Oblig.

The actual secret is bringing a marker.

The best in stall didn't involve words.

No stepping stones here.

Friend-stalking!

Obligatory.

Bike wreck!

Requisite bathroom post, poodle dog.

I'm interrupting her nap.

My face looks better. Knee not so much.

Oops. Teeth and face.

did you agree - it's a must

if you get too excited about girl talk's cover of "let's call it off" by peter, bjorn, and john, you might accidentally spill your freshly opened beer all over your pc tower with the vent on top. totally justified, but a tad messy. i'm just saying.

Maybe this will be a bathroom blog.

Is this not the cutest soap dispenser?

huh

i don't know what to tell you. if i've seen you, chances are i haven't really explained what's been going on, or said too much. i'm bored right now though. i meant to write something more interesting, but now it's weird. beer.

i'm going to beauty bar tomorrow. an ex will buy me drinks (yes, rand), and we'll watch our friends' bands. maybe there will be photobooth shenanigans. at least i like my hair? and am content to leave it shallow here (i shot my intellectual wad earlier on an email).

I don't have ocd issues.

I look old. I'm going out anyway.

I'm classy.

Mybloodyself's earring!

sunday living

sorry about the lack of content. i'll do more posting later on this week, i think.

i broke my internet fast today (obviously), and was it ever delicious. the foxymoron comment thread on gawker is over 10,000 now. i'm going to take the gmail and myspace plunge in a little bit. the backlog hopefully won't be too daunting. i'd put up another picture post, but my phone died and i'm not around my charger.

Drunk work parties.

GIANT PEN!

Eh.

Scrap bale.

Camp mabry 1915, facing north from mopac

New shoes

At flawn

Stinky!

so the snake was about four feet long, jumping (with what legs? -ed.) from branch to branch in the creek trees. i first noticed it when it was about twenty feet in the air, and then only because the birds were all flipping out and screaming, and fluttering from branch to branch keeping an eye on it. it's rare that a mated cardinal pair, a woodpecker (who almost got got, when he wasn't paying attention), a female grackle, and a blue jay (and other assorted birds) all work together like that, right? i'd forgotten what a racket birds make when they see a snake. i saw one by the OAG garage once on my way to work during session. it was huge and slithered underneath a car in the metered spots, and there were more than twenty sparrows screaming and divebombing it and standing around on the sidewalk rubbernecking. a female grackle even hopped under the car to investigate and see where it went. i peeked too (not too close), but i guessed it went up into the transmission. oh well.

i borrowed joo's bike today. the seat's too low and it makes my knees groan in protest to ride it. i did talk to someone at work who has the san jose, and he said it's good for rides less than thirty miles, and if you're going faster than twenty mph the older frames shudder. so, yay and shit.

This is my snake-in-a-tree picture.

isa

isa
Originally uploaded by chizoo

ugh. so this kid, my dutch/chinese cousin, is barely thirteen. i remember when my brother and i went to her parents' wedding. *feebly shakes cane in the air*

if you look at the other pictures, you can see how light brown her eyes are too. i feel old. this is from a horrible, horrible clump of emails my dad sent last week. there were these, and then another cousin's (a really bitchy cousin) second kid was born a couple weeks ago, with the requisite email slideshow, and then my dad's older cousin's new kid is six months old now (and way cute, but not cute enough to post), and all this on top of going to a baby shower yesterday with lots (two) of babies there --- bleargh. stop it!

fuck it. i'm going to look at non-baby-infested parts of the internet. cobrasnake! last night's party! aah. i feel better.

dood.

i got paid today. i wonder how much $500 is in pennies. oh wait, i'm on the internet. hmm. it could weigh anywhere from 125 kg (275 lbs) to 155.5 kg (342.1 lbs). all right then. i won't cart it around on the bike. oh wait! i broke the bike today! i can't cart shit around on it! (technically it's not even my bike. it's billy's.)

one of the reasons i agreed to house-sit at the bergackens' was the allure of the batman homecoming, where your inertia gets you speeding like some guy with one testicle, or maybe greg lemond, who probably has the normal two, and then you punch the garage door opener as you zoom down the approach and hopefully don't slam into the door, which is taking its sweet time creeping upwards. too bad i seriously fucked up the back wheel (it's way off alignment now, wedged against the frame) on the first dip, and had to hump the bike the rest of the block. i'm just glad i didn't bring the ACTUAL BATMAN OUTFIT to wear for my ignominious forced march home. their home. whatever. this sucks. however, now we're at the next topic!

i've fallen in love with a bike, and also admire its poorer (cheaper?) american cousin. i want the bianchi san jose, but i might end up settling for the schwinn madison '08. yes, i will try out the fixie side of the flip-flop wheel, whichever one i get. you are all invited to come and watch as i pedal maniacally, but don't panic because i have brakes. the price difference isn't that huge, so i'm going to have to actually try out both and see which one is faster, lighter, and more comfy. the 2008 madisons will be at clown dog next month. the san jose is so sexy though. damn. [btw spacebeer, john at clown dog is a cute redheaded boy. his redheadedness improves the bicycle repair experience, and totally helped sell me on the schwinn. almost.]

