Oh, my stars and garters!

Boo. Hiss.

I can't tell if the station is good or not because it keeps timing out. I guess lots of other people want to listen too. I'm hopeful that I'll like it, but I'm afraid it's going to be the kind of thing that gets tired and obnoxious really fast because everyone sounds smirky and self-congratulatory. Sort of like what happened to Michael Moore; I used to love him, but now I can barely watch him. I still think he's funny and I agree with a lot of what he says, but he eventually stopped being an irreverent underdog crusader and started acting like a self-satisfied blowhard. It's very difficult to skewer self-satisfied blowhards when you are one yourself.

Shit, did that make me sound like a self-satisfied blowhard too? I hope not.

Goody!

Air America Radio is offering streaming audio, so all us poor folks in the red states can listen too.
I hope it doesn't suck.

High culture

Hey, guess what I watched tonight? I would have gotten through more than I did, but there are only three episodes left.

When I was done letting my mouth hang slackly open in front of the television, I whipped up a batch of Joolie's Super-Special Down-Home Nachos, a recipe I concocted during my gustatorily bleak high school years.

You'll need:
One large handful of smashed stale Tostitos.
However much cheese you feel like grating before you get fed up.

Combine ingredients; microwave for 30 seconds.
Enjoy! Be sure to use your fingernails to get after the cheese splotches that are fused to the plate.

They're actually pretty good. Nobody believes me when I tell them that Cheetos are delicious in macaroni and cheese either, but I have many converts to back me up.

Wanna read a crazy story?

This guy collapsed on the side of the interstate and lay there for a day and a half before anyone found him.

Pen Pal!

I have one. How cool is that? She wrote me, I wrote her back. Etc. I think we're on round three now.

Much has been made of e-mail and how it killed the letter, but I think that's bullshit. Even before that, there were letter writers, there were people who might send you a card at Christmas and maybe a postcard when they went to Tahoe or something, and there were people who would move to another city and you would just never ever hear from them again.

I'm a letter writer. Not a particularly good one, but I try. And if I'm corresponding with other letter writers I try extra hard.

I have a friend whom I knew, eh, fairly well in senior high school. We had a lot of mutual friends and hung out for the last half of my junior year and the summer after, going bowling and to Denny's and stuff. We liked each other a lot but hadn't really known each other that long.

She went off to college a year before I did that fall. That probably would have been it, but she wrote me from school and I wrote back. And so on. That was in 1992, and now we exchange letters at least two or three times a year, supplemented by e-mails and the occasional visit. I'm closer to her now than most anyone else I went to school with, even people I met when I moved to my hometown in third grade. Actually, I'm still in touch with one girl I knew in the third grade, and she's an intermittent letter writer herself.

Anyway, it's great to send big fat letters crammed with photos and cartoons and stickers, and it's even greater to receive them. If you have a friend who lives out of town, at least send them a stupid postcard with a jackalope or something on it. That will make them so happy, and maybe someday soon you'll come home from a stupid day at work to find they sent you something back.

Homicide

I don't want to get too tedious on the subject, but I love this show. I'm about three-fourths through season three, and we have season four on order. I think it comes out tomorrow.

You do have to remember that it's still a network cop show. It can be a little heavy-handed on the introspection and the drama, and sometimes the Hip Music Selections aren't, but I am having so much fucking fun gorging on it in four- and five-episode chunks.

I also have to admit that Yaphet Kotto turns my crank just a little bit.

Lomohome

Hey, look, my friend's Lomohome is site of the day on the Lomo page!

I think her pictures are wonderful and that you will benefit greatly from looking at them, if only to see my boyfriend and my cat.

Logy, grody

I can tell I'm not really going to wake up and catch my snap today until about 15 minutes before I need to go to bed.

I have a big, hard, painful zit on my lower lip. It looks and feels disgusting. Whenever I get one of those I always want to draw a huge arrow pointing to it and write "NOT A CHANCRE" on my cheek with a Sharpie.

That ink's a bitch to wash off, though, so I'll just go on record now: It's not a chancre. Jeez.

Whew.

