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.

2001-10-09T20:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2001-10-08T23:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2001-10-06T17:10:00.000-07:00

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.

2001-10-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

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.

2001-09-29T03:13:00.000-07:00

Here you have it. This is a year of my life, September 29th to September 29th. I've kept journals, on and off, for most of my life, but this is the first time I've managed to chronicle my day to day activities for a full year. I haven't embarassed myself just yet, but there's still time.

At this time last year, I was writing my letter of resignation at The Magazine Which Must Not Be Named. I was bored, desperately bored, and when I think back to that time I'd like to believe that I could already smell the odor of decay. I don't think that they ever moved into that beautiful new building that my boss promised me. It's certainly empty now. They filed for Chapter 11 this week.

And now here is my year in review, with a few statistics:

Apartments occupied -- 2
Jobs held -- 2
Months spent working -- 7
Months spent unemployed --5
Months spent drunk, insomniac, and/or unable to eat -- 6. Most of my stay at Plague of Locusts.
Vacations -- 4
Major theatrical epiphanies -- 1
Dinners at Plouf -- 4
Corsets purchased --2
Pounds lost -- 10
Friends lost -- 4
Old friends found -- 3
Ex-boyfriends resurfaced -- 2
Crushes -- 1. I've made a full recovery, thank you.
Loves -- 1, from which I will hopefully never have to recover.

It's funny to think that those numbers should explain how I got to where I am. My years do not stack up on top of each other, one identical to the rest. This is not my most chaotic year, but I do wonder sometimes if I go through jobs, through apartments and people, just a little too fast. I can't believe the number of times I've said that this will be the last apartment, the last job, the last boyfriend for a while. Now that I have this one, I swear a solemn oath to settle in and pull life, cozy and tight, around me.

A few days ago I started looking at warehouse spaces on craig's list again. It was supposed to be for a friend, but prices have fallen to $1 a square foot for the first time in years and soon I started to imagine a brick warehouse ten times the size of my loft that my friends and I could rent and remodel. Don't you see what's wrong with this picture? What the hell do I need a better loft for? I've only lived here for six months! Now is not the time for rental infidelity. I can't live with one eye always wandering towards the next thing.

Maybe this coming year I'll be the Red Queen. I will have the run very fast in order to keep standing in the same place. I will not move. I will not stray. I will not throw away my friends. I won't go looking for that bigger, better, faster, more glamorous life that I could be living. Let next year be just like this one. How hard could it possibly be?

2001-09-28T01:33:00.000-07:00

J and I escaped the loft compound and went to Haight St. for shopping and burritos, almost like a date. There is no good used clothing on Haight these days. I used to walk away from Wasteland or Aarkvark's with armfulls (arms full? would it be "arms full"?) of clothes. Today they're not buying much, which means that there isn't much turnover. All of the things that I didn't want to buy months ago are still there.

I'm certain I've offended some wrathfull and trigger-happy god of fashion. Do you hear me, God? I don't want your pink imitation-snakeskin jeans! I spit on your clever op-art print fabrics! Nothing in this world could make me wear those Wilma Flintstone tank tops that only come up over one shoulder.

Bring me the head of the fashion sadist who brought back glam.

Where have all of the black beaded cardigans gone? Where are the black cotton eyelet dresses? The peter pan collar blouses? Where are the vintage nightgowns that don't look like they belong on a 60's tramp in heavy blue eyeshadow? What makes the fashion gods so unkind? Will I have to sacrifice 50's cocktail dresses and knee-length bloomers on a burning pyre? What must I do to prove myself worthy?

All of my favorite clothing is falling apart. I will have to steal J's clothes --his black jeans, his floppy DKNY sweaters. I will look terribly plain. I'll look normal. No one will be able to recognise me.

LOCAL WOMAN KIDNAPPED, REPLACED BY BANANA REPUBLIC MODEL

The local authorities will have to send out a search party.

2001-09-24T22:16:00.000-07:00

Life is so hard. The streets are so gritty. I'm so authentic and real to be walking around here. Sure.

What did I do on Friday night? I went to the opera --Ashak II --with my mother. The world is full of people who would rather have their eyes scooped out with a mellon baller than spend three hours at the opera. I'm not one of them. I see something in opera, even bad opera, that most people don't see. Let me be clear on this: Ashak II is a terrible piece of work. If you don't have half season tickets to the SF Met, I can't in good conscience recommend that you spend an evening watching this thing. Stay home, my nebulous reader! Wash your hair. Pay your bills. There must be some reruns of Night Court on TV you could be watching right now. Leave the American productions of Italian operas based on Armenian history to me.

Adam Gopnik once wrote of that "moment in opera when the clouds of schlock lift and something crazily artificial becomes transporting." I've seen it happen once or twice, during performances of La Traviata or Don Giovanni, I've fallen completely into the moment. But more often than not, the schlock never lifts. It settles in for a long stay. A cloud of schlock. A rain of the stuff, even. The sets tower; the costumes glitter and we know that the plot is paper-thin, the libretto is poorly translated, and that heaving, buxom soprano is hardly convincing as a frail girl of seventeen. It is ridiculous when the ghost appears from behind two columns, all dressed in white, and solemnly intones "I am your father." Overweight performers, hearty songs from the death bed, the details of offstage wars related by page boys, are all the cliches that opera is made of, but they're such vast and awesome cliches that I am moved by their very scale.

Maybe I have a weakness for epic tackiness, after all, I like Las Vegas. Opera is a great, grand, ugly, straight-faced venture in which the audience pays a lot of money to give themselves over to the illusion, but also to keep themselves seperate from it.We pretend that the acting is convincing and the story is moving, that we're society women and patrons of the arts when really we're just dressing up to spy in the house of wealth. Because we're impostors, my mother can nudge me in the ribs when the ghost comes out and whisper very quietly so that only I can hear, "I am your father, Luke. Come over to the Dark Side."

2001-09-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's not the zeitgeist novel, this thing that I'm writing. I don't think that I'm ready for a novel just yet. I have maybe one good short story in me per year. It's usually about three thousand words long and it takes me six months to edit. There are tree sloths that work faster than I do. There are monkeys at typewriters who are more prolific. That's why when people ask me if I'm a writer (they ask, I don't know why), I answer no. I write sometimes, but I'm not a writer.

But I've written so much here, in this space. I've got a year of walking through San Francisco down on paper. I've learned a few things, walking around late at night. I've learned how monsterous cities are. I've learned a little bit about the way the streets devour people. I have the language with which to describe the broken bottles, the graffiti, the smell of stale beer and urine, the different catagories of street people and their desire for my spare change, the crummy apartments with sloping floors, the basement offices, empty parking lots, cars with broken windows, all-night porn stores, stolen bicycles, and Wells Fargo/Starbucks Borg cubes that make up my neighborhood. I've spent the last couple of years living in places that people tell me are not safe, not proper, if you're young and female and prone to walking alone late at night.

Now everyone is thinking about their safety, the illusion of safety, the lie we tell ourselves that just because everything is clean and everybody is pleasantly middle class, that nothing could go wrong here. The Transamerica pyramid was on the list of terrorist targets published by the FBI this week. I used to work across the street from the pyramid in an office where people used to make a face when I told them the block I lived on. Isn't it dangerous there? Isn't it dangerous everywhere?

2001-09-18T18:28:00.000-07:00

Am I a bad person for not wanting to write about last Tuesday anymore? I'm all out of outrage. I don't have any shock left in me. I can't talk about sympathy or mourning or how brave those firefighters are. Yes, I know that Falwell wants to lay it all at the feet of gays, feminists, and abortionists. I know that CNN has done a miserable job of covering the story. I know that the dead are piling up, bits and pieces of them, and we can't really expect any survivors. We're almost certainly going to bomb Afganistan, I know that. Nevermind that people have been bombing Afganistan for decades to no avail. George W. Bush's approval ratings are through the roof. There's something I really don't want to discuss.

None of that today. I'm going to talk about the Virgin. There's a Virgin Megastore on 4th and Market, the only giant corperation that I can't help patronising. Not for the music, of course. I am vehemently opposed to paying full price for a CD. I have an addiction: glossy art books. There's an illustrated copy of Julie Taymor's Titus. There's one of Kevyn Aucoin's makeup books. There's a history of lingerie and a book of Jan Saudek's photographs. There's a collection of Glenn Fabry's covers for Preacher.

Prominently featured on one of the tables of newly released books, next to the new Francesca Lia Brock novel, is The Office Kama Sutra by Julianne Balmain, who used to work with me at Plague of Locusts. It's a cute little book --a guide to romance in the workplace, says the cover. We all knew that it would be published eventually. Julie left Plague of Locusts to become a full time writer. Maybe it's too easy to make fun of the CTO's girlfriend when she writes a book about sex in the office. This is the comedic equivalent of a sitting duck. None of the machines in the server room were suspiciously sticky when she left. I take this as a sign that she practices the discretion she counsels in her book.

Who am I kidding? I'm jealous. Some girl, a girl from my office, is sitting at her word processor at this very moment writing the great American novel, for which she has received an honest-to-god advance, and what am I doing with my abundant free time? Nothing. My zeitgeist novel remains unwritten What will happen if she beats me to chronicling the inept management, the visits from OSHA, the frat boy engineers and bizarre coffee mug-related office memos of Plague of Locusts?

I'd better get writing right now.

2001-09-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

J took this picture of me in the courtyard of the Louvre this spring. There's a corresponding picture of him setting up a tripod: the geek in his native environment. We'd been walking non-stop for three or four days and our feet were starting to rebel, but I think that was the last time that life felt limitless and benign.

2001-09-13T19:38:00.000-07:00

All of my friends are safe. You don't care, of course. You have your own friends to worry about, but when the newscasters say "the world will never be the same again" I know my world will be the same eventually. I've got jambalaya cooking on the stove and sometimes I can look away from CNN or BBC World Service because I'm not afraid that the moment I look away, something awful will happen.

I haven't felt to starved for information since I had the chicken pox. I came home from school one day and collapsed in my parents' bed. I was cold, the coldest I've ever been in my life, and they had all of the best blankets. No matter how many blankets I wrapped around myself, I shook. When my mother took my temperature that evening, it was a hundred and five. It's dangerous to get the chicken pox when you're twelve years old --maybe not so bad as when you're thirty, but you feel it. When you're hot and aching and weak, you understand that sometimes a very small thing can kill you.

I spent the first week of the Gulf War delerious with fever, drinking from the 2 liter bottles my parents left by my bed and listening to NPR. I never turned it off, not once, through BCC World News and Sound Money and Terry Gross. I had newscasters speaking in my dreams like the voice of God. I would close my eyes and pretend I had no body, nothing that shook and itched (I scratched, even though you're not supposed to scratch. You can see two pox marks on my face if you know where to look) and sweated while Patriot missiles fell on Iraq and retaliatory SCUD missiles fell on Israel.

I couldn't stop listening. I couldn't look away, but I think I can look away now for a little while.

2001-09-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

Comments have been broken for a couple of days because reblogger lost its free hosting. Reblogger has been moved and comments are back up, but I seem to have lost all of my previous comment data. If you had anything to say, now you've got to say it all over again.

In other news, the world is a little surreal today. When I was a kid, I read a lot of cyberpunk novels. Embarassing as it seems now, I played a couple of cyberpunk role-playing games. The news looks like a page torn from a cyberpunk role-playing supplement. This is what I get for living in the future.

2001-09-10T18:40:00.000-07:00

It's Monday evening and I'm finally doing the dreaded playa laundry, a triple load of clothes that used to be black, for the most part, but are now almost white with alkali dust. The desert is not kind to clothing. All of my vintage slips and negligees feel brittle. My burgundy Lip Service bloomers are ripped in two places. Everything I own which is made of leather could use a good polishing because no amount of soap and water is going to completely banish the dirt from my coats and boots. A few years ago, a friend of mine, still addled from his weeks in Black Rock, was doing his own playa laundry at the local laundromat when he noticed that the clothes he was wearing were pretty filthy and could do with a good washing. His shirt was halfway over his head before he remembered that he was back in the real world, a place where spontaneous nudity is not appreciated.

I gave him no end of grief when he told me that story. That only made it more embarassing when the very next year, I nearly stepped out of my dress in a laundry on Franklin Street --I was that close --and a crowd of pseudo-hipsters with brightly colored hair and tell-tale filthy sneakers all smiled in sympathy. We all had the Reality Bends. We had it bad.