i wonder why gmail doesn't work over here. i cleared the cache and even deigned to use ie, and it still just keeps reloading (all the security gibberish in the navigation toolbar keeps refreshing). oh well. you know where i be.

i'm thinking about going to hawaii next month. juliana has found that shipping a dog alone costs more than someone going with the dog, inexplicably. and it's true, i'm at loose ends after election day. i'd ask you guys what you think, but--seriously, who's going to tell me it's a bad idea?

i only brought one book over here, since there are so many, but now i miss my books. i dunno. i'm stupid.

Did you know whales have teeth and bows?

bleah

on the way to work i saw a dead teenage possum. hooray and gross, all at the same time. i say teenager because it was only the size of an average cat, not the mastiff-sized ones we get here. can't someone declare a species war between the raccoons and the possums and coyotes and have them kill each other off?

work has been extra painful this week. i take back all the whining i did about lifting heavy shit, because we've been in training to learn about procedures for election judges. not only is it insanely boring and repetitive, but i also managed to (probably) fail the test we had today. like knowing the difference between a limited ballot and a failsafe one is going to matter when i'm driving the van out to randall's four points in lakeway. snzzgnx! we have two more days. nooooo-ooooo-oooo!

central market is making ridiculously overpriced exotic frozen dinners and selling them at heb. being a connoisseur of all frozen saag paneers, i'm trying it, and the rice is underdone (and sucky), and the spinach is sort of watery (and sucky). the portions are divided evenly between rice and saag, too, so it takes some work to make the rice not suck. or not think about how it sucks. on a scale of one (not having any saag paneer around) to five (eating freshly made saag paneer) this is a solid 1.75 to 2.25. i'm going to stick with tandoori palace if i want it frozen. that one's a 3.75, or 4 if you're really hungry.

the-neighbor-gary is in a band. i didn't ask for the name because, well, you know how i feel about music, and he's got a giant black sabbath poster mounted on foam, which is sort of normal and sort of dorky, and such a tell either way. he did put up a rubber frankenstein head on the doorway molding, and i bet it's sort of halloweeny but more like us (you guys) having monster shit around all the time.

i have been told that little mexico (s. 1st, south of oltorf) is the way to go for mexican food. it's on my list.

i dunno. maybe i'll eat some ice cream later.

This thumb is grate-d. Ow.

Index finger-sized grasshopper.

a mystery solved!

a mystery plaguing our collective minds for a couple of months: why the weekend accretion of south asians at an anonymous corporate park behind half price books? hah, don't let me give it away.

i got some more books. i should probably buy things like people and pet food, but ooh! the chicago manual of style! football physics! the uncorrected proof of jesus freaks, all about the children of god cult! did someone say trixie belden? this indiscriminate (bosh, utter hyperbole, i'm picky--ed.) literary omnivoraciousness gets expensive. (i picked up the omnivore's dilemma, too.) oh, bibliogluttony. you delicious, delicious sin. let me never forsake your tender, albeit slightly dusty, embrace.

want to know the answer? muslims! gathering for some good old-fashioned praying! they look more south asian than middle eastern, with the women's uncovered heads and arms in their very brightly colored sari-esque clothes, but what do i know? i'm a texan who likes shooting guns, eating dead animals, drinking beer, and ... um, complaining about taxes and government?

hmph

the results of this week: bruises, blood, chapped lips, achy everything, and hopefully at least thirty hours of work. i couldn't be bothered to add it up before i left. the larouche nutbags have been setting up their table right next to my bike every day. i hope when i'm old i don't turn into a crackpot who harangues people with lengthy tirades about impeaching cheney. bo-ring.

i have a new neighbor today. gary has moved into jennifer's old apartment, and he doesn't mind the mold. he's around my height, latino, with long hair. he seems nice, if kind of a metal head. that's probably okay. the little downstairs yippy dog tried to go after luna. i'll punt it if it ever does. dogs should have good manners.

i got nothing. shepherd's pie made by dan is very tasty.

hooray books! or, coming attractions...

for the last year or so, a tiny tear in the fabric of space-time has provided me with a selection of e. e. "doc" smith books whenever i go to half price. it's very, very hard to stop buying all these old paperbacks when i've been looking for them out of sheer habit for thirteen years. i put children of the lens back today, since i think both spacebeer and i have them now. i did pick up skylark duquesne and subspace explorers, and i don't even care if i already had them or not.

