Dear diary,

Today I went to school. It was okay. Then I went home and ate Cheerios. Transformers was on, but there was a baseball game instead of Batman.

Dear diary,

Today I slept until noon, almost. I dropped my coat off at the tailor's to get the lining fixed and then I went to Discount Fabric Warehouse to look for fabric for my Burning Man outfit. They had a nice black cotton that was perfect for the lining, but their selection of velveteens left something to be desired, so J and I headed for Haight Street, where the other Discount Fabric Warehouse is, the one that always closes early.

There was a crazy woman on the bus. She was yelling "fuck" at the top of her lungs. Actually, she's saying other things, but every other word is fuck. The man she's with is yelling at her to shut up. A bunch of people in the back of the bus are telling her to get off. She calls some guy's girlfriend a bitch and the guy gets in her face.

"Call my girlfriend a bitch one more time and I'm gonna smack you!"

"Go ahead and smack me. Do it! Do it!"

"Call my girlfriend a bitch."

Everyone had backed down by the time we reached Masonic. The fabric store on Haight had more velveteen, but they didn't have it in burgundy, so I settled for blue. Then J and I went home and started making dinner while I fixed my clothes. A friend of ours came by and we watched The Iron Giant, which wasn't very good, but it was noise in the background while I refurbished my dresses and hemmed my skirts. Then we ate sticky mango rice and a curry. I've decided that I love sticky mango rice more anything in this world. It's sweet and perfect for such a hot day.

The three of us went to Bondage-A-Go-Go and danced. I saw Kalico and we swore a solemn oath that we would get coffee this weekend and maybe fire dance. Creepy fetish-club men tried to talk to me, but I hid behind D. Then it was time to go home.

I ate Cheerios. Batman was on.

Now I don't want any more complaints about how infrequently I post to my journal. If I wrote about what I did every single day, for God's sake, it would sound like this!

I live here. This is the view from my roof deck. I will never get over this place. It's actually an unobstructed 360 degree view. I can see the Bay and Pac Bell Park and all the city's hills and towers, but the downtown skyline is my favorite. This is why I live here, in this great glittering mess. From here, I could just reach out and grab it.

Some people like living out in the woods. They want nature. They want peace and quiet. I've lived among the redwoods with the surfers and the hippies and the cows put out to pasture in the middle of the college campus. If I see another redwood I will scream. I'm not in a real place unless it's covered in concrete and there's sushi within walking distance.

I don't miss Santa Cruz. I don't like the rebuilt Pacific St, all boutiques and hippie shops. Some great sucking fashion vacuum has removed the gutterpunks, the goth kids, and the rockabillys, not to mention the stores that cater to them. But the comic book geeks must still be alive and well, because Atlantis is open for business.

If you're one of those people who makes a face when people say "comic books" you might as well stop reading now. I'm never going to convince you that comics are a valid storytelling artform. You're never going to believe that some of the most beautiful art of this decade is being produced by people employed by DC and Marvel. When you think of comic books, you think of pulpy Superman stories or Chris Claremont's overwrought X-Men or Japanese porn in which hairless women are raped by tentacle monsters. You think of the nitpicking comic book guy from The Simpsons. I know you do.

I am not some middle-aged man with a beard and a beer gut who can tell you the exact date that the new Wolverine action figures are coming out. That's not why I read comics. I read the horror stories. I grew up reading Frank Miller's stories about babes and bullets and people who don't always live happily ever after. I watched Garth Ennis take over Hellblazer, where the greatest the horror wasn't the monsters or the muck, but the contents of John Constantine's head. I read fairy tales. Who writes fairy tales anymore? Neil Gaiman does and so does Caitlin Keirnan. Their fairies are fickle and cruel. They have very sharp teeth. I read about Spider Jerusalem, a cyberpunk Hunter S. Thompson. I read about Jesse Custer trying to find God, who has abandoned his Creation. Sometimes I read about Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny. Sometimes I even read about superheroes, provided that they're drawn by Alex Ross.

If you don't like comic books, then it means nothing to you that Dave McKean's paintings for Arkham Asylum were sometimes three feet wide, that they were works of collage, that they incorperated bits of newspaper and pieces of lace. Glenn Fabry's grotesques wouldn't move you. It makes no difference to you that Alex Ross has models dress up and pose for photographs that he uses as guides when he creates his ultra-realistic portraits. The fantastic detail of Darick Robertson's covers (street signs and bumper stickers and slogans on tee-shirts), the graffitti on the walls of Timothy Bradstreet's streetscapes isn't art to you. No, they're just comic books, mindless entertainment for children and geeks.

I won't try to change your mind. You see, that means one less person standing in front of me when I want to talk to David Mack. And it means he has a little more time in which to draw me a picture.

This is my ode to unemployment, my layoff love song.

