badgerbag: messy, surly, full of books

feelin' uneasy

I'm looking forward to tonight's party but a little exhausted from the trip to the Xplorat0rium -- which was a total blast. We met up with Dr. Bit.

It was sunny and nice when we got there but hailing when we drove off.

I can't stop thinking today about the uncertainty to do with school and what I'll be doing. What if professor F. read my paper and hated it so intensely she doesn't want me for her student and won't pull for me anymore? What if I just get it back in the mail or get a terse email about how she expected better from me and she's disillusioned with my scholarliness? I've been coasting most of the time on "whatever happens, happens for the best and I'l'l cope" but there are moments of terrible unease and near-panic.

Also thinking suddenly very intensely about identity and anonymity (the extremely thin anonymity of this blog is only one aspect... when I publish stuff, what to publish it under? When I write an author bio, depending on context, what do I include? The old zines? Sleazy things? "respectable" things? ) i am in principle against my being closeted about anything. And it feels like pointless lying because it will all end up being connected or coming out anyway. I'm not aiming to be a super respectable academic so it's not like I'll be fucking that up. It's just the thought of upsetting my parents and their extended family or friends that bothers me. By now I just wish they could go "Oh well, that's my weird daughter, it's her life" in the same way they got to a point of putting photos of me and M. with funny-colored mohawks on their desks at work.

I look at other people's novels and short stories and wild poems that are web searchable and think about this a lot. THEY deal with it don't they? You think kathy 4cker's great-aunt gave her mom shit for her novels? Or was it all just politely ignored and glossed? For fucks sake sometimes it feels like people's families have an easier time sweeping their alcoholic wife-beating family members under the rug than they do their slightly transgressive writers and thinkers. Or possibly I'm just overly paranoid and no one in my family will give a flying fuck about anything I do.

I saw a funny letter somewhere lately that schopenhauer's mom wrote to him about how intolerably obnoxious he was. i'll link to it later.

I'll talk more about this but for now... feeding, bathing Moomin and a quick pre-party nap for the Badger!!!

off!

we're off to the Xplorat0rium!

woooo! It's sunny out!

me in the mall

I forgot to tell about the part where I was waiting to get into the dressing room with an armload of completely whorish thong undies. I am scruffy looking today and was in a nasty sweatshirt that I slept in and some green carpenter pants that are 2 sizes too big and my pink furry boots with pompoms and my gnarly hair unbrushed, unwashed since yesterday's gelling-up.

Now you can picture me looking very skanky with this bunch of lacy seethrough things over my arm... and the whored-up anorexic V.S. saleswoman with spike heels on (why?!) and a, oh, more than a ton, let's say a cubic hectacre of makeup smeared over her face. And right when these 2 other very gorgeous expensive skinny-assed big-boobed playboy bunny-looking girls walked up next to me with a lot of pushup bras to ask a question, I sneezed really hard, which made me fart, but I was totally crowded into a corner and could not swiftly flee the scene of the crime. Overcome with horror and stench... I just had to stand there and try not to start laughing...

Later driving away I remembered it and started laughing for real thinking that I would blog the incident... petrifying... trapped in my own fart, right next to the popular cheerleaders!

flashback!

Oh, the cheap, tawdry, glory of the crap I just bought with my m4cys and vickwhoria's secret gift cards...! And the things I tried on... V.S. was especially full of rhinestone-studded thongs with little dangly things like pieces of insane chandeliers. Ass-crack chandeliers.... I resisted those actually but now I kind of wish I had gotten one. They were TACKY. Some of them were on sale and some were like 25 bucks. One could take a regular thong and sew a dangly earring onto it and achieve much the same effect.

The un-padded pushup demi bras were good... I seem to have gone down a bra size since pre-pregnancy. Am now 34 B... just fyi...

m4cys underwear dept. is full of crazy bargain racks with scary pink sheer things with marabou feather trim. They might be peignoirs. In english I think we just call them "slutty things".

I was going to save the m4cy's card for what would amount to a deep discount on leather pants or a fancy dress, but instead just now frittered it away on sparkly things and ridiculous underwear...

I was wishing that I had some of the really slutty clothes that my aunt handed down to me in high school... my mom threw them away... that one horrid dress that was obviously really expensive but looked like torn up slutty safari-esque rags... like something br00ke shields would have worn in that one movie about being castaway on the tropical island. Alas, that garment is gone, but my stupid highschoolish taste in clothes is not.

yummy! and baby dodgeball

I'm the last nerd on earth to know this, but Firefly is awesome and incredible and I am now obsessed after watching the pilot and the first episode. J. sent it to Rook... He sends the best stuff! OMG I don't think I ever give him comparably excellent presents. It's impossible.

We watched it last night with Chula, who thrills me with her ability to translate most of the chinese swears. Earlier she played with Moomin while I watched Peanut for a little while.

Peanut really, really likes a medium-sized playground bouncyball. The sort of ball you'd play dodgeball with in a more barbaric age, but smaller. She almost crawled after it, many many times! She's so close to figuring out crawling! But as I watched her trip out heavily on how the ball rolled around--it goes away! Moomin rolls it back! she whacks it and it gets smaller again and then can't be reached! that means it went away again and Auntie Badger sends it back into the lap of the Peanut! I thought surly crusty old-person thoughts about the sort of electronic toy that doesn't make any sense or teach you anythnig. We make fun of them as "rave trip toys"... you whack it or hit a button and a random sound and flashing light happens. There is no logic to it. You learn nothing about cause and effect. Okay, I realize I'm talking out my ass here as when a baby is cranky I'd do anything to shut it up and if the random flashing lights hypnotize it or make it happily flail its arms and legs around, I have no objection... but.... A rolling ball is just as unpredictable to an infant who has just recently learned to sit up, and yet the rolling ball becomes gradually more predictable because it teaches physics... Just like dropping all the toys outt of your crib teaches you physics and yelling for your parent to pick them up teaches you psychology.

Moomin was v. helpful with the charming little Nutmeg as he played rolly-ball, leaped around to entertain her, and picked up her sticky banana spoon over and over as she flung it under the table. He is buying the line I feed him that "Peanut wishes she could walk around like you" and struts about proudly displaying his big-kid skills. (instead of sulking or competing for my attention)

Peanut v. cute like some sort of perfect roly-poly baby advertisement... and yet as I became covered with sticky banana I was filled with revulsion and impatient weariness, and wished I could eat my dinner with 2 hands. In short she is fun, but I am immensely relieved to think that I can avoid going through all that again. Especially I was glad later as I peacefully slept through the night. Sleep! It's so wonderful!

It looks like the Pilot and I will trade off some childcare this coming semester! I will take Peanut Thurs. mornings. This works out great as I can just walk her over to bad-moms coffee if we keep it on that day! and she will then watch Moomin Thurs. afternoon till Rook gets home.

a slight good randomness to the day

It wasn't on purpose that I looked extra butch today when I visited Rook at work and met his boss and all his co-workers. It just so happened that I had freshly shaved my head and gelled back the top part of my fauxhawk, because I'm growing out the back and it sticks up funny... so it either needs to be spiked up or slicked down. Nevermind that i looked extra dorky with my pants falling off me and headphone wires tangled up with my wallet chain. The boss of Rook gave me an extra special weird smile like "This explains a lot..." but I could not tell what conclusion he was drawing or what suspicion was confirmed.