next up, llana of gathol, pellucidar, and the mastermind of mars, so i can figure out if barsoom is all that rutting old goat heinlein claimed in number of the beast. i find that edgar rice burroughs' mars isn't as gripping as they supposed back in space cadet days, but who knows? i also picked up strata, which looks like a boring, unfunny pratchett book, pre-Discworld. excellent.

besides two more hole-fillers, i got petroleum politics and the texas railroad commission (david f. prindle) and mary poppins, when she wrote: the life of p. l. travers (valerie lawson). i'm so excited. i promise i'll review christopher paolini's eragon and eldest next time - he was certainly quite the impressionable teenager. i've got to figure out the blogger version of ljcut, so that i won't bore most of you with block quotes and examples.

speaking of which, does anybody have a GIS textbook? they look interesting in the store, and i'd like to borrow it for browsing purposes.

Why, twice-baked potatoes!

Oh, dairy me, what will i do with this?

A button for a lazy stalker?

The most photographed stop sign ever.

i'm sorry

i've realized i meant moPHOblogging. the possibilities are endless.

please forgive me.

muah, ha ha, ha ha ha

since rereading the past all several posts was insanely dull, i will now subject you to chewtastic 2.0 - mopicblogging! (awkward 2.0 jargon - © by me. not that you'd want to ZOMG use it anyway.)

this pic is from monday during lunch. it's very cute (there's another one on the opposite side of the street somewhere), but i can't help wondering what's going on with all the health-conscious graffiti. is it a backlash against the painfully sweet candy corn? will brushy be far behind? flossy? portion-control-and-regular-exercise-y?

maybe i'll start wheatpasting foie gras posters.

Toothy!

From a walk on duval.

days three and four

yesterday was eh. today, well, i got cut before noon and don't have to go back until monday morning. it'd be a great opportunity to catch up on some sleep... if i hadn't drunk about ten gallons of coffee. i mean ounces. coffee consumption is not nearly as fun if you pour it into a nalgene, because then you see why you're twitching so much your hands are blurred.

i'm bored. this is like that unemployment thing, but worse, and i still won't have any money until next month. who wants to amuse me today? probably nobody. *sigh*

day two

today was the logic and accuracy test. i was partnered with a training troubleshooter who mainly writes software from home, and also does poetry slam stuff. she was entertaining. i thought there was a mistake in the sample ballot's proposed constitutional amendment, but there wasn't. oh fuck, note to self, there was - the spanish version needs to be fixed. stupid memory. then we fucked up a test and had to do the whole thing over. pro: i get to sleep in until noon tomorrow! con: this job is shit for hours. i wonder if it'll ever hit forty hours a week.

inclines are slightly less taxing by bike now. i wonder how much more riding i'll have to do to get my cardiovascular endurance up to pre-smoking levels. probably a lot. there's something wrong with the bike, too. if it was a car i'd say it needs a wheel alignment.

employment! day one, cha cha cha

too bad for you, i forgot and left all my paragraph breaking tools at the council. HA!

i thought i was going in for paperwork today, but it turns out i actually worked. i forgot that a) this job is a pain in the ass because temps don't get keycards, so you have to walk around in big circles through one-way doors all the time trying to get to the bathroom or the copier and back; b) the warehouse is dusty; c) each voting booth contraption weighs thirty pounds, and manhandling a metro shelving cart loaded with ten of those on there is also a pain; d) if you're in the warehouse part, you have to look busy because you're on camera and your management's superiors come in randomly and will bitch them out if you're not futzing with something; e) you don't exactly leave at a set time; f) you have to pick an a.m. or a p.m. shift later on, and i don't do six a.m. anything, unless it's sleeping; and g) there's a lot of trying to look busy. the work has evolved to--let's not exactly say it's been dumbed down over the years, but maybe it's for forks, not knives or spoons. i was told today that apparently i'm in the running already for "rookie of the year," whatever that means. this ain't proofreading, that's for sure. i like the hour lunch; it gave me enough time to leisurely hunt for a crossword and finish a large coffee. i wonder when we get paid. there are people whose faces i remember vaguely from last time, and then there's this one guy from the golden boys that i guess i forgot worked there too. i dunno.

that was quick

oh, the joy of having shit just fall in your lap. with minimal effort, i have landed myself the technical troubleshooter job for the county elections office. hooray for seasonal work! i'll start sometime next week; i'm going in monday morning for the paperwork bit.

day nine, including seven and eight

my life has been subsumed by television, for the most part. oh, the horror, now that i've finally reached the dread grotto of banality; for lo, the next and last stop will be daytime network fare, a maelstrom of judges punch and judy, afroth with the foam of soap operas. intellectual emaciation is my new catchphrase.

