Success!!!

I have gotten the kitty's collar on. (I felt it was necessary because we are going to move soon, and even though she's supposed to be indoors only, things happen.)

Of course, this will only last until she get's it off. She's already begun scratching at it, and complaining. But I guess that I can enjoy my sucess for an evening, anyway.

6/29/2001 06:23:42 PM

Thursday, June 28, 2001

Scar-ee:

6/28/2001 04:29:52 PM

Wednesday, June 27, 2001

why is THIS online?
6/27/2001 05:16:59 PM

Dangerous Intersections according to a study by State Farm.

Weirdly, none of these are in San Francisco or the suburbs of Washington DC, or in downtown Austin, despite the fact that I can think of several intersections that have taken years off my life.
6/27/2001 04:37:37 PM

Tuesday, June 26, 2001

Ever wonder what happened to Sudanese giant NBA player Manute Bol? Apparently he got stuck on the wrong side of a civil war. (normally I don't follow basketball, but he played for the Bullets when they were still the Bullets, and I remember him)
6/26/2001 09:34:22 AM

Apparently, sleep deprivation (on average, less than 6.5 hours a night) can cause type 2 diabetes. (picked up from Al at View from the Heart.)
6/26/2001 08:52:41 AM

Sunday, June 24, 2001

Yesterday James and I went biking around the wharf to Crissy Field and back. I was relieved to establish that I still can ride a bike, even if I haven't bothered to in 16 years. The fact that my legs hurt means that we'll have to do it again -- this time longer than 7.5 miles, and with me wearing something more comfortable than a pair of jeans.

James, Jean-anne and I watched the Pride March here in San Francisco today. I only stayed for the first couple of hours, because honestly the Pride Parade here is tremendously disorganized, sometimes with three or four block gaps between groups, and I get impatient standing in crowds (the trains don't run on time in San Francisco).

Typically I go to see dykes on bikes, then carry on with my day while reflecting that unlike all those people that *drove* to the City, I can get around perfetcly easily on my own two feet. Parades and street fairs are the great equalizers in that respect.

I was - as always - struck by how much of the parade feels like a HUGE small town parade with people from every portion of society represented (politicians, trash men, policemen, preschool teachers, moms and dads, teens, the marching bands). There have been complaints ever since I got here in 1998 that the Pride Parade has become far too mainstream and commercialized. I think complaints about corporate sponsorships - especially from alcohol companies -- might be justified, but the *mainstream* feeling of the parade, complete with tourists and straight spectators, shows how far acceptance of gays and lesbians has come since the parade began. Part of being accepted is being assimilated. Perhaps that's uncomfortable, but I still think it is true... (I don't know where I'm going with this and I'd rather not annoy anyone with half though out commentary, so I'll stop.)
6/24/2001 08:50:54 PM

Friday, June 22, 2001

William F. Buckley on Abercrombie & Fitch Catalogs:

The last part of the book actually depicts clothes of one kind or another, but the reader getting that far is hotly indignant: What are all those shirts and shorts and pants doing, interrupting my view of the naked kids! I mean, I showed you my ID, didn't I?

I hate Buckley's politics, but he's very droll, and James and I have been remarking on the scary sexuality apparent in the giant oiled nipples of 14-year-old Abercrombie models in the window of the store of Powell Street for quite awhile, now.
6/22/2001 09:31:06 AM

Well, I think it's done. Last night James and I signed a lease on a 1 bedroom apartment on an alley near the intersection of Valencia and Dubose. Barring some last minute problem with our credit, we'll be moving next month. We've told my other roommate, who took it reasonably well, although she'd have preferred that we told her we were apartment hunting earlier. [I'm aware that this would have been nice, but frankly, we've never had a roommate who was moving out warn us more than 30 days ahead of time, and if she'd jumped the gun and decided to move, we couldn't afford it to cover her rent for the month and pay for a deposit. Beyond which, she owes us a fair amount of cash as it is, and I can't lose anymore right now.

So you're likely to see me grousing about moving trauma this month, including cleaning the apartment and getting rid of old, dilapidated furniture that even Goodwill probably won't take (if Karen decides to move out).
6/22/2001 07:47:24 AM

Thursday, June 21, 2001

This mouse house thing Ev is talking about here is a little worrisome, isn't it? But he's right, nDroid is cool. (How's this for a useless me, too post?)
6/21/2001 10:56:25 AM

Wednesday, June 20, 2001

The Castro Theatre is screening the 1924 silent film version of Peter Pan on Sunday, July 8 at 11:00 am, and because of my extra wonderful boss, I have 2 comp tickets.

This makes me feel smug, and if this were a livejournal, i'd be looking for a little round bouncy guy who would indicate smugness.

Now if I could just get my left eye to stop twitching.

6/20/2001 12:34:48 PM

Sometimes society isn't very kind to boys, is it?
6/20/2001 10:58:12 AM

Tuesday, June 19, 2001

According to his online journal - carefully packaged and passworded by bowie.net, and quoted without permission - David Bowie is addicted to The Spectator:

Journal for Thursday, April 26th 2001

While having coffee at the local around the corner from where we live here in 'downtown', it struck me that I rose at about the same time as Joseph Addison. What the jeeblewheeb, you might ask, who the stubblewub is he? Well, in 1711 he and his friend Richard Steele started a daily news or comment sheet. Just two printed sides, it tried to capture some sense of how London society, high (mainly) and low (somewhat), moved. Most all of the characters mentioned are fictitious but generally based upon real people around town. But everything relates to what was happening at the time. Our correspondent identifies himself only as Mr. Spectator. It also set a gentle precedent for the satire mags. like Lampoon or Private Eye.