Moomin requested some exciting fun, so rather than bring him home to the same old playground I tried the downtown xmas tree festival thing. It was not really exciting fun- just some dumb trees and animatronic crapola... the best part of it was the quetzalcoatl statue. Moomin is a genius art critic as he took one look at it and started laughing hysterically so hard he was falling down, hanging precariously by my hand and sort of twirling in that annoying little-kid-helpless-hangy-way. "San José is silly. They have a statue that looks like a giant pile of poop!" I didn't even have to prompt him. As we got closer he then said, "It is a very silly statue of a dragon coild up that looks like a pile of poop!" He's so right!

Also, I didn't have a jacket for him so he got to wear my jacket and I froze. So we spent 16 bucks to go to the tech museum, which was suckily crowded. Full of total fuckwad adults who shove past small children in their eagerness to put their face on the bug puppet or make a shadow picture with the butterfly screen... god! nassssty. also after me and moomin waited in line for a million years to spell his name with the robot arm and the blocks, some asshole teenagers shoved in and I had to tell them off. We spent a lot of time at the tinkertoy build a machine sensor feed-the-fish thing.

other than that... my day... some spanish-workbooking... I got my teeth cleaned and my glasses fixed...

I ate lunch at an awesome korean place called "Totoro" in downtown Mountainview - I highly recommend it. For $8.95 I got a giant clay pot of perfect tofu-mushroom soup with fancy mushrooms, a raw egg to crack into the clay pot (which was still boiling several minutes after it came to the table) a hefty amount of kimchi, garlic sprouts, and vinegary cucumbers. YUM. When the waitress whipped out the little dish with the raw egg I started grinning madly as that seemed like a good sign for authenticity and weirdness instead of the grody fake korean food you get sometimes as fast food... and YES. it was totally delicious... Tantalizingly, there was almost wireless, but not quite. If I had a usb antenna extendy-thingie...

Basically i had like 1 hour to myself in the morning between 10 and 11 and then had to do dishes, laundry, shower, and go to the dentist. It was not quite my dream of working hard for hours and hours but actually will tide me over nicely... If I send out poetry submissions tomorrow I will be doing okay.

the wrong choices

I liked this short essay from Suzette Haden Elgin's blog this morning:

Over and over again, instead of choosing what I knew perfectly well that I ought to do, I chose an alternative that was easier for me, or safer for me; over and over again, I chose for my own comfort. I did what I wanted to do instead of what I knew I should do. I did a lot of skillful rationalizing, but I knew what I was doing. And every single time I did that, I was making my own small contribution to the vast global web of circumstances that has brought us to the current situation.

in common

We just were watching The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love -- as Rook is still wading through druidsquirrel's giant stack of lesbian movie classics -- and I realized it had the same ending scene as Fucking Amal - the 2 having to come out of a squalid room with a howling mob outside...

Which makes it seem much less about individual lesbian experience and more about the gay rights movement and visibility of queerness.

Fucking Amal was about a million times better of a movie. But 2 girls in love, though so cartoony, laid things out more explicitly and had an interesting violent edge -- the parents all howling "I'm going to kill you!" not meaning really kill them -- but then the scary married guy really threatening to kill them because they were a danger to (his) marriage. "Amal" didn't have that threat.

Anyway. It's a perfect example of how context deepens your understanding of the value and meaning of a work. When I saw that scene in Amal, I was mostly thinking about "coming out" as an individual experience. I was thinking about myself in high school and comparing experiences. That it showed up in both movies made me rethink the scene and realize that it's also about a general social change and cultural visibility on the macro scale. I am sure any real queer-theory-reading person will roll their eyes at my slowness!

workylicious

I'm so odd. I was feeling really low earlier today. Working on some dumb spanish workbooks made me feel so relieved, like time isn't just sliding away without my doing something to make progress...

Progress! Strange!

If I don't pressure myself... no one else is going to.

(Depressingly... McCoot is back in town. I don't want to work for him really and I think he can tell I am way less tolerant of his longing to be social and talk about politics and lesbian love. If I get into Bezerkeley, I'll quit. Hell maybe I'll just quit anyway. Typing medical transcripts was way less stressful, and paid the same, if I get to where I feel like I need to pull in some cash.)

And Rook will take Moomin tomorrow for the morning and early afternoon, to work, so I can do some translating, more workbook stuff, or whatever, and go to the dentist alone this time.

Much better!

what can I say

People die all over the place every second. But I still can't stop thinking about the tsunami. I watched the video from in the restaurant by that norwegian guy a couple of times. The way the water just kept coming. Even a small wave is so very strong.... nightmarish. I had a cartoonish mental image of a giant wave about to break towering overhead, but that's not how it is... instead, that fast implacable rising water turning to waterfalls.

I napped, played with Moomin, laid around feeling strangely cruddy but not really all the way sick, either. My hands hurt a lot from the rain I guess, and I just didn't want to do much of anything.

Maybe tomorrow I'll drink a ton of coffee, make myself go out... I wanted to get so many things done but it hasn't been happening. I could be working through some spanish workbooks and doing some translations even if I'm uninspired and low-energy like I was today... we'll see, tomorrow.

Resikto in the magic desert

"Those are my Royal space cats," says Moomin. He is perched on a large yellow pillow that is his golden throne. "I think they just went out for a spacewalk."

We are on our way, in dinosaur hats and viking helmets, to the magic desert in a movie called "Return of the Magic Sword". Moomin is driving the rocketship and the game. I mostly nod and agree.

"Guards!" Moomin yells commandingly. "Bring my huge rocket giant puller-upper-machine! And pull up the sword from where it is stuck in the sand! Vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrooom. Thanks!"

I wonder why my pretend-man-king's-friend name is always "Resikto"? Is there some character named that? Reesicktoe?

"They've got our friend! The bad guys from the place with the Red Walls has got our friends and they put him in the Red Walls! Take your sword, and I'll take my flag lance! That giant tiger is friendly. Don't worry! That is my bad brother who is a bad guy and my friend is stuck in the Red Wall." *noise of radio static, hand to fake helmet-radio* "Oh, my dragons are calling me. What is it, dragons?" "We are killing your bad brother in space and we've almost got him." "Good. Keep going." *static noise again*

***
He talks often about the guy who is stuck in the Red Wall and I have only just now figured out what that's about. We have a plastic fake old-fashioned camera which he just handed me so that I could look through it and see the guy stuck in the red wall.... I always thought that camera was just clear wtih a button, but if you push the button you see a creepy ghostly hologram of a guy spring up seen through a red filter. He looks like a super-gay Han Solo stuck in the carbonite! Ew! So that's who Moomin is always rescuing!

another example

I meant to go get a Brazilian wax today but then flaked out. I must do it tomorrow morning or it won't be calmed down in time for the New Years' Party!

This brought to mind another example of reanalysis: the "boyzilian" or "boykini" wax. Now, this one is not a mistake, it's a deliberate pun. But you could imagine future misunderstandings and mis-dissections of the word so that "zilian" came to mean "getting something waxed" and you could affix the names of body parts to it so that getting your toes waxed would be, um, getting a digizilian, or dedozilian in this neighborhood since it's said "el wáxing" or "el bikini-waxing" or "un brazílian " Or, if you were waxing a hairy hippopotamus at the zoo, it could be a hippozilian. My question is, does the original deliberate pun-word have a special name in linguisitcs?

And is boyzilian a new word from this year, coined in SF by some clever waxer in the Castro and picked up quickly by others? If it weren't recent, it would have more than the 100 hits it has right now.

