Sometimes I think about things other than books.

Devon's friend Carrie, newly unemployed, has come to visit from Minneapolis. For the last several days, our merry band of slackers has roamed the city, showing Carrie the sights. Admittedly, this has included a lot of bookstores, but on Monday the Sight of the Day was Haight Street. As we were walking into Villains, we passed a camera crew, a guy and a girl with a digital video camera chattering in Japanese in front of the elaborate Halloween Emily display in the window. Emily didn't search to belong. She searched to be lost.

I did what any city girl would do. I ignored them. Devon, Carrie, and I walked into the store and never noticed that J hadn't quite followed us. The Japanese camera crew had him cornered and he was gamely answering their Emily-related questions. A few minutes later, he caught up with us somewhere between the bug-shaped backpacks and socks with little flames woven in.

"Well, that was funny. I'm going to be on Japanese television."

"I just found a shirt with a robot monkey on it!" Devon is a sucker for monkeys.

The couple was still standing outside when we departed the store. They were bolder this time.

"Excuse me, do you live around here?"

No San Francisco native will ever resist the chance to tell a tourist that they do, in fact, live here. Among San Franciscans, years spent in the city are the badge of authenticity. We are always eager to wave our good fortune in the face of those who are somehow unlucky enough to live somewhere else.

"Do you mind if we tape you for a moment? Will you explain this to us?" The woman indicated the window full of merchandise depicting a strange little girl and her cats. Emily isn't evil. She's just up to no good.

"Do you have Emily merchandise? Can we come to your house and see it?" Now, when you're a city girl, and some strange couple with a camera asks if they can see your house, you say no. If they're nice, you stall and say you're not sure. If your boyfriend is J, it doesn't matter what you tell them because he is busy scrawling down his cell phone number and address. [As a footnote, J has just chimed in to let me know that he did not give them our address right then and there. He just gave out his cell phone number and it wasn't as if he thought they were ever going to call him back.]

Really, I didn't think that we would ever hear from them again. That's why I stayed out all night instead of cleaning the house. That's why I flung my clothes all over the floor and fell asleep in my makeup. That's why my jaw hit the floor when the phone rang and J told me we had about 45 minutes until the guy with the camera showed up.

There's no point in trying to describe this. You've all seen the scene in that movie or TV show when the kids have made a terrible mess and the clean-up is shot in fast forward to the tune of Chopin's "Minute Waltz." That's it happend, I swear. It was one terrible, cliche-filled blur. Emily isn't lazy. She's just happy doing nothing.

The shoot itself was painless. The cameraman came with a big bag full of Emily stuff, just in case we didn't have enough. We set it all up on the chaise lounge so that we could shoot the house and then come around to the couch and do the interview. I don't think that the punk rock DIY ethic is very common on Japan, because the camera always lingered on the things J and I had made or altered --the dress I made for Gatsby Summer Afternoon, the acoustic foam J put up on the walls of the studio, the way I'd cut the sleeves off of one of my Emily tee-shirts.

I answered the cameraman's straightforward questions about Emily things. When was the first time you saw them? Why do you like them? How much do they cost? I grinned for the camera and hoped that somewhere, the people watching this Japanese fashion program ("a major, major program," they assured me) read a little bit of English, at least enough to read the words written across my shirt: Don't Trust Me.

Emily is very strange.

When I die, I want to be buried in Green Apple Books on Clement St. Please leave me resting peacefully in the back, sitting on the stairs between the art books and the children's section. Bookstores are my weakness, especially cavernous bookstores with creaking floors and long lists of employee recommendations.

New Lemony Snickett novels. A reissue of the Vertigo Tarot. Glossy art books. Books by Ian Banks, Joyce Carol Oats, and Michael Chabon. Some book about Shane McGowan. More books about working in restaurants. When did it become trendy to write books about working in restaurants? When I walk into a good bookstore, I can feel my bank account shrinking. At this time last year, I remember, there wasn't anything that I wanted. For a little while, I was free of the sort of compulsive desire that makes me buy a postcard or a bottle of nail polish. Oh, but I have six months of knee-jerk consumerism built up now. Everything that I see looks good. I've never wanted to buy so many things.

