geegaw.com

breakneck

Depressed at missing 801 on Wed and the conveniently located George Bush Retirement Party tomorrow, but whatever. A blogger living vicariously through her readers instead of the reverse.

quick update

This week it's been jump out of bed, wash hair, hop on train, work, go home, pay the bills, watch ATHF, then it's lights out. But tonight A. and I left work before sunset and had dinner together. I ate animal products for the first time since Sunday, at Aki on w. 4th st, and the animal products were strange and delicious bits of flesh from the oceans.

Signed up to do voter mobilization in battleground states via US Action/Citizen Action and hopefully Partnership for America's Families too. Pennsylvania is the nearest battleground state.

I turned the webcam on my desk out the window - the view is of Manhattan buildings from 20 stories up. Don't have the time to really stare out the window myself, but it's nice to occasionally glance at a 100x120 pixel image of pigeons necking on my screen.

Thanks for the poetry teacher getting fired link - ARGH it makes me so mad.

Back in NYC

Avec jet lag, sans free time. Reading "An anthropologist on mars" on the train. xoxo M

Why don't they have freakin Fish McDippers in the US?

Amend that, I actually meant to post that someone has published Toadex Hobogrammathon's 136-page book NaNoWriMo book online! Name, a Novel. I suspect they did it without T.H.'s approval. C'mon you fuckers, how about sending him some fucking royalties here?

I think the funniest part of the book is the phrase "in Venice (Italy)".

Why I don't eat 'em, part III

An octopus love story.

Rip Van Winkle

It's been a week since I posted here? I guess my work blog, which I update daily, has eaten what I nonensically think of as my "real life blog." Silly rabbit. Only connect the work blog and the real life blog, the workstation and the laptop, the bizarre fucked-up division whose machinations have been described as "pure soap opera" and the nights spent lying on the sofa watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force reruns.

Crossing El Camino Real on foot in the dark a couple nights ago, a fleeting fear of some car with its lights off, slicing through the darkness like a fin. And even when driving the grossly oversized white minivan I worry that I'm invisible, lights out, and just a patch of paler dark in the pitch dark. A. said, "The subway is the only safe mode of transportation" and I wouldn't go that far, but I sure miss it.

Anyway. "A Room With a View" was inferior to "Howards End" until you conceptualize it as a chick flick starring, say, Cameron Diaz and Colin Firth, at which point the novel is set in relief and becomes brilliant and beautiful. I'm currently reading the 2002 Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology, which opens with a good time-travel/aliens/poker story by Kelly Link.

New incarnations of what look like the same zit are tracking their way across my forehead like a slow-motion pixel from a Mooninite's gun. I'm back to my usual weight, plus a California tan, and I have a stylin' new wardrobe of corporate/promotional t-shirts.

Parallel universe Miranda is carpooling with -----'s ex-coworkers to the Blogger launch party tonight, but I don't think I can "do" parties right now, when I'm just not as interested in meeting new people as I am in establishing a sense of home again. On the bright side, I'll be home again soon. I'll try to catch up on email in the airport tomorrow.

Shake-zulah, the mike-rulah

I just figured out where the below vision came from! It's the cover of Bruiser Queen!

Metatron and the Decepticons

That unspoken contract, the bargain struck between life and work, seems to have been amended in favor of the latter party. Then again, my new job seems to be a lot more similar to the things I do for fun than it is to my old job -- staying up late messing around with Linux, trying to get people I knew in college to be nicer to me, blogging, and reading up on CULTI and TRASFUSIONE SANGUIGNE. Unfortunately both babelfish.altavista.com and translate.google.com translate PENSIONE as "pension" and find no Italian equivalent for "hotel," which is just embarassing.

Came back to the PENSIONE tonight to find that the maid had spread my baggy blue velvet pants across my bed as though the ghost of The King himself were lounging in them, watching the TV. Trust me, it was spooky.

And when I get too tired, I start imagining things, like on Monday when I was talking to Andy and for a split second instead of seeing my office and the things around me and Andy's face, all I saw was this:

Aaaanyway. I am very happy that you guys would rather post to the diablog than search the site archives for "His Dark Materials." It shows a charming and delighfully non-stalky orientation to the question.

Leave the poetics to us

Work was rotten the first half of this week (better today), but A. and I went out for sushi and I ate a chocolate chip cookie and I got to hear Madeleine Albright talk and briefly met indie cartoonist R. F. who recommended Lee's Comics, at Rengstorff and Leghorn, which just happens to be on my drive home from work. She seemed quiet but really nice. I'll try to pick up a copy of the Ganzfeld #2 so maybe I can get it signed by her. When she heard that I was trying to meet her, she wanted to know if I was a goth, because most of her fans are, apparently."That doesn't fit in real well with the software lifestyle," I told her, by way of apologizing for my baggy blue velvet pants and threadbare green striped shirt.

Finished Howards End last week. Liked the synthesis of live in fragments no longer and the withering away of thesis and antithesis in the beast and the monk will die; didn't like realizing how deeply the central conflict was related to class; identified with this passage even though I shouldn't:

Oh to acquire culture! Oh, to pronounce foreign names correctly! Oh, to be well informed, discoursing at ease on every subject that a lady started! But it would take one years. With an hour at lunch and a few shattered hours in the evening, how was it possible to catch up with leisured women, who had been reading steadily from childhood?

Another guilty, delicious TV pleasure is Aqua Teen Hunger Force: I haven't missed an episode since A. and I discovered them two days ago. Oh yeah, also MTV's Wildboyz. Some "boyz" -- they're like 30 now.

"Dieting" is hard. I find myself getting twitchy without my daily carb binge. And end up eating pretty much the same way I always do

Oh yeah, I took the Soulmate Calculator, for laughs. Some crazy guy in Garden Grove thinks single people should all post XML blobs containing their stats and what kind of person they're looking for, so others can search for them. He says that finding your soulmate is purely a matter of statistics, but his Calculator told me the probability of there being someone who fits my specified criteria was zero. Good thing I've got A.