people enjoy it, and i'm good with dishes. emily sat on her bum on thursday, but she was our waitress on saturday. balance.


balance! i fail to understand the bowel-clenching twentysomething crisis mode business. i think i lucked out when i overdid teenage angst: there's some regrettable juvenilia, sure, but i invented drama for so long that the muscles are mostly blown out. this is huge, as far as i can tell: Issues may be there someday, but for now i get to drink tea and read things. hot damn, honestly.

11.26.01 what's he like? it's not important -


article in the chronicle on saturday: bay area planned parenthoods got hand-delivered "warnings" from an anti-abortion group saying that they would be driving around the city with big dead baby billboards. this is considered to be in poor taste "in the wake of september 11". of the silly bits in the piece, the last makes me titter the most: "in the wake" is a mental image of bobbing around behind a cruise liner, for me.


also bobbing around: many terror sex babies. folks are predicting a birth rate spike next year, as "i am alive, you are alive" sex came into fashion after the terrorist attacks. for future reference, this is what happens when you cancel america's regularly scheduled programming for a week.


from the senate mail bag:

i, like my father before me, have the ability to hear dog whistles. this morning, however, i noticed that someone had left a trail of small screws outside my house. i have now also lost the ability to hear dog whistles.

11.19.01 black magic woman


have been reading little, watching little, accomplishing little. work friends juggle three and four jobs, multiple performance groups, multiple partners...i, on the other hand, ended up backing out of a reasonable night of work at slim's because i wouldn't have time to get the apartment together for family later this week. several half-excuses: having your mum over for A First Holiday is big. not gut-clenching big, but still. and though slim's would be a great racket - good money, meeting bands, so on - i had a violent ego moment about it the other night. i would like to buy things; i am not in a coat-check state of mind, though. no art to suffer for, lately.


so med students do the whole saved by the bell eggsitting-as-life-experience thing with human skulls. saturday i met several kids who were in the middle of this: one has to brush the moss from her skull's teeth, sid's is his drinking buddy, and so on. i love yicky stuff, and i couldn't even touch one. bad, bad vibes. on to a conversation about stone removal - "we were in there anyway, so we thought we'd just do him a favor" as in impromptu liposuction with handfuls of oh my. i thought draining abscesses on our lunch breaks was hard core. this is what led to the ego moment: i came home from that party and checking coats turned my stomach. casual work, okay: outerwear, no. medicine hells yes, but no skull-touching.

11.17.01 do this, don't do that


so i answered this posting on craigslist for "female vocalist with dark sense of humor". they were thinking low & snarly, lots of spoken word, whatever on formal experience - hey, why not? they called me in fifteen minutes, made me an offer and pointed me to an mp3 site. decided not to hook up my speakers - the pieces were called "force feeding" and such. i'm genuinely frightened.


jude broke nick's necklace. one minute he's batting at the chain, and the next he's chewing on something - the whole stone fell out. i'm thinking that when a three-legged cat bites off one's ex-boyfriend's anniversary present, one is supposed to take some sort of hint. i put the stone in a drawer and am wearing the, um, socket; the look is interesting.

11.12.01 meanwhile, back at the ranch


carstravaganza with dad this weekend. he's been wanting to road trip for months, so i picked him up friday morning and went north or east. food emerged as a substantial theme: we saved packets of frosting, tried to remember to photograph our dinners, and trucked around with three bags of groceries that are mostly inedible or in my kitchen now. i have a new indestructible teapot. it is likely to destroy me.


+5: tea on lake tahoe
+4: nimble little car
+3: aspen on the truckee in reno
+2: campari umbrellas
+1: ronald reagan jelly bean portrait
00: nevada's oldest hotel
-1: prostitution museum
-2: continental breakfast
-3: bowling injuries
-4: carson city speed trap
-5: oakland international airport security (A: so how do you feel about waiting in this line for the terminal? B: i thought this was the line for space mountain.)


from lemony snicket's the hostile hospital, in which klaus and sunny baudelaire labor to save their sister from esme squalor's nefarious cranioectomy:

"She's not here," Klaus said, putting down the last page of "Pneumonia Ward." "Violet's name is nowhere on the list. How are we going to find her in this huge hospital, if we can't figure out what ward she's in?"
"Alias," Sunny said, which meant "Maybe she's listed under a different name."
"That's true," Klaus said, looking at the list again. "After all, Mattathias's real name is Count Olaf. Maybe he made up a new name for Violet, so we couldn't rescue her. But which person is really Violet? She could be anyone from Mikhail Bulgakov to Haruki Murakami. What are we to do?"

read lemony snicket, damnit.

11.07.01 hours to go


essentially planned our evening around 24's premiere last night. i feel no shame; i've never been one for asceticism. in the months before the television, joe and i would congratulate ourselves on its absence and then watch the stereo from the couch.


i'm under the impression that one can't really approach This Modern World without the tube. blah blah nixon-kennedy debates blah, that's not what i mean. A, james's 'house of fiction' was scenic, but i never really believed that anyone lived there. B, i'm sick to death of male writers who describe women like they're taste testing donuts. no thesis here, but i've concluded that one must acknowledge television.


24 itself provoked a little. is exposition feasible in "real" time? i'm fond of dead souls, in which gogol waits to describe characters until they're busy climbing stairs. pinter's pregnant silences, i like those too. 24 is impatient, or paranoid, or both: sez kiefer sutherland, essentially, "estranged wife, you must find our disillusioned daughter on your own as i avert this global disaster with my erstwhile lover the secretary." i am deeply afraid of meeting someone who needs that dialogue. is tv telling me that they exist?

11.05.01 crack mule


read adam west's back to the batcave yesterday. he might have been the sedentary man's superhero, but a lot of butt came his way in the sixties. west made this heart-rending case for himself in "mature batman" films; i'd have felt for him, but he called gotham city's lower class "dickinson". no butt for you.


mucking through fast food nation as well. apparently your average mcdonald's worker is more likely to die on the job than, say, a police officer. also, fries are made of people. also also, joe eats the lardy bean dip at la morenita though he claims to shun mammals. we're all going to hell.


today i am contributing to america's greatness by counting morphine tablets. 7500 so far. i'll be blind by christmas, but glasses - an eye patch? two? - could lend me an air of mystery.


and finally, woo woo, a left-handed guy won the world series for arizona last night. shame that professional athletes are as vital as, say, pill counters.

11.01.01 what do foxes eat?


tentative plan to make for new york in march for magnetic fields shows. will get around to offering priceline more than $75 for airfare, eventually.


signifying rappers (costello, wallace) materialized last week. foster wallace the grad student is cute, but for his insistence that punk sucks. i think joe will like it more than i do, but he's getting tricky: in arizona, he went after a transatlantic love affair (nelson algren + simone de beauvoir) sans a peep from me. this man threw a tantrum when i tried to make him read "prufrock". trust no one.


don't

buy breaded eggplant from trader joe's. no eggplant. could've been denny's cheese sticks.


leave dye in for an hour if you've never tried the color before.


play 'beat the reaper' with nausea. it will wait for you to wake up.

other lauren sounds benevolent. i'm used to fighting laurens: one must rule. this one wished me a happy birthday, though, and i'm that easy. right back at you, lauren: prosper and prosper some more.