I settled for three:

Take the Cannoli, a collection of short stories by Sara Vowell of This American Life fame. That includes American Goth, in which Sara goes over to the dark side by letting Mary Mitchel make her over into a Louise Brooks lookalike and take her to Roderick's Chamber.

Strange Behavoir: Tales of Evolutionary Neurology by Harold Klawans. It's a little less technical than some of my neurology books, but there is a blurb on the back from Oliver Sacks.

Nobrow by John Seabrook. It's subtitled "the culture of marketing, the marketing of culture." It seemed to have some Adbusters promise. I only bought this because J had already snapped up Jihad vs. McWorld. When we're done with both of those, we'll really have something to talk about.

If I haven't written, it's because I've been reading some trashy James Ellroy novel for the last three days. Never underestimate the power of a good trashy novel. On Friday, I promised some friends I would catch up with them at Assimilate just after the next chapter. By the time I looked up, I'd read over a hundred pages and it was last call. I spent most of today spawled across the bed with the fairy lights on while Officer Bleichert tracked down the Black Dahlia's killer in postwar Los Angeles.

I was browsing at Booksmith a few days ago when I saw this postcard and I thought of a boy that I know. I can't send this to him, so I'm putting it here. This is for you, no matter what my banner says. You know who you are.





J will be getting a job offer this week and I have some contracting work coming up, so this may be the end of my jobless interlude. I have caught up on five years of sleep and three years of television. I have slept late and done yoga in the middle of the afternoon. I only shop for groceries in the middle of the day on weekdays so that I might avoid the crowds. Every time I told myself at Plague of Locusts that there was more to life than mindlessly plodding through routine, short of temper and devoid of sleep, this is what I was thinking of. Each day begins as a blank slate and I choose how I am going to fill it.

I have not been as creative with this time as I might have been. I spent a lot of days at home doing nothing. I don't doubt that I've wasted some of this time, maybe even a lot of it. Sure, I worked on the loft. I wrote a little and I read a lot of books, but I've hardly sewn anything. There is still no trapeze hanging from my ceiling. All of the sculpture in my head remains unbuilt. There is a part of me that feels guilty for thinking about art when I am unemployed. In the end, I'm afraid Tyler Durden was wrong. I am my job. I have spent all of my adult life becoming a professional. I am proud to tell people what I do for a living.

I'm a tech girl. I don't diddle around in Flash or Photoshop. I don't call HTML "code." I don't even sully my hands with Windows. I am a UNIX Systems Architect, you bastards. I have a set of skills you will never glean from Learn UNIX in 21 Days. I work odd hours. I'm on call 24/7. I don't walk away from my cell phone because my life is building networks and making sure they run smoothly.

I am my job, and in these last months I've felt as if someone has taken a chunk of my personality away. I wonder sometimes if all my skills, which got me anything I could think of to demand for the last five or six years, are now useless. Maybe my whole life as a geek has been useless. How can it not be useless if I'm in the same position as the Flash and Photoshop people, the secretaries, and project managers? What does it matter that I'm a girl in a man's world? We're all neck deep in it now: me and J and all of my friends and the fat middle-aged UNIX administrators. I'm not at all different from any of them.

Work is good for me.

After six months of living in a warehouse, I've decided that all of the charm is gone from charming Victorians. I feel as if I'm betraying some sort of a fundamental San Franciscan belief. Charm, particularly the charm of those little Victorian gingerbread houses, is our currency, the stock and trade of a city that lives on tourism. It is the duty of every San Franciscan to love them, to swoon over them, to note their prices while flipping through the Real Estate Times, and dream of one day having a Painted Lady of their own in Cole Valley or maybe the Duboce Triangle.