Fear me, for I have twisted the innocent historical linguistics books around so that they're a fun pedantic segueway to blog about my coochie and its marvellous adventures!

smug little bits of information

Tucked securely away in my sloggy getting-a-cold brain: The prefix "mini" is a newly available building block in English, from the 1960s when someone figured that from the word "minimum" and "miniature" it must mean small (what does it mean? must look it up). They coined the word "miniskirt." Now we blithely affix mini- to whatever we please; this process is called reanalysis. The catachrestic moment of misunderstanding, mis-reverse-engineering the word minimum, created this cool useful piece of language. At least that's how I see it!

"Catachrestic" has been my favorite new fun word for over a year now, along with "haplography" which I have now encountered in a new form in this fabulous book (haplology, which is when the language evolves to drop a syllable from a word that has nearly identical syllables). I've probably said this before but which would you rather, hear me drivel on about how my throat is scratchy, or go into excited pedant mode over the one paragraph from the Historical Linguistics book that I might remember?

If you are especially lucky you will catch me 2 years from now whipping out this useless factoid about miniskirts at a party and grinning smugly as if I am particularly fascinating and know a lot about linguistics, and you can make fun of how I don't remember anything else from that one really good book by what's his name.

I wish I could remember all the terms... if I had read this book before I was 15, I would have effortlessly memorized them all and would still know them now. It took no effort then and the space in my brain was hungry (starving) and infinite.

If I get into Berserkely I'm going to have to really work to learn icelandic or latin... or something... But this sort of book fires me up to want to work. Imagine the fun I could have translating some knotty little poem from old norse... I could find some flyting which is the improvisational duels... and write the paper I'd like to write about the Fl0rentino duel-poem and flyting and doing the dozens.

p.s. My throat is all scratchy. fuck!!!

curses upon the fiend

Curses upon the fiend who stole my camera. Moomin is wearing the viking helmet and holding an enormous wooden shield that is almost as tall as he is, and is holding a sword on high. The other sword (very hobbit-sized) is sheathed down the back of the neck of his shirt.

A fine lazy day.

the rules of Rs

A mystery explained -- why my relatives drop "r" sometimes and sometimes add it.

This particular N3w England accent is non-rhotic and the rule is that you don't pronounce an R unless it comes before a vowel. So car = Cah or /ca:/ . and dark = Dahk. And if there are two vowels together then you insert an R. ("Cuba", but "going to Cuba and..." turns to "going to Cubar and"... "idea" but "the idea is..." turns to "the idear is". "non-rhotic accents have extended the linking r to cases in which no r was historically present..."

It's nice to know that it all makes sense and is systematic.

hilarity in the bunk bed!

Woot! I'm off the hook for a few hours as Moomin's friend Spam is over for a visit. I only had to make about 10 phone calls to find a kid who could come over to play.

"What if my bunk bed was too close to the ceiling and I would be squashed?" Spam announced loudly.
"hahahahah! And every night you would get smaller and smaller!"
"Hahahah! Squashed! You know what? Santa Claus is not a real guy."
"I know. But sometimes he is. Because I saw him in a toy store and he was a real guy."
"I know. But he isn't really."
"Yeah right. Because he has a costume!"
"Spiderman is a real guy in a movie too."
"I have a hamtaro dressed in a costume of a witch. "
"I saw spiderman 1 AND spiderman 2." (random boast)
"Oh yeah? Well _I_ saw Star Wars." (strong counterboast) *** "My guy is flying over to the castle." "My turtle is an amazon warrior and he is a hero." "Is that from Star Wars?" "No, it's not from anything. It's just from me."

*sigh* this is great. I'm going to eat chocolates while reading about labial fricatives and degramination.

wave speed

I'm still not getting it how the earthquake is felt through the earth a couple of hours before the tidal wave comes. the waves go at like 600 mph right? how fast do earthquake waves propagate through the earth?

parties parties parties!

It's been a few days of doing almost nothing but going out to parties.... our own wh1te elephant one, the xmas carol party, Chefily's, Nolly's, Whump's and then Genet's.

All good for different things; raucous or quiet, flirty or cosy. Good food or sketchy. Underwear flashing sort of party, or definitely not. all kinds of parties!

Yesterday I took Moomin to the McD's indoor playground, one of those habitrail things. He was full of boasting in the car of how he would ask kids what is your name and do you want to play. When we go there he went up to the very top and scrabbled around for nearly an hour often pretending in a little cornerr to be driving a spaceship. He knows how to say what's your name and let's play in spanish, but got shy about it... then when some english-speaking kids showed up, he was firmly in shy solo mode. At least he ran around and got some exercise.. I might be reduced to going there again, or the squalid Polo Alto kid's "museum" since it's raining like crazy here.

At whump's yesterday I played a railroad-building game. Can't remember the name of it. And could hardly tear myself away from JL and MA who are nerdy, fun, and sweet! They described how every year for xmas one of them makes the other one a very fancy multi-course dinner. When I say "very fancy" I mean it. It was impressive! "then, a wild mushroom puree with creme fraiche... a terrine of somethingorother... a salad with somethingelse and foie gras.. lemon granita to cleanse the palate and then the parchment-wrapped sole..." Heh!!! Then we couldn't stop talking about books. They will both be in the M0by D1ck group. (They also totally endeared themselves to me by properly admiring and paying attention to Moomin.) May i just say once more for the record that whump really knows how to throw a party and he is a fabulous host! A skill not everyone has.

I left Moomin and Rook and drove off to Genet's party. I had never met her, but she is my "ex"girlfriend Dot's co-author and publisher and also published one of Chula's books. And is now living with a housemate who I knew from the l3ather faeries 15 years ago. It was a nice party but sort of overwhelmed by society of J4nus people for my taste.... they have a very different style or ethic or something. Anyway, on the way over there I got completely lost as the directions said 24/580 and I kept going on 24 nearly going through the tunnel! ack! then, lost up near the Claremont Hotel which oddly we were just "at" in our Buffy game last week for the pretend technopagan conference. I greeted it with the recognition one should give to places one has pretended to be for hours and hours in a dorky role playing game.

More being lost... lots of dark winding streets in the intense rain... ugh! No cell phone, as it was stolen with my backpack... 2 gas stations misdirected me. Finally i found the place on a map and got there. OMG but Chula had left her purse on the bus and was unnerved and upset... I hope she finds it!

Since I lost my own bag last week I hope I was properly sympathetic. I am going to check the lost and found at the grocery one more time today and then give it up for lost and buy a new phone.

Dot and Chula had not really met either... sort of... but now Dot was like "Oh! so THIS is badger's new girlfriend " and giving me funny looks as if she saw right through me in some slightly uncomfortable way that I was not able to see myself in. But nice benevolent looks of general approval and "aren't you rather sweet together". I think later I will be in for the "I approve of your new girlfriend" speech and many questions! As is possibly the lesbonic way everywhere...?! We accidentally wore matching outfits -- I was in my same red and black legwarmery gogo-boot outfit with a black pleated miniskirt... she was in red stripey armwarmers and tights also in black pleated mini. hahahaa. dorks!

quake

Here's the link for the usgs quake info.

matching presents

Which present should I dress up to match?

The minipod?
The go-go boots?
The historical linguistics book, which could be my party-hard accessory for today's partyhopping?

Perhaps I will try to match my underwear to the book. It shall be our bloggy little secret.

phew

I'm not a very good burglar! Last night I couldn't get into Spanglemonkey's house with the key, which seemed to fit the lock but wouldn't turn. Should I go around to the dark, dark, spooky back of the house and try all the windows and the back door lock and have the neighbors shoot at me and call the cops? Why didn't I feed them earlier than 10:30 at night? Oh, misery. Cats unfed and unpetted on Christmas!

