Never's Spooky Dream House

2003-06-23T20:02:00.000-07:00

What? You're still here?

The Spooky Dream House is empty. This doesn't make it any less spooky, but it does make it somewhat less entertaining. Mostly, I am here.

Same girl (goth). Same world (strange). Different webpage.

2001-12-21T00:48:00.000-08:00

Someday, in the event that I have nieces and nephews, adorable little children (all children that eventually go home to somewhere else are adorable) will look at me with their Dave Keene eyes and say "Auntie Never! Tell us about the nineties! We want to hear all about the internet boom when everybody became a millionaire overnight." Some of my friends did become millionaires. It was funny to see the names of people that I knew in press releases. It was strange to hear everybody talking about some company where I knew the CTO. Someday, when I'm surrounded by wide-eyed children, I will tell them about the time The Magazine Which Must Not Be Named rented out City Hall and threw a 2000-person party with eight open bars. There were the suddenly-rich ravers at Critical Path and the thugs-in-suits at Scient. There was that time that J, S, and I all made $10,000 overnight. On New Year's Eve 2000, most of my friends were in Fiji.

Some of them struck it so rich that they were inspired to spread it around. Jamie, unhappy when Netscape's corperate celebrations, rented out the Sound Factory for a Mozilla Party. D found a champagne he enjoyed so much, he bought every last available bottle in the United States, and then brought it out, case after case, for his friends to drink. I'm certain that there was an entire year when every time I went out, I saw some display of wealth so ludicrous I couldn't stop laughing.

When I got the invite from Dan Sully, I didn't understand at first. The first time it showed up in my mailbox, I mistook it for spam and deleted it unread. I do this a lot. My friends, if I've been owing you a reply to some tidbit of email for six months, there's a very good chance that your message has been lost in a fit of overzealous deleting. I thought he was just getting some friends together for the premiere of Lord of the Rings. We would all stand in line and give each other moral support. I could not have underestimated him more. Dan pulled a move directly from the 1999 playbook . He had rented out a full theater at the Metreon and he'd invited three hundred of his friends to see Peter Jackson's movie the moment it premiered: midnight.

Nevermind the movie. It was a beautiful movie, a great movie, I can't even count the number of times it gave me goosebumps, but the night was a beautiful thing in and of itself: three hundred people milling around a theater in the Metreon, hugging the people they hadn't seen since last week and the people they hadn't seen in years.When the lights dimmed and we took our seats, it was like watching a movie on a couch that seated hundreds of my friends. We cracked wise and hooted and laughed and ahh'd in a way that we would never have done in a dark room full of strangers. When the credits rolled, after we were done applauding Peter Jackson, we turned and we applauded Dan, because he'd thought to do this when we all so desperately needed cheering up. And this bitch of a year, 2001, didn't feel so miserable.

2001-12-16T14:43:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I don't know why I do the things I do. That's not true. I know why I recorded Angela's Ashes. I felt guilty for not reading the book. I am a literate girl (how old can you get before you're not a girl anymore? Will I still be a girl when I'm eighty?) and the idea of a Book of Some Importance that I haven't read is bothersome. Everything I know about Frank McCourt comes from a former co-worker of mine who is his niece.

There's nothing at all romantic about poverty. My parents and grandparents had to survive things that make my worst day look like a picnic. You wake up one morning and your mother's gone to pawn the last of the family silver to feed your eight brothers and sisters. You wake up one morning and you're dying in a Soviet hospital because they've botched an operation which is standard throughout the United States. You come home from the war and your entire family is gone, buried in a mass grave just outside of town. It's not that I think McCourt found poverty romantic, not in the least, but I suspect his readers did. There is nothing quite like American sympathy for the Irish Troubles, the way we drink their beer and fake their accents because we think that their troubles are part of some great epic tapestry, so very unlike our own.

It rains all through Angela's Ashes. It's either raining or about to rain. It rains and then somebody dies (a child, if at all possible), then it rains some more and McCourt's father comes home drunk. I almost couldn't stand it, so much nasty unrelenting sogginess, but I watched even though I knew that thing would never get better, that Angela's life would never improve, that there would always be some new indignity around the corner. It was a slow, sad car crash, but I'm sure I could have looked away if I wanted to.

2001-12-12T17:58:00.000-08:00

When the going gets tough, when the tough can't bring themselves to clean the house or do laundry or look for a job, the tough go to the gym.

My gym is within walking distance of the house. It's unpretentious. No one bothers me, or talks to me, or carries on any sort of conversation. Sometimes women will talk to each other in the locker room, but it's network television or some radio station I don't care for and everyone quietly counts their reps. I like that in a gym. It's hard to find a place to work out in San Francisco that isn't a pickup joint. Nevermind what the boys do in the men's locker room, I just can't stand sweating in the kind of place where women put on makeup before going to their afternoon aerobics class. There are some things I simply should not be forced to endure.