I can't do it. Screw hardwood floors and coved ceilings and crown molding. I don't care about those disused little fireplaces, bricked up since the twenties, but with such lovely mantles. Don't talk to me about built-in bookshelves and cabinets covered with a hundred layers of thick white paint. The electrical work hasn't been upgraded since the Truman administration. Those beautiful hardwood floors are so thin that you can hear every step that is taken upstairs from you. Let us not forget the walls. There's no privacy in a Victorian house. Your walls might as well be made of paper.

Say goodbye to your paycheck when PG&E comes calling. There's nothing quite so drafty as a Victorian house. With the fireplaces gone, it's up to the landlord to decide what to do about heating. You know those old-fashioned radiators that people are always getting handcuffed to in movies? There are a lot of those here.

I love my concrete bunker, my lovely, quiet concrete bunker. I will write a love song to my loft in which I will tell it how much I love it despite its lack of a clawfoot bathtub. Oh loft, you know that I would never leave you! You know that I'd never even look at another, baby. Every other piece of real estate just looks cheap and gaundy in comparison to you. I'll stay here forever, loft, to clean your floors and hang art on your brick walls. Nothing could ever make me stray from you...well, except maybe this.

Normally I use this place for essays, but today I want to leave some links.

Visit Raza, who lives in San Francisco. He is allowed to keep living in my city because he makes it sound beautiful. See Miguel --his funny jokes, his adorable children, his vast collection of readers' shoes. Read JenX, because your first grade teacher was a real person and these are the things she probably wrote about you.

Oh, and the carthedral. Go here and cry because none of us will ever be as cool as Rebecca Caldwell.

Stop the presses. I've been talking so much about my Israeli grandmother and being mushy about J that I completely forgot to mention that I've seen an excellent opera. I'm serious. This is my second half-season of the San Francisco Metropolitan Opera and for the first time they put on a performance that gave me that Adam Gopnik moment. The clouds of schlock lifted and I got shivers. Samson et Delilah was fantastic.

Schlock has been the fashion in opera production for the last couple of years, very stiff, grand, operatic design and direction that borders on kitsch. Samson et Delilah certainly had a bit of that, as if we were watching a Ten Commandments era biblical epic, only with arias. Delilah had a voice that crept up my spine and attempted to throttle my brain throughout most of the second act, most of which involves Delilah's plans for revenge. My grandmother insists that this is the sign of a solid dramatic soprano. I just think it sounds transporting.

So much of opera (and of theater and of life) is just hopelessly mediocre. It pleased me to see something that wasn't.

Lest you think I'm some kind of dull, snooty creature, I also saw Iron Monkey. Really, I can't only take so much culture at one time. I used to go to movies much more often, but very little has caught my interest in the last year or so. The nearest theater is the gleaming Sony Metreon, architectural cousin to the new international terminal at SFO. I've never seen a shopping mall make such an effort to hide its mall-ness. All of those flat screen televisions and spinning go-bo's, the view of Yerba Buena Gardens and William Orbit playing over the public address system is supposed to lull you into a sense of false comfort: You are not in a shopping mall. You are not in a shopping mall. You are the sort of person who hates shopping malls. You like it here. You want to pay ten dollars for noodles and shouldn't you take a look at those new digital cameras that burn directly to CDR?. Nothing makes me happier than paying $9.50 for a movie ticket.

What fun it was! I'd regretted not renting Iron Monkey at Le Video the one time I managed to spot it. It was either sword and sorcery kung fu with some actor I'd never heard of before or one of the hopping vampire movies. I cannot resist hopping vampires that can only be defeated with sticky rice and sacred scrolls. I'm powerless against them. It was lovely to see HK chop sockey on the big screen, and not the little scungey screen of the Four Star Theater in the Richmond District. The subtitles were cunningly, if not accurately, translated. A gang of hooligans, students of a disgraced Shaolin monk, are referred to as "Shaolin punks."