This morning I tried all the windows and took off a screen (ugh, sorry) while cursing Jo's diligent window-locking. Furtive chair-standing and tenative screwdriver/crowbarring... No. Not unless I"m going to completely destroy a windowsill. No, no, no. Finally... the key for the Nth time... it fits one back door lock but not the deadbolt... the front... well, before I break a window I could try THE PLIERS. Will the key break off in the lock!?

With my new plier-grip robot lobster claw superpowers I managed to get inside. Go, me!

The cats still had plenty of food and water. Milton is a very good cat. Betsy came out from under the bed with a lot of coaxing.

*giant sigh of relief*

yay for books

The Historical Linguistics book is wonderfully fun and entertaining! I get back into the groove of middle english easily and could read most of the old english examples.... FUN.

Thanks J.!!! I'm enjoying it.

"it burns" isn't really sufficient

I love those bad harry potter fanfics... It's an unhealthy addiction... (Thanks, pottersues!

Here's a sample.

Harriet had never been so embarrassed Hermione was pushing around down there trying to show Harriet how to put on a tampon.

“There’s really nothing to it, just push your virginal folds apart and push it in” Hermione said.

After that very embarrassing episode Harriet had to ask, “Hermione are you a lesbian?”

Hermione laughed and said no “Oh” Harriet said. “Why do you ask?” Hermione asked, “I kind of thought you were when I caught you staring at some of the other girls butts”.

Rook is laughing at my outraged comments. "Neville would NEVER say that." "As IF Harriet would be automatically good friends with LAVENDER."

Today (yesterday?) in the car Moomin was asking questions about W0rmtongue. "He is from Lorrd of the Rings, right? And he is very powerful and he has a fight with G4ndalf with staffs." "No, actually, he doesn't. That was S4ruman. and W0rmtongue is sort of a wimp and G4ndalf can just snap his fingers and W0rmtongue will slink away in disgrace." Rook jumped in with his method of explaining. "Yeah. W0rmtongue is not very powerful. It's like he has only.. Power 100. No. Not even power 100. power 50." "Oh! So Wormtonngue has power 50?" Me, outraged: "What! oh, come on. W0rmtongue doesn't have power points! Moomin honey, Daddy is just making an analogy, it's LIKE he is power 50. He doesn't reallly have, um, points...." I trailed off as Rook was laughing like a maniac at me. "HAhahaha wormtongue in REAL LIFE doesn't hahahahaha"

I tried to save face wtih a long digression about how worm = wyrm = dragon = persuasiveness... He's not called Worm because he is like a slimy earthworm, it's because he is a cunning adviser; a point that probably escaped me the first 30 times I read those books and you know... it's important to pass on those crucial bits of wisdom to your child. I was interrupted.

Moomin has an iron will, though he appears docile and quiet. "Well. In MY PRETEND MOVIE ON MY PRETEND TV, Wormt0ngue and G4ndalf have a battle with their magic staffs. "

*smug, dreamy silence from the backseat*

***
p.s. Harriet Potter would NOT wear a tube top. I like it better when they give hermione a punk makeover and she has sexy bondage pants and a lot of eyeliner.

p.p.s. the same fanfic author (age estimate.... 15? 16?) has an even funnier story that is strangely charming, where H.P. is a werewolf AND a vampire.

ANTS!

Heh... the Pilot liked her package of plastic ants! They've been plagued with ants next door.

We're very cozy over here amidst our loot. All off in our different worlds - me with my minipod, Moomin with his coconut shell halves on a string and his bazillion new knights and dinos and bad guys and wizards and dragons!!!

Somehow he doesnt' really seem to like the RC car even though he picked it out. Dammit! Maybe later?

I got :

- pink mini-ipod
- mugs i bought myself
- hot topic bracelet
- gogo boots
- red fishnets
- victoria's slutteriffic s3cret gift cert. from mom (?!)
- rather scary historical linguistics book from J. (coolio!)
- moleskinny notebook from mom and dad (could be the same one I gave my dad last xmas?)
- candles (allergic to smelliness of them, must re-gift...)
- misc. bath stuff and choclate from rook and Minnie, yay!
- ceramic ornament that is a beaver with antlers balancing another ornament on its nose....??!!!!
- sagas of warr1or poets (bought for myself)
- nifty bandanas from Minnie
- something mysterious from whump: "Delicious Librarian"

I'm basking in the glow of warm presents!

Rook got the coolest thing from his mom- one of those things doctors get from pharmaceutical companies - a glowing blue clock that says, "Isn't it time you asked your doctor about V1agra?"
Besides the bike from everyone, I got him an adapter thingie to play cds in his car. Why does he get that sort of crappy drugstore thing when I got a mini-pod? Well may you ask. I think it is his thrifty virtue and conservativeness. I got that way about dvds and about cell phones so we didn't have either of those things till very recently...He seems to scorn an ip0d but now that I have one he might be swayed... I am the one with a little more gadgeto-techno-philia...

Chula is in holiday-hating hermit mode, walking for miles and miles around the empty city. she liked her supergirl long sleeved tshirt.

We are off soon to Brian's and then to Chefily's party!

booty!

last night: yay!!! go-go boots from Minnie!

We were up late... and in theory the kid is supposed to wake up and be all excited but instead I woke up at 7 and realized i had forgotten to put a bunch of things under the tree... the big dinosaurs and stuff. Then Rook got up and started some mysterious bustling. Moomin is sound asleep since he stayed up till probably 10:30... the Pilot just crept over here and reported they had a Bad Night with Peanut and so are just going to sleep, maybe.

Last minute feeling that I wish I'd bought something rather dramatic for Moomin! Or at least those extra superh3ro action figures in the no-name collectible toy store. There is no super great present unless you count the radio controlled car? I hope that is sufficient to impress him so that he is excited and has a really nice memory of excitedly opening stuff and we can all hang out playing with him and eating our cinnamon rolls or whatever... I will put stripes on his new bike flag so it will match the "flying t1ger" theme of his little bike...

mmmmmm oily!

So many things taste better when they've been fried in a vat of olive oil!

I'm happy just smelling this food. Today we went by the "biscotteria" place on El Cam (one of those cool hopeful businesses that seem doomed to near-instant failure) and I nearly fainted from the smell of the toasting an1se biscottis. Now I'm tripping out on the greasy olivy smell, garlic and cheese and onions and breadcrumbs. Nostalgia train! The 5/16ths of me, or whatever it is, flares its nostrils in ancestral bliss!

experiment time!

It's time for some wild cooking! Recipes - who needs them.

In the name of Science and Art, I shall don an apron and make a huge glorious mess!

- tiny italian meatballs? or braci0lis? not sure. anyway that needs no recipe. same thing, different shape.

- some kind of thai chicken-cucumber salad with chili-pepper-lime-mint marinade. this will be the main mad scientist experiment. It will taste more delicious and perfect than anything found in a restaurant! It will be Invented by Me!

Or, possibly i will fuck it up and instead will blush and roll my eyes at the party tonight/tomorrow night and just bring some beer.

cake

I got email from the admin of the Berserkely dept. saying that I was missing a rec letter and one form. She emailed me the form and said to send it back, no big deal. (!) and then a couple hours later wrote me again and said that one of my 2 missing rec letters just came in, so the 4 one would be "just the icing on the cake" if it came and if it didn't no worries.

Goodness.... icing on the cake... that sounds promising!

Oh help! I leap into situations beyond my ken! if i am going in as Professor F.'s pet radical I am going to have to live up to it and I will need to kick serious ass.