The song is finally gone. Now my only immediate problem is whether to drag my stinky, hungover, cramp-wracked body over to Dan's house to watch "Bring it On" and "Bring it On Again" on pay-per-view. Path of least resistance dictates that I stay home and writhe and watch my Sunday stories. But it's hard to pass up a four-hour snarkfest.

A joke you will most likely hate

Q: Why couldn't the princess potato marry Ted Koppel?

A: Because he's a commentator.

Help.

You're workin' really hard/And you've got a lot of pride...

The Chevy dealership jingle will not be exorcised. It's on a permanent loop in my head. I heard "Billie Jean" in the car tonight and thought for sure that would take instead. It did not.

We're all in this together for a long, long ri-ide...

That ad has run for years and I've never had a problem with it. Why now?

You can depend on us/We're tried and we're true...

This is almost as bad as the two weeks in 11th grade when I was plagued by the saxophone solo in "Baker Street."

Shit list

1. Banana-flavored candy. Why ruin a perfectly good bag of Skittles with these nasties? Bananas are ok, but artificial banana flavoring is simply unacceptable.

2. The Henna Chevrolet jingle. It's been stuck in my head since Sunday freaking night. This is our pro-mise, we'll follow it through/Henna Chev-ro-lay-ay, we'll stand by you. Kelly Willis sings it, looking and sounding all cute. This commercial invariably makes Roone sigh because Shania Twain is rich and Kelly's still shilling for a car dealership.

3. Lean Cuisine meals that contain tough meat and mealy potatoes that make me gag and spit a good portion of my lunch into the trashcan. This one's my own damn fault. Anybody who buys Lean Cuisine deserves exactly what they get.

4. John Aielli. Because John Aielli is always on my shit list.

Hot romance tips

Hey, gals, do you want to drive your man wild? Well, of course you do; for what other reason were you put on this earth?

Set the mood by drinking a bunch of beer before he gets home from work. Greet him sloppily but enthusiastically.

Settle in to watch TV. Be sure to talk a lot, especially during the good parts. Drink more beer and chain smoke.

Suggest a midnight drive to the gas station to buy more cigarettes. Return home, light up again, and open another beer.

When you're nice and relaxed, engage your special guy in a long conversation about politics. Employ lots of circular logic and emphasize the same obvious point several times. If his interest starts to flag, spice up your tirade by jabbing your index finger into the air and pounding the table. When he finally gets a chance to offer his opinion, snort and call him a fearmonger. Counter by repeating pretty much the exact same thing he just said as though you had a revelation.

If you are lucky, he will be calm and patient without seeming condescending toward your drunk ass. This is because he is kind and, sadly for him, pretty used to this sort of thing.

After the conversation has been run into the ground, head for the bedroom. Pull on rumpled pajama bottoms and slip into bed. Relish his chaste and hasty kiss goodnight because, girl, you've earned it.

TV party!

Roone just sent me an e-mail to let me know that season three of Homicide just arrived at our house. That's 999 minutes of mid-90s ensemble-cast delight. This is so perfect; I had nothing better to do this weekend, and the calluses on my ass could really use some thickening.

"You shouldn't make fun of people with issues."

No, I suppose you shouldn't. Especially if the people happen to be Richard Simmons, who will slap the shit out of you.

Git off my land!

View from our front porch

So my roommate reports that the car alarm guy finally dealt with the problem yesterday by muffling it with a bath towel. Other options might have included disconnecting the horn or starting the car (and perhaps driving it off a cliff), but hey, whatever works.

I suppose we could have helped him out, but I'm afraid we are not very friendly neighbors. I've lived in the same house for almost six years, and due to high turnover and my tendency toward shyness, I know almost nobody. Our block is full of mysteries, but we'd rather endlessly speculate on our neighbors' lives than actually talk to them.

For example, the car-horn people are running some sort of business out of their house, judging by the daily UPS visits and the cars that are parked next to and occasionally in our yard. Is it a brothel? A recording studio? A catering service? We may never know.

Why is there a battered bread truck parked in front of another neighbor's house all of a sudden? Are they spies? Bakers? Heirs to a recently deceased bread truck owner? Betting is open.