I'm addicted. More to the point, I realized the other day that it is in absolute parallel with the current year. April 26th 1711 and April 26th 2001 both fall on the Thursday. So here, for your enjoyment, is today's news. 290 years late.

Probably you don't understand how cheerful this makes me, but I have vivid memories of sitting in the undergrad library at UT Austin, smelling the slow rot of leather bound volumes from the 18th century. Gentleman's Magazine was on the shelf and where volumes still had their original binding, the cover came off like sawdust in your hands. Despite their fragility, though, you could still pour over news that was two centuries late (and orginally read in a frock coat and knickers), and laugh at the jokes in Punch at which someone else had been laughing more than a century before you were born.

It's nice to know that someone I admire enjoys that, too.
6/19/2001 06:50:59 PM

Sunday, June 17, 2001

Saw Moulin Rouge this evening. I think it's an ambitious film, but a little too campy for me. I liked the visuals and the cotumes (a lot), and didn't find the MUSICAL parts difficult, despite the contemporary music. But hearing people using schlocky Whitney Houston songs as spoken dialog make me want to yank my ears off - and that use of song lyrics as dialog undercut character development to the point that I did not care about any of the characters. I'm not sure I was supposed to.

Anyway, I regard it as a failed experiment (a little like Julian Temple's film of Absolute Beginners) that I'm not entirely sorry I saw.
6/17/2001 08:51:32 PM

Saturday, June 16, 2001

Look at these photos, but not at work (political photo art nudes).
6/16/2001 07:16:57 PM

I'm very anxious today, and - as I was telling James over breakfast before coming in to work this morning - while I could list for you all the things I am anxious about, I'm not sure that they are CAUSING the anxiety. I mean, it's just as likely that my brain, heart and stomach are just anxious and attributing anxiety to the outside THINGS is rationalization. Does that make sense?
6/16/2001 12:29:13 PM

Friday, June 15, 2001

Happy Friday to the rest of you. As it is ALA weekend here in San Francisco I have to attend half day events both Saturday and Sunday. Thus, *I* don't get a a weekend, and wish to pout about it publicly. These are the wages of making one's wages as a professional [italics added for mockery] development person, I suppose. Sometimes I think I'd rather work in a bookstore. Then I remember what rents are these days.

I know that posts here have been rather sparse. I've been consumed with non-wedding related personal issues, the most important of which is the fact that Ruth Garcia, the daughter of someone I know has runaway, and may be in the Bay Area. I've been mostly concerned about getting the word out to look for her without doing anything to spook her. Her parents desperately want her to call home.

I don't know Ruth at all - in fact, I only know her dad as the coworker of one of my old roommates in Austin, but I REALLY don't want her on the streets here with no money.
6/15/2001 12:09:30 PM

Wednesday, June 13, 2001

This is cute, yes?

6/13/2001 07:33:20 PM

This post on craigslist, about the American public's perception of Asians, is food for thought.
6/13/2001 08:54:36 AM

Tuesday, June 12, 2001

In the summer of 1939, an experiment was performed on 22 children living at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, IA. It used psychological pressure to induce children who spoke normally to stutter...

Sometimes I hate people.
6/12/2001 08:48:11 AM

Monday, June 11, 2001

I've been fighting with a raiser's edge export all day...

bah...
6/11/2001 02:35:32 PM

Tuesday, June 05, 2001

I'm reading Edmund White's exhaustive biography of Jean Genet (1993) -- who was an odd, odd man. Evidently I was ripe for some mid-20th century reading, because I've been failing to be interested in science fiction for w-e-e-k-s now. I admired Genet's plays and novels as a college student because of their insistent artifice and because Genet concentrates so much on the way people interact when are forced into social roles. Something about Genet's interest in playing out power relationships (mistress and maid, prostitute and client, prisoner and guard) fascinated me.

In the early part of Genet, White extrapolates (from thin documentation and Genet's own mythmaking) the story of a child who was abandoned into a rigid French welfare system in the first year of his life. Like other French orphans and foundlings during the period, Genet was fostered with a family in a rural region of France who, in exchange for a stipend, agreed to feed and educate him until he was 13 years old. After that, if he were especially successful, Genet could expect to take an apprenticeship as a trademan. Othewise he might be a laborer. Rather than accept these rather dreary opportunties, Genet began running away from authorities shortly after he turned 13. This - as well as a tendency to steal things - initiated his rejection of his own expected social role and his life as a criminal, prostitute, vagabond, soldier, writer, and political activist.

Although you'd expect the subject to be grim, some of White's account of Genet's life can be funny. He writes, for example:

Genet recalls in The Thief's Journal that one day when it was raining he experienced one of his most galling moments. A ship arrived in the harbour, French tourists came to shore, looked at the beggars loitering around the dock and commented on their picturesqueness, comparing them unfavourably to the more dignified beggars in Casablanca. One tourist even remarked, "They're happier than we are." (Genet, 102)

Anyway, I'm 125 pages in and I'm enjoying it. That's so surprising that it makes the front page instead of the reading page. (I was forced to give up A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for now, and I was so impatient with the pointless sexual relationships in Souls in the Great Machine that I put it down 75 pages from the end (cool post apocalyptic librarians or not).
6/5/2001 09:33:25 PM

Friday, June 01, 2001

!!!
6/1/2001 04:46:42 PM