I am never tired anymore. When I want to sleep, I sleep. I can take a nap in the middle of the afternoon. I can stay up until dawn. I can sleep for ten, eleven, twelve hours, the kind of sleep that's really a heroic undertaking. Then I can spend the next three hours lolling around in bed before I decide to make breakfast.

On Thursday, I woke up at noon and ran around the house in my underwear until six o'clock, just to prove that I could.

I don't have days of the week anymore. I have renamed them after club nights: Deathguild, Camera Obscura, Bondage A-Go-Go, 1984, Assimilate, Shrine of Lillith, and She Said. The week makes much more sense to me this way.

I get to see my friends during the day. They squint because it's summer weather here. They're unemployed too. I pour them orange juice and they recount the signs of the coming Apocalypse. Yesterday, a calf was born with two heads. Today, the recruiter I recommended to Mitch laughed in his face and said "I've got a thousand resumes just like yours."

If these are the End Times, I want my money back, because I'm just not feeling the despair.

I don't cringe every time my cell phone rings. Sometimes, I don't even answer. I don't take it with me when I leave the house. If somebody wants to get in touch with me, it can wait.

My back doesn't ache. My shoulders don't hurt. My wrists aren't bothering me. I don't have eye strain. I can walk away from the computer and I don't have to worry about what's breaking on the network while I'm gone.

"Drink up, drink up. You can't get this stuff anymore. I bought it all." I'm supposed to be suffering, but I'm in the kitchen of a Pacific Heights flat where I've lost track of the number of glasses of champagne I've emptied. Some incredibly rare vintage is lined up, bottle after bottle, on every counter. The host's twelve year-old daughter is fighting off the advances of a 40 year-old guy in an industrial tee-shirt. We're all laughing and chomping down on bread with sour creme and caviar and wish that we'd been half so clever in Junior High.

I wish I could be half so clever even now, but instead I'm going to go outside and lie in the sun.

The downside of cohabitation is that when your darling gets sick, you know you're bound to come down with it sooner or later.

J spent most of the weekend feverish. I brought him water and aspirin. I made vanilla almond tea for him. I snuck out of the house to go to a poetry slam while he was tossing and turning. He was feeling better in time to go to Deathguild on Monday night, but for my inattentiveness (but that "Eminem is my bitch!" poem was so funny!) my temperature rose, my throat closed up, my voice dropped an octave, and my head feels like it's full of cotton. My tongue is sore. How, exactly, does a cold give you a sore tongue?

I feel disgusting and weak and it hurts to talk. I have consumed so much tea that I have to pee every ten minutes.

I don't know if men get that feeling, the one where they wake up in the morning and they're ugly and fat. They haven't grown another head overnight. They haven't put on thirty pounds in their sleep. The skin they were perfectly comfortable in on Tuesday is a horror on Wednesday. I hate this feeling. It makes me understand why men are always rolling their eyes at the instability of women. I've never seen a man rendered hysterical because he is unable to locate his socks.

This is the part of the cliche when I collapse sobbing over something stupid. It should be a zit on my face or the placement of the couch or the color of a dish. In truth, I am buried under all of my blankets with hot tea in my Jack Skellington mug repeating to myself in my calmest, most rational Computer Science student manner "This will pass. This will pass. This will pass."

In fact, it's passing already.

There is a look that people get on their faces when they're rolling hard, brains flooded with seratonin. They'll meet anybody's eye with that hopeful smile, as if they're just on the verge of making that crucial connection, and you are the person they've been looking for all night in the hot and lasered darkness of 550 Barneveld. Great hair. You're so pretty. Can I kiss you? They're all dilated pupils and glowing with sweat.


The next time I go to a rave, I'm going to wear a tee-shirt that says "I am not the love of your life." It will be the raver equivalent of "Vampires aren't real. Grow up."


I don't talk to strangers at raves anymore. I used to. I used to make up elaborate lies for the boys in their big pants and their muscle shirts. I'm a dancer. That was my favorite start. It's no fun to tell them I'm a UNIX geek. I'm a dancer, which is safe and uncomplicated. I'm unlikely to be quizzed on unfamiliar dance terminology. No, I can't give you my number. I'm married, you see. Yeah, five years this spring (sometimes it's fall). I'm not wearing a ring because I live in a rough neighborhood. Wearing a wedding band would just get you mugged. No, not around here, New York. You know how it is. The Bowery has some cool bars now, but it can still get pretty sketchy.


I'm not there to find the love of my life. I'm there to dance and see my friends who have gone over to the bright side. It's just not a party unless you wind up sitting on the back stairs delivering a Ecstacy-induced confession about your childhood. I don't think I'm pretty. I didn't talk to you before because you intimidated me. I didn't have sex until I was
twenty-five. It's as if the grinding of your teeth chews away at the common sense filter between your mouth and your brain. Everything comes pouring out.That's no fun with strangers, but there are such rocky walls of fear and intimidation between friends that it's nice to see those walls come down sometimes.