Iron Monkey has everything that I expect from a kung fu movie. A beautiful yet stoic woman (Jean Wang) beats back an army of attackers. At least one restaurant is trashed in a fight scene that involves a considerable number of break-away tables. A corrupt official is fooled by the hero's ridiculous disguise. Chases across rooftops? Check. Kung fu fighting children? Check. The honor of Shaolin kung fu avenged? Check. I kicked and punched all over the house the moment I got home.

After all, "you can't best the rightious."

I know I'm not supposed to do this. A lot of people like to pretend that when they're writing in their journals, they're writing purely for themselves. We don't write for ourselves. If that were the case, we'd all be scribbling away in personal diaries hidden under our pillows. I've kept private journals before. You wouldn't want to read them. My private journals are unspeakably dull. I admit it, I'm writing for you, my ephemerous reader. Some of you are people that I know, some of you are people who have been kind enough to write to me, but mostly you are strangers. Who is it that hits my journal from Malaysia? Who are these people from Saudi Arabia and Japan? I'm sure they're tired of all this talk of death.

I saw my friend dead in a coffin this week. I feel very mortal. Now let's talk about food.

I made borscht on Thursday. This probably doesn't sound like an achievement to most of you, but you must understand that I am overcoming a childhood dread of soup made from beets. It wasn't enough that my mother and grandmothers were indifferent housekeepers and mediocre cooks, the woman who looked after me until I was old enough to go to school made them look like the product of a mating between Donna Reed and Escoffier. Every day, this fiendish woman delighted in feeding the dozen helpless children in her charge a pink soup that tasted like dirt with bits of greasy pork swimming in it. Her kitchen smelled like lard. Her hands were permanently stained with beet juice. My babysitter was the first woman I ever truly hated. I remember starving myself all through the afternoon rather than eating her cooking.

The Joy of Cooking has a recipe for borscht New York style, a vegetarian thing with carrots and potatos and not a shred of mystery meat. J looked at me funny when I threw beets in the shopping cart at our insufferably hip grocery store.

"What are you going to do with those?"

If you cook beets for long enough, 45 minutes or so, they don't smell like dirt. Everything in the soup pot absorbs their sweet flavor. The potatoes turn dark pink through and through. With enough salt, it's good stuff. It's comfort food, the food of my ancestors, for those times when no amount of Vietnamese pho will make me feel warm and safe.

Borscht, alas, does not spell familiarity and comfort for my boyfriend. He will happily make pasta dough at the drop of a hat, but I don't think he'd ever eaten a beet before. "It's good," he told me, with a sort of puzzled look on his face, but I think I understand why Eastern European cooking is not a widespread phenomenon. J retaliated by making cinnamon buns from scratch. My kitchen is a battlefield.

Whenever I am tempted by some passing pretty boy, I try to imagine them baking scones for me at four in the morning. Men, pay close attention, if you are a mad cook, no woman in her right mind will ever leave you. A few months ago, a friend of my mother's came to see the loft. She took one look at our potrack hung with two full sets of much-abused Calphalon, and asked "Who's the cook here?" My mother answered "No one. They go out a lot." Men do not cook in Eastern Europe. Men also do not do housework. Growing up, I can't recall a single incident of my father cleaning anything. I explained that J, in addition to being an engineer, is a compulsive cook, given to wild sauce-cooking, pasta-making, bread-baking sprees in the middle of the night.

My mother's friend rolled her eyes as if I had just announced that J wore pink angora sweaters."American men," she pronounced. "They are so strange."

Spoken like a woman who did not get fresh cinnamon buns with her coffee on Friday morning. I don't say much about J here. Sometimes I wonder if, reading this, one might come away with the impression that I have a roommate rather than a boyfriend. So many other journal writers are given to droning on and on about their loved ones. I'm only going to say this once, because it's important that I have it written down somewhere: I adore him, my strange, pragmatic, compulsive, east coast boy. Oh yes I do.

I'm back from the funeral and the wake.

Usually, in the movies, funerals are sparsely attended events. A few people dab at their eyes in each pew. Take's funeral was standing room only. At one point, there was a crowd of us standing in front of the funeral home and some Mission hipster walking by muttered "Did a rock star die?"

