Blogger is being awful. I have updates. Oh, such updates I will give! You just have to be patient.

Did I say that my family doesn't do holidays? Did I say we didn't celebrate Thanksgiving? I lied. Thanksgiving was in Palo Alto this year, hosted by my aunt and uncle, who care enough about holidays to organize this kind of thing. I imagine that other people have Thanksgiving holidays like this one: Aunt, Uncle and assorted cousins, parents, grandparents, kid brother (now approaching six feet in height), a number of family friends and their dizzying variety of children. Kids ran through the house. Parents gorged on turkey and zinfandel and talked about how they all used to go to high school together. Being neither a child nor an adult, I stuck to the most neutral topic of conversation, computers, the surest way to gain favor in a room full of engineers.

Have I mentioned the children, the endless parade of children? It's a recent development, all of these kids. For ten years, I was the only child in my family, no siblings, no cousins, not a single relative in the States my own age. This year, I could hear my Uncle calling at the top of his lungs for the kids to stop playing and come to dinner. The Thanksgiving dinners of my childhood usually involved one of my parents trying to pry my nose out of a book.

Down comes Julius, eleven years old, then Elias who is eight, and Abira, age three, who has a bit of trouble negotiating the stairs. The youngest of my cousins, this little girl who is loudly declaring her love for her baby dolly Alexis, scares me a little. To use use the tritest phrase, she gives me shivers. She creeps me out. While Julius has his mother's curly hair and full lips, and Elias has something of his father's demeanor, dark-haired Abira has nothing in common with either of them. There's no reason why she should. Abira is adopted.

Two years ago, my Aunt went back to Russia for the first time in fifteen years. She visited a Moscow orphanage, where she adopted a year-old girl named Daria. It was a scandal. My Aunt already had two boys, two perfectly good boys of her own, and Daria (now Abira) was Russian, really Russian. She might as well have flown to Berlin and adopted a Hitler Youth, to hear them talk. She'll hate us. She'll never be one of us. How could anyone love a child like that?

She does. She loves her. She dotes on Abira, my Aunt who is always so strict with her boys. Maybe strict isn't the word. I was the only child, remember? More often than not, I was treated like a very short adult. I was the family midget. My Aunt and Uncle's children are, well, children. They have set bedtimes and limited television time. They are allowed only so many sweets. Three-year old Abira sits at the table as if no one has ever told her that she is a child.

It's none of my business. It's not my place to guess why my Aunt would travel halfway across the world for a daughter. So I won't guess, I'll just tell you why she gives me shivers. Take a picture of black-haired, dark-eyed Abira, who looks like no one else in her family, and take a picture of one year-old me --we look exactly the same.

Someone who reads this once described my life as a "rock and roll fairytale." Most of the time, I don't feel very glamorous. My life doesn't feel remarkable or exciting. There's nothing special about my dancing or drinking or dinners that elevates them above anyone else's dancing or drinking or dinner. Most of what I do is boring or private or simply doesn't lend itself well to a personal essay. You'll never know about it, but trust me, you're not missing anything.

Sometimes when I come home so late that it's almost dawn, just before my head hits the pillow, in that moment of exhaustion, my life feels like a rock and roll fairytale. When I was a kid, I remember trying to imagine what being an adult would be like. I've talked about this before. In my imagination, I'd be I writer in New York, living in some dingy apartment, suffering nobly for my art. In my solitary imaginings, I had fabulous, talented, bohemian friends. That's what made the suffering worth it, these fascinating people. The most compelling reason to grow up as quickly as possible was to meet my destiny, a whole world of bright and shining people that I could be part of.

Is it obvious yet that I wasn't exactly a popular child? That I hid in books? That I was desperately lonely? There was no one at all that I looked up to, no one that I wanted to be like. I believed in my mythical New York the way that some people in believe in Heaven. It was my just reward for surviving Junior High. Some day, probably after college, flights of angels would escort me to a smoky nightclub full of beautiful, witty people, and I would fit in perfectly among them.

Well, I'm not in New York. I'm out of a job. My rent is due. I don't look quite so good in my leather hotpants as I did a few months ago. Most of my friends are still unemployed, but goddamn it, they are a stunning lot. I am proud to be associated with them. Just last night, they put on a twelve-hour arts extravaganza. There were good bands (Honeyshot, Unwoman), and bad bands (Cyclone 9), a puppet show of questionable artistic value, some clever photographs by Helena, the usual DJ's, and a whole lot of fire. Artlan danced with her firestaff; I danced with poi; Bruce and Slater provided some fire acrobatics; Raven and her brother breathed fire while a troupe of tribal bellydancers undulated to Sepultura.