"Rocky walls of fear and intimidation." I didn't just say that. It must have been someone else.


I had a boyfriend years ago who used to fall asleep immediately after sex. I asked him once, under circumstances so obvious I probably don't have to explain them to you, why it was that men did that.


He stretched out like a lazy cat and said "There are so many barriers between people, between men and women. We don't really look at each other. We don't really listen. Sex breaks those barriers down, but it's so exhausting to be really close to someone, that afterwards all I can do is fall asleep."


He was a sculptor. He had wide and calloused hands, honey-colored skin. I was beginning to suspect that he wasn't quite so smart as he thought he was.


"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."


By that time he was already asleep.


The walls are there for a reason. They keep us from wandering the streets with goofy smiles fumbling for a thread of connection that isn't there. Those walls keep us from wearing giant orange pants and hugging strangers. Sometimes, late at night, so late it's almost morning, I'll put my head on J's shoulder and tell him that I love him; I'll tell some friend how much they mean to me. The rest of the time, it's probably best just to go to sleep.

The DSS is set up, Tivo is working, the computer is plugged in, and the stereo is putting out enough bass to shake the pillars. By all rights, our productivity should fall to zero. We should move the futon (we're still sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor next to the kitchen; it feels like we're squatting in some rich couple's loft) in front of the TV, microwave some popcorn, and fall asleep to reruns of Junkyard Wars and Red Dwarf.

Instead, we're proceeding down the slow road towards domestic normalcy. Today we threw out a mountain of garbage. Tomorrow I will buy eight yards of velvet to make curtains. We're finished with the floor upstairs and J has put up all of the acoustic foam in the studio. Sure, there are still boxes everywhere, but each day I eliminate a few more of them. Oh, I'm just glowing with usefullness, usefullness and sweat.

I make lists. Here is the list of things I need to do this morning. Here is the list of loft-related things. Here is the list of work-related things. Here is the list of things I need to buy. Here is the list of things I need to sell. Here is the list of people I have promised to have lunch with. I feel virtuous for getting so much done. I could be lounging around in a robe, drinking Manhattans at noon, and reading Look Homeward, Angel. Instead, I've maintained my focus. I applaud myself.

I've started half a dozen journal entries in the last week and they all sound exactly like this. I'm filled with shame to think that now that I have the free time to write, all I can put together is a recitation of the petty little errands that I've run. Every time I have the option of sitting down to write, I suddenly remember that I should be doing my laundry or cutting down cardboard boxes. This is navel-gazing of the lowest order.

I'm going to fling myself from a cliff now.

If I don't get a job in a couple of months, I'm going to turn the loft into a strip club. Hey, it's zoned for commercial use. I could do all kinds of things in here.

The dancers will all be former tech industry girls turned strippers. It will be called Live Nerd Girls. They will dance while wearing glasses with thick plastic frames. For a little bit of extra money you can get a private dance in a standard issue gray cubicle while a nubile young thing who cut her teeth on UNIX whispers in your ear about the finer points of mounting devices.

Customers can grab free coffee or Snapple or beer (only on Fridays) from the kitchen. There will be a foozeball table.

I'll put out ads in PC Week and The San Jose Mercury News. The place will be packed every night, I tell you.

Unemployment: Day 9

What happend to my life? Over a period of three days, I came back from Paris, lost my job, watched J get laid off, and then moved into a construction zone. Every morning J and I wake up and spend the entire day either moving boxes, building things, or searching through the hardware store for the parts we need in order to continue building things. Every day someone new comes by to gape at the loft and help us with construction. By midnight we're so exhausted, we collapse on the futon. Every muscle in my body hurts.

The painting is done today. The two big walls in the main room are a fantastic shade of dark, dark green. J has finished most of the electrical work in the studio. We've been working on the mezzanine floor for days. It feels like we're at Burning Man. We work all day and we're covered in dust. Last night we went to get pizza for dinner and it felt exactly like those first few days back in civilization after a couple of weeks on the playa. You're several shades more tan than usual, coated in dirt and sweat and it still seems a little strange that people exchange little green pieces of paper for goods and services.

I know this feeling won't last, but I think I needed this even more than I needed a vacation in Paris. I remember thinking, when things were particularly bad at Plague of Locusts, that life doesn't have to be this way. People don't have to work 16-hour days and 100-hour weeks. Most people don't sleep until 5 pm on weekends because they're recovering from their work week. Most people do not start the day with their cell phone ringing because something at the office is broken. People aren't meant to spend their lives numb with work-related exhaustion.

After Plague of Locusts launched, I don't think I ever re-took my life. Oh, I went out. I saw people. I did things. But it was always as if I expected that at any moment, I would have to rush to the office and rebuild an application server from scratch. The only things that I have to do now are the things that I have chosen to do for myself.

Life should always be like this.