I still have my Playa Body, ten pounds lighter, tanner, sleeker than my usual self. Everything fits a little more comfortably. The Playa Body is a point of pride at Burning Man. It takes almost a week to fully acclimate to the harsh Black Rock terrain, tan enough that you don't need to slather yourself in sunblock, tough enough that you don't need to carry a gallon of water with you at all times. You burn two thousand calories a day just sitting in the shade and sweating. You need avocados, candy bars, steaks, things you would never, ever eat in the real world, just to fuel a rigorous workday. The legions of the tanned, whose bodies no longer secrete natural oils, sneer at the newcomers, anyone whose hair is still neat, those people whose clothes look suspiciously clean, people who look as if they have had a shower (a real shower with hot water!) in the recent past. A newcomer, a tourist, a pansy frat boy spectator who probably brought beer instead of water and is only there because they hear Burning Man has lots of tits, is anybody who arrived on the playa after you did. In some ways, Black Rock City is not so different from San Francisco.

At Thunderdome, we are filled with the malicious urge to defile our newcomers. The first thing Matt does when he sees me is grab a handfull of playa dust and rub it into my hair. When J sees Jen, more than a week later, he rushes her, screaming "You're so cleeeeeeeean!" A true playa veteran is dirty, dirty and unrepentant.

2001-09-06T20:53:00.000-07:00

There is a long tradition of holy pilgrimages into the desert. We journey into harsh environments to cleanse ourselves. We put ourselves through trials on an alien landscape because ordinary life has no real trials to offer. For this reason I've seen people cut themselves, go on fasts, get tattooed and pierced, and hung from hooks that dig into their flesh. I see a lot of those people at Burning Man, people who are there because they need to escape easy, boring, ordinary living. Every year I put myself through the dirty, unpleasant, exhausting, expensive ritual of Burning Man because it is hard and everything else is a just a little too easy.

Welcome to Burning Man. We built this city, but we were really hoping you wouldn't show up.

That's Mateo on the megaphone in the Center Camp Cafe, which isn't even open until the event officially starts on Monday. We're waiting for a demonstration of the Tesla Coil (not Doctor Megavolt's, but somebody else's) and Mateo is filling in the time by heckeling the audience: Which of you dumbass motherfuckers left fruit in the port-o-potties? Fruit! How many times do I have to tell you? If it's not shit, piss, or vomit, it doesn't belong in the port-o-potty! If you can't remember that, get off my fucking playa and take your American Spirit hippie cigarettes with you! There's more, but Lil' Matt is busy rummaging around under my skirt as if he's lost his keys down there. Matt is a dangerous and unstable psychotic who has been drinking since the middle of the afternoon. His idea of hitting on a girl is to restrain her so that she cannot run away and then bite her until she bruises. He has a kiss like a meat grinder. In the desert, I find this charming. Later that night, we jump into Mateo's art car (a beat-up Saab that only drives in reverse), drive past the greeter's gate, and begin to assault cars coming into Black Rock City, demanding cigarettes, candy, beer, and beautiful women before they would be allowed to pass.

Driving around Black Rock with the DPW and Deathguild is like being aboard a maurauding pirate ship. There are two bottles going around, the booze and the chaser, and every hour or so the bottle is emptied out and someone has to bring out another one. Everyone is dangerous and drunk, looking to cause trouble, and as we cruise down the Esplanade, people point and yell "Deathguild!" That's how notorious we are. That's how unbelievably cool we have become. In a temporary city of almost thirty thousand people, we're the one who wear black so that you don't have to. We'll drink all the booze, do all the drugs, harass anything carrying a glowstick, and fuck anything that doesn't run away fast enough.

I felt like such a badass. I caused trouble. I kissed boys. I drank abysmal vodka. I did a lot of drugs. I shouted from the roof of the hearse until my voice was gone. I choked myself on excess.

You already know that couldn't last.

2001-09-05T13:27:00.000-07:00

I'm back, but I'm exhausted. I need more sleep. I need some food. I need to get the alkali dust out of everything I own. Then I'm going to tell you a story.

2001-08-23T01:48:00.000-07:00

I have no net access, yet I must post.

My birthday, for those who have been kind enough to ask, was not earthshattering, but I found it pleasant and filled with raw fish. I had the chance to eat Ebisu sushi not once, but twice! I also had the opportunity to spend the afternoon with my mother, who happens to be a minor deity walking this earth. I wrote a very long entry about how little damage my parents managed to inflict apon me growing up, but I only have a few minutes here and I have an awful lot of summary to do.

I have a small assortment of gifts, all lovely, including a necklace from J, a tiny black whip that looks as if it was made from a Koosh ball squashed flat, a couple of 8"x10" glossy prints of some pictures J and I took in Paris, and the new Terry Pratchett novel. My friends have all been exceptionally cosiderate and kind, especially considering that we're all running around like headless chickens in the days before Burning Man.

I'm going, you know, probably tomorrow, possibly as late as Friday. My plans are in a shambles already. We've finally moved the speakers and the playa-covered subs out of the living room, but we still have a GP Medium army tent, with an assortment of polls right next to my couch and three rolls of bright green astroturf leaning up against the bar. As usual, I don't know if I'm ready for this. Every year I approach Burning Man with a little less hope and a little more apprehension, but I can't bring myself to miss it. I'm on a speeding train heading for Black Rock City, because for two weeks out of the year I need to go to a place where no one is trying to sell me anything.

I'm packing my notebook.

Stay tuned.

2001-08-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

I can't feel my arms.

Every time I'm foolish enough to think I know everything there is to know about fire dancing, somebody comes along and shows me that I am only at the beginning of a very long journey. In many ways, fire dancing is like martial arts. There are an infinite number of styles and approaches. If you watch a dancer for long enough, you can get a pretty good idea of who their teacher is. The different schools of fire dancing have their petty rivalries, their interpersonal feuds, and plain old differences of opinion. In any good martial arts flick, these differences would come to a climax in a fiery dance-off between two masters, spinning poi and fire staffs in the ultimate display of balance and agility, with flying kicks, handsprings, and behind-the-back turns. The dancers would yell "You killed my brother! You must pay!" or "Your double leg wrap is no match for my under-arm release spin!" Gallons and gallons of kerosene would be consumed.

Do you hear that sound? That is the sound of my readers (both of them) breathing an immense sigh of relief because I am not a filmmaker. Poi of Legend will not be hitting the theaters any time in the forseeable future.

Back to my arms, those useless noodles on either side of my body. I have unearthed a fire dancing master. I am a grasshopper again and I don't stand a chance of snatching the pebble from his hand. In the last few days I have tried out entirely new planes of movement, new techniques, new styles. Fire dancing is more than a series of moves strung together. It's not about who has the flashiest tricks or the most innovative equipment. In this sense, fire dancing becomes ballet. There are plenty of ballet moves that are technically difficult, but you dance a character, you dance to tell a story.

That is my newfound fire dancing Tao. No. That's not exactly true. I've had this revelation before, last year when I saw O. At the time, I thought that the answer was choreography, but now I am convinced that this can be achieved with a meticulous consideration for style. It's a difficult, picky, cerebral path I'm embarking on, but I've seen what's at the end.

It's beautiful.

2001-08-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickenson. Yes, it was Emily Dickenson who said that hope is a thing with feathers. Well, if hope is a feathered creature, the world is a mob of angry monkeys throwing poo at anything that dares to fly through the air. Today , if I may be allowed to continue what I know is a lousy conceit, the monkeys must have been distracted, because hope landed on my shoulder. The world felt good and right and full of wonder.

It's the job thing, you see. I was awakened this morning (I've stopped sleeping until the middle of the afternoon. It was impossible to buy groceries) by a call from the astoundingly pleasant company where I interviewed on Friday, They wanted to know if I was still interested in the job because if I was, they were preparing to make an offer. Yes, they can meet my salary requirements. Yes, they're a mere six blocks from my house. Yes, the company is so hip it has difficulty seeing over its own pelvis. Yes, the Web Services group is satisfyingly brainy. One of my interviewers had a PhD in astrophysics.

I would like to work in a place like this. Their problems are interesting. The company is sexy in that technology/entertainment industry kind of way. And best of all, my hair and general demeanor didn't phase them in the slightest.

As further evidence of the job market recovery, my friend Simon has landed a job after six months of unemployment. He is the first of my layoff-casualty friends to have regained employment and I take it as a hopeful sign. Simon went to art school. He basically a web creature. If he can find work in this muck and mire, then J and I may not wind up begging for change on Market St.

Just to be sure, J and I both went to interview with a couple of recruiting companies today. FutureComputer, my old mainstay, has been useless, but I went to visit places that had been recommended by friends and actually resulted in job interviews. J and I interviewed at one recruiter at the same time and had a ball listening to the reps talk behind our backs.

This one is going to be great.

I can place him, no problem.

We walked out of the office laughing like a couple of children, then we treated ourselves to dinner in North Beach, with flirtatious Italian waiters (this dish comes with a free massage, but only for the ladies) and tiramsu. I ate a risotto so heavily dosed with saffron that the spice tasted like honey on my tongue.

For the first time in a long time, I'm happy to be here, in a beautiful city with lovely weather and fantastic food and charming company, seven days from my birthday. I don't regret it. I can't regret a minute of anything that brought me to this place, happy and covered, just covered, in feathers.

2001-08-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,

I've gone mad with power. Determined to use my talents for evil, I have holed myself up in my fabulously-decorated secret lair plotting revenge on those who ignored my genius. If I have been lax in updating this journal, it is because a force even more evil than I, the telecommunications industry, is slow in installing new DSL lines to underground laboratories no matter how many mutated flying monkeys I send to harass them.

Threatening them with my Death Ray has proven useless, since many minions of the telecommunications industry are so slow and stupid I suspect they died quite some time ago. Normally I would be forced to use my Haggis Ray, Scottish dining hall haggis being, as we all know, far worse than death, but the damned thing refused to turn on, so I sent it to a mechanic in the Mission and when I brought it back it turned everything into burritos. Now, the Cancun Vegetarian Burrito with Everything on It is quite tasty, but it does not strike fear into the hearts of my enemies.

Now I must be going because the tailor is here with a vast collection of leather swatches for my Supervillain costume. The lab coat is really quite frumpy. I've told him that I was interested in an X-Men/Farscape kind of look, but he has informed my that mad supervillains with Death Rays are required to wear some sort of cape.

2001-08-07T13:55:00.000-07:00

I wrote a lengthy entry about my job interview on Monday, but then my browser crashed.

It comes down to this: the job is boring, inconveniently-located, and will probably not pay enough, but I'm scheduled for the second-round interview and I stand a very good chance of getting an offer. I don't want this job, but if they make an offer I don't think I can justify turning it down. None of the people I know who have been laid off have found new work. None of them! I can't sit here for very much longer and hope that I can wait out the job market. If I don't take this job, there is not necessarily a better offer waiting around the corner. I've made it this far by playing it smart. I was conservative with my money. I saved like a madwoman when all of my friends were buying houses and cars. I cannot turn my nose up at a job just because I don't like it. Some people spend their entire lives doing jobs they hate because they have obligations they need to meet. They were happy to have a job, any job at all. Life is not always roses. Sometimes you have to do things that you don't enjoy.

All the same, I'm calling all of the contractors, the headhunters, and the employed people that I know. I'm pulling every string I have access to. I'm calling in every favor I have ever been owed. I do have a little bit of pride left. I'm not going to take some dull biotech job if I don't have to.

2001-08-04T15:43:00.000-07:00

I have 18 days left until my birthday. Funny, I feel much more than a year older. Every few months, my world changes completely. I'm not sure I like that.

Even though I don't believe in astrology, I'm a Leo. I know, I know, you can read anything you want into any of the signs. Horoscopes are just as accurate and meaningful if you read Scorpio or Pisces or all of them at once every week. But Leo is the sign of the arrogant, attention-grabbing bastard. The Leo's "planet" is the Sun and true to form, the world revolves around her. Well, at least in the best-case scenario. Sometimes is the Leo is a sad creature that thinks she's the center of the universe, but has nothing at all in her orbit. There's never a question of whether or not a Leo is arrogant. The only question is: does she have the talent to back up her talk?

A few more days and I could have been a Virgo. By all rights I should have been a Virgo. I was born almost a month premature. Virgo is the sign of the uptight, frigid bitch. Virgos are prissy. They're squirmish. They're obsessed with household order.