The form I had to fill out was all about my language background and breaking my gpa into undergrad, grad, lower/upper division, language/linguistics/literature. It looks kind of pathetic when you break it into all those categories and it makes it clear that my spanish is pretty weak and didn't improve much. Aaaaagh!

I put in the "explanations of informal study" category that I've dabbled in translating other languages and co-translated a little from H3brew... ack but I will always have less legitimacy than the people who like, grew up being dragged around europe all their childhoods... or at least lived overseas.

swoony literary crushes

Have I ever said how much I like J3rome R0thenberg.... I know I went off at some point about the coolness of D3nnis T3dlock but Rothenberg is more my type, a little wild-eyed and trying to do everything at once, raving about postmodern collage while dipping his toes into everything from every language...

Somewhere in the house my "Pulp Fiction Short Stories" book is languishing as I put it down and ran outside when I realized the cats had escaped. Panic! The cats are back in, but my book is lost. All the rest of the books next to my bed are very Serious and Stimulating. I tried "Beasts of Tarz4n" to relax and then turned away from it dissatisfied.

R0thenberg anthology "translat1ng through: tr4nsations and variations" is wildly overstiimulating and makes me want to hop around excitedly or else curl up in a corner and cry that I will never be that fucking cool of an anthology maker, wide-ranging of a translator or as good of a poet as, say, Hu1dobro or Vitzeslav Nezval. I could leap up this very minute and run to the all-night K1nkos and make a magazine in my excitement. I won't, but that's how I feel.

i'm going to be wildly distracted from any sort of th3sis writing by my new H3rnandez-translating project!

I am not sure if the giant robot poem I just wrote sucks or not. I was feeling very pleased with myself last night but now in the cold light of the next day...??!! Less smug and pleased and more giving myself a fond pat on the head for being kind of a dork. The other long one I've been working on all this week is ... it definitely has good points but it's not quite jelled. Both of them are about being in bodies and a little bit about... about (the culture of) fear and joy and superhero powers, I guess.

cute movie!

OMG this movie is so great! The Sticky Fingers of Time -- yay! time travelling lesbians bi girls!

***

Stylish... pulp dialogue, the kind I like best, that goes way over the line into gigglingly cheesy... nonlinear yet not lacking in story. And there are girdles and pointy bras!

My new favorite movie! Thanks to druidsquirrel and her girlfriend Hecate for bringing it over!

a good omen

this seems strangely encouraging that Gayle who i know from days of yore is in C0mp Lit. yay for the virus infecting the borg.

!!!

Coffee in the afternoon. It makes me write poetry composed almost entirely of exclamation points.

funny shit from the "lost" notebook

Notes from a p0etry reading. ONe of the worst poems ever, transcribed by me in nearly indecipherable handwriting. I will not reveal the poet's name. Imagine it read in that fakey poet-voice of transfiguration, agony and ecstasy. The actual poem was quite long - pages and pages - and was about her bad marriage, in which she has hot sex, her husband beats her up once in a while, she's bored, they had some kind of badness that might have been a miscarriage or crib death or infant murder. [quite disturbing.] Then they had hot sex again and sat before the fire sipping martinis and looking over their stock portfolio. Here's the distilled essence of bad poetry:

Pain.
My oxygen -
Reality -
Significance -
Start all over.
Hope.
Addiction.
I CAN say no.
TIME.
Minutes pass...
MISCONCEPTION.
The little body -
blue -
SECRETS.
And life goes on...
Eternal hope,
Eternal hatred.
A hot bath.
BUNNY SLIPPERS.

notebooks and action figures

Joy! I found my notebook in my huge backpack. So it's not lost!

My face still feels very odd all up and down the left side. Like when you still can't feel your lips all the way from the dentist, but inside the eye socket instead.

I'm at Chula's... we are going to hang out and write for a while and then feed Leann's cat and have some noodle soup at C1trus.

I took Moomin to lunch (with Too Beautiful), to the post office, and to the no-name used toy store in RWC on Broadway. He was incredibly excited that there was an entire wall full of St4r Wars action figures and superhero ones on the opposite wall. Picture me with the left side of my face numb, still kind of dazed and emotionally exhausted from the dentist ordeal, answering the question, "Is this a good guy or a bad guy? What are his special powers?" at least 500 times.

NOTE to all locals, tthere is a new hot-topic-esque hipster shoe store with some really good stuff right in front of the P0werhouse gym! It is like the winter solstice Penguin god of suburban retail heard my prayers and knew all about how I want ska-flavored sparkling maryjanes with stars on them, and tiny purses with fur on them, and go-go boots and tshirts that have bad silk-screens of che guevara wearing a pink bikini... They just opened 2 days ago! So perfect.

fight or flight

Dental whateverocaine has a lot of epinephrine in it, so that it shuts down the small blood vessels around your nerves. This keeps the somethingocaine from being washed away too quickly by your blood.

So, if you bring your child to the dentist to watch you get a couple of small fillings and then suddenly by accident the Xocaine injection goes into some kind of major facial artery, your whole face will go numb. Your vision will go all wacky and then you won't be able to see! You can't close your left eye without using your hands to move the eyelid! Then the other eye starts to lose its cool. Your face goes pale while you're slackjawed and drooling! The epinephrine hits your heart and you start cussing, panicking and your heart's pounding!

If you are Moomin then you look on with puzzlement and turn back to your book, trustingly believing when Mommy says everything is okay. Her vision is doubling and disappearing, and several dentists are now explaining what is happening to her but she is under some kind of epinephrine-adrenaline panic-rush and is trying to look her last upon the crazily blurring and disappearing face of her child! The book he is holding turns into a blue and white fuzz. She can still see the shape of his nose and dark eye-spots, but then his face turns into a big blurry featureless thumbprint. WHAT IF THIS IS THE LAST TIME. WHAT IF.

I closed my eyes and sat there unable to swallow... I wonder if that is what having a stroke feels like. What a fucking nightmare. When then panic started to wear off and my heart stopped pounding so hard I was finally able to cry. I thought of optical migraines, which I read about recently. Everything will be just fine, the fear is from the adrenaline in the bloodstream... They let me cry for a little bit, apologized a lot, and then filled my cavities.

I'm still shaken but obviously vision okay now since I drove us home and am typing.

God! fucking scary! 30 years of dentists and that has never happened to me. I had no idea it was possible.

Shouldn't they have checked my blood pressure or something? I'm still kind of shaky.

***
Here is an interesting article (PDF) about what just happened to me.

it's all happening at the zoo

Moomin at the zoo; delightful. He'll sit and stare at elephants or hippos for half an hour without wanting to rush around. That way we get to see animals actually doing things. Hippos yawning mightily for the zookeeper to throw apples into their mouths! Tigers licking themselves all over! Penguins who suddenly spring into action en masse and indulge in leaping chase-battles through the water, coming up to honk at us, looking for fish or perhaps just used to our presence as we sat like Sam B3aver quietly observing. We watched zebras standing around grazing scratching their backs against trees and nosing each other -- we made up imaginary conversations between the giraffes and the zebras. (They are bored by each others' conversational topics, but try to act polite.) I wished Rook was there with us to see all the cool stuff and enjoy the relaxing sun and funny comments from Moomin... but he had to work.

It was sunny, so the animals were unusually frisky for winter.

Afterwards we met Chula and her friend JQ and JQ's kid Lehi. We walked to a park... an old fashioned metal merry-go-round, not the big kind with lots of bars but one more like an overgrown sit-n-spin. Moomin was disappointed that the other kid was not a Big Kid. We'll see... I have called every Big Kid Who Is A Boy (as requested) in the nursery school phone book -- everyone is on vacation or their parents work -- one BKWIAB did call back today. Maybe they will have a play date later in the week.