Or the guy who lives behind us. Why does he have so many city-issued trashcans? What of the mounds of exercise equipment rusting in his backyard? Was it really easier for him to punch out a pane of glass in his side window than to install a cat door? Why is he so rarely home, and when he is, why does he turn off all his lights when we pull into the driveway at night? I won't even pretend to guess what he's up to.

We're on a first-name basis with one couple on our block because they are so friendly that they initially would not knuckle under to our unenthusiastic waves and lukewarm nods. So they are not a mystery at all. They gave me a tour of their house once. It's modern and quite nice. Every once in a while they get drunk and have these great screaming Fuck you!/Fuck ME? No! Fuck YOU! arguments. The husband used to bring a beer or two over to our front porch in the evenings, but he finally picked up on our polite lack of interest and now only waves from his driveway. I feel a little bad about that because he's a really nice guy, but ultimately I prefer to sit on my porch alone, smoking in the dark and silently judging anyone who might pass by.

Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep

Confidential to the guy down the street whose horn-based car alarm keeps going off over and over and over: I hope you get eaten by water moccasins.

My brain abhors a vacuum

I just had a stress dream about work. That makes no sense, because my job isn't very stressful. I'm not even at work today.

Hm. Maybe my brain is tricking me into feeling stressed and frantic so I can feel all important, if only when I'm asleep. What a sweetheart my brain is! It could get away with just regulating my temperature and breathing and stuff, but sometimes it really goes the extra mile.

I guess they laid off the proofreaders:

I-35 at 38 1/2 Street

New favorite things

I've spent most of the day playing with the pen pad and the painting software. I like both very much. Click on the picture to see what I have to show for it:

What is it with the disgusting snack food?

Do not ever go to the mall with my friend Roone. He will drop twenty bucks on gummi octopi and lemon drops at the bulk candy store, and you will end up in charge of it on the way home. Half a pound of sugary gelatin later, you will be a wretched human being.

No mas chicharrones.

Bleah. Ick yuck gaah phooey.

I like pork rinds. I think they're delicious. So what happened tonight is really so sad, because I may have to revise my opinion of them.

Will you look at this?

What the hell are those black dots? Is it possible that I almost ate a pork rind studded with pig bristles? Can that happen?

I know that some fucked-up things go on during meat preparation. I know that pork rinds require scalding or burning the bristles off hogs before the skin is removed and deep-fried in vats. I know all this, but when you eat meat you sort of make a deal with yourself that you're not going to think about that stuff too much. Visual aids hinting at the process do not help me with that little arrangement.

In my search for more information about um, pig bristles, I came across the USDA's glossary of food terms. I hope you'll enjoy browsing through it as much as I did, although I don't recommend that you do it over lunch.

Whew. That's enough of the pen tablet for tonight, for, as we all know, doing challenging things is stupid.

I am tired-wired, and unless someone comes up with something free and fabulous tomorrow, I think I'm done with SXSW. I saw some good bands--Split Lip Rayfield rocked my world this afternoon--and didn't spend too much money. Good enough.

I did ride my dork ass downtown tonight because my friend Dan told me there was a pervasive rumor the Pixies were playing a surprise show. My head was saying it was bullshit, but my heart was pointing out how furious I'd be if they did play and I missed it because I, like, employed common sense. My heart is dumb. Fortunately I ran into Dan outside the club. He had since heard that it was in fact a load of hooey and talked me down before I spent $20 to see a bunch of bands I didn't care about. Actually he talked me down and then teased me for a while. (Wait! Is that Kim Deal over there? Aheeheehee!) I felt a little silly, but I figure that since people are buying plane tickets to places like Indio, California, and Saskatchewan to see them, it wasn't so drastic to ride my bike a few miles to check out a long shot.