Many years ago, at Burning Man, some friends of mine formed Deadly Sunshine Cleaning Camp. We tore through other camps with garbage bags, mops, and brooms, striking without warning, showing no mercy, cleaning up everything in sight. We'd been cleaning like madmen all afternoon when we blundered into a small, shady camp, a camp that obviously didn't need us because everything was pristine. Not a single item was out of place. The campers were all asleep in the shade, wearing the self-satisfied smirks of children who had done all of their homework.

Virgo Camp.

2001-08-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

Of course I wrote back to him.

He wanted to know what I was up to, so I told him, even the bit about being unemployed right now. In return, he told me he's still living in Washington, working as an electrician. He worked as an underwater welder for a while. He handled hazmat emergenies at some refinery. Now he's joined the Navy, working in explosive ordinance disposal.

I should have known. S isn't really happy unless something is in danger of blowing up.

2001-07-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write about DEFCON 9, about the "Free Dmitri" campaign, about Peter Shipley and why you shouldn't pay for your laminate. I've started this piece a few times now, my take on the geeks, the frat boys, and the hangers-on of DEFCON. I was going to write about the cult of tee-shirts and the bizarre lack of pranks at the Alexis Park this year. I'm not going to write about these things tonight. You see, I just got a very strange email. I need to think about it for a while.

You probably don't want to talk to me, but I'm here.

That's S, my first boyfriend. It was my first year of high school and I had just turned fourteen. That was the year I traded my glasses for contact lenses. I started a high school for smart, artsy outsiders. I bought my first pair of army boots. I fell in love with a nineteen-year old boy who was listlessly attending City College while his father traveled through Italy. He was lovely. I've got the pictures to prove it. S had pitch black eyes and immaculate cheekbones. You could watch the muscles move under his skin, biceps and triceps, perfectly outlined abs. I think I would have fallen in love with the first person who told me I was pretty. It could have been some other kid my age, confused and covered in zits. We could have flailed our way through kissing and groping, notes on blue-lined paper, and high school gossip. Instead it was S. At nineteen, he was practically an adult. Even if in hindsight he seems like a hyperactive, overgrown child, when I was fourteen years old, S seemed like a God.

There's nothing quite like your first love. I would ditch my friends and run to his house after school. We'd make pasta or order Chinese food and watch cartoons (Batman, mostly) under blankets in his living room. We roughhoused constantly. That's what people do when they don't really know how to touch each other. At the slightest provocation, we'd be rolling around on the floor, trying to pin wrists and shoulders. Essentially, we behaved like children, except for that somewhere along the line I misplaced my virginity. I imagine it's still somewhere behind S's couch.

In retrospect I think it should have fallen apart sooner. I don't know how long relationships are supposed to last when you're in high school, but in comparison to my peers, my relationship with S was epic. Two years. It took two years for S to go from some mysterious stranger who made all of my girl friends sigh with envy to some annoying puppy dog that wouldn't stop following me around. So it fell apart. I cheated on him. We fought. He hit me. It didn't even leave a bruise, but it was the excuse that I needed, so I left him. So he slept with my best friend.

I remember the night I broke up with S, I was hysterical. I couldn't stop crying. I was sitting on the floor, making these gasping sobbing sounds when my mother came home. She went directly to the liquor cabinet, opened a bottle of cognac, and started feeding me shots.

S moved to Washington not too long after that. I liked to think we were both better off that way. I don't have misty-eyed memories of my first relationship. When I thought about him at all, it was as something vaguely embarrassing that I'd outgrown. It was years before I understood that he'd ruined me. I opened the door one afternoon and was introduced to --what shall I call him? It doesn't matter, does it?-- the most heart-breakingly beautiful man I'd ever seen. Nevermind his eyes (blue) or his hair (blond) or his smile (goofy), that man was standing there with S's cheekbones. And his chest. And his arms. I was sure that my knees were going to buckle under me.

LOCAL TEENAGER VANISHES. MYSTERIOUS PUDDLE FOUND ON HER FRONT DOOR.

I know that there are men who read this. Well, listen up. Listen closely. Don't ever let a woman tell you that physical appearances don't matter. I've dated all kinds of men. I've been in plenty of relationships, but the one thing that will invariably swoon me is a man who looks like my very first boyfriend.

Damn.

2001-07-25T20:00:00.000-07:00

I don't understand how anyone who has taken an elementary statistics course can believe in luck. I know, people still believe in God and angels and aliens and Bigfoot. They believe in hunches and lucky numbers and beating the odds. You can't beat the odds. Just in case you think you're some kind of exception, take a look down the Strip. Las Vegas builds giant temples to the laws of probability. It's all built with the money of people who thought they were lucky.

Every quarter dumped into every slot machine (worst odds in town) is another drop of water in the well. That's what builds the giant pyramid, the Venetian canals, the roller coaster through New York, the fountains that dance to Frank Sinatra, the volcano that goes off every five minutes. What do you think brings a billion gallons of water to the middle of the desert just for the hell of it? Isn't that just a giant middle finger in the face of Mother Nature? Don't you just have to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of such a thing?

There are people who don't understand what I'm talking about when I tell them I love Las Vegas. It's the most honest city in the world. San Franciscans are always trying to prove their right to live here. They need to prove that they're cool enough, they're real and gritty enough to be taking up precious San Francisco real estate. Everyone needs to prove that they remember a time before the city was gentrified and defiled. Every time the city changes, San Franciscans take it as a sure sign of the End Times. It's not fog we're drowning in, it's near-permanent nostalgia.

Las Vegas doesn't lie to you. Sure, the courts are fixed, the University is a joke, and the Strip is full of promises of not-quite-legal sex with ladies of negotiable virtue, but Las Vegas exists solely to take your money. Free drinks? That's so you'll gamble and lose more money. Comps for the food court? That's so you'll make bigger bets and lose more money. Provocatively dressed cocktail waitresses? That's so you'll look away at that crucial moment and lose more money. Extra oxygen pumped into the air on the casino floor? Daytime lighting at all hours? I'll give you three guesses. The first two don't even count.

The casinos track everything. I've never before seen an entire city so single-mindedly engineered towards turning a profit. It's like watching a perfectly functioning machine. I'm a geek. There's something appealing about complex systems, the vast infrastructure that's necessary for such an undertaking. There are miles of tubing that take liquor from a locked basement in the casino to every single bar in the place. There are machines that sort millions of dollars in change every day. There are tens of thousands of security cameras watching every dealer, every pit boss, every face at every table. A casino can track everything you do from the moment you walk in the door to the time you walk out. It's somebody's job to analyze that data and come up with more way to squeeze money out of your wallet, any little thing they can do to tilt the odds in favor of the House.

Devon and I immediately fantasized about moving to Vegas. Can you imagine what kind of network runs the computer system in a Strip casino? How about lighting design or one of the companies that designs slot machines? To be honest, I'd be perfectly happy to run away to Las Vegas and deal blackjack. I don't care if I have to stand on my feet all day. At least for once the odds would be in my favor.

2001-07-19T21:15:00.000-07:00

When you're on the road for a very long time, the world dissolves into yellow and white lines on the road. Everything becomes very simple. Follow the lines. Follow the lines. Are you listening? Follow the lines. I know that Highway 5 is long and boring, but you're got to follow the lines. When we stopped somewhere the middle of Nevada because there wasn't a bathroom for miles, everybody stopped to look at the sky. The desert sky, high up where the atmosphere is thin, far from the nearest source of light polution, is the clearest view of the stars I've ever seen. There's Cassiopia and the Little Dipper and the Milky Way! At least I think so, I'm always getting the constellations wrong, and all of our eyes were so used to following the lines that the stars moved in shakey spirals every time we tried to focus on them.

In the van, we tried to keep each other distracted with music. Two or three hours into the trip, it was easy enough. Velvet Acid Christ's Fun With Drugs got a cheap laugh with Johnny Depp's Hunter S. Thomspon exclamation of "Oh God! Did you eat all this acid?" Eventually it moved into a contest to see who could dredge up the most annoying album. Annoying Devon was easy. He hates synthpop. All that J had to do was threaten to throw in Wolfsheim's Sparrows and the Nightingales and Devon would look as if he'd just swallowed a lemon. I was ticked off by noodly hardcore techno. Devon saved his secret weapon for the ride back: an album of music by the same guy who did the soundtrack for Twelve Monkeys, creepy carnival music, featuring groaning accordions. I was rather partial to it myself, but J made it quite clear that he would rather be listening to a dying horse.

Somewhere around three in morning, I opened my eyes and was awake. I hadn't realized that I'd nodded off through the Nevada state line, and some town with a roller coaster, and Jean. A couple of hills parted, and everywhere on the horizon there were lights, the glimmering gold lights of civilization. Even twenty miles away, the Strip looked larger than life, like some giant had stumbled into the middle of the Nevada desert and left its toys behind. Liz Frasier thought that the lights of Las Vegas looked just like Heaven. She's not too far off the mark.

2001-07-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

I must have mentioned that I don't own a car. After three years of commuting 40-60 miles to work on the world's least pleasant freeway (101), I swore off driving forever. It wasn't just the driving, it was the parking. There isn't a spot in San Francisco where it's legal to park for more than two hours at a time. In a single year, I had my car broken into twice, my driver's side mirror smashed, and a hit-and-run that required the replacement of my bumper and the front quarter panel of my car. Did I mention that I ran up over $3000 in parking tickets? Do I even need to tell you how many times I was towed? Did you know that if you want to get your car back from impound, you need to pay off all of your outstanding tickets at once? Now add the price of car insurance and gasoline and you can see how getting rid of my car was a load off my wallet.

I am a city girl. I live in a city. I have arranged my life so that everything I need is within walking distance. I am four blocks from the center of this city's public transportation system (extensive and cheap, but smelly), should I be too lazy to walk. When all else fails, if it's cold and raining and I'm tired, I hail a taxi. Anything is cheaper and less stressful than owning a car in San Francisco.

I'm sure you've guessed that this lifestyle doesn't exactly lend itself to road trips. I've made many pilgrimages to Las Vegas, but they've always been the painless one hour flight variety. It took me less time to get to Vegas than it took for me to get to work in San Jose on a day with heavy traffic. We did not drive because we have some sort of romantic notion about the open road. Driving was our concession to poverty. It was a whole lot cheaper than getting a last minute plane ticket. Besides, we had all the time in the world.

The vehicle, our chariot, was Devon's minivan, a giant tan Windstar completely stripped of anything unnecessary, like air conditioning. You may laugh. You wouldn't be the first to laugh at Devon's soccer mom car, but his commitment to the world's least hip form of transportation is part of my deep and abiding love for this man. Devon is a sound and lighting geek. He has to move piles of speakers and parcans from one end of the Bay Area to the other, not just his equipment, but usually J's as well. Devon has regularly driven across the Bay at the very last minute to either contribute his own gear, move someone else's gear, or set up gear when no one else has a clue what to do with it when he could have been sitting comfortably at home, editing video and eating steak. The Windstar is the ultimate symbol of Devon's commitment to substance over style. While everyone else is buying motorcycles or tricking out their art cars, Devon has a vehicle that does exactly what he needs it to do and nothing more.

So we threw our luggage into the back and prepared to hit the road.

2001-07-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

And the answer to yesterday's $10,000 question is...The Misanthropic Bitch. There are 2500 people on her mailing list. Most of them have hit my site in the last three days. Many of them have been kind enough to send e-mail explaining what happend. I'd never suspected she had such a huge following. Most of them sent mail along the lines of "I can't understand why she linked you. You're not a single mother on welfare or anything like that." Some of them followed up by saying nice things about my writing or asking where the naked pictures of goth girls were at.

Why does The Misanthropic Bitch link the things she does? Of the four links she left at the bottom of her most recent mailing, one was a mid-twenties gay guy from Ohio who wrote very articulately about his life, including his shady past as a candy raver, the other was my journal, and the next two links were clearly chosen to amuse and infuriate her readers. What does it all mean? I will never know. The Bitch moves in mysterious ways.

Let's move on to Las Vegas, shall we? Sometimes the weasels are closing in, you just need to pack up your stuff, fall into a car, and drive to Vegas. "The Savage Heart of the American Dream" Hunter S. Thompson called it, though he was talking about a different Vegas, a few shards of which remain downtown, and he was talking about it in the context of the end of the Summer of Love. Something monumental and huge had ended and a decade of unspeakable ugliness was just beginning.

