James and I (and assorted others, including my massively cool boss, who used to be the Director of the Cartoon Art Museum) saw Nick Cave play at the Palace of Fine Arts last night.

My favorite artistes seem to be playing very minimalist tours this season. Mr. Cave spent this show playing behind his piano, accompanied by a bassist, a drum (low key) and violinist, accordianist and freak extraordinaire (we liked him) Warren Ellis, who is NOT the same Warren Ellis as the comic writer. He was ironically chatty with the audience, who begged him for songs, professed their undying love for him, etc. I only suggested that he come back and play again next week.

3/28/2001 09:29:57 AM

Tuesday, March 27, 2001

Are you fucking kidding me?
3/27/2001 02:25:03 PM

Monday, March 26, 2001

"According to the Centers for Disease Control, and Department of Health and Human Services, it is your children, and not those of the urban ghetto, who are most likely to use drugs."
3/26/2001 02:20:18 PM

Tuesday, March 20, 2001

Blogger is creeping at a slow, petty pace today. Or it might be my network here at the library. Who knows? I can't really complain, as blogger is a free service and I'm quite cheerful about every day it's still here.

Things in the office are tense for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, but I'm having trouble taking it seriously, since the day is just GORGEOUS outside. I attended Death Guild's 8th anniversary last night with Ben, Wanda and a cast of thousands. It reminded me strongly of clubs I used to like attending in DC - humid, and low on pretensions . I'll have to try it again soon to see if that was some sort of abberation. Less good news is that Fernando, a local DJ, had his entire CD collection stolen last night. The CDs are his livelihood, and this is personal disaster for him. Money collections are being taken up to help him out; I'll probably contribute.

This leads me to ask: can a DJ insure his CDs? Can you at least write off stolen property as a loss on your taxes?

Other than that, James and I were awakened at 6:30 am this morning by an "earthquake" which rattled the change machine on the top of the bookcase, and shook our bed. An investigation established that the quake was actually being caused by our roommate and someone who apparently spent the night with her last night - the clue was that she turned off all the lights - and the computer - in the house around 9 pm last night, and I could hear her talking to someone in her room. I dutifully hid in my room and read. I think she may have thought I wasn't home. We never saw the other person, and were not told he'd be there . . . and didn't see our roommate this morning. I find this rather uncomfortable, but can't for the life of me nail down how I'd preferred she'd handled it. *smile* So I guess it's a moot point.
3/20/2001 02:50:16 PM

Monday, March 19, 2001

Blackouts again today.

I'm having a great deal of trouble focusing on work. I spent all morning doing a preliminary edit on the Proposal That Will Not Die, and am moving on to work on the smaller projects that interest me more. I keep finding that Foundation's have narrowed the criteria for their environmental projects to the point that Stegner might be hard to fund. I can't decide whether I should just send the proposal anyway...
3/19/2001 03:14:59 PM

Thursday, March 15, 2001

So I'm back on a steriod inhaler, to see if I can banish "the cough." You have all doubtless been introduced to "the cough" who has been a houseguest of variable volume chez Eva since April of 1989. I tried to get "the cough" to move out over a three week period by using 3, that's THREE, different inhalers, about 5 times a day in 1995. It worked, but I didn't want to inhale stuff all the time for the rest of my life. I've changed my mind.

So I'm giving the steriod inhaler another go for 3 weeks to see whether it works. Wish me luck.
3/15/2001 01:28:13 PM

Wednesday, March 14, 2001

According to NPR this morning, Greenpeace protesters dumped cereal all over the floor at a San Francisco Trader Joes to protest Genetically Engineered foods. What are they going to do next, spike the mangoes? Trader Joes employees beware.

In all seriousness, I do think there should be some controls on genetically engineered foods because I'm afraid of making our food sources so uniform that a virus could kill them all. But can we talk about this civilly?
3/14/2001 07:31:35 AM

Monday, March 12, 2001

Drag party this weekend at the home of a friend of Ben and Wanda's (and Brandon's and virtually everyone else). James and I established that we fit into eachother's clothing, although his back is a lot broader than I had expected.

No, thank you, there will not be pictures put up here. Don't even ask.