Lehi's playroom was incredibly great: a spiral staircase up to a warm huge attic that was set up very M0ntessori with windowbenches, toys everywhere, big open space. JQ was super nice, fun, smart, friendly, everything good.

After that we parted (due to the truck being too small for 3) and met up again at that really good hippie-ish bakery on 9th and Irv1ng. Hung in the cafe, talked, ate, C. explained the imaginary dynamics of coffee roasting in a very silly energetic way... we cruised a comic book store which i enjoyed a lot until we were leaving and I realized the store owner loathed me for having a kid, not buying anything, being generally annoying etc. I just wanted Moomin to look around and get the idea that there were lots of cool books about superheroes. He was wildly excited! Toy stores are fun for him but he never freaks out with joy and greed in his heart in them the way he does in bookstores! He wanted to know about every superhero! I approve and Chula is an excellent native guide to the realm. I am so lame I thought Sp1derman was part of the Just1ce League.

I also often mix up a lambeosaurus, a hadrosaur, and a parasaurolophus. They all have things on their heads. Like moose.

If anyone has some old superhero or donald duck comic books they will give me or sell for cheap, Moomin would like them very much! A wholesomely nerdy thing for him to get into...

time, time, time, what has become of me?

I just realized while writing a bio for my reading in January:

I've been publishing xerox zines for almost 20 years.

It was 1986 when I made my first one in high school and I've had publishing projects continuously since then but for the rather miserable time in the mid-90s though it occurs to me that even then, I helped Darko's friend Xrissa make one when we lived in Santa Fe. Hmm.

1986: "Voices from Underground" (oh the angstiness! but reasonably decent articles!)
then later, the untitled poem-booklet with the little chaos-arrow sigil made of fish skeletons.
1987-89: R4tatosk. only 4 issues... i think i must have made other things but i can't remember without going to dig through my stuff.
1990-91: safe sex booklet and V4nilla M1lkshake, with Masha. 3 small books: Poetagraphica, Buy Me, and Fear of Dreams. infinite amts of stickers and crap like that. And the stuff i did for the U-Lez group and our culture-wars coalition and The Howlers and The Polemicist.
1992: involved with Venus Inf3rs... wrote that article about net sex that made all the leatherdykes run out and get netcom accounts.
1992-95: Slut Ut0pia, and bunches of one shots.... and the Bitch Manifesto and Scum Manifesto reprints. Punk Paper Dolls. more infinite stickers.
1996-97. dry but for doing that thing for Xrissa -- "R4vens and L0bsters" a series of short dreamy essays that i found charming. she used to walk around wearing a huge plastic lobster around her neck on a string. how NOT to make her zine? Feeling rotten about my own writing during this time as Darko was nasty about it.
1998-99: no zines, but wrote a bazillion very complex MUD areas.
2000: wrote a lot for everything2.
2001-03: T0llbooth Press. bunch of small books: W00dbird Jazzophone. Fl0rentino. Short. 4 poems of longing. Inamorata. Pray3rs are better sung. E.K.'s book (ergh. nightmare project.) started Composite mag.
2004: Cuts anthology. foray into dealing with actual printer instead of xeroxing.

I just realized it as I was trying to write the bio -- somethign which always makes me itch uncomfortably -- while cruising my CV and typing the words "editor and publisher" feeling a little bit bogus, as always. But! 20 years next year! Wow.

My projects are incredibly small - i suck at the distribution and just usually hand them out to people or sell them at random times, though Slut U+opia had distribution for a while through a couple of places. I think I still have a box of 100 R4tatosks - what to do with them!? I usually print 200 of everything but sometimes it's only 100 or it's some freaking random number and I don't keep track. I always liked this one illustration in the comic book version of S4lome where she is sort of floaty looking with her arms outstretched and paper and doves are flying around sort of magically from her fingertips. The charm of little paper zines is that you can shed them like dandruff or glitter. I would like to make more tiny things like N3ttlebeck's "This is Important" that can be scattered to the wind. This is part laziness but part on-purpose freedom, I think. Cheap zines, cheap to make, black and white, not too hard to make (my error with the T0llbooth handmade books...) yet nice enough that people don't look at them, pick them up, and throw them away.

the moral of the story is...

What a nice day. I'll describe it later. But in the car on the way home, as Moomin snored in the seat next to me, I was thinking about various kids' books and what the point of them is. I was telling J.Q. a little bit about narrativity and reading kids' books out loud, and she was telling me about how as a therapist she tries to figure out people's internal stories and tinker with them.

Anyway, there are some kids' books with messages I consider awful, like "The G1ving Tree". In fact most of Sh3l Silverstein has never impressed me. Occasionally fun and wacky and witty but there is always something incredibly grating. I'll analyze it in detail here someday because I can hear you gasping in horror at the blasphemy of not liking That Guy's Books in general.

For a minute I considered Le0 L1onni's book "T1co and the G0lden Wings" which is a lovely book in many ways and yet, and yet, and yet! Tico's friends love him and bring him food when he is crippled and pathetic. Then he gets a magic wish and wishes for lovely golden wings... Fuck you, little birds, for dissing Tico because of his golden feathers! And the heavy-handed way that after Tico gives away all his golden feathers he is rewarded by looking exactly like everyone else and then is finally accepted by the crowd. But secretly inside he is different. Thanks, slightly disturbing assimilationist fable! It's okay to just dream about being different in some way but you had better not do it because your friends will peck you to death... Grrrrrr.

And yet maybe that is a sort of necessary realism and the point is about acknowledging possible loneliness. I prefer Lionni's books "Al3xander and the Wind-up Mouse" and also his book about the chameleon. Both have the theme of "animal that is different and lonely and then finds a friend."

Another cool book: M0rris the Moose. This one is cool for its take on identity politics. Morris meets a cow and asks it why it's such a funny looking moose; he has four legs, things on his head, etc. The cow insists on being a cow. They find a deer and ask the deer to settle the argument. "You are both very funny looking deer." The cow and the moose are outraged.... they all 3 go along and run into a horse, who looks them up and down says, "Why do you horses have those funny looking things on your head?" Hilarity. Finally they all look into a pond or something and once they see themselves they realize the other ones look quite different and are not just deformed versions of their own species. The end! I like the moral and the story is funny and even a very tiny kid can understand what's going on and how irritated and frustrated the animals are at being mis-labeled.

I was also thinking about books that have lovely prose. W1nd in the Willows, as I was reading it yesterday, knocked my socks off. Sometimes people tell me that they like my writing but I consider any prose I write to be a lazy, clumsy hack. Take a look at chapter 1 of W. in the W. sometime and just marvel at the ripply loveliness of its sentences!!!

So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, `Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

I feel like I've admired this before in a bloggy way. I'm old! I'm repeating myself tediously!

or what about...

As he gazed, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; and it was too glittering and small for a glow-worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture.

   A brown little face, with whiskers.

   A grave round face, with the same twinkle in its eye that had first attracted his notice.

   Small neat ears and thick silky hair.

   It was the Water Rat!

Nothing all that exciting happened. "He climbed up out of his hole" or "He saw something that turned out to be a rat." But wow! the dynamic excitement of the way it's told!

Or certain moments in books by M4rgaret W1se Br0wn. "And down the hill they went, roly poly, pell mell, tumble bumble, till they came to the green grass; and there they stopped short." Such a good thing!

garbage pickup rules!