i had my first overnight guest wednesday (that's day seven), and we watched some of the futurelovesexsoundslikeabunchofsongsthatotherpeopleprobably thinkarehottofuckto special, until she decided to find out exactly how much people paid to see this shit live. well, the upcoming j.t. show in l.a. has nosebleed seats that start at $100+, and then if you want to sit on a barstool at the end of one of the catwalks and have the opportunity to touch j.t.'s shoe or have him drip sweat on you or something (a la my mom's yanni experience) you can pay $1300. that's right. she decided it had better include a hand job by him as well. you know what else? THERE WAS ONLY ONE OF THOSE SEATS LEFT. i'd extrapolate and try to figure out how much justin timberlake grosses for each show, but i don't feel like math and i would probably rend my garments in fury once i saw the total. if you thought our civilization was doomed for requiring ice sculptures as wet bars at weddings, realizing that people spend this much money for three hours in a giant arena to see a tiny dancing former boy bander won't cheer you up much. we did like all his lushly busty and badonkadonked dancers, though the choreography seemed kind of lewd to me. i must be getting old and prudish.

finally finished re-reading the number of the beast that night too. the last bit with the convention and his "pantheistic solipsism" is rather exhausting if you're contextually rusty and haven't read any other sci fi in a while. "World-as-myth" is an interesting idea, but it seems much more fan-fic, escapist, and a hardy storytelling crutch convention than an actual stabbing viable worldview. although i wouldn't mind reading someone else's paper that dragged it into context with social networking, mmorpgs, and the hairy pooter, lotr et al., as well as how the converse happens, e.g. simpsons quotes used as conversation. whatever. i can bring the book tomorrow if anyone would like to borrow it.

day eight was sleeping, cookie-baking, and television. buh.

today has been sleeping and internet. whatever happened to my bike riding? i can't function without externally imposed structures dictating goals for me. left to my own devices, i take the role of an audience, not a creator. here's to doing something today! *clinks*

let's say today's day six;

weekdays are the problem here, anyway.

the weather was nice, and i didn't get very sweaty riding around. unfortunately, i didn't get anything else practical done either, except for doing the nyt crossword. jennifer's back. today's sandy's birthday. i'm boring, thank goodness. here's to staying away from drama.

day whatever, week two

today was fairly eh. i learned that not only did an unnamed company fucked me tax-wise, but unemployment benefit-wise as well. stupid piece of shit. myers and i went to the record store and then puttered around all the girly stores on first and congress. we ended up getting birthday presents for a birthday girl, and laughing at all the sequined tube tops, ruffled hot pants, and gold lamé pantsuits the eye could see.

i want lemon bars. maybe i'll go get lemons tomorrow. pie crusts are new to me though. i don't like fucking things up, or being bad at doing them. i want twice-baked potatoes too, but then i have to think of something meaty to eat with them. ooh! maybe if it doesn't rain, i can convince jennifer to ride bikes with me! if that doesn't work out, i might dress in all black and ride to spiderhouse and write angsty things in a journal while chainsmoking, drinking coffee, and glaring at pretty people. yes.

also, i'm outing the drummer of the sword for liking justice. (not justice by the sword, but justice a couple of cheesy french djs i like.)

p.s. joolie is perfect, awesome, perfectly awesome, and awesomely perfect. there. i've blogged for today.

p.p.s. i really like the word "crossly." i like to think that i do and say a lot of things crossly. (yes, obviously i've just re-read children's books, and also, i know you're all emphatically agreeing. thanks.)

p.p.p.s. stop reading if you don't want TMI:
i learned today that i am not the only pre-teen who ever harbored sexual fantasies about sandy and dennys. ha. aren't you grossed out now?

p.x4.s. misshapes is finally over. i still don't regret not going to beauty bar that day. although... if it had been at beauty bar - lumberton or beauty bar - des moines, i totally would have gone. in the future, the jennifer needs to go to last night's party or cobrasnake things and tell me how delightfully excruciating they are. there's nothing like a douchebag attack to get you to reach for your coke inhaler. i bet i would feel just as out of place as at cotillion or something. i'm always being oppressed, darn it.

day something

i guess today is day four? my enthusiasm for Getting Things Done™ is totally spent. i'm sticking to my brutal exercise regimen of only going to the 45th street walgreens for cigarettes, and today i got a 15 pound bag of dog food too. i got some unemployment papers in the mail as well. my sense of accomplishment is just completely overwhelming. under. underwhelming.

the kite runner was okay. i'm trying to re-read the number of the beast, but (especially with just having re-read good omens) i can't get into it. maybe you have to be in a certain kind of mood to enjoy lots of math, time travel, naked people, sex, and pulp science fiction, oz, and biblical references, all at the same time. i'm just not a horny old sci fi writer with a predilection for nude redheaded space captains bending genders with every switch of the underwear. maybe tomorrow. the eco book of essays made me feel stupid, but i'll try it again this weekend.

maybe craft night will get me all fired up. i'll go cobble together some shit.

gassin' it!