There's a pleasant hum of activity in the gym, everybody going about their business, machines running, weights clicking up against each other, "personal trainers" with immensely broad chests intimidating neophytes into doing one more set of situps. Gym etiquette is like library etiquette in that no one ever makes eye contact with a stranger. There's no one I want to make eye contact with in the second mile of my run. I'm a terrible runner, all short legs and no stamina. After twenty minutes or so, my legs feel like Jello. There's no one I want to make eye contact with while I'm stretching. Stretching in a public place always makes me feel like whoever is watching is trying to imagine what I'd be like in bed. I know it's an irrational concern, but I just can't shake it. It's paranoid delusions like this that make yoga classes impossible for me. There's certainly no one I want to see when I'm doing freeweights or machines. H.R. Giger missed his calling. He should have designed exercise machines, sleek and terrifying black monsters powered by the force of grimacing and grunting humans counting "twenty-one...ugh...twenty-two...ugh...twenty-three..." I think he would have liked it. I hate weight machines almost as much as I hate running, but I use them, hoping to tone that one little obscure muscle that the machine indicates it is designed to improve. Soon, the world's most powerful triceps will be mine!

As much as I hate exercise, I do love coming home with my lungs feeling clear and my whole body buzzing with extra oxygen. I like waking up in the morning just a little bit sore, so that I feel like all of my muscles are really there. It's worth it. In fact, I think I'll go again tomorrow.

2001-12-05T13:54:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's Spooky Dream Poetry, courtesy of CmdrTaco. You can make your own poetry here.

Spooky Dream House
Parents grandparents, kid brother now approaching
six feet in the mechanic overcharge? Will give!
You heard this Take a great
vast nobrow culture, of an exciting time when
elite John Seabrook see it
is. a few months all of my family,
friends and fired again in
believe in the Nobrow culture,
of books. I
have you can
I had
two perfectly among them.Just stand there, comes
Julius, has his curly
hair and
good boys Maybe
strict with the morning that I do her family, no
siblings,
no cousins, not hesitate. George Bush is due.

2001-12-01T23:42:00.000-08:00

I've spared you my updates. They would have all gone something like this:

Dear Diary,

I am sad, so sad! No one loves me! No one understands me! I will cry now for no good reason and then I will write wretchedly bad poetry. This is just like junior high. Waaah!

You don't want to read a thing like that. I don't even want to write it. The air is thick with disinterest. So forget about my week, except for the bit where J took me to dinner. That was nice. J took me to Azie, a sort of high-end Asian fusion place a few blocks away, and for the length of the evening, things were not so different from the way they were a few years ago, when we methodically made our way through every fancy restaurant in the city in a ritual we called Snob Night. This led to Never's Year of Being Fat, which wasn't so bad, considering that I got to get drunk on excellent wine and find out what fois gras tastes like. For nostalgia's sake, J and I ordered some ridiculous dessert that looked as if it had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, if Frank Lloyd Wright's medium of choice had been pears. We came home tipsy and full of lobster, which is the best way the come home there is.

It's wonderfully comforting to have a partner in crime, someone who will notice when I fall into a week-long pout and say "Hey, that girl needs to be taken to dinner." Men, pay close attention: nothing says love like "let's go out to dinner." Of course, my moods aren't terribly hard to decipher. My happiness is inversely proportional to the amount of time I spent watching TV shows about forensic science. The New Detectives, FBI Files, The Justice Files, American Justice...Case Studies in FBI Justice with File Cabinets --any show which features people getting killed and then the killers getting caught because of geeks in white lab coats. Ballistics studies? I'm all over that. Luminol? Love it. Some people turn to drinking or drugs when they need to feel a sense of overwhelming numbness. All I need is a lengthy discussion about blood spatter or castor bean poisoning.

I'm sure I could commit the perfect crime by now. I know a million different ways to kill somebody. I know that there are hidden VIN numbers on cars whose location is known only to the vehicle manufacturer and the FBI. I know not to trust my phone records. I know that people leave hair everywhere. I know that blood gets everywhere and you'll never be able to clean it up completely. I know an awful lot about dental records and scratch marks. Every episode is a little morality play, a simple drama in which bloodthirsty monsters are caught by supernaturally calm, middle-aged men and women in white lab coats. When life is confusing and unfair, what could be more comforting than that?

2001-11-25T00:57:00.000-08:00

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

2001-11-24T04:26:00.000-08:00

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.

2001-11-18T22:33:00.000-08:00

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.

2001-11-15T14:39:00.000-08:00

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.

2001-11-14T18:43:00.000-08:00

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.

2001-11-09T23:09:00.000-08:00

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?

2001-11-09T20:41:00.000-08:00

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.

2001-11-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

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?

2001-11-05T23:46:00.000-08:00

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.

2001-11-02T17:11:00.000-08:00

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.

2001-10-30T17:48:00.000-08:00

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.

2001-10-29T20:34:00.000-08:00

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.

2001-10-28T00:24:00.000-07:00

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.

2001-10-23T04:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2001-10-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

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.

2001-10-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

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.

2001-10-18T03:25:00.000-07:00

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."

2001-10-14T00:55:00.000-07:00

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.

2001-10-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

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.