Oh, well. I rode home and then spent a quiet evening drinking beer and talking to friends in their big, interesting house. The previous owners had done some bizarre shit to the place, like inexpertly carving holes in the walls to jam windows into. My favorite was the attempt to install a medicine cabinet in the shallow space between the bathroom and exterior walls, a project that apparently was abandoned in favor of propping a huge mirror over the exposed insulation. My friend said that when he first moved in there were locks on the outside of all the bedroom doors, best not to speculate, and there were disturbing-looking stick figures crayoned on the walls of the kids' bedroom. But it's really a fantastic, rambling place, and I had a nice visit there.

Speaking of rambling, I am. But look, I can stop. See?

Omen

A roadrunner wandered in front of my car today. I had to do a double take because I didn't know we had roadrunners in Austin, and I certainly didn't know they wandered. It was really pretty, and its upper legs sort of moved in a fluid circle, just like the WB version but in very slow motion. I hope it wasn't too lost.

Is there some sort of superstition about a roadrunner crossing your path? Like, Roadrunner see, dyspeptic you'll be. Or Cross paths with roadrunner, your life will get funner. Anyway, it was bizarre.

Eric just told me it's time for us to go drink free beer, and who am I to argue?

We have fun

Mission of Burma good. Everyone happy. Drinks now. Bed soon.

Minefield

Oh, boy. One of my roommates is sort of seeing someone now. I don't know much about her, but I'm sure she's a lovely girl.

Ok. Our household is 75% male, so the talk around here gets pretty raunchy. Even when we start out with good intentions, talk about voter turnout or vegetable preparation usually lapses into exchanges touching on flatulence, mass murder, anal sex, or loose women. It's generally in the spirit of good fun.

Anyway, this all means that when I'm in the bathroom tonight and hear my roommate come in, my first impulse is to yell "Hi! Your skank-ass ho called earlier!" through the door. No reflection on the actual girl, you know, just the way we do things here at Casa XY. But I'm finishing up in there and for some merciful reason decide to wait a few seconds.

I come out into the hall, turn to blurt out the joyous news, and am confronted with my roommate and his ladyfriend as they're trying to slip into his bedroom. Oops.

He introduces us. She's cute and seems friendly. She politely extends her hand.

I'd just washed mine after using the bathroom, and it's dripping wet. Ordinarily I'd dry them, but I hadn't really expected to be shaking anyone's hand at two in the morning. So I keep mine at my side. We both look at it until it dawns on me that an explanation might be in order. I tell her I'd shake but I just washed my hands. We both look my right hand again as though it might be visibly crawling with bacteria.

She withdraws her hand then and says well, then you won't want to get them dirty.

Well, shit. I thought I had just avoided insulting my roommate's girlfriend, and then the skanky ho completely misunderstands me.

I try to salvage the situation by mumbling something halting and incoherent like, "No! They're wet. Not a germ thing! Nice to meet you!" Then I flee as gracefully as I can while wearing striped orange pajamas.

This story underscores two things. One, I am a clod. Two, it's really time we all got our own places.

Erin go bleah

Most of my coworkers are wearing just enough green that no one is going to dare to try to pinch them but not so much that it looks like they're actually wearing green. Raise a glass to the grumpy ones, me included. And raise a glass for Eric, who has to work ten hours tonight at a bar that's decorated like a pub and features more than one Guinness tap, poor boy.

I'll be drinking beer tonight, too, but it'd be a holiday if I didn't.

People are so touchy

After my little camera v. helicopter run-in on Sunday, I thought it was funny to find a story on Obscure Store about a guy who inadvertently closed down an entire freeway with his video camera.

Eric picked up a Photosniper off eBay a while ago. It's pretty nifty, but there's no way he can use it in public without making people extremely nervous. It will remain a conversation piece until he can find the right batteries and take it out to the middle of nowhere.

1/24

This is the only picture that came out of the roll last night, and I'm glad even for that.

I used 200 film, which was probably too fast. You have to keep the shutter open until you see a strike, and it doesn't take long for the city lights to fog up the image.

I think the dark sky people are onto something.

I'm wasting my life

I am bored to distraction, and you know what that means: Photoshop art and stupid links!

Did you know that hippos are mean as hell? Click on the deceptively harmless-looking little fella to learn more.

Zap

It's slow today. I'm just sitting here drinking violently strong coffee and watching weather porn.