My own personal pack of weasels was knocking on the door when J sat down with his laptop across his knees and announced that we were going to Las Vegas for DEFCON and that --here's the kicker, folks-- we would drive. We would go with Devon in his van. We would drive for ten hours, at night mostly. We didn't want to be cruising through the Mojave in July without air conditioning. He'd found cheap rooms at the Luxor. We would spend our days by the pool and our evenings at the Alexis Park, where DEFCON takes place, drinking with people we see only once a year and merrily avoiding what few technical aspects there were to the convention. It would be an epic journey, a reaffirmation of everything that was good and right in this world!

To be honest, J, Devon, and I were going a little bit stir crazy. We needed to get out of the house. We needed to see some new faces. We needed to spend ten minutes in broad daylight without being panhandled. So we aimed Devon's van at the Land of Denial, a city whose sole purpose is to make you feel like you're rich while it sucks away at the contents of your wallet.

Viva, at they say, Las Vegas.

2001-07-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

I've had close to five hundred hits since yesterday, all from various email links. Does somebody want to tell me what's up? It looks like I've been linked to some enormous mailing list. All of these hits and not a single message. Who are you people? Why are you here? Who or what sent you? Is it porn? Is it spam? Do you think I'm someone else? I suspect that you're not here to tell me what a wonderful person I am. I'll bet you're not here because you're fascinated by my plans to buy a Birthday Party tee-shirt or you want a review of Kitchen Confidential.

Why are you silent, mysterious e-mail linked visitors from places like Sri Lanka? I've set up a handy little comment system. I have an e-mail address. I have a whole second journal for you to praise or laugh at or ridicule, but hundreds of you are just passing by silently. Are you lazy? Is my writing sub-par? Do you speak English? Are you just looking for naked pictures of goth girls? I get that a lot. All you have to do is say so and I promise to understand. But this silence is intolerable.

For God's sake, say something!

Actually, you can take your time. I may be a little punchy because I've been in a car for the last eleven hours. Vegas was lovely. Diaries will be posted.Right now I'm pulling the curtains shut and going to bed.

2001-07-12T01:43:00.000-07:00

I've added a couple of new pages to my website, more as a design exercise than anything else. They're here and here. Coming up are some pages with actual content (one for the house and one for fire things) and a redesigned and updated links page.

2001-07-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

I have a new nightmare.

I'm asleep in my bedroom and people starting walking into my house off the street. They're people I don't know. They mill around the entrance for a while, looking around. Since they've left the door open, more people start to come in. They're looking for a party. When I come down to intercept them, still dressed in my house robe and slippers, that's what they tell me. I start to explain that I live here, this is my house, where I'm trying to sleep, and they need to leave. I show a couple of them the door, but no matter how often or how rudely I eject them, they keep coming back. I see people walk in through a side door. How are these people getting in? I keep locking the doors behind them, but that doesn't stop anybody.

I lead more of them out. I punch a girl. Now everyone is looking vaguely familar, so I have the added embarassment of being rude to people that expect a certain level of politeness. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs "Get out of my fucking house! I fucking live here!" I scream until my throat aches. "Get out of my house or I will call the police!"

So I call the police. I tell her that there are people in my house who refuse to leave. I've got people trespassing here. I'm hysterical and sobbing and my voice is getting weaker and weaker and the woman on the other end of the line doesn't seem to think that "having people in your house" really warrants that kind of reaction. It's just like having ants or cockroaches. Of course, as I'm telling this to the policewoman, people start to shuffle out, so I'm forced to explain to her that no, sending a SWAT team to my house will not be necessary.

The moment I put the phone down, people stop leaving. There are people in the music studio now. They're smoking cigarettes in the studio and they've got my wine glasses out. I walk up to these people and say "Didn't you hear me yelling? Didn't you hear me saying that this is my fucking house? I live here, dammit, and I want you out! Did you somehow think that I didn't mean you? Do you think you're some sort of fucking exception?" I remember that I was definitely swearing a lot at this point. Then one girl turns around, and she's someone I know, and she says "Well, yeah, we're your friends. We thought you were talking to everyone else."

2001-07-10T21:24:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I've been reading it for two days straight. In a few pages, I'll be done with it and it will be time to lend the book to J. That's the way things usually work around here. Books work their way from one side of the bed, where I read them, to the other, where he does. The sole exception was Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon about a year and a half ago, which we spent three weeks swiping back and forth, grabbing it while the other's back was turned, and constantly losing each other's place.

There isn't a lot of good writing about food. I hate restaurant reviews. I hate watching smug English majors who would otherwise be slinging espresso find clever new words to describe the steamed mussels they're eating on the company dime. I hate the people whose job is to pass judgement on restaurants. When I was in high school, my best friend's father was a wine critic, with a sideline in hotels and restaurants. He was the single most joyless man I had ever met. Here was a man with a vast wine cellar, a man who was paid to eat at Fleur de Lys, Chez Panisse, and Stars, and I think he'd long since ceased to feel the pure, unadulterated joy of eating good food.

For all of my summers bumming around the back rooms of Thai, Vietamese, and Cambodian family restaurants, for all of my Culinary Academy friends gossiping about trysts between the sauce guy and the pastry chef, I'd never quite imagined restaurant kitchens in quite the way that Anthony Bourdain describes them. Maybe it's the pride with which he describes his compatriots, a pan-national crew of dangerous, untrustworthy, tattooed, filthy-mouthed, psychotic degenerates. Maybe it's his penchant for late 70's New York punk rock. I'm charmed. For Anthony Bourdain and his crew, food is war, a war that is fought every night by obsessed and unstable professionals.

I can almost see Hunter S. Thompson at the grill while Jim Carroll does dishes.

There are some jobs that are more than jobs. The strange and terrifying people who devote their lives to these callings do so because they are unsuited to do anything else. I've met novelists, software engineers, nightclub bouncers, and car mechanics like this. Add cooks to the list. In fact, I think I can add them at the top.

2001-07-07T03:15:00.000-07:00

I think that there's something wrong with me. Some filter in my brain is broken beyond repair. Every night I go out, I fall in love. It can happen four, maybe five times in one day. Men who suffer this affliction became Cassanovas. They're the cads and serial seducers of this world. Their persuasive power derives from their conviction that at this very moment you are the most beautiful woman on Earth.

Women who suffer this affliction simply become miserable.

I can fall in love while waiting for the bus, or walking down the street, or doing my laundry. I can fall in love while I'm on the dance floor or cooking dinner. I could almost fall in love while sitting on the couch reading my email, but not quite. It's hard to fall in love while typing. It's like walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time.

Girls slay me. I fell in love with S, with her little black bob and immaculate silent film star makeup, for thirty whole seconds while she made kewpie doll faces at me for reasons that I can't quite remember. I fell in love with J when she gave me a hug and it felt like I was holding on to something tiny and birdlike. I fell in love with some girl in black stockings with the most perfect legs I'd ever seen. There's K, hopelessly disheveled, swaying drunk, and I'm hailing her a taxi because if some boy takes her home I will find him and kill him and no one will ever find the body.

I fell in love with some boy whose name I can't remember (didn't he tell it to me twice?) because he managed to look old and young, smooth and weathered at the same time. For five minutes I was hopelessly in love with M, who has one of those Greek God profiles. There was an entire week when I was in love with D, all tattoos and cigarettes. I don't even like the smell of cigarettes. I can't stand it. But every time I would see him, it felt like a cold hand was closing around my heart and squeezing until it was completely wrung out.

How do people live like this? How do they get through the day? Do they lock themselves in their houses? Do they take a vow of celibacy? Do they blind themselves? Is there medication or meditation? Is there a mantra? Will they be starting a twelve step program?

"Hello, my name is Never, and I am a sucker for beauty. I am powerless against it. I need help."

2001-07-04T14:48:00.000-07:00

I'm not normally the kind of person who wears tee-shirts. I own three of them, which I only wear in case of a severe fashion emergency.

Exhibit A: One white tee-shirt from the Pink Godzilla Sushi restaurant in Santa Cruz. Says "More Wasabe!" on the back.

Exhibit B: One white tee-shirt from the Community Spacewalk in 1998, featuring three monkeys, hearing, speaking, and seeing No Evil. Fits perfectly.

Exhibit C: One black babydoll tee of the Emily variety. This one says "Emily Has a Posse."

I used to have a punk rock boyfriend with a vast collection of re-dyed, bleached, sleeves ripped off to show off his tattoos, and otherwise messed-up tee-shirts depicting all of the things he thought were cool back when he lived in Hollywood: The Velvet Underground, Abby Hoffman, William S. Burroughs and such. There were blurry silk screens of Frankenstein and Marilyn Monroe. My favorite was a picture of Chairman Mao, large as life, printed on a tee-shirt that instead of red, had turned out magenta pink.

I wore the Mao tee-shirt constantly, with my most comfortable black jeans and my purple Doc Martens, in punk rock imitation of him.

J's tee-shirts are all black. They're the record of ten years spent up to his eyeballs in industrial music. He has a tour shirt for every band he's ever seen. There's the tee-shirt from rec.music.industrial. There's the tee-shirt from Kurtzweil, promoting some new keyboard. There's Front 242 and Front Line Assembly and a Cure shirt so old it looks like it's about to disintegrate. I don't steal those shirts. For some reason, I just don't look good in them.

Exhibit D: My next tee-shirt. I'm going to soak it in bleach and dye it sloppily and rip the sleeves right off. I'll wear it even when I'm not completely out of clean laundry. I promise.

2001-07-02T18:53:00.000-07:00

I've started a livejournal. I don't know if it makes sense to keep two journals. Hell, it doesn't even make sense to keep one, but we'll see how this evolves.

2001-07-01T15:46:00.000-07:00

I am not a charming hostess. I'd like to think of myself as the kind of person who has small get-to-togethers where I make sure that everyone has tea and we make witty conversation all afternoon, but I know better. In truth, I'd rather be at other people's parties than host one of my own. I don't like handing out fliers. I don't like desperate, last-minute house cleaning. I don't like worrying about what to wear when I know that not a single person will remember it the next morning. As much as I like showing off my new home (a fellow Mark Danielewski fan has dubbed it The Five and a Half Minute Loft), I'm not quite comfortable with the idea of people I don't quite know getting their grubby hands all over my stuff.

Despite my lack of hostess charm, J and I threw a housewarming party last night. It was the most painless party I've ever put on. L. brought over all of Bound's old liquor, which was more than enough to stock the bar. G. provided the guests with food, little sandwiches and pizza and spring rolls in the most incredible peanut sauce I've ever tasted. A rotating cast of DJ's played music much too loud, so that everyone who wanted to have a conversation had to go the studio or the mezzanine or outside or the roof. People danced. Champagne appeared out of nowhere. Some guy brought a couple of boxes of nitrous. S. brought me a little sign made of diamond plate to hang on the door instead of the #3 we have made out in electical tape.

I mixed people drinks with little paper umbrellas in them. Then the umbrellas wound up in my hair and they caught on the porcupine quills.

Somewhere around four in the morning, just after we'd kicked the last of the people out, a whole new group of people came storming in. It was a bunch of rock stars on their way to Insomnia. They did what rock stars always do, which is smile and make vague promises, and then disappear so that J and I could finally go to sleep. One of them was opening for My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, I think, I wasn't really paying attention by then, and he was on his way to Chicago. I'm pretty sure it was Chicago. He kept saying that I should send tape of my fire dancing because they wanted fire in their show.

We'll fly you out. We'll pay you.

Lies, I'm sure, but it was a lovely thing to imagine as I was falling asleep.

2001-06-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

I can't do it. I can't write. I don't know what happend, but every time I try to sit down and write something, the subject doesn't quite match the mood. That proud and glowing feeling I had on Sunday morning after the fundraiser has disintergrated. There's nothing left of it. You're just going to have to take my word for it when I say that fire dancing there was the most satisfying performance I've done in a very long time. I'm hoping that's a little taste of what it will be like to fire dance on the playa this year. And I fear that it will be nothing like that at all. There's a terrible, lonely feeling that you can get when you're in the middle of the desert with thirty thousand other people. You're certain that twenty thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine of them are doing something incredible, riding the wave of some peak experience that you will never, ever touch because you can't plug in.

I can't plug into the world today. I'll try again tomorrow.

2001-06-25T22:20:00.000-07:00

This is just a place marker so that I remember to write about the Thunderdome fundraiser we had this weekend.

Stromkern played live. Marisa sang an aria while wearing giant bat wings. People beat each other up in the mini dome. Devon screened his Thunderdome music video with footage from last year's trip to the desert. Burn Unit danced. And danced. And danced. I got up the guts to spin fire in front of hundreds of people while wearing black leather hot pants.