Bought two dresses and a (newish) hat from the vinage expo on Sunday -- all for a total of $35. One of the dresses is this very small dark floral cocktail dress, which may end up becoming the top to a Victorian ballgown, the other is a much more comfortable (and big) red patterned fifties dress - something like flannel, but lined. I would normally have passed on the first dress, but for $10, I thought I could risk not being able to wear it later because I'd gained weight...
3/12/2001 02:20:58 PM

Sunday, March 11, 2001

"The findings appear to buttress suspicions that the "skyrocketing demand" explanation for rising energy prices is a cover for what is really happening-- that power companies have simply started charging more for an essential commodity, regardless of whether it is in short supply." --San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, March 11, 2001
3/11/2001 11:57:28 AM

Friday, March 09, 2001

This seems evil to me.
3/9/2001 10:38:56 AM

Thursday, March 08, 2001

I'm in a state of worship. Neil Gaiman has a blog.

I only wish I'd known before. I'd have been wasting time over my writers block at work reading Neil, rather than looking at wedding dresses!
3/8/2001 07:48:36 PM

Monday, March 05, 2001

I've been going over a hypothetical wedding invitee list for when James and I actually have a wedding venue. We're going to hold the guest list to 100. We've got 150 people on it now, and I'm not sure how we are going to cull it. (Though substantial numbers of those people would have to travel to get to us - some of them from overseas - and that might shorten the list somewhat.)

I've been mentally reviewing all of these people I used to know who may or may not be on this list. I'm not inviting anyone who hasn't made a real effort to "keep up" with me, even though a lot of people have stopped trying because I'm such a lousy correspondent. There's no justice in that. I'm not keeping a short list because I want to cut out old friends, but just because weddings are expensive, and I have to set my priorities somewhere.

I'm astonished, actually, at who isn't going to be at the wedding.

One example is Kim, who I haven't heard from in 5 or 6 years. We had a close friendship in high school that ended partly because we grew apart but more, I think, because of a web of long-avoided issues and bad habits of dealing with each other that weren't ever really resolved. For my part, I wasn't very good at articulating or identifying my feelings as a teen, and I was fiercely and irrationally jealous of Kim's boyfriends, and not very respectful of her political opinions. (I'm not sure what Kim's part was, so I'm not going to attribute anything to her.) Despite later (or ongoing) conflicts, you couldn't have told me that Kim wasn't going to be a friend of mine at 30 when I was 15: I spent 3 or 4 hours a day on the phone with her during my high school years, and can remember venting adolescent trauma (hers frankly a great deal more substantial than mine) with her at all hours of the night.

This morning, out of idle curiousity, I did a web search on Kim. There are a few references that allow me to follow her through a writing MA at Old Dominion (she was always a better writer than I) in 1996, a post on a Buffy fan site, and an article for a James Taylor* web zine, but I haven't found anything later than July 1999. I'm curious about what she is up to now, but not curious enough to try to contact her - I feel as if the amount of time that has passed and the distance we've diverged from each other is just too great.

*How she got to James Taylor from The Beatles, David Bowie and Peter Murphy when I ended up with VNV Nation and Nick Cave from essentially the same musical place is very mysterious to me. Now that I think about it, though, Kim and I stopped being friends during a period when I was reinventing myself for DC goth clubs and science fiction conventions. She never did seem to like angry music, and well, I still like angry music. So maybe it was me.
3/5/2001 03:48:45 PM

Sunday, March 04, 2001

James and I just decided (against our better judgment) to haul ourselves to the Mission to get breakfast. We choose Boogaloo's ( this Cajun-y place at Valencia and 23rd or so) for a change of pace (because Spaghetti Western is gone), but when we got there, people were standing around in the rain waiting for seats.

James and I had lost the Slate umbrella to wind and weren't feeling in the mood to stand around waiting for seats, so we walked 6 blocks up to Ti Couz (a Breton crepery that has definitely lost it's edge in the last year) without the umbrella.

I am soggy, dissatisfied and sick of rain.

(and just to close the loop, the landlord tells us that the little man rewired the light fixture. It looks just the same to us...)
3/4/2001 12:48:39 PM