okay. it's definitely the flu.

okay. it's definitely the flu. it's been a long time since i've had it, but it made itself known. i hope i recover in time to see liz phair and the flaming lips tomorrow night. actually, i just hope i make it to tomorrow night.

blah.

i haven't been feeling so

i haven't been feeling so well lately. i'm weary all the time so i sleep for twelve hours which leads only to more weariness. i have a strange, painful cough. i seem to be doing everything more slowly than usual, including the updating of this blog. it's odd. anyway, this is not to garner pity -- there are web crises and real tragedies that deserve our sympathy -- but just to say: don't go away, more bloggy love will return shortly. (sing nickelodeon "after these messages" ditty to yourself now.)

inventive.

him: how much does the average bra cost?
me: depends on where you buy it. victoria's secret, $26 - $36.
him: i'm going to design a bra and it's going to cost $700.
me: what kind of bra?
him: it's going to have a weight-sensitivity device and self-adjusting straps.
me: not a bad idea. actually, could it be tension-sensitive? i like the straps to have a certain tautness.
him: well, tension is just an observation of weight. besides, what happens when you're running or going down a flight of stairs?
me: um, bouncing?
him: exactly. that would be prevented.
me: cool. would the bra be sexy, as well?
him: no. it will be ugly.
me: (laughing.)
him: also, it will come attached to a backpack to hold all the wiring and instrumentation.
me: (further laughing.)
him: you could take off the backpack, but then it would just be a regular bra.

okay. no more seeing crazies

okay. no more seeing crazies in concert. as much as i loved cat power last month, as much as i enjoyed elliott smith last night, it's just too nerve-wracking to worry constantly that a performer will suddenly get stage fright and forget a song. i do feel fortunate, though, because elliott's completed-song rate was about 70% -- higher than i fretted it would be after hearing some foreboding tales of his on-stage caliber.

it's a lot easier to forgive a performer for their mistakes when you're standing six feet away. mostly i wanted to give him a big hug and say, "don't mind these screaming drunkards telling you what to play. i realize you don't remember 'condor avenue', you've said so several times, and it's okay. just play whatever you're able." because i was so close, i could see his eyes dart around in panic when he made mistakes, and i could see his hand start to shake as he tried to rescue a song from error. so there was a tendency for me to let things slide -- a forgiveness i might not have had if i'd been standing in the thankless back of the bar, unable to see the guy, in all his brilliance and intoxication and fright.

all in all, i really enjoyed the show, even though the audience proved to be one of those groups of people you wish you could punch in the collective face with one swing.

a friend of mine directed

a friend of mine directed me to the poll on the american idol website which asks the following question:

do you know who the next american idol will be? [ y / n ]

presumably, the brains behind american idol are interested in the prescient abilities of its targeted audience. in effect, voters are asked to choose between two options:

"yes, i can predict the future." OR
"no, i cannot predict the future."

i found this infinitely amusing. but that's not all.

as of the time of this posting, the results for the poll are as follows:

14% NO
86% YES
number of voters: 205,987

the implications of these findings are staggering. apparently, when clay or ruben is crowned with this year's honor, only 14% of the show's fans will be surprised.

and, even more notably, this means american idol has identified 177,148 telepathic people.

my building sits on the

my building sits on the edge of the torrey pines golf course. today, as i strolled there from the deli where i bought my lunch, i paused for a moment to take in the cool mist that had just rolled in, and watched the golfers on the other side of the fence.

i was thinking. and you know, i wish i were interested in golf. because then, when events like the buick invitational are played here or people like tiger woods are across the way, i'd be more able to appreciate them. as things are, the most i can say is, "hey, there's the goodyear blimp! that thing looks like it's going to land!"

i can't help feeling that the blimp is the last thing i'm supposed to ogle.

but in my defense, it really was flying low. i half-expected it to waltz into my building.

about a year ago, our

about a year ago, our office hired a temp. i never knew why. but one day, the computer in the conference area was out of use, and the next day, suddenly, it was powered on, with a picture of bob dylan's face tiled across the desktop and an eccentric kid staring calmly at it. the kid had longish, dirty blond hair and crooked, spacey teeth. he dressed entirely in black and wore black boots with pointy heels and pointy toes.

sam worked in our office for a month or two, sometimes wandering into our cubicles to talk or hear us talk or collect our dirty work. his last week there was a week i spent in spokane, and before i left, knowing he'd be gone when i returned, he gave me a note written in thick gold ink on thick red paper. in it, he told me how much he liked me and how special he thought i was and how wonderful it would be if i ever wanted to call him -- though if not, of course, no problem -- and how no matter what, i should "just keep smiling that gorgeous smile of" mine.

i was busy with other things when i got home from spokane, like being in love and sunning on the beach and pretending that this strange young man had never professed his weirdly tender interest in me. he came to visit us several times, when i was coincidentally out of the office, and i never saw him again.

until last week. he's back, hired as an assistant to someone whose office door is immediately adjacent to ours, meaning that sam's desk is directly outside of -- practically obscuring -- our office suite door. i wasn't notified of his return to the department and when i saw him the first time i did a classic double-take.