Two of my friends stayed up all night finishing the binding on my corset so that I would have one to wear with my costume that night. I felt loved.

There's nothing quite so satisfying as doing what you like and doing it well. There's nothing so lovely as having friends who will stay up all night so that you can look pretty the next day. It made me proud to look out at the fire and the art cars and the giddy drunk crowd and think "I'm part of this."

2001-06-22T02:56:00.000-07:00

Everybody has a favorite stranger. It used to be that you would find that stranger in the grocery store, on the bus, in the office hallway, or across the classroom. Now I sit on my couch with a laptop across my knees and I can see strangers as they are at home, strangers from all over the world. I know what they had for breakfast. I know what they think of their lovers. I can see pictures of their cats. It's like walking down a street where in every house the lights are on and the curtains are wide open. Sometimes all you can see is a big room and you have to guess what kind of person lives in a room like that. Sometimes they're sitting on the couch in their underwear eating macaroni and cheese.

When there are so many rooms, the novelty of peeking into other people's lives wears off quickly. There aren't a lot of places I come back to. But once in a while I press my nose up to the glass and I can't look away.

I have a favorite stranger. Her name is Banshee. She's a photographer. She lives in New York. She listens to Nick Cave. She looks for twenty dollar dresses. She has perfectly disheveled hair. I will never talk to her. I will never meet her. But I keep looking into her window.

When I was a kid, I had this vague vision of what being an adult would mean. I would live in New York. I hardly knew anything about New York outside of brief trips to Manhattan when visiting my relatives in Brooklyn and Queens. I only knew that it was huge and dark and humid ( it was always August when we went) with thunderstorms that soaked my clothes right through. I had to live there, even if in my head New York looked an awful lot like a Victorian flat in the Lower Haight. Being an adult meant living in New York with a boyfriend and a lazy gray cat, sleeping on a futon on the floor, doing something to get by while I pursued Art. Even then I knew that artists always did something else to pay the rent.

I wonder where my life veered off from the path I'd assumed it would take. I'm supposed to be some quirky, post-gothic, East Coast bohemian thing. I keep coming back for reasons that have less to do with Banshee than with myself. My favorite stranger is really quite familiar: an alternate skinny, dark-haired Never, living in a neat little apartment in a fictional New York where it's always August and the thunderstorms are coming.

Why not?

2001-06-22T00:58:00.000-07:00

I have comments again. Know them. Use them. Love them.

If only you knew how close I'd come to abandoning Blogger and switching to Greymatter.

2001-06-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

I've never really understood women who are obsessed with makeup. Television and magazines and night clubs are filled with perfectly painted faces. They've found a way to fake flawless skin. They know how to apply little wings of liquid eyeliner around their eyes. I don't think they ever sweat. They're poreless.

I've seen their bathrooms. They own a dozen different shades of lipstick. There are so many little tubes and compacts and brushes that the entire assortment needs to be kept in a tackle box. All of those colors come with soaps and moisturizers, exfoliants and cremes to remove makeup. Everything has a little label from Lorac or MAC or Urban Decay.

I didn't get it for a very long time. I felt as if I was missing some essential aspect of girliness. I'm so meticulous about my clothes, but spending an hour in front of the mirror worrying about my eyebrows or my lips seemed like an enormous waste of time. I was convinced that somewhere I would find the secret to perfect makeup. Somewhere in some beauty magazine I would find a succinct guide to Louise Brooks' lips and giant Clara Bow eyes and those really high painted-on eyebrows favored by Marlene Dietrich.

I'd never read beauty magazines before. I didn't take long before I understood why. Beauty magazines are not there to tell you how to be beautiful. They're there to tell you that you're not beautiful, that you can never even hope to be beautiful until you lose ten pounds and buy, buy, buy. Women are empty vessels that can only be filled by Sephora. I couldn't read Vogue, American or French, or anything else with a moody-looking supermodel on the cover without feeling as if a huge, clawed hand was reaching for the contents of my bank account.

And how useless it all was! Something terrible has happend to fashion. It happend just about the time those awful one-shoulder dresses designed to make women look like refugees from the set of The Flintstones came into vogue. Those pouty gazelle women sporting the Look of the Moment are hiding behind the ugliest pink-tinted 1970's sunglasses I have ever seen. They're tan, so tan, and their perfect skin is shiney.Why would anyone deliberately make themselves look as if they'd just gotten off the Stairmaster?

What's a girl to do? Skin Two and Marquis don't offer makeup tips. There's no guide in the back of fetish magazines that will tell you how to do your hair like Dita or Mistress Midori. So I will never be one of those perfect china doll women. I don't have the patience or the know-how to transform myself into a flawless, untouchable thing every night. Maybe that makes me a little less girlie, but just thinking about all of the things I'd have to buy tires me out.

It's enough to come close. It's enough to be pretty. I don't have the energy to be beautiful.

2001-06-20T00:57:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, it's the final clinching proof that I have only one facial expression.

2001-06-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

I think I've had too much sleep. My brain doesn't feel entirely in synch with my body.

My house is clean, even if not all of the major projects are done. Many things have been sewn. My bills are paid. I may be developing actual muscles again as a result of going to the gym.

This has to stop. I think it may be time to find myself a job. Sure, I enjoyed having so much time to myself. The BBQ's in the middle of the day were nice. The chance to see my friends in broad daylight was lovely; and if J and I hadn't had a month in which to work on the loft, we'd probably still be sleeping on the floor. But there are too many things I've been putting off because I can't stand the idea of spending money when I don't know if I have more coming.

No vintage steel medical cabinet. No blue velvet chaise lounge. No black and blue patent leather corset from Stormy Leather. Nothing at all from Gallery Serpentine. I'd feel guilty if I ran off to Boston or Las Vegas or Prague.

And to tell the truth, I'm a little bit bored. I miss having a room full of Sun gear to play with.

So I have updated my resume, polished it until it was shiney and bright, and sent it out into the ether. We'll see what happens now.

2001-06-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

"You don't want kids? Ever?!"

Most of the people I know think I'm a little older than I really am. I have a stable relationship, a nice apartment, a good education, and a career. They think I'm coming up on that age when I suddenly get the urge to buy a station wagon and pop out a shrieking, mewling Baby Never that will leak fluids from both ends and suck out my soul.

"You're so good with children. You'd make a great mother!"

No. I don't think you understand. I'm good with other people's children. I love children who giggle and laugh with me, who feel proud when I treat them like little adults. These children that will never fall to the ground screaming in the middle of a Toys 'R' Us because I won't buy them a Lifetime of Distorted Body Image Barbie with Style-It-Yourself hair. They will not puke on my 1940's silk velvet bias-cut gown. They will not wreck my figure, fray my nerves, and obliterate my personality until the only name I answer to is "Mommy."

"Oh, you'll feel differently once those maternal instincts kick in."

I don't want maternal instincts. I don't want to make baby noises and talk about my darling's latest poo. I don't want to become the drooling zombie slave of some thankless parasite. I don't want to love it even when it's ugly, or stupid, or "socially disruptive."

You see, I have a plan. I'm going to be my own favorite child. I'm going to love myself with unfailing devotion. I'm going to buy myself every toy I want. I'm going to spoil myself rotten and I will always be thankfull. I will never send myself to my room. I will never sneak out at night and not call myself, leaving me to wait up, sick with worry, until dawn. I won't deliberately embarass myself in front of my friends. There will never be tear-stained fights in which I accuse myself of not really wanting me.

I will never leave me. I won't pack myself off to a retirement home in Florida just to get myself out of the way. I won't talk about what a burden I've become to all of my friends. I won't talk about what a chore it is to spend the Holidays with myself because I always get drunk and start saying the most horrible things.

No, I'll be too busy taking myself on fabulous vacations and always buying myself the most perfect little gifts. After all, I know exactly what I want, so I'll always be pleased, even if it's a little difficult to surprise myself.

There will be those who will call me self-centered. Pay no attention to them. Who is more deserving? Who is more appreciative? What better candidate is there for my love and devotion than me?

2001-06-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

We are fantastically close to Mars right now. Last night we reached opposition. The Earth, the sun, and Mars were all in a straight line. For the next two weeks, Mars will creep closer and closer until it is just 42 million miles away.

If you look up in the sky right now the way the three of us did in my doorway last night, you'll see it, a little disc almost as bright as the moon. J pointed, "There it is! Mars!" And the homeless guy down the street turned around to look, as if Mars was somewhere at the end of Folsom Street with the drunkards and the club kids, the taxi drivers and the policemen.

Through the telescope, I could make out shadows on the disc. We are 42 million miles from another planet. It has canyons and mountains and craters. Even across all of this distance, it glows a bit red. Through the telescope, it looks like a little marble you can reach out and grab, but it's a planet. It has no atmosphere to speak of. It has no planet-wide magnetic field. Its gravity is a fraction of our own. The average temperature is 85 degrees below zero.

Maybe it's just the result of a lifetime spent reading trashy science fiction novels, but I looked up at Mars, just 40-something million miles away and coming closer, and I understand why there are people who devote their entire lives to getting humans off of this rock. It seems so strange that we should only want a little dot in the corner of a universe that's so damn big.

2001-06-12T22:25:00.000-07:00

At the last minute, my little brother scrapped his speech, walked up to the podium and said these words: "I've been here for seven years. I've spent the last three sitting in chairs just like the ones you're sitting in right now. I can understand why you'd want these speeches to be short."

He didn't thank everyone he knew. He didn't use the words "unique personality." He didn't say "this school has been like a second home." He got up there and told people that while he didn't like change, he felt prepared to leave.

I think he'll make a fine adult.

2001-06-11T23:20:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I have to wake up early. You're all going to laugh when I tell you I have to be up by nine, but I've aquired the habit staying up until four in the morning and starting my day around noon. If I'm not careful, I'll become completely nocturnal. I've had weeks where I stayed up until dawn and slept until the next evening. The downside of this schedule is that the day is completely shot if you want to do anything that involves interacting with people who are on a normal timetable. It could take me three or four days to get around to buying groceries. Waking up at noon is a reasonable compromise. I can stay up all night and still get things done during the day.

Tomorrow I have to get up in the morning and go to my baby brother's graduation. It's his last day of grade school, the same grade school I attended between the ages of nine and thirteen. He's in the same building with the same eighth grade teacher (that one extra tough teacher that everyone dreads and yet wants to impress) who once described me as the single most stubborn student it had ever been his pleasure to teach.

My baby brother is going to high school. That little blond thing I used to feed out of a bottle is now seven inches taller than I am. There's fuzz on his upper lip. He refuses to wear contact lenses because he thinks his glasses make him look smart.

My baby brother is an adolecent. He's moody. He slouches. He has piles of science fiction novels by his bed. It's hard to tear him away from computer games. He racks up an enormous phone bill talking to his best friend in Sweden. In three months, he will be in high school, where he will be forced to play basketball on account of being so tall.

My baby brother is an alien. When I was thirteen years old, I was miserable. Had my parents had a less Spartan approach to medicine, I would have been pumped full of antidepressants.

I had a journal then. The entries went something like this: "Dear, diary...I hate everyone and everything. Other people are slimey, worthless, dirt-creatures. I'm going to read fantasy novels and write poetry now."

It didn't help that those were some pretty embarassing years. I had glasses and braces and even without them, I wasn't a pretty child. Worse yet, I was smart. I was smarter than anyone I went to school with and I told them so. I was surprised when this didn't make me popular. When I told my mother that I cried horribly every night, she shrugged and told me that she'd been hopelessly unhappy through most of puberty. One day, somewhere around fifteen years old, she woke up and realized that she wasn't depressed anymore. It's just hormones. You'll ride it out.

I imagined throwing things at her. Sharp things. I kept imagining that until I woke up one morning and I wasn't depressed anymore.

Dear diary...I'm fifteen years old and I've discovered sex with men who really should know better, Jack Daniels, and staying out all night. For the first time in my life I feel pretty and desirable. I think I'm going to do as many stupid things as possible to keep this feeling going.

I wouldn't wish this on my brother. I wouldn't wish this on my parents. In fact, I wouldn't even wish this on my worst enemy. I hope that adolecence is kinder to my brother. I know he'll make mistakes, but I hope that they'll be different mistakes, maybe even mistakes that will terrorize my parents a little less than I did. They've survived the Soviet Union, immigration, Israeli bombings, earthquakes, and a teenage daughter. Go easy on them, B, please.