We had a pretty nice little thunderstorm come through last night. I set up the camera and tried to get some lightning pictures after it had passed to the east. I think I grabbed a few good ones, although I missed the nicest bolt of the night because I was fiddling with the lens.

I think lightning photography is a good activity for me because it requires patience and perseverance, two things I am pretty much devoid of. But it also hinges on sheer dumb luck, which is way sexier than practicing a bunch of stupid virtues.

Anyway, if they come out, I'll post them here in the next couple of days. If not, I'll have 20 more overexposed shots of my front yard to add to the collection. I can't lose!

Boooo-hoo. Everyone feel sorry for poor, poor me.

Seriously, my left shoulder is killing me. I don't even think about my shoulders ever, usually they're just there, but today it's acting out and getting lots of negative attention.

Ibuprofen is worthless and stretching is a joke in the face of this tremendous muscle knot. I doubt that even a massage would work; it feels like the knot would just twist up through the skin, grab the masseuse's fingers, and snap them like toothpicks.

That's maybe a little hysterical, but it does hurt like a bastard. It's kind of ruining my day.

Nyah

I've only been up for an hour, and I've already amassed quite a shit list:

My shoulder, for locking up on me and sapping my will to get out of bed.
Myself, for oversleeping, calling in late, then oversleeping again.
John Aielli, for being a smug, self-satisfied boob and playing an awful, awful, awful synthesizer version of some Phantom of the Opera song on my alarm clock first thing. Jesus fucking Christ.
My hair, for refusing to look adorable despite the costly haircuts and infrequent washings I give it.
My clothes, for being ill-fitting, incompatible, and dull.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, for making me feel like I've run out of oxygen, even if I hear just a tiny snippet as the radio scans through the stations.
Celtic music, for its jaunty fife that burrows into my skin and jars my bones, especially if I can't change the station right away because I'm making a left turn.
The maroon Mazda 626 that pulled out right in front of me and then couldn't or wouldn't accelerate to more than 15 mph, probably for a reason related to the huge blue clouds of exhaust it was spewing.

I'm sure there's plenty more that will piss me off today, but for now at least I'm safe in my office with a cup of coffee and an officemate who understands that I'm not always very friendly in the morning, or many other times for that matter.

The weekend

I am so glad that I don't hate my job because Sundays can be devoted to walks, drinks, and television instead of dread, regret, and television.

I had a really decadent weekend food-wise. Since Friday night I've eaten fried chicken and cream gravy, spring rolls, pork chops, bacon and eggs, and these insane sandwiches that Roone made with goat cheese, Swiss cheese, roast beef, salami, prosciutto, and creamy horseradish on poppy seed rolls. Also lots of good beer and red wine and a shitload of gummi bears. I could barely trundle my puffy ass down the street for a walk this afternoon, and when I got home I had another sandwich. Oof.

I stayed pretty close to home all weekend. Friday night I went to happy hour for a friend's birthday and hung around the house.

Saturday I cooked and had a surprise visit from our friends who moved to Houston last year. They came by with vodka and we hung out in the living room until everyone fell asleep except for my one friend. Among other things, I love her for her ability to get hyper when drunk and stay up very late talking about interesting things. That's a stellar quality in a friend.

Today I went for a walk, worked on a T-shirt design, got intimidated by the police (I'm probably on some spooky FBI watch list now), and hung around the house some more.

Not so exciting, I guess, but right now I am content, drowsy, and very full. Success!

Like I wasn't paranoid enough already

Did you know that if you take pictures of a police helicopter from your front yard it will circle back around and hover directly over your house for several minutes?

Eek.

A masterpiece of subversive design

Not that everyone didn't know already.

Tick. Tock.

My grave misfortune

Due to humidity, sleep, and an overzealous application of product, my hair looks a little like James Traficant's this morning.

How much do I love the Daily Show?

They used the word "felching" in a segment about homosexual zoo animals tonight.

I am covetous.

Can you blame me? Eric got these shoes off eBay. I have owned some nice Converse, but nothing like these.

Well. Bully for you, Mr. Hot Shit shoe shopper.