being inappropriately glamourous at the coffee shop

jon is on vacation this week, which means i actually leave work after eight hours, and get to do fun stuff like sit on the patio at caribou coffee on grand avenue using FIVE separate apple devices between us.  we used our iPhones as our tile racks for the scrabble "board" on the iPad, and he has his iBook, and i have my MacBook.  i even brought my old 3G iPhone in case anyone happens by who would like to join us in scrabble.  or, rather, join me in a game, as jon is too disgusted by his devastating defeat at my hands with my Q, J, K, and Z to his As, Is, and Ns to be able to continue playing.

anyway, i sure am having a good time.  there are at least two pairs of women who are sponsor and sponsee meeting to share experience, and the pairs are within ten feet (easy earshot), and it is really rather bizarre.

sunday stealing

oh, yes, and now i shall meme.  questions from the sunday stealing blog.  i need to learn more html so i can format these better, but for now, this will do.

1. What curse word do you use the most?
probably "fuck," but only because it can be used in various forms as virtually every part of speech and has numerous senses of meaning.


2. Do you own an iPod?
yes, i have an iPod touch, but i rarely use it because i have an iPad and an iPhone that i use for portable audio.


3. What person do you talk to on the phone the most?
oh, probably my mom.  i don't talk on the phone much.  i'm a texter.


4. Do you still remember the first person you kissed?
yes.  mike carter in sixth grade.


5. Do you remember where you were on 11/9/01?
yes, vividly, as it was my thirtieth birthday. though i think this question was written with the european convention of day/month/year and refers to september 11th, 2001 rather than november 9th, 2001.


on november 9th, i was at a joint 30th (me) and 40th (my friend bruce) birthday party at my former friend julie's house here in lovely st. paul, minnesota.  my parents came to town and we had a cake with images of my and bruce's faces rendered in icing, and we both looked like we were black.  (we are both white.)  it was a really fun party.  i had (and still have) wonderful friends and they were all there.  some shitty friends were there, too, and i enjoyed chatting with them as well.


on september 11th, i was working at caribou coffee on grand avenue, and we were getting news reports filtered in from customers about what was happening at the world trade center.  we turned off the programmed muzak coffee house blend after the second tower was hit in favor of the news on mpr.  the thing i remember most about it was a conversation with a woman i secretly disliked strongly because she was cooler than me (according to my faulty self-perception at the time).  that and a customer who looked like kris kristofferson, and is actually played by kris kristofferson in my memory, coming in in the middle of the extra-hectic and confusing rush shouting something about the second tower going down.


6. What was the last movie you watched?
beetlejuice.  i watched it today on tv.


7. Has anyone ever called you lazy?
probably.  i have called myself lazy, but at those times, "depressed" or "unmotivated" would have been more accurate.


8. Do you ever take medication to help you fall asleep?
yes.  usually benadryl, sometimes ambien.  my sleep is sort of sensitive to stress, and i almost always have terrible insomnia thursday nights because i work too much.  ambien is good as far as a more serious drug than benadryl because its half-life is a few hours so i can take it even if i have to be awake for work in four hours.


9. Has anyone told you a secret this week?
ummm, well, my clients have shared things that are private and deeply personal with me, but i don't know if that counts as a secret.  i gossipped with my friend kate, and though those weren't specifically secrets, i certainly wouldn't want anyone else knowing how judgemental i can be when i let my hair down, as the saying goes.  so probably not in the classic sense of telling a secret.



10. What is the first thing you notice about the opposite sex?
it depends on the person.  when i was single i probably focused on signals of the person's availability/interest and his intelligence, but now i just notice what's the most noticeable thing, like eye contact, social skills, and ability to process ideas and respond quickly.



11. What are you looking forward to?
work tomorrow.  i love my job.



12. Do you own any band t-shirts?
yes.  some sicbay shirts are probably still hanging around, and i know i have an old pike sweatshirt.  i'm sure there are several others but i don't know which ones.


13. What will you be doing in one hour?
reading in bed or sleeping.


14. Is anyone in love with you?
yes.  jon is madly, deeply, head over heels crazy in love with me.  


15. Last time you cried?
i cried today when i was scrolling through some friends' pictures on facebook from this weekend's pride parade and festival.  i cried because i was so moved by the undaunted activism of my LGBT friends in the face of such ugly hatred and institutional homophobia.  the sheer joy and delight and celebration on the faces in those pictures is an amazing sight to behold considering that they are told daily, "you are bad and wrong, and you may not love who you love."


16. Are you on a desktop computer or a laptop?
laptop, baby.  macbook all the way.



17. Are you currently wanting any piercings or tattoos?
no new ones.  i still need to have my gigantic back piece finished.


18. Would you ever date anyone covered in tattoos?
no, because i would never date anyone other than jon, and he is not covered in tattoos.  but i have dated plenty of elaborately-illustrated people, so tattoos were never a deterrent.


19. What were you doing before this?
reading my friend heather's blog.


20. When is the last time you slept on the floor?
well, i slept on an airbed on the floor at my parents' house last christmas.  if that doesn't count, i have no idea.


