Crackin up

I'm not perfect. I don't have to be perfect. I hold myself at such high standards it's absurd. I find myself apologizing to people for having even the smallest emotional outburst at all. When I wait for the bus and people "cut" in front of me to get on first I call them cocksucker in my head and then feel waves of guilt for a few minutes. I think the reason I have this little turret-esque mental voice is closely related to how hard I try to appear nice, pleasant, non-argumentative. I never tell strangers my political views because I'm afraid they won't like me. Over the years I've turned into quite the comedian because I know it pleases people and I love that feeling. Now, there's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it's the suppression of everything else that leads to my unraveling every once in a while. And then I feel guilty for unraveling. Because the boys never do that, do they? Or if they do, then certainly not in front of other people and not as often.

Why do we women strive to be like men? We look at their ambitions, their confidence, their rational approach to everything, and we think it's better. We call them unfeeling but secretly we're jealous. We think they're not fully living on all levels of their lives but then we want to be like them. It's a conflict I wasn't even aware of in myself until recently. It's the water our society floats in.

This is me: I am not practical. I change my mind sometimes. I'm fucking funny on more outgoing days, a believer in vocal brevity on other days. Books and movies affect me significantly, and sometimes make me feel insane. I like fewer better friends and therefore often don't like to meet strangers. I find my lack of commitment to a career pleasing and often terrifying. I've started taking more control of my emotional oscillations and therefore find them a little more interesting, more like a game than a female inadequacy. It's still a delicate relationship, and as I've gotten older I've noticed that nutrition and excercise are not just good for it, they're basically everything it rests on. I worry that if tragedy strikes me, I will forever be off balance because I'm not tough enough. I'm constantly working towards having people see me for who I really am, but it's difficult and terrifying.

Also: Regardless of what I've said in the above paragraph, I think I'm making excellent progress.

Flesh Slinky

February is Strong Beer Month.

My body is painfully aware of this fact right now.


Ah, in finding those links I figured out what was going on last night at the brewery. There was this enormous group of people dining together in the lofted portion of the place and at one point they all turned and waved/shouted at the rest of us. It was disconcerting, and if I hadn't been wearing my pink wig I wouldn't have known what to do (the wig told me to smile and wave back). But now I know. Now I KNOW THEIR DIRTY SECRET. They were being educated. beer-ducated.

On the bus

I haven't seen the retarded baby on the 24 line in a while. I used to see her and her mom (who is almost the same size as her-she's an enormous 2 year old and her mom is tiny) every day on my way to work. I miss her. I don't know for sure that she's retarded, but that glazed, unengaged look she had and the way she never cried or spoke made me think it. A very easy kid to care for on the whole. I did see the spacy Haight Street bus teenage-girl, the one who sprints to and from the bus with no facial expression, for the first time since moving away from the Haight. That bus is full of wacky regulars, and I feel sentimental every time I ride it.

My dear dear friends are moving to New Zealand next month. We had all tentatively been planning to go together around August, but events accelerated in highly coincidental and unanticipated ways this weekend. Now they are giving away most of what they own for free. I am deeply tempted to take some, although it means I will be in a similar position a few months down the road.

Every time I look around, everything has changed. Startling confrontations, abrupt endings, people coming and going, I feel extremely fluid right now. Rikky talked to me this weekend about that feeling a lot of people have when they realize that this, working full-time, is what they will be doing for the rest of their life. I personally don't have this feeling, but I think it's because there is a clear ending to my workiness approaching. I see a long series of working and not working in my future. It's very nice to think about! I will never be rich, and maybe I'll have to rethink this plan if a kid appears, but it makes me hopeful in a way that many people aren't.

Ahem. Sappy statement aproaching! This is the first Valentine's Day I've had that I neither feel bummed about being single nor in need of acknowledgement of the occasion by a significant other. I am creating new definitions of a good relationship and I think I will add this feeling to the list. Fuck yes!

Excuse me, I usually have this sort of outburst under control but lately this stuff is exploding out of my mouth all over the place. YOU know.