How could I possibly not love it here? What could be wrong with a world where I can stand shoulder to shoulder with my friends as we watch the Leonid meteor shower above us while a girl in a corset sings and plays the chello? Is a life in which I find myself packing sound gear out of an illicit Oakland performance space at 4:30 in the morning a rock and roll fairytale?

Yes. Yes it is.

William is right. When the going gets tough, when you are lost and without hope, that's when it time to turn to a higher power for guidance. That's when you ask yourself WWSD. What Would A Supervillain Do?

Now is an exciting time to be a supervillain. Evil loves a bad economy. It is now possible to lease a secret underground lair for less than $1 per square foot. You can furnish the whole thing with those pretty Herman Miller chairs purchased from bankrupt technology companies. While we're at it, you can also buy all of their servers and link them up into a Super Beowolf Cluster of Doom. Every supervillain needs a superintelligent computer to do her bidding, churn out neat little graphics of the world's impending destruction, and eventually betray her to the hero at a crucial moment. No matter how elaborate my defenses are, the hero will always be able to hack into the system after 45 seconds with an iBook --30 seconds if it's one of the titanium iBooks --20 seconds if the hacking is being done by the hero's Brainy Sidekick of Color.

The competition for Evil these days is so confused, so lacking in focus. Flying airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that is evil, but there was no followup. Where's the Death Ray? Where's the demand for the contents of Fort Knox? Why isn't Osama Bin Laden on the phone right now demanding Jenna and Barbara Bush as nubile love slaves? George Bush is acting like a perfect idiot hero. He must be wearing his Superman underoos. Have you heard this guy talk in the last few months? It's all eradicating evil and making the world safe from the enemies of freedom. A real, leather-clad supervillain would not hesitate. George Bush would be crushed beneath the heavy, yet stylish, boots of evil! The sky would be dark with genetically engineered flying monkeys!

Osama, the League of Supervillains is very disappointed in you. You are hereby uninvited to the Annual Supervillains Potluck and Poker Night. You're giving Evil a bad name.

Take me away from all this. Take me away from the spitting rain, the dreary news, this cough, my fainting, these days and days of waking up in the morning and having nothing at all that needs to be done. When I was working 80-hour weeks, I prayed for free time. I had elaborate free time fantasies. The laundry would always be done. The house would be spotless. I would make sculpture. I would make new clothes. I would write my zeitgeist novel. I never imagined that I would spend most of my time walking in circles around the living room because the moment I try to commit myself to a project, I'm paralyzed by job guilt.

How can I possibly write/firedance/work out/sew when I should be looking for a job? There are people who have been hired and fired again in the time I've been unemployed. If this keeps up for much longer, I may forget what a Solaris server looks like. The guilt! The awful, crushing guilt! The guilt, which strangely enough, never seems to kick in if I'm reading a book or watching a movie or sleeping until noon. I watch a lot of movies these days. I read a lot of books. I spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself because I seem to be flinging resumes into the ether.

The jobs appear. The jobs disappear. The company decides that they want somebody more senior. The company decides they're looking for someone junior. The company finally admits the truth: that they're looking for someone with senior experience who will never leave the office and accept a junior level salary. The company can't hire anyone until January. The company has decided they want to switch to Windows NT.

I need a vacation or I need a job. I will harp on this as much as I harped about my desperate need for a new apartment last year because it's the only thing I can think about. Every morning that I wake up for nowhere to go, I feel useless. Every day that some recruiter doesn't call me back, I wonder if I'm really smart enough to be in this business. I used to pride myself on being tough, but I don't feel very tough right now.

Job Market 1, Never 0

Do you hear that, you soulless HR harpies? Are you listening, Sluggish Technology Sector? You won. I have been sapped of all my will. All that I want now is to run away to some place with bright neon lights or sandy beaches or a not-quite-so-merciless economy. I just want to be somewhere else.

There comes a time in every girl's life when only one thing can soothe her frayed nerves: clothes. On those days, it is sometimes necessary to set foot in places where a girl would not ordinarily go. For me, those places are Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie. I'd be lying if I said that my wardrobe was nothing vintage dresses and custom-made corsets. Sometimes a girl needs things you just can't find in any vintage store. Face it, no one ever gives away their simple black tank tops and comfortable sweaters.

Even so, the very thought of a place like Urban Outfitters makes my blood boil. John Seabrook wrote in Nobrow about seeing his father comtemptuously ripping Ralph Lauren ads out of a magazine. "Ralph Lauren," the senior Seabrook remarked "offends me." He felt that Ralph Lauren was packaging and selling the cultured, New England upper crust look that was his own, by right of birth and good taste. Ralph Lauren was making available to any bozo with a credit card, the look that had once marked Seabrook Sr. as a member of the cultural elite. John Seabrook didn't see it that way: "I saw [Ralph Lauren] as a validation of my taste, not a threat to it."

