02.23.02 if a double decker bus


per the rspca's site, the scottish ban on fox hunting has gone through; it's speculated that similar legislation has a fighting chance in england. toss that in with extant bans for fur farming and handguns, and i'm tempted to brave the ugly companion animal quarantine and sail away. mmm, england.


developing a taste for the lovecraft collection i started last month. it's a neat foil for the dostoevsky, really - in place of background backgrounds and crippling historical guilt, one gets it's too terrible for me to describe and you just can't, the crawling chaos will kick your ass. have some consonants. i appreciate matter-of-fact narrative sloth.

*02.22.02 about saffron


martha stewart won't recommend showering with your house painting supplies, but i can't say enough about one-stop cleaning. my eye's a bit yellow from 'shampoo for me, shampoo for sponge roller', but god gave me tear ducts for a reason, and now i don't have to buy more. rollers.


intense dish washing, crab tank mucking, trip-outfit-laundry-planning as well. i could blush for wanting to be fly in new york, but i don't worry about food poisoning, airborne diseases, additive cancers, natural disasters, or stepping in pee when i wear flip flops downtown. i allow myself a slight fear of disapproving strangers at the moma.


word on the street is that little sis found herself an english boyfriend in paris. i forgive her for being a better student than i was, for making varsity her freshman year, for already having long hair, but damn.

*02.21.02 something meets boy


chuck decided he was the boss of dinnertime a week ago and punched open one of his containers of meat-paste: i know this because i get covered with cat food goo whenever i take things from the cabinet, and he looks especially smug. i can't find the compromised package, though, and it continues to ooze, and no amount of hand washing gets the putrefied chicken niblet smell from my hands. turnabout is fair play: he's got "falling star" yellow whiskers from fucking around with my paint as i tried to salvage the walls this afternoon. so much for the sheba commercial good looks, buddy.


saw the dentist for the first time in years. no prodding from mom - i'm a big girl! this guy has hollowed out his ceiling and filled it with synchronized twinkle lights: it was creepy, but mesmerizing enough that i only cried for ten minutes when he went at my gums. much better than visits of yore, though i miss my OC dentist's toothbrushes (we love your smile! ivan ho, dds). subgingivally, i'm ready for the east coast.


karamazov count: 252. tap, tap.

*02.17.02 you ain't half the exotic


yeah, i bought a couple of lotto tickets. i didn't expect anything to come of them, but i liked the willy wonka tone the whole business had acquired by the time the jackpot got around $180 million. the guy at smoke signals down the street sold an $88 million ticket a few years ago; perhaps i should have gone with the crowd and had him kiss mine. then again, gambling still terrifies me. it's best that it's over.


i may go ahead and paint the (living? family? couch) room. i started peeling the nasty denny's bathroom wallpaper away tonight, and peeling is fun, so i seem to be committed. i was thinking yellow, but the couch is red and the chair is blue; i dislike the chiasso / romper room implications. my hair place has gold foil on the wall, and hey, but foil is expensive. it seems silly to pluck a color from the $50 ebay rug, but il faut cultiver notre jardin. whatever.

*02.14.02 consider the anableps


pleasant discoveries: flipping around in the car today yielded the magnetic fields' "book of love". on the radio, hey hey! then john cale covering "heartbreak hotel" and nico doing "my funny valentine". it was KUSF, i think. only comes in for about five blocks, but geez. i must park there sometime.


and crabs! thai devil crabs! who can live in a ten gallon tank and don't need live food and won't fear the cats! they even had an aggressive - keep away from small children sticker on their tank at the pet store: now they live here. one has been building a mound of river pebbles all afternoon while the other waves him on. i have identified the sound as a handful of mardi gras beads dragged across bones. perfect for valentine's day.

*02.13.02 second hand living


commute radio fun fact: angus young's sister thought AC/DC would be a powerful name when she read it on her sewing machine. some people have ...to be happy about calendars; i have THE BONE. i've set mix tapes aside for a bit, as paul's is in danger of wearing out and joe's has a wrenching lyle lovett song about a guy who can't get over world war 2 and a chatty wife. i was about to complain that he should respect mixes' inevitable subtexts, but it's a fair swipe at poli sci / english couples. now that i think about it.


oh, so you karamazov people thought you'd slide a bit, eh? i was on schedule, damn your eyes! but i'm not bitter, not really. i'll post something obvious and then we'll all be comfortable enough to say small things. please.


let no one say that non-profits skimp on freebies. i have tuna-flavored toothpaste and you do not.

*02.11.02 the sea wants to take me


san francisco is determined to cram all the fun it can into the weekend we'll be in new york: bimbo's will have modest mouse, guided by voices, and the donnas, boom boom boom. i should be ashamed of the donnas, but few can claim immunity to palo alto high school girls with a straight face. try it.


on absence and fondness, i never gave my thumb the credit it was due. it leapt beneath a vegetable knife yesterday - baby, if i'd known you felt so low - and i now have a lovely right fin. i really only hacked the tip, but jesus it hurts to touch things. appreciate the marginalized, i say. hug a catholic. or an anarchist.