My apartment is empty again. Yeeeeeeeeeeessssssss. A tornado of girls hit it and tonight when I get home from work I am going to lie on top of the pile of rubble left behind and listen to Boards of Canada. I will not think. I will turn off my phone. I will alternately stare at bright colors and adjust my curtains to try and make the ceiling look pink and then green. I will raise my legs up into the air so that they lift half my torso up with them, and then I will hover like that with all my weight resting on my shoulders and upper back until I get tired. I will not take out the trash.

Maybe.

Quotables!

Quotables are like lunchables only they don't slowly and insidiously kill your kid from malnutrition.

I always think of things that sound like quotes when I'm in the shower. For example, from yesterday: "It's easy to be mature about other people's problems." Can I put quote marks around something that I myself said? I'm using them to indicate that they are not a new idea or part of my current narrative flow, so I'll say I can. Motion passed! I said this "quote" because I was ruminating about 2 of my roomates and all the troubles they've had with each other, and I felt all rational and reasonable, psychologically analyzing them and playing that game of, well, if only she had done this or he had done this, then none of it would've happened. But that's not really how things work is it? Woulda coulda shoulda chug chug. I'm glad one of them moved out now, it makes me more likely to hang out at home, cook, clean, all that nesting action. My new replacement roomie seems promising already. She made a little sign for the dishwasher that says, "Stick it in" on one side (with a penis doing said action) and one side that says, "Pull it out" (with....you know...so that we know if the dishes have been cleaned. Practical. And dirty.)

I also sing better in the shower. Did you ever see that episode of The Flinstones where one of the guys (Fred? His teenage son maybe in the later episodes?) only sings awesomely in the shower, so he has a concert under a shower elephant and then the elephant gets scared off or something and suddenly everyone hears how awful he sounds when dry? This has stuck in my mind for oh, I don't know, 2 decades now?

I really wanted to answer your thing about ownership Steve, but I kept thinking of more and more to say and then I got tired and didn't feel like answering. But you've solidified a lot of my ideas and spurred me on to some mental reorganization, so, thanks! Maybe sometime in person we can talk about it!

I know it's incredibly boring to talk about, but San Francisco has been kicking ass in the weather department this week. I'm all like, wahwahwoah, I don't know what to do with it, like it's a burning glass of alcohol and I'm all over-excited and tossing it from hand to hand.

Rikky's in da house tonight! Good thing I cleaned my sheets yesterday, in my book of etiquete it is not proper to let female friends sleep in sexed-up sheets. It's just not done!

Maybe my book of etiquete can be a supplement to the very promising Grownup Magazine: The Magazine for Grownups that has been churning in a few of my favorite people's heads.

crying game

It's time to talk about crying.

Crying!

So good. I always forget that it's the best drug ever. Last night I experienced that intense kind of physical pain that leads immediately to crying. It was either cry or vomit from the pain, and my body chose that natural medicine. I never remember what crying without choice is like. When I cry every couple of months it's usually an emotional breakdown, and I can choose whether to do this semi-taboo thing, making myself feel much better but perhaps embarrassing myself a bit, or suppress it and feel a little dull and shitty ( I guess it's not much of a choice when I put it that way, huh?). But crying from pain is a much more exciting story.

I'm fine now anyway. Short-lived exciting pain.

I always know someone's gonna be ok if they start crying, because then I know that they're feeling a really rewarding and pleasurable sadness, rather than a stagnant pain. When my friend had a terrible hangover from a drug, I was really worried until I visited her in her tent and found her both cracking jokes and crying. Her body must be very good at fixin itself. Very Sexy. I'm gonna market a beverage that shows this horribly bloated and red crying face on it (a woman, I think it's gotta be female, it might be too weird to be a guy) and call it Very Sexy. Maybe it's an infused vodka.

Hey bloggy blog, can I give you all my best ideas ever? I want to give them away, because I sure ain't using them. I don't care about property anymore, I want to give all my valuable stuff away for free. Copyright law pisses me off more than almost anything, it's really the extreme expression of our society's most basic and annoying value, ownership. I think the mistranslation of it a century ago resulting in it's extreme form today ( the ownershop of copies in addition to originals) was actually inevitable given our more and more extreme ideas about property.

Wow, was that my first rant? I think it was, this blog is like a really intense fast relationship, I'm getting all the bases covered in record time. Emotions, rants, musing, jokes, links, my very first middle-of-the-night entry.....nice.