can you smell it? i was farty with beer hangover today; staci got crop-dusted by a stranger in the bookstore; and i ate popcorn tofu, red cabbage, and pinto beans. it's a gas-tasm!

i'm tired. i rode down to wheatsville, then we went to toy joy, rode up to half-price, rode to my house, rode to ut, then finally rode back to staci's. oof. now i'm entertaining fixed gear fantasies, although i think my strategy for stopping would be the same as for roller skating: find a wall.

the bike auction was a bust. the only cool bikes (like, two out of a zillion) were too expensive considering the amount of work that'll need to be done to them. it was pretty awesome watching (hopefully) normally rational humans get wound up about a bunch of shitty broken-ass bikes with flat tires, wonky wheels, frozen chains (some actually dragging on the ground), split seats, and fucked up paint jobs. one even looked like someone had haphazardly tried to remove the yellow bike paint before just slapping a sticker on it and calling it a day. the sky was gorgeous too. the roof of the parking garage was high enough so that no neighboring buildings towered over it, and the fuzzed out contrails only made the sky more blue. the sunset was okay, wedged between two buildings on the horizon.

staci and i discovered we have a common love of the three investigators, only she went even farther and had an all-girl three investigators that "solved" "crimes" in their neighborhood. i didn't have any friends in my neighborhood.

today's acquisitions: eco's foucault's pendulum and apocalypse postponed, the kite runner, mary poppins in the park, and hello mrs. piggle-wiggle. (all links are to the versions i bought.) yes, i agree that i'm having issues with my self-image as a reader right now. also, i only need one more to have all the mary poppins in this recent edition.


dan, there are zombie duckies at toy joy. i refuse to keep track of what you have any longer. joolie, i've found you a gift that i know you will promptly and joyfully regift.

wholly unfounded opinion no. 001

ATL is an awesome movie solely for the skating sequences, because just one totally beats anything in roll bounce. whirled peas out!

wholly unsubstantiated question no. 001

did goethe drink kostrizer? i guess i'll have to break in my ut library card so we'll know. it's in some beer book we have and also mentioned on some guy's myspace blog. how unreliable. the internets is useless.

mmm, beer. i want beer. i ate two slices of bread instead. i should stop procrastinating since the csi fest is over.

this is starting to sound like a roone post. um, go arsenal! go rangers red sox! airplanes! soccer! general complaining! i didn't get laid!

day one

with the advent of unemployment, i'm going to regale you daily with my whining about the boredom and loneliness, which will hopefully motivate me to keep busy instead.

i got up at eleven - that'll be the latest time i try to wake up this week. biked to the new barbershop, which is delightfully empty compared to the south one, dished and compared gossip updates, and then promptly sweated out the new haircut with a trip to the iga. since i was on my bike, i naturally purchased heavy canned and jarred (wha?) items. genius. at least the coffee was the most important selection, and prevents me from going to the coffee shop to waste time. i registered for unemployment and sent in the first payment request. i've planned to call time warner and bitch, figure out which one class i should take, and clean the apartment to fill out the rest of my day. reasonable, right?

i'd dick around more on the internet, but the computer can't seem to handle more than two tabs open, and if i browse with my usual ten or fifteen, it flips out and then i flip out and have to restrain from chucking it off the balcony. if i had a magic 8-ball, i would definitely see reformatting in the very near future. oh god, i'm boring. this must be what it's like to be my pets. geez. no wonder jennifer's place was always so clean.

maybe i'll try doing book reports. i really don't feel like sitting on hold with time warner. not like i'm not the gross douchebag who poops while on the phone. i usually resist. with friends.

i guess i'll get started on this horrorshow. today will also be day two of abstaining from alcohol. i might break it for free beer saturday at the grand opening for birds north. but only if you go too.

geez

do you miss geocities pages? i don't, and this site has a much more annoying design than they did.

so jealous

i would so ride to work if the city GAVE me a bike that i didn't have to worry about. damn you paris! you stole our "freedom" schtick too! you're supposed to call them french bikes! at least texas is bigger than france. *cries, curls up into fetal ball*

you can see the pictures on the velib flickr pool. i don't know how to stick a flickr picture in; i wasn't paying enough attention when dan explained.

this fucking rules

how the state legislative and executive branches spent their money in the first half of this year: link

the vaughn building has been on nearly every other one so far - i used to work in that vipers' nest, and harry whittington (shot in face) owns it. talk about a moldy p.o.s. inside, too.

inexplicable and unfortunately not brusque music reviews

the encroaching ravages of age invariably makes me more and more out of touch with the youth of today. thusly, i present my feeble attempts to stay culturally in the know.