2001-06-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

I helped beta test a club last night. A year and a half after Jamie Zawinski purchased the DNA Lounge from Rob Schneider, the club is reopening. The sale was made with great fanfare. Here was jwz, internet wunderkind (nevermind that no one should be called a wunderkind once they pass thirty), Netscape multimillionaire, buying a San Francisco nightclub in a year when the police in South Station had made it their unofficial policy to shut down the club scene. Venues were being turned into dot com office space every month. Every single late night permit that came up for review was summarily denied. Local residents asserted time and time again that night clubs attracted the "wrong element" into their neighborhood. Nightclubs are noisy. Nightclubs make it hard to park your car in the evening. Having clubs open after two o'clock in the morning was "simply not appropriate."

Dear SFO, please stop flying airplanes at night. I have just moved close to the airport and the noise makes it difficult for me to sleep.

When Jamie won his appeal and successfully transferred the DNA's late night permits, I remember how giddy everyone felt. Rents were going up; housing prices were going up; parking was impossible and driving on the freeway was a nightmare, but here was a sliver of hope that San Francisco might not become some glorified suburb. Cities are loud and dirty and a little bit dangerous. Cities are where we go to discover ourselves through dancing and drinking and howling at the moon. No one gets carried away by a romantic impulse and moves to Concord.

When Jamie bought the DNA in March, he thought it just needed a few repairs and he could be open for business by Christmas. As it turned out, a few cosmetic changes weren't going to cut it. New ownership meant that the DNA would have to meet new noise abatement standards, which meant having to pour a new concrete wall two feet thick. The DNA turned out to be providing electricity for three other buildings on the block. The architect took months longer than expected to write up the plans. Contractors either stupid, lazy, incompatent, or flakey. Jamie started to refer to the club as the DNA Money Pit.

On Thursday night, the Money Pit had its test run. Jamie said he wanted the DNA to look like "that cool club you saw in that movie that one time." In that sense, the DNA is a success. From the industrial mesh on the walls, to the blurry TV's showing views of other parts of the club, to the steel toilets in the bathroom, Jamie's built a movie club. All that he's missing is a couple of vinyl-clad girls dancing in cages suspended from the ceiling. But the giddy hopefullness is gone. Everyone is too busy worrying about their rent, their jobs, and their car payments to think that the reopening of the DNA is going to change anything.

A year ago, the opening of a nightclub would have meant something. It would've been a potent symbol, a geek who made his money writing large chunks of Netscape's browser putting his money where his mouth is. Now the money's all gone and we're all in retreat, soulless yuppie hordes and working stiffs alike. A new place to drink on 11th Street seems a little trivial. Not that the DNA project wasn't an enormous undertaking, but I've heard people talking about this place for the last year the way people talk about the return of Jesus. The DNA was going to save us all. It was going to singlehandedly revive night culture in San Francisco. It was going to employ all of the bartenders, club promoters, and bouncers we knew, buy us free drinks, and never ask for ID at the door.

But it's just a club, a very nicely designed club. Anyone who expects more is bound to be disappointed.

2001-06-06T23:20:00.000-07:00

Where have you been, lil' miss? What's been keeping you so busy? You never call. You don't send email. You don't chat or post on messageboards. Telepathic communication has been fruitless.

I've been sewing. I've been fire dancing. I've been lying in the sun. I've been barbequeing with my comrades in unemployment. I've been planning, God help me, for Burning Man, which is sure to swallow up my life for the next three months. I'd sworn that after five years, I was putting an end to it. I've done every kind of Burning Man trip there is. I've done the three day newbie trip, where I knew no one, walking delerious through the desert, living on drugs and Oreo cookies. I've done the week-long trip with friends, no drugs, but plenty of debauchery, that left me covered in yellow paint from Pepe Ozan's opera. I've done the trip that lasts a week and a half and takes all year to plan, when you spend more time working on your camp than seeing the rest of the event, where you don't even have time to watch the burn because you're too busy performing. I've done the July 4th camping trip. I've snuck out to the hot springs. I've lived day in and day out as a spectacle.

I don't think there's anything left for me to experience on the playa. There's the cold and the dust storms and the smell of kerosene. There's sneaking away to look at the stars, the brightest, clearest view of the sky I've ever seen. There's someone coming over from the camp next door because they've cooked breakfast and they want you to have some. There's watching the sun come up while you're sitting with your friends on either side of you.

There is nothing to do at this event that I haven't already done. I have fully explored it. I have maxed it out. Now I should just let it die. But a few weeks ago, I started drawing sketches. Last week I bought fabric, and last night, as I drafted a pattern for the vest I was sewing, I knew that I was going to Burning Man again.

This will be the last time, so I'd better make it good.

2001-06-04T14:22:00.000-07:00

I don't think that I mentioned how important it is to help your friends move. You've got to get up in the morning and help put their things in boxes. You need to be there when the heavy furniture needs to be guided down a steep and treacherous flight of stairs. You need to sit with them and eat burritos when you're on the brink of exhaustion and there's just one more load to go. This is what friends are for. I've lived in four apartments in the last three years and I know how vital it is to maintain your Moving Karma.

So J and I helped S move from the Outer Richmond (the hinterlands of San Francisco, occupied only by immigrant grandmothers and fog) to the Inner Mission (occupied by junkies and trendy restaurants), which was widely considered to be a step in the right direction because now S is within walking distance of Rainbow Grocery. Most of S's things weren't terribly heavy and we were able to get them across town in just three truckloads, but a lot of his sculpture didn't lend itself well to packing. It was all dead roses and manzanita branches and metal busts of eyeless women grafted to television tubes. Once he has recovered from the shock of moving, we will all collaborate on a sculpture for the loft.

I need to come up with something else to call this place. "The loft" sounds like a big white box occupied by yuppies. Flat screen televisions are delivered to "the loft." "The loft" has gleaming racks full of Calphalon cookware which is never used to do anything more complicated than boiling water. There are no books in "the loft" because they didn't fit into the decorating scheme.

No. This is definitely something else.

2001-06-01T01:02:00.000-07:00

For those of you wondering what happend to the "comments" section of this site, this is the problem. If you still feel inclined to comment, use the guestbook, send me mail, or feel free to communicate telepathically.

2001-05-31T03:30:00.000-07:00

Dear diary,

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

Dear diary,

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

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

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

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

"Call my girlfriend a bitch."

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

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

I ate Cheerios. Batman was on.

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

2001-05-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

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

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

2001-05-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

2001-05-19T14:16:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2001-05-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, it's passing already.

2001-05-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By that time he was already asleep.

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

2001-05-11T01:54:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

2001-05-05T03:45:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2001-05-04T15:17:00.000-07:00

Unemployment: Day 9

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

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

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

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

Life should always be like this.

2001-04-26T22:49:00.000-07:00

Unemployment: Day 1

You are not your job. Your are not your job. You are not your job. Lather. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

I have been through all of the stages of grief. Denial: I'm not laid off. I still have my job. In fact, I'd better go call C about the web logs she messed up while I was gone. Anger: Those bastards! It's always the technical people who get cut so that some fat, dishonest executive can keep on cashing his paycheck. Bargaining: If I give up computers forever, can I please have a job that will last longer than a Budweiser in a frat house? Grief: Pass the salt (sob). Yes, dinner is lovely (sob). Why oh why did this have to happen to me! Waaaaah!

Now I have reached Acceptance, the Zen-like state that allows me to shrug and sigh when people tell me how sorry they are. These things happen. Lots of people are being laid off. We all knew that the good times were over. Now, in a tight job market with a mountain of bills due, I get to find out if I'm really a rock star, one of those people who is so good at what they do that they will never lack for work. Of course, then I go right back to denial and start worrying about whether or not the development server has enough swap space.

I have resolved to make May a holiday. I'm not going right back to work. The last time I changed jobs, I left The Magazine Which Shall Not be Named on Friday and came to work for The Company That Shall Soon be Visited by a Plague of Locusts on Monday. Plague of Locusts took the vast majority of my waking hours between October and the middle of February, at which point I could chart and document everything I had done in the last four months, making it that much easier for me to be replaced by a younger, less experienced, cheaper UNIX systems administrator.

I will spend the month of May overseeing the enormous amount of work that still needs to be done to the loft. I will find furniture and paint things. I will drink coffee in the middle of the day with my unemployed friends. I will go to the gym. I will have dinner ready for J when he comes home.

When I do go back to work, I'm contracting. If I'm going to work a sixteen hour day, I'm going to work by the hour. I will take time off between contracts whenever I please and I will never again put my heart and soul into a company that would gladly screw me over just to save some middle aged marketing zombies. No one will ever have a chance to smile and say with the most sincere look on their face that, I, of all people, will always have a job at this company just so they can stab me in the back a month later.

At any technology company, there's always a level of animosity between the Suits and the Geeks. The Geeks are arrogant. They think that the company can't possibly function without them. After that, what's a technology company without a product? They think that that the suits are superfluous. When the Suits think about the Geeks, which is hardly at all, they think of them as cogs in a machine. The Geeks are plentiful and replacable. In fact, once they've built the technology, who needs Geeks at all?

No one has ever explained the concept of maintenance to the Suits, at least not until something breaks. Then that explanation costs $200 an hour, and I can take a vacation whenever I want.

2001-04-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

Are you there, God? It's me, Never. If you're an omniscient and omnipotent God, then you know that I don't believe in you, but sometimes I need someone to talk to while I sort things out in my head, when I'm trying to turn Events into Stories, those little tidbits of conversation you can feed people who ask "How're you doing?" This is the Executive Summary of my life. Executives are very busy and they won't read anything that's more than a page long. Even then, they don't really care, so if you want an Executive to really notice something, you need to put it in a concise little list with bullets next to each item.

I went on vacation, my first real vacation that hasn't been sucked away by Burning Man in years. It's cold in Paris, colder than it ever gets in San Francisco, but that just meant I could wear my leather trenchcoat with the fur collar. I felt smug for being so well prepared. It's beautiful there. Every time we saw another cathedral or park or palace, J and I would laugh and say "Oh look, another diamond," in that bored tone of Uma Thurman's in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Since we've in Executive Summary mode, I'll make a list: the catacombs are closed until July; the RER is much more complicated than the Metro; the couscous in Paris is like nothing else on Earth; the French have five weeks of vacation mandated by law; they have also mandated a cafe every fifty feet and a carousel every ten blocks. At night, the Eiffel Tower lights up the same way it did on New Year's Eve 2000, twinkling with lights that rise ever upward, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne, for five minutes, or until the Tower operator decides to put an end to it.

The whole Internet thing is just hitting France right now. I have a glorious fantasy in which I drop everything and move into a flat on the Rue Saint Germain and do consulting for some French computer company at a ridiculous rate. A Silicon Valley systems administrator is worth her weight in gold there. I would never need my five weeks of vacation there. I could just walk to the Musee D'Orsay.

I came home to perfect California weather. It was seventy degrees and the sun was shining.

I came home to an email from F to an email address that I hardly ever use anymore. It was dated the day I left for Paris and it said that his father in North Carolina was very sick and he was going back to Asheville to look after his family. He's probably never coming back and I never got a chance to say to goodbye properly. I locked myself in the bathroom to cry.

I'm drinking now, even though I haven't been drunk in three or four months. I have a bottle of 1997 Cabernet Sauvignon and I'm not ever bothering to pour it into a glass. I came to work early this morning. It's one of the benefits of jet lag. I couldn't sleep past 6:30 am, so I came to work at 8:00, when the office was mostly empty and quiet. I read through a week's worth of work-related email, then I tried to log in to some of the servers to see what kind of shape they were in. All of the root passwords had been changed. I knew then. No one had to tell me. I wrote up the procedures for letting someone go from the IT department. Those were my documents.

They've laid off half of the people from Technology, including a couple of H1B's who will probably have to go back to India now. I've never been laid off before. They've been quietly getting rid of contractors and such for the last couple of months. My people were concerned enough that I even called a meeting with my boss and talked to him at length about our job security. "We're understaffed as it is," he said. "If we fire anyone here, we're screwed." My boss is looking for another job right now. He doesn't want to catch the blame for the Hell that's bound to follow.

In a way, this is the most backhanded compliment I've ever recieved. My department is the department that took the cuts because "we need the least attention." I've engineered our network so well that the Powers That Be are under the impression that it runs itself. In the all company meeting that was taking place while half a dozen of us were being laid off, when my name listed among the fallen, the lead developer looked out at the Powers That Be, the powers that sign her paycheck and said "Now we're fucked."