The trash guys are SO NICE. I am always amazed at how nice they are and how they are all super into being fast and efficient. And they don't like it if we forget to put the trash at the curb and yet... they still take it if we do forget...

Just nice! What can I say! What a sucky job and yet I'm so happy that someone does it.

bear butts, mistaken beliefs

This morning the Pilot came over and invited Moomin to watch a bear movie with her "after dinner." he claimed to be hungry, ate lunch, and then insisted it counted as dinner...

all day... "And now we can watch the bear movie with Pilot in Pilot's house..." No not yet. "Is it later yet? When is it later? Is it almost after dinner now? Because after dinner we are going to..."

Let me just say that if I were the PTA president and were doing some kind of initiation rite, the Pilot would have just flunked! I'm just kidding... but the Bear Movie had:

- flies buzzing around dead skinned bear corpses
- bears tearing the entrails out of giant elks or caribou or something
- guys crying as they break their legs and bears menace them and they barf from fear and stress
- bears eating the red spotty mushrooms and hallucinating glowing flying starbursting butterfly things
- the baby bear whimpering in fear as its mother is crushed by giant falling rocks
- hunter guy shooting his favorite pet dog which has been bloodily mauled by a bear
- more bloody wounds
- nightmares about psychedelic flying spiked frogs (????) and the baby bear's dead mom
- nightmare fisheye closeups of savage dogs and mountain lions about to kill you
- bears fucking while grunting crazily, and the baby bear watching

I CAN'T WAIT for Peanut to get a little bigger. I will show her the movie, "101 Ways to Kill and Cook Fluffy Little Kitty Cats" and then "Horrid Fangy Things," "How Animals Fuck," and maybe Koyaanisqatsi...

hahahaa.... Well.... the scenes of the baby bear frolicking happily in a meadow full of flowers were cool...

Moomin seemed to like it and he's seen scarier movies I think ... he hid behind a pillow a lot of the time!

We had an awesome time bouncing with Eliz. and Sophie on RJ's trampoline today. I cleaned like crazy. We re-read the first chapter of W1nd in the Willows. Castle was played.

I have been labelling presents to him from fictional characters. He is fascinated, but my explanations have not dented his belief that a guy dressed up like Mowgli came to our door and put a present under the tree. "It's not REALLY from Mowgli. It's from a GUY dressed in a COSTUME of Mowgli." Nodding sagely.

paper storm

Cleaning off the 2 shelves by the door - accumulated junk from nearly a year - has taken me all morning. Now I have:

two giant piles of paper that must be sorted
a tub full of things that go somewhere else
a jar full of pennies
a lot of pens that probably don't work
dust
the lost box of checkbooks
3 pairs of pruning shears
a ring that was my grandfather's (how did it get there?)
cat hair
a crystal candy bowl full of rocks and shells

I thought I was going to go through all the papers in one day. WRONG.

Moomin has made up a song on the harmonica. The name of it is "I love you but I don't want you to take me away". Cowboys sing it under the moon.

I am reading Martian Chronicles - it's better and more interesting than I remembered!

ionic weirdness

The air purifier thing makes it smell kind of odd in here. I'm not sure it's bad but I am not yet used to it.

Next project... baseboards for the living room and Moomin's room...

but now - to the bath. and am I going to start reading Mobydick right now? tonight? or cryptonomiccon instead? or one of the slightly crappy looking sf books I got from K and M.'s book giveaway?

singing fools!

The caroling party was great as usual! Though I wish I'd brought more food. Usually they have a ton of great food... tonight no one brought stuff and what was there almost all had nuts in it.

But oh what a great party! We sang with rapidly increasing competence... K.'s favorite weird songs like the W3xford Carol were challenging... I couldn't reallly sing alto on anything that wasn't completely obvious and easy or else stunningly familiar. Though i was not as bad as the person who shall remain nameless who was sitting next to me for a while and who could NOT stay on a note... wtf... when you're just singing the same note over and over for a whole line how can you fuck it up? I got up and sat next to Rook, finally, though he is singing a different part at least it is actually harmony.

The shap3-note singers are really good! They get very excited about everything.

The ubernerdy filk guy, whose name I always forget, passed out copies of the original words by mendelssohn to "ang3ls we have h3ard on high" which are all about Gutenberg. No one really laughed at my dumb jokes about how it's all very mean to gutenberg to say that he's a liar, and gross, and wack. how not to make fun of german? come on. someone has to do it.

These people intersect with last year's pr0ust reading group and they are next going to do Mobyy Dick which is one of my favorite books. It's so weird and rambly and digressive! And it is not what people think it is about!

Moomin could sing all the secular nursery school songs, and followed along with me on a few others, but mostly he laid on the floor reading and playing with little animals and knights.

I love how they give away giant boxes of books at every party! We all turned into total rabid animals! If anyone wants an advance review uncorrected proof of Ors0n Scottt Card's "X3nocide" then I can hook you up.

My favorite thing was singing rounds esp. the dona nobis pacem one. And whenever K. and the chick playing the piano would go off into wild descants. I guess I also especially love all the very grim parts of the carols like "sorrowing! sighing! bleeding! dying! sealed ina stone cold tomb!" or anything about Hell. I had xeroxed one of my favorite hymns that is not quite an xmas carol but is close enough -- it's not grim but instead ... well you can look at it. It's all good except for the "throbbing vein" line. Anyway, it was one of my favorite songs to sing when I was little and would sit way up high in the giant spruce tree in the yard.

Every year we get better at the "Bost0n Ch4rlie" song which is sung to the tune of D3ck the Halls and which sounds really incredible and silly with all the harmony! And just that it's all grownups very seriously singing it with their best serious, religious church voices, on purpose to be funny.

castle, comix, new backpack

I played castle for a long time this morning. Spaceships - sneaky hamsters - amazon warriors - stolen thrones, backpacks and magic crystal globes. Moomin was going wild with the villain dialogue!

We walked around to look for my backpack some more - but no luck.

I got a used quadra air purifier thing off of craigslist. The city was all sparkly and sunny. my air purifier guy was the really good kind of person you want to buy stuff from, super anal, he had the box and all the packaging and obsessively unpacked, demonstrated, and packed it all up again quite perfectly.

Chula bought me the perfect new backpack. It is ska-flavored and pretty much the same shape and size as my old one! I will cover it with strange patches that I've been saving for years.

I have this one patch I bought in 1977 at a hippie sew-on patch fair at my elementary school that says "May the force be with you". I've always been afraid to sew it onto anything for fear I'll just lose that thing. That's so nuts! I think it's time to sew some patches onto things!

that's better

My backpack's still gone, but we had a great party that was very silly. I had... uh I can't even remember whatall presents I had. Fancy glasses and a decanter, but someone took them and I ended up with a poker set that was sort of lame. As T. had an even lamer Mister Mister CD I traded with him.

The Pilot is asleep in my bed with Peanut. oops! Rook just went to bed too. I'm up for a while. I imprudently drank some coffee with cognac in it.

I made lots of ch1cken cutlets and people ate them. Good! And oddly the party ended up being all in the other house and not in ours really, so.... I cleaned everything like crazy and decluttered and now it's STILL CLEAN. Rather sad that no one got to admire and use it. and yet. it's like... all clean and shiny! I'll go wash dishes in the other half of the Nuthouse tomorrow morning to even things out.

We also have rather a lot of beer left. Everyone went for the hard liquor I guess. We'll have to have another party to get rid of all this beer.