John Seabrook mistakes a cultural gap for a generational one. His great vast "nobrow" culture, in which there is no longer any difference between marketing and art, is the New World Order, the culture of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings and everything that follows. He thinks his father is the relic of a time when elite culture was the antithesis of consumerism. He couldn't be more wrong. His father is a member of a subculture, just like goths and punks and ravers. Subcultures are the only place to hide in the Nobrow world, the only place where the real and authentic, the hand-made and difficult is valued above the mass-produced, the easily-attainable, and easily-understood.

When Urban Outfitters puts out racks and racks of faux vintage clothes, I cringe. There is a subculture of people who wear vintage clothes. Dressing vintage sends an immediate visual message: I'm not some preppie who shops at the GAP. I don't care what look some Conde Nast publication thinks is in at the moment. You cannot even hope to buy what I am wearing right now because every item of clothing I own is unique.

Do you see where a rack of identical "vintage" blouses might be a little unclear on the concept?

Day 4:

I started my day by cracking my head open on the concrete floor.

Upside: J went to the Hall of Justice for me to wave the last of the paperwork in the face of the Government Drone.

Downside: Twelve hours later, my head still feels as if it's about the explode.

Once we'd established that I was not concussed, it was off to Pier 70, the industrial wasteland where San Francisco keeps its unfortunate, forgotten, and unloved vehicles. When you're trying to get your car out of car jail, it's easy to be annoyed at every little thing, but I am no stranger to Pier 70 and I have never had to wait half an hour for the return of my poor little car. No one is in a hurry on a perfect Friday afternoon. No one wants to push cars around on a forklift. They want to make conversation with the funny-looking white girl.

Have you been waiting here long? Hav you been taken care of? What kind of car is it? Someone should have taken care of it by now. How long have you been here? And of course, the inevitable "What's with all the black?"

"Somebody died," I told the curious City Tow worker. "That's what's up."

"Oh man, I'm so sorry."

Sometimes it pays to always dress like you're going to a funeral.

Day 3:

The car is still at the tow lot, but I have my precious Moving Permit. I felt that a great light should come from above and angels should sing when the DMV woman handed it to me, but the heavens were dark and silent. God does not want me to have my car,

Stay tuned tomorrow, when I try taking the Moving Permit back to the tow desk so that we can go around in "You need a registration...I can't get a registration until I get my smog check...I can't get a smog check unless I have my car...We can't release your car without a registration" circles some more. Find out if the fickle tow lot workers will take pity on me and allow a third party tow truck to pull my poor Nissan to the mechanic. Will the tow truck arrive in time? Will the mechanic overcharge? Will J drive off to his new job and leave our heroine to become a housewife?

Sure. Why not?

When I explain to people that I don't have a car, it's not entirely true. I hate cars. I hate driving. I hate sitting in traffic. The very thought of driving on 101 at rush hour fills me with panic and dread. My shoulders tense up; my head starting aching; I'm sure that my blood pressure becomes comperable to that of a fortyish lawyer with a full case load, a cheating wife, and a tax audit. I loathe parking. I hate driving around in little circles for hours on end trying to find the one piece of sidewalk in San Francisco where I can legally keep my car for longer than five minutes. I ran up more than $3000 in parking tickets. I was hit and run twice. But I never did sell my car. When I found a job that I could walk to from home, I parked my little inelegant Nissan in front of my parents' house, where it's been sitting for nearly two years.

Until yesterday, when the DPT towed my car. Ordinarily, I would have let them keep the damned thing. So long as the DPT has my car, they can't give it any more tickets, no one can smash the rear view mirror with a baseball bat, no other car is likely to swerve into my parked vehicle and take out most of the front quarter panel. Alas, J has just accepted a job at a company twenty miles away. After all of these years, we finally have a real need for a car, and my little burgundy terror is sitting in car jail, guarded by the heartless minions of the Department of Parking and Traffic.

I send J down the street to the Hall of Justice (really, that's what they call it!), armed with his credit card, ready to free my poor car at any cost. The clock is ticking, and the longer we wait, the more "storage fees" pile up.

"You have tickets," they tell him. "Parking tickets."

I can't have tickets. The car hasn't moved in almost two years. There isn't a single parking-related sign on the street where I've kept it.

"Registration," comes the Voice of Doom. "Your car hasn't been registered since 1999. You cannot register your car here. You need to go to the DMV."