"hi!..." and, upon the empty pause, "...sam?"

he looked up at me, expressionless. "yeah," he replied after a moment, with the tone of someone pointing out the dreadfully obvious, "hi."

he so clearly didn't want to talk. i ended the conversation and left quickly. i'd assumed he had forgotten the note he gave me a year ago, especially given his eager admission that no call from me would be fine (with the condition that i continue smiling). had he been more upset than i imagined, and was he still upset after all this time? i don't understand his sudden remarkable unfriendliness. it's profoundly awkward and unnatural to ignore someone i see by necessity every time i enter or leave my office, but he ignores me so intently that i see little other choice for me other than to reciprocate.

he comes into our cubicles, like he used to, though less often, and now he doesn't speak to me --only to the other analysts. once he came in while i was away from my desk. when i returned he'd lain down a wrapped korean cracker by my keyboard. i forgot to take it home that day and the next day it was gone.

a weekend with dad.

my father never ceases to surprise me. this is a man who makes me wish i'd brought a tape recorder to our discussions so that i could publish his comments and experiences in a best-selling memoir. a man who begins sentences with, "i read four books this morning...". a man who already impresses me with his full scholarships to princeton and yale and his fullbright scholarship and all his degrees in political science and who then decides to add to all that with the offhand comment, "did i tell you i got a masters degree in counseling psychology some years ago?"

i never leave our conversations without feeling supremely interested and quietly thoughtful and somehow enlightened. i truly believe that some of the beauty that spills so effortlessly from his lips belongs on paper. i nearly came to tears when he told me about the summer he spent in london as an undergraduate, falling for a french girl, feeling profoundly rejected by her distanced manner, being unable to cope with the divergence between his injured emotions and his reasonable mind, perceiving the world of feeling tear painfully apart from the world of rationality, realizing now, forty years later, that the darkest period of the summer and one of the most difficult times of his life was so dimmed by the unavailable affection of this extraordinary girl.

though, it still turns my stomach a little when he makes mention of "intercourse."

seriously. tell me what is

seriously. tell me what is better than an afternoon off spent in a cute bikini by the pool.

when i wake up stressed,

when i wake up stressed, there's about a 50/50 chance it's because i dreamed about being in a nasty brawl with "the other girl". i keep looking down at my fingernails, expecting to see blood and hair and bitch underneath.

today, my morning commute increased

today, my morning commute increased by a factor of six. (luckily, it's normally only five minutes.) the reason: a crane collapsed onto the area's busiest freeway right at its merge with another major interstate -- already possibly the most congested area in the county -- and trailed a fistful of major power cables along behind, draping them over the highway. the damage was power loss for thousands and the total paralysis of north county as both freeways closed and traffic spilled onto quickly-clogged surface streets.

my sensationalist mind has tweaked this image into something fantastic. the way i picture it, a crane used in a construction project on the steep slope alongside the freeway came wholly tumbling down the hill in a great bouncy path of destruction, tethered by dozens of power cables to a row of telephone poles that were helpless to resist the pull of the toppling crane, which crashed down with its ilk onto the traffic-coated surface of the road and in its momentum trampled over hundreds of poor commuters across a long sweep of defenseless highway before finally coming to a precarious rest in the median, leaving behind it a wide swath of devastation.

this image, though wrong, left me wondering, why haven't movie producers utilized this Crane O' Catastrophe idea? a crane, with its huge size and weird shape, is an ideal weapon of moderate accidental destruction. just a thought. i'm going to have a mr. goodbar now.

hurrah for travel!

in the past weeks i've acquired tickets from here to london (the better part of the summer), from london to ireland (the first week of july) and, less striking but still tremendously exciting for me, from here to oakland (first weekend in june) to see my big sister and to visit my brother and his fiancee while they're still living in sin, a state that will end the weekend i return from my overseas jaunt.