the cribs - men's needs:
i attempted to listen to their other songs, and briefly skimmed the pitchfork review. meh. i'm not sure why i like this song, but i think the bass line sort of reminds me of severin's upside down ( i dunno why, as i haven't had a record player in a year and have no idea what the song sounds like any more, even though i probably wore out the groove on that side of the 7"). also, the vocals are sort of okay. the video is dumb and a little gross. the naked girl makes me think of the episode of the two coreys i watched the other day, where feldman's wife had some peta honcho over for dinner and she had red hair and kind of looked like this girl we'd see at fuzz club sometimes? i'm stupid. moving on...

i like trashy dance music that reeks of youthful twenty-somethings coked up and revamping 80's outfits, sweating to the future's oldies with $7 drinks clutched in the air while the cd dj "spins" his tunes. it follows that last year's mstrkrft street justice was a hit on my headphones, and that i am newly enamored of justice. you can wikipedia that shit, or you can suffer through a banal three-part swedish documentary in french with swedish subtitles and english with french subtitles or something, where anyone under the age of twenty-five thinks the paris club style sprang artemis-like from i dunno, the god of techno's head or something. whatever. *eyerolls*
if you get far enough, there's an interview with uffie, who is basically some sort of rich dumb party girl.

i got nothing. critique be damned, i'm going to get drunk and put on my dancing shoes.

no more slime in the ice machine

RIP Marvin Zindler: charismatic tv personality, sort-of neighbor, and republican donor

oh dear

i guess i'll have to buy this for someone before they get back.
yiffys and fashion are, improbably, even creepier when combined.

old

these pictures, i don't know. it is like a headache, one that you get at beauty bar when the dj sucks and the band sucks and you get two drinks at a time so that you won't have to wait thirty-five minutes in line for a while, and you go outside because it's too crowded inside, but the patio is crowded too, and you recognize people who were dressed perfectly normally five years ago, but have taken the greasy douche look to heart and there's nothing that makes me more twitchy and grossed out than necklaces partially obscured by chest hair. oh, and "old" people our age dressing as though they were twenty and lived in new york. like so: what will they wear next? better yet, when will they shower next?

for john

the third-rate emo band.

*cackles*

blech

all you guys' macro shots of bugs are gross. i want to make with the smushing. hence, the aggies' guide to identifying and killing them. although i think you'd all find the aggies' pictorial guide to bugs and some nature guy's separate galleries of texas bugs, lizards, beetles, spiders, moths, and caterpillars more helpful than me with a rolled-up newspaper.

p.s. i think the spider we saw at dylan's work was the silver argiope, the one we said was bigger than my hand.

yar and stuff

tonight is a night of bromance here at my house. the boy has a man-date from work over here, and they are both popping their homebrew cherries. i'm glad i've procrastinated today's post until now, for nothing glazes my eyes and sends me into a catatonic state more than talk of how to brew beer. i just want to drink it. i don't care where it comes from, whether it's free-range or brought up in a veal cage. the dog is being cute though. she keeps going in and out of the bedroom to see what he and his date are doing (and probably to smell his leg some more. how embarrassing (now "em-barr-assing" is going through my head much like ciara/rihanna/whoever's "um-ber-ella". great.)) i may run off to dan's if they start making out on the couch later.

anyway. today must be the day of the month when homeless old men lie around on the ground. i got off the bus this morning and there was a hobo (i like saying hobo, even though i know perfectly well none of them are going anywhere) lying in the middle of the crosswalk at 16th and guadalupe. his younger friend was sitting on the bus bench, holding both their bags. maybe it's cobra for hobo yoga? he kept getting up and falling down, gettin' uu-uu-uu-up. who'd fall in love with a hobo who's all fucked up? (sorry) i tried to walk away, but the old lady smokers at the atty gen's garage were all concerned, so i promised and followed through on telling the first state trooper (if they were dollars on the ground, i'd be rich!) about the magical collapsing hobo. sigh. the snake i saw on that walk a couple months ago was much more interesting, because it was the height of teenage chick season and all the birds (mostly sparrows) were flipping out and attacking and generally being a nuisance. the best part about that was a female grackle that followed it and hopped around, trailing it underneath a parked car and standing below the undercarriage, watching it as it went up into the transmission and (all the other bits i don't know) shit. anyway, two occasions make a day, as we went to walgreens on tEh way home and as we were leaving, a hobo clone kept trying to stand up on the wet sidewalk using his cane, by the entrance, and falling. i still feel the bay area has hardened me to the point where more than ten years later, i say fuck 'em, if i see a homeless person struggling. i agree that i'm a bad person, but you also have to at least concede that, because of reagan, there's no place to put them and many fewer resources with which to help them (and i will never choose to help anyone but the functional blind and deaf at most. i don't have compassion enough to birth myself a child, let alone help someone less abled figure out what the fuck's going on. that's my day-to-day struggle. sheee-it. and yes, my only therapist visit ever included as a humorous postscript a homeless guy asking me if i was born ugly or i made myself that way. thanks for asking. oh wait. you weren't asking me that at all. you're a homeless person who uses a word chart and your pointing finger to communicate and somehow you have an electric wheelchair and you're actually ASKING ME TO SIT ON YOUR LAP. i thought you needed something. fuck you. i can't believe someone who can't even leer verbally is creeping me out.) yeah, i have issues. and yes, differently-abled sex drives is one of them. NEW TOPIC.