21. How many hours of sleep do you need to function?
i can function for a day on four, but only for one day.  i manage on about six most of the week, and on weekends sleep about ten to twelve to make up for it.  ideally i would get eight or nine a night.


22. Do you eat breakfast daily?
no.  i don't eat breakfast ever.  unless diet coke and cigarettes count as breakfast, in which case, yes, daily.

what's wrong with this picture?

i think this is hilarious.  in this picture, you're like, why does that hand on jon's face look all fucked up and weird?

and then you see this picture, and you're like, oh, because it's a foot!

isn't jon cool for letting me ply his face with my weird monkey feet?

i'm kind of amazed

that i like alec baldwin better as a megalomaniacal old fatcat:






than i do alec baldwin as a recently-deceased ingenue:





i'm watching beetlejuice.  it's pretty good.  plus it gives me occasion to goad jon into telling me early nineties minneapolis winona-ryder-is-such-a-bitch stories.  i still like her.  we're the same age, and i had that same charming combination of self-centeredness, naïveté, grandiosity, low self-esteem, and fucking guitar players in the early nineties too.  i did stop the rich girl shoplifting thing way before she did, though.

oh, god, i can't do this

i'm going to be a terrible blogger.  i hate what i write.  what i've written so far is stupid and not "me" somehow.  why is this different from the very blog-like notes i write on facebook?  this seems so much more vulnerable.  on facebook, i "share," but on this blog it feels more like i've told everyone at the party to sit down and stop talking because i'm going to tell a story.

it's like writing it in a blog post carries some implicit claim that it is worth reading, and i should carefully craft each piece to make sure it is aesthetically valuable.  this is why i can't call myself a writer.  motherfuck.

you know what?  i'm going to push on.  this isn't the paris fucking review.  it is a blog, a web log.  and a log is just a record.  if someone comes and reads and thinks it sucks, he or she can just not read it again.  i want to use this thing for me.   it's partially about writing, and partially about establishing an online place to interact with others that isn't facebook.  i believe facebook has totally made my life richer and more thoughtful, and deepened and change many of my relationships in significant ways.  i do, however, have some serious concerns about facebook's data privacy practices and zuckerberg's cavalier attitude and machiavellian sensibility around users' information.  SO, i'd like to find some sort of social networking methadone as i consider cutting down, and i'm starting here.

here's my statement of intention:  it's just for whatever i want, it can be a series of responses to question memes, reposting of facebook notes, status-update-like posts of whatever ideas drift through the transom of my mind, too much information about my gastrointestinal or reproductive health, or pictures of my cats.  i will stay the course!

"pussies, and dicks, and people fuckin' and all..."

when i was in the fourth grade, i had a friend named mary nell.  she just tracked me down and friended me on facebook, and i am blown away in that way that we all are when small worlds' orbits intersect in that bizarre universe.  anyway, i have a funny story involving mary nell that i like to tell from time to time.

one weekend mary nell spent the night at my house, and we probably did usual kid stuff.  the next day, we hung out with my friend and neighbor, whitney, and one of things whitney and i liked to do was snoop through her older brother tim's room and check out his porno mags.  he would have been in seventh grade. whitney and tim and i talked about sex-related stuff in a kid way-- like jokes involving dicks and periods and pubic hair.  innocent and more interested in being gross than anything actually sexy.  but i guess i was fairly savvy about sex for a fourth grader-- i don't really know, and at the time i assumed my store of forbidden knowledge was similar to that of my peers.  and i think mary nell probably had been exposed to much less information about sex than we had at that point.

anyway, whitney and i showed tim's magazines (hustler, beaver, and oui, if memory serves) to mary nell, and sort of pointed out and explained the various parts and activities on display, to the point that we understood them.  she didn't seem surprised or confused or anything more than curious in the same way we were.  so then we finished that and did other kid stuff like playing in the creek behind our houses and riding bikes.

later in the afternoon, the three of us piled into the family van when it was time for my dad to take mary nell home.  as we were pulling out of the driveway, my dad asked us if we'd being having fun and what we'd done that day.  mary nell piped right up and said, "oh, we had lots of fun.  we went over to whitney's and looked at magazines and they had had pictures of pussies, and dicks, and people fuckin' and all."

whitney and i looked at each other, absolutely mortified.  we had assumed mary nell knew what we were doing was something that parents would not think was cool, and could lead to an earnest talking-to or punishment.  my dad responded just as though she'd told him about the crawdads we'd caught in the creek.  i don't think he even said a word-- just a look like, "oh, huh, interesting," and drove on.  and he never said a word about it later, either.

am i going to try blogging?

i guess i am. i'm just going to keep this blog instead of starting a new one because it's easier. but those first two posts, from 2005 and 2008, probably won't be consistent with any ongoing theme. actually, i doubt there will be any sort of unifying theme, so never mind.

but anyway, welcome to my new blog. i came here because i want to tell a story about my friend mary nell from fourth grade. which i will now write in another post.