Yes, you inconsiderate bozo, a rock star died. He had funny hair and a long black trench coat and an immense collection of very sharp suits. He died like a rock star, on his motorcycle, screaming by at a hundred miles an hour. We mourn him the way we'd mourn a rock star: hundreds of us together.

I'm not going to tell you about a girl...I'm not going to tell you about a girl.

Let me tell you about a girl. I'll call her N. That's not the first letter of her name. It's not my intention to write this in code. Even though I never met her, I think that there are some things I should keep for myself. N was a voice on the telephone. She was answering machine messages. She was letters that I never saw and handwriting that I couldn't decipher.

She was K's ex-girlfriend. K isn't the first letter of his name either. K was the beginning of a lot of things, but I didn't know that yet. I was seventeen and K was a boy ten years my senior, one of those boys who never becomes a man. His looks were boyish. His smile was boyish. His sense of humor and his charm hovered right where I was, at seventeen, and because we were essentially the same age, we got along well.

We were feeling our way through the beginnings of a relationship, trying out the strange idea of going out rather than staying in. It didn't work. We hardly went anywhere. We'd be in bed when the phone would ring and K would groan and pray that it wasn't N.

"She's out of rehab," he explained."I didn't know she was like this when we started dating. She didn't think it was serious, just using once every couple of weeks, but I told her I couldn't date a junkie, so it's over."

He wouldn't see her, the new, improved, clean N. He dreaded the thought of seeing her. When the calls stopped, he was visibly relieved. He was so good at having nothing to do with her that he didn't find out about her overdose until three weeks after the funernal. It must have been late when he found out, because he called my house at midnight.

"Come out. We have to meet. I have to talk to you."

"It's midnight! It's the middle of the week! I have school tomorrow."

"There's got to be some way. I have to talk to you."

"What am I supposed to do, walk up to my parents and say 'I have to leave the house in the middle of the night because my friend's ex-girlfriend just overdosed and now it's imperative that I drive with him to the Mission and drink hot chocolate?"

"Yes. I'll be there in ten minutes."

I don't think that I told them that. I just walked out of the house and got into his truck and we went to an all-night doughnut shop where the hot chocolate burned my tongue.

We sat in the truck, parked way up on Portola, while K looked out over the city and said things like "She's dead because of me. I wouldn't take her back and she lost hope. I never got my chance to tell her how much I loved her." They found her naked in bed with some guy, probably a drug dealer, certainly the guy who gave her the heroin. She died naked in some man's bed less than a month after getting out of rehab.He couldn't stop repeating that some other man had watched her die. "She wouldn't have done it if I hadn't pushed her away." And all the while, my stomach is heaving, because I'm watching K fall in love right in front of me. He's falling in love with a dead woman.

That was the end of something between us. All that I could feel for K as he bothered N's friends and fought with N's parents over possesion of her artwork was embarassment and pity. For myself, all I had was the crushing self-doubt that comes when you fall in love with a man who cannot possibly love you because you are alive.

K was the one who put up that scrap of Pablo Neruda next to the mirror in his bedroom:

No, forgive me,
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you
have died,
and all the leaves will fall on my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping,
but
I shall stay alive

Yes, he stayed alive, and I stayed alive, and in a way she lived too, as a cold ghost that slept between us. More often than not, I would sneak out of his apartment very late at night because I couldn't bear to sleep with her around. I couldn't stand to hear him sigh with my head on his chest and talk about something N had written or his continued wars with N's parents. Every mention of her was a reminder that I wasn't enough pull him out of his meloncholy. I wasn't enough to make him live though she was dead.

How can I write something frivolous when Take is dead? Every time I start to think about what happend, I start thinking about clothes or food or the bills that are due. I'm going to bury this in the minutea of everyday life, because I don't want to think about one of my friends being dead.