oh gee. i'm drunk now. the mandate is married to a massage therapist, and they enjoy les baxter, etc. at home. my social interlude was musically deep...-ish. and i'm supposed to meet her now, eventually. insert socially appropriate grunt.

so anyway, i'm still at the point where i can't properly distill what i would like to use as a response to lord morgan, so you're going to get what i wanted to say days ago. um, tomorrow.

hi, i'm back from going out and drinking more and i don't know how to argue with an episcopalian seminary student (who is kind of drunk too) so i'm not going to. huh. i'll give you my talk later.

wheee!

well, since john is doing a relatively good job of updating frequently, i suppose i'll have to too. two.

i meant to bring you a quote from antoine de saint-exupery's book wind, sand and stars (or terre des hommes, if you espeaky french), but i'll share later. it seemed germane to some conversation i had this week. the book isn't too bad, memoir or no. imagine if roone actually logged a lot of hours in the heady young days of airplanes and wouldn't shut up about the majesty of flight, transcending gravity's chains, the physicality of becoming one with your machine and battling storms, etc. the english translation does a good job of imparting a similar stylistic sparseness to his voice, and off the bat you can immediately tell this is the man who wrote the little prince.

(since i've been browsing through this book, i've noticed there's a little nagging voice in the back of my head, asking me to elucidate why i prefer the desert-island-stranded- jimmy-corrigan to the little prince. i don't know. do you know?)

when he crashes in the sahara, he could have used a playa lake. even if it had been full of haterade, it would have still been something to drink.

also, i got all excited on the bus to work today (the rollercoaster's lowest point was when i initially got on and saw that not only was a passenger having a baseball conversation with the driver, but the crazy old bike-riding MR dude was on there) because i thought i saw a new wheatpaste style. then the intertubes told me, and i went to women and their work to check, that it was for some exhibit there. she's the one who does the latch-hook pornography rug things, if you've seen those at parts and labor. so boo. you will be able to identify these posters easily, as they look like a first-year art student's laborious copies of ugly cutesy posters they stole from a teachers' supply store. i'm sorry. i meant paraplegic first-year student. i'm probably being too harsh now.

my new weather theory is that whenever joolie has the day off, the weather behaves properly and the sun shines and the rain keeps to itself in some little alcove with a few issues of the new yorker for the day. ref. friday through today, for instance. good thing she has wednesday off.
also, i got a stupendous email today. the 84" gigaball is finally available online at target!



this would be so much fun. it's a drunken people hamster ball!

i've been halfheartedly trying to get through blackwater, ways of seeing, and jem. jem, well, i obviously need to post on miriam's journaling linky thing, but it's of that stilted sci fi style beast. the characters could be toppled with a sturdy tom clancy push, i'm having to wait too long for the plot pizazz to get started, etc. there is a danny interacting with a morrissey though. it could be promising if there's hot gay sex. (i doubt it.) blackwater is nice so far, because it appeases my conspiracy bent(?): there's gobs of sekrit money going to the republican party, the company was set up as a(n unholy) warriors' alliance between the theocons (both evangelical and hot-to-trot catholic) and navy SEALs, and shifty military-industrial complex shenaniganery with the requisite post-NEVEREVARevArEVEREVEREVERSHAKE A BABYFORGIT 9/11 terror paranoia. hooray! as an adjunct, i also have an article about SAIC from march's vanity fair to (re)pore over. such are the joys of a foil-hatted dilettante.
what else? friday i found i take a sick pleasure in trying on $200 jeans and pretending to the saleswoman that i would buy them, except for the painfully obvious fact that my body is nowhere near whatever shape they're cut to. i think perhaps most of them would be a tad long and big in the ass for kristy. i did see a $350 diane von furstenberg dress i would almost have bought. mostly i just wondered why i was smarter and better looking and poorer than everyone else in the upscale strip mall. apparently i miss living in houston more than i realize, if i'm getting my jollies from hanging out in the arboretum.
i finally have a couch! if you're not impressed, take into account that we've been using a twin mattress the boy has had for ten years (and that now has food stains on it) as a "sofa" since we moved in august. so i'm lazy and cheap. whatever. now i can trick you all into hanging out here, plying you with alcohol so that you'll really tell me what you think of me/my books/my tastes in music/my spurious "art"/my pets/my boy/my proofreading abilities/pretty much anything, as long as i get to spend time with you. so i'm needy. whatever.
i got nothing. the joolie told me i had to make a blog post, so i waited until i was drinky enough. i don't have rant material right now, and self-flagellation is TOTALLY boring to type out. go look at hers if you want to see interesting shit people did today.
p.s. roone and ARSEnal and flight simulators are totally boring, and if he talks about the bar, it's only interesting if he reports on what's going on with eric.
p.p.s. maybe i'll come up with a good rant soon.