This company will probably be out of business within a year. Morale is at zero. Everyone is updating their resumes. But in the meantime, I have to pay my painters. I have to pay my rent. I have to pay for new floors for the bedroom. I have a million stupid, expensive errands to run before I move this weekend. Everyone has promised to help me. Everyone has sworn that this time off will be good for me. My boss has sworn that there are people tripping over themselves in their eagerness to hire me, but I'm scared, so scared, and I'm crying just like I've just been dumped by my first boyfriend.

Are you there, God? It's me, Never. I'm sad and I think I'm drunk and I don't believe in you anyway. Do you remember, God, when I was in college, and I had to decide if I was going to pay tuition with my body or with my brains? I should have become a stripper, God. Strippers don't get laid off.

2001-04-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

The last time I was in Paris, it was with F. He'd never been to Europe before, so I took him. I already knew Paris' streets and museums and chocolate mousse from vacations with my parents. Besides, I'd read enough about Paris, from Alexander Dumas to Henry Miller, that the geography of the city was burned into my brain.

So one summer, I gave F Paris. I unwrapped it for him like a present. It was one hundred degrees and our feet were sore after walking all over London. The Pope was in town with a million Pope Groupies singing Jesus songs. Every sensible Parisian had abandoned the town in favor of milder climes.

F didn't speak a word of French. I translated street signs and poetry on plaques. I told him the names of churches and the history of the Place de Vosges, where we made a picnic out of a baguette and caviar and sour creme from the market. We dipped our feet in the fountain at the Luxemburg. We bought a bottle of wine and passed it back and forth while sitting on a bridge over the Seine the night I turned 18.

I know it's a cliche, right down to the charming Left Bank bistros and the carousel at the Place de Bastille. I was young and in love and in Paris. I was convinced that it (everything really, but especially F) was going to last forever. It didn't. I can't tell you how certain I was, how everything we said and felt and did seemed to be the center of the universe. It wasn't, of course, but it was dizzying to be so sure of something, even if it was wrong. It's an awful thing when you learn that love ends. You can flip through a calendar and mark off the days.

This is when it started

This is when it ended.

These are the years that have passed in between us. There have been lovers and jobs and jokes and vacations since then that you've known nothing about. Now, I can't see the beginning without thinking of the end. What a shame it is we fell apart. What a shame it is that all things fall apart eventually.

It's much harder now to start anything. Every year love gets a little bit heavier and it's harder to push it into motion, but I've managed. I love J and I want to show him Paris, even if it's a cold and rainy Paris that will require my warm coat. I'd like to show him the museums and the gardens, the book stores and the cafes, the places to buy wine for less than five bucks.

I hope he likes it there.

2001-04-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

Work has been slow. I've been writing up documents, tying up loose ends, taking care of those boring little details that I'd pushed aside when my top priority was just to get everything up and running. It's a calm time. I can go home after eight hours if I want to. When I do, the sun is still shining. Sometimes the bookstores are still open. I haven't woken up to the sound of the phone ringing in weeks.

I can't help thinking that this is the calm before the storm, that I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning and half of our servers will be down. There will be rioting in the streets. Heads will roll. Head. My head. Everyone tells me to relax, to take advantage of the lull and enjoy my vacation. I think I will. I haven't had a real vacation in a very long time. I've taken a few weekends to go to Vegas, sure, but Burning Man has swallowed up my serious vacation time. I haven't been out of the country in years.

I lost my passport a year and a half ago. I was in a terrible panic at the time. I had no idea where it might be. I turned my bag inside out. I turned my apartment upside down. I yelled at everyone. Replacing a lost passport is a royal pain, such a pain that I didn't bother. It wasn't as if I left the country very often. I'm not the international jet setter I used to be.

About a month ago, D. found it at his warehouse. Lost things from Cats and the Manhattan Lounge end up at his house. It had been sitting there for over a year before he realized it was mine. I wonder how drunk I was that night. I wonder if it fell out of my pocket or my bag. I felt stupid to think that it had been lost for so long and I'd been too lazy to replace it. I'm not normally so careless with my things.

The passport is expired now. I had to replace it anyway.

2001-04-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

The blogger ate my entry! Oh well. In the meantime, I took the some pictures of the loft. You can see them here.

Joe (the painter) has started painting. There's no big hurry, so he'll probably take a week or two. Right now, he's finished the entire back wall, the studio, a bunch of door frames, the kitchen, and the base coat for both bathrooms. I tried to get a picture of the bathrooms, but the light is so bright in there that it washes out the color on the walls. Every time I visit the loft, the place looks a little bit more finished.

2001-04-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

Once apon a time, I looked like this:

2001-04-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

Where did my weekend go? I didn't go out. I had to do a code push in the middle of the night on Friday and J worked for most of Saturday and Sunday. I don't feel rested at all because I woke up at 8:30 (don't laugh!) to meet with my painters and make all of the final decisions about the walls. My father would say I'm "making a circus" out of this wall thing. Of course my father could live in a cave and not care so long as he had high speed internet access.

It's unusually important to me not to have white walls in my house. It's not enough to paint the walls. I have to live in a place where colored walls don't look ridiculous. I need high ceilings and maybe even crown moldings. I need romance in my living space. I never lived in a place like that when I was growing up. My family lived in dingy apartments, surrounded by old Soviet furniture of unsurpassable ugliness. Family legend has it that we arrived in America with two suitcases, one of which was filled with my toys. How we managed to fit all of those bookcases and the green striped chairs into the other suitcase I'll never know.

I remember our second apartment in San Francisco, right after the basement room we shared with my grandparents and their temperamental Pekinese. The carpet was nubby yellow-green stuff and it was covered with plastic. Plastic! Who covers their carpet with plastic? Was the landlord afraid that we would damage his cheap, ugly carpeting? What could we possibly do to make it worse?

I grew up in houses with textured walls, pine paneling, and decaying linoleum. We lived in the remnants of late 60's and 70's apartments because no one else wanted them. We moved the lime green striped chairs and the bookcases my parents got as a wedding present and the light-colored rugs my little brother puked all over and the waterbed (what year is this again?) from one apartment to the next. There was never anything on the walls. I was fifteen before I thought to hang up posters for Blade Runner and Lost Boys. I covered my room in dried roses and bits of black lace. Honestly, I think that made things even worse. My pointy-toed goth decor clashed so violently with the off-white carpeting, the fading pastel furniture, the plaid bedcover I'd had since I was three, that the room looked like a joke. Kids, don't try this at home. I mean it. And wipe all of that black eyeliner off of your face too.

So you see, I can't live in a big white box. A big white box is the ugliest, most soul-crushing thing of all. It's being poor and living on Ramen and never inviting anyone over because all of my classmates live in mansions in Pacific Heights. It's having no friends and spending my weekends reading science fiction/fantasy novels and eating Eggo waffles. My house must have colored walls and pictures in frames. It has to have velvet curtains and candelabras. It has to be crowded to point of bursting with things, found objects, flowers, scraps of fabric, stacks of books. If Tim Burton designed a Victorian bordello, I would live there.

In fact, I wouldn't settle for anything less.

So J and I fight. We never fought before, but we do now. He's spending all of his money on silly technological gadgets for the house. He's thinking about rewiring everything in the back room. He's unhappy with the way the lights are arranged. He wants to buy a three thousand dollar projection television. I'm worried about where we're going to find extra bookshelves and a couch. I spend all of my time worrying about what colors I'm going to paint everything. He thinks I should relax. He thinks it's not the end of the world. But someone has to make the decisions and they can't be unmade unless you want to repaint two thousand square feet of wall.

I can't help it. I can't relax, take it easy, go with the flow. I have to flip through books and mutter about colors and spend my nights plagued by self-doubt. I have nightmares about my teeth falling out. Then I wake up and J and I snap at each other some more. I tell him to take this seriously. He tells me to relax. This can't be over soon enough.

2001-04-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

Oh God, I'm dreaming of color swatches. I can now close my eyes and envision every wall in the loft, where they connect, and what furniture will probably be nearby. I can't help thinking that valuable neurons are being used to store this trivia. I could be solving world hunger or meditating on the key to peace in the Middle East. Instead, I'm deciding whether to use three shades or two for the color wash on the west wall.

I snuck out of work in the middle of the day and went to The Builder's Booksource to pour over glossy interior decorating bibles, pictures of other people's beautiful houses that look as if no one has ever lived in them. When did it become fashionable to paint everything white? When did everyone become obsessed with "opening up space"? Much coverage was given to making a small room seem larger. Everyone wants to make a small room seem larger. No one is interested in taking a huge, cavernous space and making it intimate.

The photos in loft books (and there are entire shelves of Books About How the Trendy Loft People Live) look like the sets for late 70's science fiction shows. I do not want interior decorating tips from The Prisoner or Buck Rodgers. I don't want giant floor-to-ceiling windows with no apparent window coverings. Why would I want to live in a place where I couldn't even leave a pair of socks on the floor?

At last, I gave up on color swatches, went to a normal bookstore and picked up Vertigo Visions: Artwork from the Cutting Edge of Comics, which is filled with paintings by Greg Spalenka, Dave McKean, and Glenn Fabry. The whole thing is now thouroughly annotated and bookmarked with Post-It notes that read "This! This is exactly what I want!" On Monday, I'm bringing a copy of Dave McKean's Mr. Punch for my painters to see.

I think it's all going to be okay. I have the inspiration I need for my walls; I have yards and yards of fabric to drape over everything and I've had good luck in finding good, cheap furniture. I've found 7' steel bookshelves for $70 each and a steel and glass display case from a store that's going out of business that I will use for storing my dishes. I have one small wall that I'm leaving blank because I want to wallpaper it with tea-stained pages from children's books.

I think I've finally stopped worrying so much and just plunged head first into this project. It feels good.

2001-04-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

Ned Kirby comes from the same part of Germany as Al Jorgensen. I wish I'd been the one to come up with that astute observation. Even though I wasn't, I'm stealing it. It's mine now. Stromkern is easily the best German band to ever come out of Wisconsin.

I can only imagine the members of Icon of Coil sitting around, drinking beer and eating some Norwegian fish-thing, saying "I know, let's tour America! There will be free drinks and Industrial groupie girls with dozens of facial piercings. We'll put our whole show on a minidisc and we'll hardly have to do any work at all. We'll have some band from Wisconsin open for us. They've only got one hit, so when we hit the stage in all of our bleached-blond glory, the crowd will go crazy. Yeah! I'm going to go buy a new pair of leather pants now."

Maybe I'm not being entirely fair to Icon of Coil here. By pre-recording most of their set, they are following in a long synthpop tradition. I've been to shows where none of the instruments were even plugged in. I can't pretend to be shocked when there's some band on stage at the Justice League doing Industrial karaoke, with nothing live but the vocals and slightly out of time drums. Then again, none of those bands ever kicked over their minidisc player in the middle of the first song, bringing their show to a halt while Andy LaPlegua sputtered to the audience, trying to fill the next three minutes.

He doesn't know any jokes, folks. He won't sing "Night Riders" either.

Maybe he's bitter. I'd feel bitter too if I'd just been completely upstaged by my opening act. Stromkern has learned the cardinal rule of playing to unknown crowds: if your audience only knows one song, play it early in your set. Ned Kirby got "In Traumm" and a new version of "Night Riders" out of the way early on and went on to prove that the rest of his material is just as strong. I went for an entire hour without once hearing the Cookie Monster vocoder patch, the confused growling sound that most vocalists use to mask their voices because they're deathly afraid that sounding like a kid who writes music in their bedroom with a keyboard and a Macintosh just isn't rock star enough.

On the other hand, Icon of Coil failed to heed the cardinal rule of playing Industrial shows: never cover "Headhunter." Don't try to sneak it into the middle of your set and never, ever, under any circumstances use it as your encore. Front 242 is a great band. "Headhunter" is a classic song, but no one will ever have a chance to miss it unless the covers stop. I mean you, Apoptygma Berzerk! Stop it! My ears are bleeding.

Have I not bought all of your albums? Haven't I danced to your songs and paid admission to countless nightclubs? Haven't I dutifully attended your concerts and bought your tour tee-shirts, provided you had them in a small enough size? Why, EBM bands of the world, do you continue to torture me with "Headhunter"?

Why?!

2001-04-02T14:43:00.000-07:00

The more I think about this year, a quarter over already, the more it seems like it's been all about wanting things. I wanted a new apartment. I wanted a vacation. I wanted some new dress or a corset or better hair or a fancy dinner. I wanted to be thin, to have people love me, to earn respect at work. The more you have, the more you seem to need. It's not enough to be a Manager, now you have to be a Director. Now you need custom-made clothes and a house filled with art and a flat-screen television. That mad burning will not cease until every moment of your life is spent feeling fabulous and special.