I was deeply fulfilled by Severin's wife finally getting her hands on the presents I bought specially for her! Alas that I am so transparent I can't like subtly sit back and with a poker face enjoy the silliness. Nooooo. Instead I giggle insanely and make an ass of myself!!! All completely worth it to see Bock obsessively zapping him with the electric flyswatter. Hahahaha! Even if Severin will never flirt with me (alas) at least I can have fun watching him flirt with his cute, obnoxious, totally insane wife!

Moomin seemed to have fun -- at first he was sort of overwhelmed but he found the present-exchanging funny, laughed when everyone else laughed, and got a cool penguin hat, some hideous snowman salt shakers, and a very strange tiny metal and red velvet chair in a velvet box. It is now a throne in a small castle. The loud drunken har-har-ingness of the party didn't bother him like it used to. He hung with his auntie and was even possibly outgoing. He was very curious to see Uncle T. put the george bush doll down his pants and thought the idea was pretty funny but he couldn't really see, anyway. god knows what he will remember from events like this.... I picture him at 18 or so telling stories of his childhood at some dorm party. "And then my parents used to have these heinous parties. I remember this one time when my uncle was like practically fucking this weird talking george bush doll..." and all his friends will laugh hysterically and go, "No way dude! you're making it up!"

We played Boggle... we are dorks... I do love word games!!!!! I want to go head to head with that chick who was kicking my ass, but under my rules of only 5 letters and up and lots of extra time.

I'm sorry for all the people I harmed by deliberately flashing my underwear all night accidentally. It was always completely an accident. It was also coincidence that my dress was really really short and slinky and those ruffly undies were completely unintentional and unplanned. I didn't mean to sit like that. I kept forgetting not to bend over and not to reach up over my head for things. I swear it was not on purpose! Absolutely! I'd never. I would be shocked if anyone had taken any pictures of me bending over. And I'm sure all those girls with their hands up my skirt were just being friendly. and I didn't mean to be on the floor wrestling with anyone and probably them spanking me was an accident and I would also never tear the shoes off anyone else or throw them on the floor and tickle them and grab their little neck chain because of the cute way they kept going, "No! No! Please don't! You wouldn't!" and looking wussy and terrified. Those things would never happen, as I am a matronly, suburban, wifely person, the sort of person who often has oven mitts and an apron on, who would not allow anything unchaste to happen in her house.

fucking non-merry

Holy fuck I hope you fucking bastard who took my backpack in the Safeway that you have a GRRRRREAT time with my fucking private diary poetry notebook and my bunch of gift cards from relatives and my phone.

FUCK.

I checked every trash can in the area but Rook has just gone to try the other side of the train station.

I had my wallet in my back pocket... fortunately...

You know I would happily hand my money to a random mugger and would give away the hundred dollar gift certificates to old navy and crap like that... on the theory that the thief needs it more than I do... but my personal stuff ... it's just no good to anyone. What the fuck. I hope they at least toss it in the bushes instead of a trash can so that it might get turned in to a lost and found somewhere.

Goddamn it. I'm in a foul angry fuck the world mood.

I can hear my stupid goddamn grandfather saying to me "You've got to keep your eyes open kid" and don't be a sucker and if you get suckered you deserve it because it means you were stupid. you've got to be smart. You think you know what's smart but you didn't have your eye on the ball. look out for number one. The world isn't going to look out for you. You have to know what's what. [insert random giant string of slightly thuggish, salesman-like cliches here]

I was just so fucking stupid!

In calm interludes I'm coming around to the thought that I am grateful that my moment of stupidity and suckerhood didn't affect my survival, it is not going to ruin my life or make me not be able to pay my rent or whatever, it doesn't fuck me up, I'm not that vulnerable, they could steal my CAR and I'd still be okay because I'm so amazingly middle class. I just have to keep remembering that and shut up the voice in my head that i've just demonstrated I haven't learned a thing.

beautiful gamers

More on Mellan himmel och hav, the 72-hour full immersion LARP based on Le Guin. What a fantastic experience, scary-sounding, overwhelming...

I can't help having a crush on Jaako S.! Some people's minds make them instant hotties!

I am the scaryweird

To the majority of people in this country, I am the scaryweird, I belong in that database. That's what I'm thinking. I don't rape anyone but I'm a dangerous pervert. Less than the kiss-in days of 15 years ago, less than 5 years ago, but I think that's part of why I'm uncomfortable with the database. Plenty of people would think I'm part of the big bad world their kids need protection against.

I know this is not true and I am a great parent and a super nice person but I'm just considering that aspect of reality for a while as I clean house.

scary weird

Well. I have complex feelings about this online sex offender database. On the one hand: it was already available information but you had to go down to the sheriff's office to see it. So why not put it online? On the other hand. Privacy. Scary big brother. Lynching. Is rehab possible when this is how it is.

Why am I looking? Photos of guys and their crimes. Hello, dude. You live 2 blocks away. Now I know your face. 3 counts of oral c0pulation with a minor under 14. What does it mean? Who are you? How did it happen and how were you caught? Does it matter that I can't help filing your face away in my memory, JUST IN CASE? Just in case what? If I see you in the grocery store, will I recognize you? Would I have smiled at you on the street before, and now I won't? What if you are the nice guy who fixed my bike on the corner of El Cam and James? Are you doing your best? I want to think so but I don't believe it.

It seems dirty and unfair, all of it.

Information wants to be free. Right? But it's also wrong and two wrongs don't make a right. Right? One oppression or injustice doesn't necessarily trump another one. If I disapprove, why am I looking? Will there be vigilantes now? Should there be? Why not just tattoo "rapist" on their foreheads? Ineradicable like the death penalty with some rate of failure of the system and innocents unjustly convicted.

I saw some movie preview recently that looked to be about some guy who got out of prison and did something awful implied to be rape or rape of children and just the preview's implications and jerking around of the viewer's sympathies for the inarticulateness of the ex-con (ex-rapist? can you be an ex-rapist or do you stay a rapist all your life? ex-murderer? Maybe I don't really believe in redemption and rehab.) Anyway just the preview pissed me off and made me feel nauseous. I turned to Rook at some point and put my face in his shoulder and my fingers in my ears.

The database is being hit hard today. I know I'll look at it again.

*** a few minutes ago it occurred to me that it is probably easy to make a script to slurp the data out of there and stick it in a whole new giant database. and then use it for whatever purpose you want. the most benign use i can think of for this would be to invite people involved in each case to tell their stories in public as a sort of victim/survivor empowerment tool. It would quickly become a very scary thing. Obviously there would be much worse uses but I don't think I need to say them here.

a portent of things to come

It's nice having a kid who can read but it does mean an early confrontation with That Thing I've been picturing ever since before pregnancy. Moomin picks up my book. "When Heaven Fell. Mommy what does that mean? Is this alien guy nice? Or bad? Do the good guys win? What does Master Race mean? Hahaha that's funny. It says Master Race." "Um. Well. It's kind of a grownup story about alien soldiers and human soldiers and there are lots of mixed-up guys and bad guys." I feel myself radiating evasive discomfort. He picks up on it and we change the subject. What to say? I'm not going to launch into a giant explanation of depressing imperialist aliens.

Possibly one of the most 4-year-old-inappropriate books I've read lately. What happens when he roams my newly organized office 6 months from now, cruising the shelves? "Naked Wunch. Dat's a siwwy name Mommy. I want to read that one. Hahaha. It says Naked Wunch. Cities of the Wed Night. What is that about?" Nooooooo! save me! I will distract him with Tre4sure Island and Bl4ck Beauty for as long as possible.