amelia bedelia is a fucking MORON.

did you know paula danziger died nearly three years ago? i would become a wikipedia editor just to fix the "the cat ate my gymsuit" entry, only i can't bring myself to be that kind of person.
at any rate, this came up because i had an obscenely long conversation about "young adult/juvenile" authors with a friend, and i got to thinking... these writers had a lot more influence on the way i thought about myself at that age than anyone else ever could or did. hence, i give you shout-outs (and also here's to hoping i never become a librarian to kids at that age):
paula danziger, she of I CAN'T EAT PISTACHIOS WITHOUT THINKING OF the pistachio prescription ever. ever ever ever!
godddamnit, paul zindel is also dead. never again will there be books in which the teenage experience is more excruciating to live and relive, even more so than all john hughes movies condensed into one, than in any of his books. my darling, my hamburger? pardon me, you're stepping on my eyeball? i was honestly relieved that my teens weren't as bad as i had anticipated after his books.
well, jerry spinelli's not dead. Who put that hair in my toothbrush? was always a favorite, although the reviews on amazon are creeping me the fuck out. stop being YUCK, amazon-people! you can get all fetish-weird, just stay away from my all-books-are-nostalgic-and-sacred area. geez. I'M TALKING TO YOU, MISS "When I was 14, my boyfriend read parts of it to me first period every tuesday morning while we cuddled." CUDDLED? WERE YOU SLEEPING AROUND IN EIGHTH GRADE? and you, mr. "as a wonderful surprise, my wife got the book-on-tape for our long drive out of state. She never read it before, but she loved it. Even though she is now 29 yrs old." you know what? that was four years ago and ha ha, i'm younger than her. and at this point, i'm just going to say you're probably both ugly, too. because i'm an asshole.
lois lowry. i think i remember liking all of them, but you'll have to wait until i reread the anastasia books.

do you remember when this came out? i do. a little late in the game, but it was super hot-as-fuck when you're twelve and there's a main character who's attractive and unapproachable, like every single guy you see when you're a shy kid.
i dunno. here, let's dial the way-back machine a little farther.
i give you (a shitty copy of a picture)....

patricia coombs' series about 'dorrie the little witch' is awesome. there's something about the watercoloring, the adult ineptitude, the socks, and the cat, which just make it a lot more meaningful to me than the moralistic "mrs. piggle-wiggle" tales, even though i did want to live in an upside-down house very, very badly.
i wanted to tell you about one more book, but i've always had a hard time finding it. i would have to read all the titles in the JF/YA section before it rang a bell. it was set in eastern europe, during the crusades, and followed a guy who had that werewolf-ish disease of scarring and hairyness (sp?durrr) and um, whatnot. see? suggestions, anyone? i'm probably the same only kid who also read these weird ladybug editions of nursery rhymes and stuff, but there was one or a series about these siblings who went on adventures, and they wore those weird dorky eighties sandals in the pictures. fuck. i'll never find anyone who saw those.

whatever you decide to do

i still like work, although it's wearing me out. last night i went to a UT english dept. party at a professor's (okay, a professors' house.) why are all the adorable, financially successful and more-monogamous gay men already TAKEN? *sigh* anyway, it helped me come to the conclusion that i am very possibly not neurotic enough to get a graduate degree in english. that's fine. if i were ever to spend the money, it really should be of more lasting benefit to humanity than that. the conversations way above my head were awesome, but were negated by the neurotic drunk irish-catholic (someone besides roddy doyle ought to inflate this stereotype to woody allen levels), and the base and distracting sidebars about law and order and battlestar galactica. HONESTLY, people. sheesh.
i had an awesome "urban" dream last night that involved me running a bar and a miniature didonato family (as in MLP size) and armored school buses and police helicopters that had blade diameters longer than the buses. it also had LOTS and lots of bad-ass gangs and vestiges of sxsw horridness. can you get ptsd from sxsw?
i need to get coffee before my favorite person in the world picks me up. you should listen to 'jolene' right now.

work is just dandy. i don't have anything else to do (except for procrastinating some horrible ab workout), so let me introduce you to my profile on librarything. that's what i'm doing. it's the tool i've always wanted. yes, the tool for the tool, whatever. just keep in mind that these books are being added in the order from the shelf whence they came, and the soundtrack to the additions are mstrkrft "the looks" and abba "gold", so far.
also, i really ought to pick up the chicago manual of style soon. and two of the three philip pullmans are on loan.

you gotta play tough my love

hello world!

this is a new beginning - no migration or linking, thanks.