Life can't be that way all of the time. What a stupid reason to suffer.

I'm going to enjoy the things that I have. Sometime this weekend I was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of things I felt I needed to buy for my new place that I curled up into a little ball on top of my bed and bit my hand so that I wouldn't scream. I don't really need these things. The world will not come to an end if I don't find a perfect dining table by the end of the month. I need to order a new phone line, a new DSL line, and move PG&E. I need to paint the walls because if I don't paint before I move, I am destined to live in a big white box. Everything else is optional.

Living spaces need time to grow. They need to develop. A decorating scheme does not emerge fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, anywhere outside of interior decorating magazines. There's no way J and I could fill all of that space up immediately. Why should we even try?

Saturday was so beautiful that I decided to go for a walk. I was going to go to Washington Square Park to lie in the sun and watch the old Chinese people do Tai Chi. Sometimes you'll see half a dozen of them, all moving in time like a flock of birds. Instead, the park was full of people. There was a stage on one end and the rest of encircled by booths. J and I nearly turned around there and then, but the banner read Oyster and Beer Festival, so we went in and ate a mountain of barbequed oysters with champage from plastic cups.

When I told my friends that J and I were moving in together, most of them said it was about time. These are the same people who ask why we're not married yet. A lease is stronger than a wedding vow. You can divorce at any time. J and I will live together for the next year come hell or high water. I'd by lying if I said I wasn't a little bit scared to lose my last shred of personal space, a place which is mine and only mine, where no one can come that I haven't invited. I was scared when I started my new job. I said right here that if it all went wrong, this is the moment that I would regret.

Please don't let me regret this.

2001-03-30T19:43:00.000-08:00

The rental agent from Building #1 just called. She offered the Howard St. place to J and me with a $200 discount on rent because they can't give us the garage. Of course we've already signed the other lease.

2001-03-30T15:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning J and I walked down the street and rented an apartment.

We were certain that the Howard St. place had rejected us. Two days had passed without a phone call. This time last year, that was a sure sign that some boring couple (he's in khakis, she's wearing black capri pants) was already moving their Pottery Barn sofa into the corner near the window. I spent an hour or two trying to convince myself that I didn't want to live there anyway. Who needs all that glass and brick and brushed aluminum? Not me. I don't need that jacuzzi either.

It was time to get back to Earth, to come to our senses and accept the fact that people like us don't get to live in fabulous showplaces. We will always be cramming our stuff into some too little place in a dangerous neighborhood because no matter how well we do, there's always some couple out there who makes more money, has perfect credit, and isn't quite so bohemian looking. It's dangerous to rent to bohemians, you know. They might actually use the space to make art. Making art is a noisy and messy business. The owners of these "live/work" developments frown on anything that might disturb the neighbors. When they say "live/work" they mean "run an internet startup from your house, where no one will ever hear anything louder than the sound of you typing away at your keyboard." Nothing makes a landlord cringe like the words "professional recording studio." Bohemians have disreputable friends. They throw late-night parties. They get photo developer all over the floor and you'll never get all of the glitter out of the carpet.

When the landlord of Building #2 showed us in, he asked "Are you artists?" and he didn't say "artist" to rhyme with "cockroach."

1600 square feet, a quarter again the size of the Howard Street place. Sealed concrete floors downstairs, for easy cleaning. Two foot thick concrete walls on all sides. A perfect room behind the kitchen for the recording studio. Fireplace. Big closets. Stainless steel kitchen appliances. Open space, so much open space it makes me dizzy.

"We're going to paint these exposed beams before move-in. What color would you like them?"

"Black."

He sent us across the street to drink coffee while we waited for him to run a credit check. Half an hour later, we were signing the lease. Another half hour later, I got a call from my boss telling me that the Howard Street place had called to check my employment references.

My, how the market has changed. Last year it took me more than three months of diligent searching to find a place to live. This year, all it took was an afternoon. There used to be crowds of potential renters at every open house, nervous couples sizing up the competition, giving them the evil eye. Now we're doing the landloards a favor, filling up their empty lofts when everyone else is skipping town.

I swear that this is where I will settle down. No more moving once a year. No more packed cardboard boxes in the back of my closet. No more pictures that I don't hang or frame for six months. This is my last $400 rent increase. This is the last time I throw out furniture because I simply don't have room for it. No more holding out for something better. No more clicking through Craig's List. No more fanciful prayers for an Angel of Interior Decorating to whisk me away to some better place. There is no better place than this, my own blank canvas with a commercial lease, a place where we can change anything.

Besides, J has already promised to help me hang a trapeze from the ceiling.

2001-03-28T20:30:00.000-08:00

You can't go home again. We all know that. Long, weepy essays about how much the "old neighborhood" has changed are a staple of nonfiction. I'm not going to write one. I'm going to keep things short and sweet. If you blink, you'll miss the whole thing.

Home is a little sliver of San Francisco we used to call the "Goth Ghetto." When I was sixteen years old, Divisadero, between Haight and Fulton was my whole world. As soon as school let out, I would walk down to the game store and flirt with the boys who worked there. On Thursday nights we all met up for coffee at Cafe Abir. When I got hungry, I'd pay $5 for pasta at the Bean Bag with cheese toast. My friends worked at the game store; they worked at the comic book store; they slipped extra things into my bag at Curios and Candles. They lived in scuffed-up Victorian flats, four or five people to an apartment, where they held epic parties. Oak Street House. Grove Street House. Ataku House. Baker Street.

Off I went to see Assemblage 23 and Imperative Reaction at Justice League, right in the midde of Home, the most familiar streets I'll ever know. Only they weren't quite so familiar anymore. Didn't I promise to spare you the weepyness? I'll try. Anne Marie's clothing store has closed. The same goes for the magic supply store whose owner is a jerk, but he employed so many of my little skinny goth girl friends who wore pentagrams around their necks and read tarot cards. The place was full of oils and incense and the girls always smelled like ambergris and vanilla. The Church of John Coletrain, with services on Sundays and Wednesdays when they played sloppy jazz, is a boutique now. They don't make pasta anymore at the Bean Bag and there is no one behind the counter at the game store that I could envision myself sighing over.

The neighborhood I grew up in has been gentrified. The places I spent time in have either shut down or changed beyond recognition. The people I cared about have long since moved away or moved on. I wonder what happend to them.

I wonder if C. ever got back into the theater. I wonder if G. likes Ireland. I wonder if M. ever got the chance to use his physics degree. I wonder if S. ever found someone to love.

I'll probably never know. It's better that way.

2001-03-26T16:29:00.000-08:00

I'm in big trouble. There's a restaurant upstairs that serves crepes and Belgian fries. They have an unlimited supply of soy chai lattes and the staff likes to play Portishead. They even have a cozy little reading corner by the window. I am in serious danger of slacking off from work. I can think of a dozen important things that I could be doing right now, but none of them sounds as tempting as ordering a cup of chai and curling up with my neuroscience book.

J and I spent Sunday looking at apartments. Nearly everything for sale in our neighborhood is a loft. The money is gone, but the building cycle is about two and a half years long. They'll be building big white boxes that no one can afford to move into for quite some time yet. So off we went to pick at the bloated corpse of the dot-com boom like vultures with funny-colored hair.

Some people want everything to be new. They want a brand new car. They want a just-built house. I like old things, used stuff, things that have been beat up a little. Newly constructed houses are hopelessly ugly. It may be all shiny now, but a year from now those white carpets will be a mess of stains, all of your cheap finish will be scuffed in the kitchen, and there will be black marks all over walls whitewashed with the cheapest possible paint. I'll bet the toilet breaks and don't even talk to me about the dishwasher.

Beware of houses built during a housing boom. It's like living in the housing equivalent of cheap Swedish furniture. But J has his heart set on a loft, and so long as it's a warehouse conversion rather than a built-from-scratch place, I'm willing to go along. To this end, we went to go see a place on Howard St. that we've both been drooling over ever since construction started. Most live/work projects are ugly, all pine and brushed aluminum. Years from now we are going to be deeply embarrassed by late 90's architecture. Yellow and orange are not great colors for hulking, boxy buildings. Yellow and orange are colors that only look good on fruit.

The Howard Street complex isn't one of these fruit colored buildings at all. The building used to be a stable for the San Francisco Fire Department's horses, back when you needed horses to pull great big wagons filled with water. Can you imagine a time when even horse stables were elaborate Art Deco things? The warehouse conversion has left all of tile and brickwork intact. All of the new construction is on the top floors, painted industrial black. The loft we saw has a giant window looking down onto the street, partially covered up by the original brick as if the apartment was buried in the crumbling shell of the original warehouse.

Within thirty seconds of walking into the place, J and I were talking (quietly, so that the rental agent wouldn't hear us) about what colors to paint the walls and where to put the recording studio. Should the dressers go into the walk-in closet? Do we have enough square yards of purple velvet to cover that window? Have you seen the stainless steel fridge? Can you believe this place? We need it. We want it. Where do we sign?

In my interior decorating fantasies, the walls are dark blue and burgundy. There's a canopy over the bed. There are piles of rugs on the floor, so many that they overlap. The mezzanine is strung with faerie lights.

I'm pricing new sewing machines. J wants to turn the downstairs bathroom into a dark room. We're already talked to Rachel about commissioning a painting from her.

Who am I kidding? We'll never get it.

2001-03-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

This mail was sent out to the entire company this morning:

Coffee and tea drinkers,

As most of you know, we are managing our budgets tightly around here as of late. In order to provide more goodies in the kitchen, I would like to ask you to bring in a coffee mug to replace the "throw away" cups we are currently purchasing. No personal mugs, please. These will be for everyone's use and reuse. Thank you for your support.

This is the mail I sent out to my department shortly thereafter:

Computer users,

As most of you know, we are managing our budgets tightly around here as of late. In order to provide amusement for your heartless corperate masters, I would like to ask you to bring in a computer to replace the expensive desktops we are currently purchasing. Windows 2000 only please. These computers will be for everyone to use and break and we would not want to confuse people with open source operating systems. Thank you for your support.

2001-03-22T01:58:00.000-08:00

The bath towel guy followed me down the street today. He wears a robe over his clothes and a towel wrapped around his head and he sounds just like every black drag queen in movies that have black drag queens in them. I wish I could remember what he said aside from "Changefourquatersforadolla'changefourquartersforadolla'."

"Say jealous," he said. "Say jealousjealousjealous. Witch." He usually calls me a witch, something something "so I can sit on it." I was curious to listen, but I had Sixteen Horsepower running through my head. I couldn't hear the towel guy over the sound of David Eugene Edwards telling me to take a breath, hard and clear, like a hammer on a church bell.

The weather has soured. It was going to be spring. Everyone promised us spring. Where did it go? I was looking forward to nights of fire dancing, but I'll settle for the chance to wear my new coat. There is nothing at all redeemable about the 1970's except for the coats. Purple double breasted wool overcoats. Green velvet opera coats. Black leather trench coats with great big fur collars. No one can possibly wear them all, so they sell cheap. Some women collect shoes. I could do with just one good pair of boots just as just as I had a coat for every occasion. It gives me a girly thrill to walk down the street thinking "Just try to find this at Gucci, you pallid Marina creature."

I will take my spare leather trench coat and cut it down for something to wear at Burning Man. I will cut out most of the front and have it close just under my bust. I'll rip out the lining from the waist down and shred the leather with a serrated knife. I'm pricing Army tents for our camp, something that will be able to withstand the dust storms. The pop-up domes were nearly blown away last year and the parachute was shredded. The little geodesic dome that J and I built stayed put, but the wind tore right through the cover and brought so much alkali dust into the dome that we finally gave up and started sleeping in the back of the truck. The 50 ft. Army tent that we bought for the kitchen worked out perfectly. When the dust storms came, we just battened down the hatches.

I have a small snake skeleton coming in the mail this week that will probably be taken apart and turned into a headpiece of some sort. The punk rock bouncer at Deathguild had a 140 lb boa carcass, but no one was willing to take it off of his hands. The skull of a boa that size would have made great art project material if only I had room for a beetle colony. The bouncer brought his poor dead boa in a bag to the Manhattan Lounge because D. had promised to take it, but M. wouldn't let it into his truck because it smelled so bad. They just left it at the base of a streetlight.

It was gone the next morning. Will the new owner of the giant dead snake please stand up?