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.


(more lydia davis)

*02.09.02 a mermaid


dream: jake forms a band called dr. freud's little glass candy jar. i woke up listening to their tape, which turned out to be beasts snoring on either side of my head. last week i had a torrid sleep-affair with the hospital's scary gothabilly tech guy. these are the urges that float up when i deny myself waking mention of valentine's day. i don't care: my obsession with ceremony will fall victim to the Total Health Plan. secular asceticism will do.


car alarms playing marco polo in the warehouse across the street, eerie neighbor girls singing the doublemint jingle at half speed. i'm hiding from theme party #427 in palo alto; i'd answer e-mail and post lyrically, but i'm tired of talking about dying cats.


jen was my best valentine's day. we took each other to dinner and talked over cheap wine as coaches blew exhaust into our room on high street.

*02.06.02 oh mi corazon


Only connect...


Ayn Rand Fan, 32, successful, attractive and fun entrepreneur seeks Dagny Taggart. I turn $ into light to look for her (song: Lemon by U2). ROM#9570


Wee Pet Lamb Looking for her headquarters. I can tell good stories and use big words. Creepy medical scenes and heavy accents a plus. WILD#7670

*02.05.02 a big nose, who knows


a russian woman came in for meds today. i told her that i'd find dora, who is fluent, and that i only understood a cute bit of what she was saying (small eluded me, as did i'm sorry). co-workers were chuffed, but then she said complicated things and i had to run away to my lunch break. i must disabuse myself of the notion that i speak russian, says joe, and this is true. but i had to try, you see, because she looked so sad with her empty box of cat laxatives. i remembered wait, do you speak french? - but asking about languages in other languages is pointless, yes. i must never see her again, no.


and the brothers karamazov in english is difficult. it gets at one's validity as a lit person to speak of it, but goodness. i'm not special.

*02.04.02 mediocrity rules


joe gave me samuel johnson is indignant for christmas on saturday; i hadn't heard of it.

BORING FRIENDS


We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.


(lydia davis)

twelve of 101 WAYS TO COPE WITH STRESS, a pet's rest refrigerator magnet from work:


- anticipate your needs
- avoid negative people
- avoid chemical aids
- repair anything that doesn't work properly
- visualize yourself winning
- tell someone to have a good day in pig latin
- don't know all the answers
- ask someone to be your "vent-partner"
- keep a journal
- quit trying to "fix" other people
- leave work early (with permission)
- practice a monster smile he's now reading the playboy i spirited from the bathroom at the super bowl party yesterday. i'd never seen one before, not in an actual house.

*02.02.02 snakeface


i took an herbal metabolism 'helper' before eating last night - ha ha, i thought, what with all the coffee i drink, i'll be able to see through walls. horrible, horrible nightmares about dying friends all night - i was crying in my sleep, for christ's sake - and such tremors and chills this morning that i stayed home from work. now i have the flu. being an idiot is frustrating.


i took this body image psych study my sophomore year - hey, two units - and sat around on a bean bag chair with these poor girls who were obsessed with their breasts. at one point we had to write letters to our most hated parts: dear butt, you are huge and i want to destroy you. then we wrote responses from the parts: kimmy, you eat ice cream when you're sad. is that my fault?

Shortly before her scheduled graduation, concurrent with the end of her first pregnancy and TM's first recording sessions, Kristin Hersh enrolled in an art therapy seminar on relaxation. "I thought, 'Great, I need to relax alright.' And they were all drawing these animals to help them relax. So I drew this little blue blowfish with a horn on it. Everyone else had drawn these unicorns in these beautiful lush forests. We were supposed to be drawing an animal that represented us, and I had this ridiculous-looking little thing lost in the middle of this huge page.


"Everyone was going, 'Kristin, that makes me feel so sad. It's like you have no environment. Don't you feel grounded in any way?' And I thought, 'Yeah, I feel like an abandoned blowfish.' So I didn't graduate. It's the last thing I ever did in college."


(kristin hersh in option magazine, 1991)

We here at the Leonard Nimoy Should Eat More Salsa Foundation believe that Leonard Nimoy is excellent, and salsa is excellent, and if Leonard Nimoy would eat more salsa, he would become an unstoppable force of excellence.

*02.01.02 this wrinkle in time


headache of biblical proportions this morning. must speak quietly, mustn't think revolutionary thoughts. now the guessing game of what it wants. tried coffee and ibuprofen, but those are too obvious. the last headache wanted a rice cake; headache before that wanted to go to barnes and noble (?).


::


turns out the headache wanted to listen to the jesus and mary chain, which is fine. inexpensive. i'm hoping that upcoming pains want to read dostoevsky; i get the impression that lauren's brothers k group is going to kick my ass.


phrenology at the british library: gorgeous images, lovely cast of goethe's head.

E-mail my heart
and say our love will never die (and I)
I know you're out there
and I know that you still care (I know you care)
E-mail me back and say our love will stay alive
Forever...e-mail my heart