Taketora Ueda was sweet and happy. He never had a bad word to say about anybody. I should have spent more time with him. I should have been nicer to him, because if he can die in a split second on some road somewhere, any of us could die at any moment.

That's the problem with not believing in God, you see, there's no one to pray to. I can't believe that Take is in a better place, that there is some kind of logic behind all of this. We all have just one chance to live our lives and sometimes that chance is very brief.

Memento mori.

Someday you will die, you and your loved ones and your enemies and everyone you've ever known. Everything seems a little trivial in comparison. I don't want to die wishing that I'd been nicer to people. I don't want to disappear from the world with so many things left undone. I can understand why people want to believe in an afterlife, some place that makes justice out of a world that is fundamentally unjust, but I can't even pretend to believe. I can't even wish that it was so. Take's body is going into the ground where he will rot and turn to dust.

It could have been you. It could have been me. Eventually, it's going to be all of us.

I've been leaving this link everywhere: Delicious Corsets. There was a booth at the Folsom St. Fair that was selling some of their work. Corsets with bustles. Corsets inspired by the circus. Corsets inspired by insects. A ladybug corsets with great big wings. It's fanciful stuff.

They've named their corsets after authors --Anais Nin, Vladimir Nabokov, the obvious Marat and DeSade. I don't know why people associate corsets with pain. A well-made corset is perfectly comfortable. Sure, I wouldn't go for a jog in one, but I've experienced more discomfort from a pair of high-heeled shoes than I ever have from a corset.

A DeSade corset should be covered in spikes and laced with barbed wire. A Marat corset would have all of the spikes on the inside. Corsets were a sort of archaic thing when Nin was writing, something like fifties girdles, but I think they would have appealed to her. A Nin corset would be like a puzzle, while a Henry Miller corset would have a zipper up the back because he wasn't so much interested in the clothes as much as he was interested in getting them off as quickly as possible. A Poe corset would be some tight Victorian creation, embroidered with spider webs.

A Nabokov corset would be nothing at all. No nymphette would ever wear a corset. Humbert Humbert was never more repulsed than when he saw a generous curve of hip or thigh. The Nabokov corset must go.

Sometimes life can become unexpectedly beautiful.

I hate throwing parties, really. As social as I am, I love my space. I don't like the thought of hundreds of drunkards getting their grubby hands all over it. I am filled with two competing desires. I want to show this place off, but I don't want strangers, terrible nasty strangers, breaking my pint glasses and spilling beer all over my floor.

It's never my idea to throw a party --always J's. He decides the dates, prints out fliers, takes care of invitations. I contribute by cleaning the house with a zeal that borders on compulsion and being unbearably crabby until the job is done. I will then spend the first half hour of the party hiding upstairs.

It takes me a drink and a half to be social enough to play hostess, but once I get going, it's not so bad. At a quarter to five, we were certain that no one would show up. The Folsom Street Fair raged in front of our house, but the loft was empty. By five o'clock, the sound system was on and there were a dozen people in my house, drinking cocktails with little paper umbrellas in them. By six o'clock the house was full and the party had spilled out onto the street. By six thirty, four people I'd never met (they live down the street from us) came in with a keg of beer they had transported on a little red wagon. Somewhere around that time, B managed to commit not one, but two lewd sex acts for an appreciative audience (once in the kitchen, once on the couch), two people were thrown out of the bathroom for attempting to commit a lewd sex act in private when other people needed to pee, and DH had just arrived with a gallon of Grey Goose. By seven, people were running down the street to Cat's, grabbing their friends, and bringing them to my house.

It feels good to be the queen, ruler of all I survey. It feels good to have people walk into the place where I live and hear them say "You live here? I thought it was a nightclub!" It feels good to wake up the next morning and see that the white board in the studio has been covered with messages from guests leaving their phone numbers, their e-mail addresses, and thank you. It's a lovely thing when other people clean up my dishes, throw out my garbage, and then hug me. It is a glorious thing to live here, and worth all of the trouble.

Still, I'd like to throw a dinner party.