that's part of what i've been doing over the last few days. that, and being so stuffy i can't breathe and so busy i can't see straight.

tonight:

the sun set on thousands of drunk san diegans trudging sunburnt bodies out of the pacific beach block party and hollering at every girl with two legs, two arms, and two breasts.

the dixie chicks are playing and i don't even feel like doing something to change that.

not even the fact that Josh The Terrible was finally voted off american idol cheers me up presently.

i wish i could call you people, you wonderful bloggers, because i know that you are smart and funny and at times hilariously naughty and i'd love a little of that right now.

oh, hey - happy outdoor

oh, hey -

happy outdoor sex day, everybody! go celebrate.

i might have forgotten, but half the referrals to this site are from searches for that phrase.

all my southern california birthdays

all my southern california birthdays have been cold. all my eastern washington birthdays were hot (okay, except that one year it snowed the day before). go figure.

help. forgot closing quote at

help. forgot closing quote at very end of last post (final word of which is supposed to be insomniac), causing impossibility to edit post because the "edit" link in blogger is compromised by the unfinished link in post. am feeling silly but too noise-rattled to do anything.

am clever problem-solver, even with bits of ear tissue and clusters of brain cells missing.

this is what happens to

this is what happens to you when the background noise during sleepy time is a medley of lawnmowers and jackhammers.

you dream.

you dream about arguing with the boy who broke your heart in an RV that is halfway sunken into the earth, while the illicit object of his affection strolls by with her posh, laughing friends.

you dream about riding angrily away on a bike whose handlebars face forward and backward, not left and right, and trying desperately to swing the handlebars around to their proper position while traveling down the street in a 40 mile per hour panic.

you dream about catching the elevator up to your dorm, because apparently you live in a dorm, and becoming frantic when the elevator starts moving sideways and you are informed that you are about to embark on a flying tour of the college campus on which you apparently reside.

you dream that the flying tour comes complete with majestic overtures and disneyesque parade music blaring through stereo surround sound, as your elevator transforms into a gondola-type car with your feet hanging free as you fly over the whales your tour guide tells you are swordfighting even though they are clearly just swinging their 100-foot tailfins at one another.

you dream that you fly over your mother and sister, who do not recognize you, but then land right next to them, and this time your mother recognizes you and says to your sister, "that's kathleen" (which is the name you were born with) and your sister says, vacantly, "oh yeah, what last name does she go by now?"

you dream that you walk with your mother and sister into a cafeteria where you meet up with your old maid, because apparently you once had a maid, and your maid begins arguing with a man who seems to be overstepping his rights, and you step up to him and point your index finger into his chest and say, "excuse me, is this your business?" because that is the boo-yah way to end an argument, and then you walk haughtily away with your maid, who is now plotting murder on this man, and with your sister and with, inexplicably, jennifer lopez a la the wedding planner.

and when you wake you really, really wish you were an insomniac.

this morning i was startled

this morning i was startled awake by a jackhammer beneath my window. not forty feet from my bed, men were drilling into concrete, at an hour it should be illegal to make such a sound. i'd like to say something funny about this, but the simple fact is that i wanted to murder one of those men with my ikea kitchen knife and i still feel like a killing spree isn't a distant possibility if i'm startled at all, perhaps by a sudden sneeze or a pop-up window, and it's taking all my effort simply to calm down.

reading anna's description of a

reading anna's description of a to-die-for bra, i was inspired to waltz around victoriassecret.com for awhile, and i was reminded in doing so that despite all the frills and lace and satin and mesh that i love and everybody loves i can never find *the* perfect bra. so i'm going to design one. i just thought i'd let you all know. i'll tell you when i'm through.

i spaced out during a

i spaced out during a group conversation today, and when i tuned back in the other participants were saying:

"i think they're cute."
"the smurfs?"
"mormons?"
"no, donnie and marie osmond."

on tuesday i drove up

on tuesday i drove up to hollywood to see cat power, aka the achingly beautiful musical stylings of one chan marshall, who is, well, a little kooky.

it was definitely the first time i've seen a performer so enthusiastically offer drags of a cigarette to members of the audience.

but apparently the smoky allure of her voice can't be compromised by slight craziness or considerable drunkenness. she was insecure ("i don't want to play that one. it sucks") yet amazing. and the performance re-arrangements of "i don't blame you" and "maybe not" were stellar.

anyway. today i straightened my long dark hair and wore my new cat power shirt and i feel pretty hot. pretty chan-ish.