That's okay. I needed to register my car anyway, if J is going to drive it to work. Fine, we'll register the car. Of course, I've already written them an enormous check for this year's registeration. What happend to that? Oh, says the gum-popping dealership airhead, we have a check here, but we just assumed it was a car payment when we cashed it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice is screaming I bought out the lease, you vapid Hell-bitch! I own it outright! Why would I be sending you car payments?

Couldn't I just hop down to the DMV, register my car and win its freedom? Forget the cost, I'll go down there myself and you can give me a refund for the money I've already paid you, right? Of course not. The dealership has already somehow mysteriously become involved in the registration process and once they start it, only they can finish it. No refund.

The dealership dispatches "Ricky" from Finances to the DMV to inquire about the state of my registration. It takes him until the middle of the afternoon, but he calls me back. He has good news and bad news, which is a nice way of saying that he has bad news and worse news. My check has, after more than a year, finally been delivered to the DMV. The "tickets" my immobile car has managed to rack up are the result of the expired registration. Once a month, a DPT officer would come by the car and ticket it for expired tags. This is the kind of silent, I-need-to-meet-my-quota ticket that never results in an actual ticket under the windshield wiper or a bill sent my address. No, they just silently pile up, gathering late fees, until I notice them. And the bad news? They still can't register my car. Since I haven't had tags for the last two years, the state of California requires that the car has smog check.

So I can't smog the car until I get it back from the tow lot, but I can't get the car out of the tow lot until it's registered? The cheerful Ricky assures me that the car jailors will let my car go if I show them the receipt for my registration with the little note about smogging the car. But I don't have th receipt of registration with the little note about smogging the car, Ricky, you do, and you are 40 miles away in the suburban wasteland known as Silicon Valley. I can't get there. You see, I don't have a car.

Ricky promises me that he will overnight the necessary paperwork and I can have it tomorrow. I resign myself to paying a second day of storage fees.

Fast forward. Ricky's package arrives. J and I walk down to the Hall of Justice, past the metal detectors and the security guard who searches my bag by pushing it, unopened, from one end of the table to the other. We arrive at the tow desk, waving our little piece of paper. The day is saved! The car is free! An angelic choir sings from the rafters.

"You need a one day moving permit. I can't release the car without a one day moving permit." Normally, I would provide some kind of unflattering description of the government functionary that provided me with this terrible news, but I couldn't be bothered to notice. Government Drone, I forgive you. You are only a tool of the nightmarish system that has trapped me.

"But I'm not moving the car! We're getting a tow truck. The battery is dead. What do we need a moving permit for if the car isn't even moving?"

"One day moving permit," said Government Drone.

"From the DMV?"

"Yes."

"What times does the DMV close?"

"Four-thirty."

It's five o'clock, of course. I'll bet you didn't even need me to tell you.

So begins my car's third day at the tow lot, a day that will cost me more storage fees. I still don't have my registration. I don't having a moving permit. In fact, I don't even know what a moving permit is. I don't have my car, but I do have a piece of paper telling me that I need a smog check. Oh yes, tomorrow is another day.

Okay, someone else brought it up, so I'm going to talk about it. That gives me permission. That makes it okay.

I read a lot of journals these days. I blame Livejournal. Everyone and their dog has a livejournal. It's easy to find the journals of people I know in real life or to give one of my friends an access code so that they can start one of their own. There are a lot of lives out there to spy on. Conversely, there are a lot of people who spy on me. Just last week, a guy walked up to me and said "Hey, aren't you Never?" He said all kinds of flattering things about J and myself. The swelling in my head has not yet subsided.

What was my point again? Now I remember --not everyone that I read is someone I like. Just as there are lives that are fascinating, people who are beautiful or charismatic, people so gifted at storytelling that they can make their groceries and laundry sound like adventures, there are also people who lead repulsive lives. You would think that poking around in someone's head, reading their day-to-day thoughts, would lead to nothing but empathy. That's not the case. Some people are so self-absorbed, so shallow and mean, thin-skinned or hypocritical or spineless or heartless that I can't bring myself to look away.

Do you think that I'm talking about you? Calm down. The real monsters of egotism don't even know this page exists. Some of them don't even know that I exist. It's not as if I'm sending them hate letters telling them how awful I think they are. I've never seen a flame war turn anybody into a better human being. These people are a car crash. They're police sirens on the street corner. I read them precisely because they're so terrible. Every person that they hurt, every stupid thing they do, brings on a rush of relief. It's not me, you see. It's not me.

I don't doubt it works both ways. I'm sure that there are people reading this who don't like me, who are repulsed by my tastes and opinions and the things I stand for. I get about a hundred hits a day here. I've got to be somebody's car crash.

Well, my disgusted reader, I don't mind. The net is vast and you are quiet. Carry on. I'll pretend that I don't see you.