sabado gigante

Since I got here I've kind of been avoiding hanging out with my boss and his wife, not always on purpose, but usually because our schedules don't quite sync up. Anyhow it was starting to make me feel a little guilty, so on Saturday morning I joined them for a trip to the waterfront area on the Embarcadero. We went to a cool arts and crafts fair at the end of Market Street and then an awesome farmer's market at the ferry building.

Being Saturday, the whole place was packed with tourists. It was insane, especially when we got down towards Pier 39, a place I hope I never get to visit again. There were some cool sea lions:

but other than that, it was nothing but fanny packs and visors and sandals with socks in every direction. I felt kind of bad because my boss' wife wanted to shop for souvenirs for the grandkids, but my boss seemed to think I was bored and kept trying to keep her moving. I wasn't so much bored as claustrophobic, but when they mentioned they were heading to In and Out Burger, I had to bail. I've been eating out for every meal since Tuesday, and it's hard enough to be healthy just based on eating out, never mind eating out at places like In and Out Burger. Plus if I saw one more fanny pack I was going to puke.

There were so many people out that the streetcars and MUNI cars were full and kept going right past every stop, so I decided to walk back. Even though it was only like 2pm, I already felt stressed out from all the tourism, so I stopped for a drink at a place on a little side street. I'm obsessed with bars and restaurants that have outside seating, and although the weather seems to be constantly gorgeous here, not many places have patios. I guess Californians are so used to the awesome wetaher that they're over sitting outside. But I'm not. So I ordered a gin and tonic, which I later found out cost $9.50, and had the extreme pleasure of eating these guys:

Healthy, delicious, and only $3 more than the drink. I walked towards the hotel and got accosted by a Greenpeace volunteer who wanted to talk to me about, of all things, Cape Wind. Well this poor guy, who approached me asking "Hey! Do you care about the environment?" sure picked the wrong passerby. I gave him a talking-to... told him about the time I met Jim Gordon... assured him that I, too, love renewable energy... signed his letter to Nancy Pelosi... and went on my merry way, feeling like such an educator.

After I got back to the hotel I collapsed on my bed for a few minutes, briefly stopped by the wine social, then met up with Hannah's sister Marisa in the Mission. We went to a tapas place on 16th Street, ordered a pitcher of sangria, and did some serious catching up. It occurred to me that I haven't seen Marisa since 2002, which is a seriously long time. Even though we had five years of personal life updates, we ended up talking about Michael Pollan and structural adjustments and other semi-dorky things i love to talk about. It was really refreshing to meet up with someone I haven't seen or spoken to once in five years, and feel like we hadn't skipped a beat.

The restaurant was ridiculously loud, so as soon as we paid the bill we got right out of there and headed to a bar called Delirium, where the people were dressed in black and the PBR flowed like water. Marisa ordered us pints of a delicious local amber beer called Boont's and we resumed our catching up. By the time we got to about 2004, it was already past my bedtime, which has gotten a lot earlier since I've arrived. The time change was actually really beneficial to my waking up early, but that night was probably the first time since I got here that I've been out past midnight.

dia cuarta: viernes

at this point I can barely remember what i did a few minutes ago, let alone what I did on Friday. but for the sake of all of you for whom a day without my blog is like a day without the Lord, I'm going to try.

I got to sleep a little later than usual, and we went to a meeting near the Embarcadero to check out the location of our second two trainings. the lady was a half an hour late, so we pretty much saw it without her help. But then she got there and we all went out to lunch at the ferry building.

The ferry building is kind of like Quincy Market, lots of food and food-related retail. Its customers seemed to be half tourists and half people who work in the neighborhood. We got some fresh bread from the Acme Bakery (lame name, good bread) and some interesting cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery (ditto). And I got gelato.

After the meeting I decided to walk back to the hotel, which turned into an epic excursion. I stopped at a few places trying to find tarnished silver, as is my custom, and got some [relatively] cheap pants at Anthropologie. Thank GOD there aren't any of those around Lowell, or else I'd be insanely broke.

I figured since I was already on a three-hour-minimum walk, I'd veer off and take an even less direct route and ended up back in the Mission. I wandered into a bookstore where I found this little gem:














if you can't see it clearly, it's Kermit the Frog saying "modernity has not come to terms with its own technics." true, I thought, and bought a postcard of some Mexican luchadores.


I made it back to the hotel just in time for the wine social. I was pretty thirsty after my four hours of walking, and ended up polishing off an entire bottle of white wine with another guest. He was kind of a strange bird, a dude from Baltimore who was here to visit his boyfriend. At first I was talking to a couple from England who were here celebrating their anniversary, and he was kind of off to the side, chiming in occasionally but looking a little like he was off in space. After the English guys left we bonded over missing our boyfriends (his lives in SF, but it seemed like something weird was going on between them) but things got a little awkward (for me anyways) when he started talking about personal stuff like his boyfriend's blanket-stealing habits.

All of a sudden I realized it was already dark out and I'd been drinking wine since 6pm on an empty stomach. My boss called to see if I wanted to go to dinner with them but I felt a little bit beyond the point where I felt like trying to make intelligent conversation in a family setting. So I took a long walk and ended up stopping at a dark, dank diner, where much to my own surprise, I ordered a beer. They had Newcastle, which I haven't seen much here, on tap, and I just couldn't resist.

day three: thursday

morning came very, uh, early on thursday. I woke up around 4am and realized that I had fallen asleep in my street clothes, with all the lights on. I turned the lights off, changed, went back to sleep, and woke up what seemed like 5 minutes later. We headed off to the train station with even MORE supplies, schlepped everything to the conference room, and prepared for our first training.

I was a ball of f-ing nerves, so I headed downstairs to smoke a cigarette before the training started. By then my boss had already caught me smoking for the first time, so I felt OK about telling him where I was going. In a way him catching me was a blessing in disguise. I had briefly considered making my first day in SF my "quit date" and trying to go cold turkey. In fact, I suffered through the entire day on Tuesday and most of Wednesday without smoking, not wanting to let him and his wife know I smoke. But after he caught me on Thursday morning, I figured, "who am I kidding? this is one of the more stressful times in my life, and trying to hide my smoking is almost as stressful as not smoking at all." almost.

so aaaanyways, I went downstairs for a cigarette. Although we were in a pretty busy area of downtown Oakland, only two people walked by me the entire time I was smoking. Guess who those two people were? Oh yes, you guessed it, the commissioner of the SF Department of Public Health, and a woman from the American LUNG ASSOCIATION. Jesus Christ on a bike. Of course, i didn't know who they were until i got back upstairs and found my boss talking to them inside the conference room. yes, these ladies and 20 other asthma activists were participants in the training we were about to do. The training in which I had to get up in front of the room and tell people about avoiding toxics in household products that can decrease indoor air quality and trigger asthma attacks. When he introduced me to them I nearly passed out. Granted, my area of "expertise" has more to do with chemicals in cleaning products and pesticides, but I've never felt like such a huge asshole in my entire life.

Other than that embarrassing little incident, about which no one said anything, thank god, the training went fine. Everyone seemed to really respond to the make-your-own cleaning products activity, which i was excited about, because it's kind of my forte. After we lugged all the supplies back to the hotel I went on another adventure, this time to the Mission neighborhood.

As you might expect, the Mission is full of old Spanish architecture and taquerias. As you might not expect, it's also full of auto repair shops, used book stores, and hipster-y vintage clothing stores, where used clothes cost more than new clothes from regular stores. I wandered around the Mission until I got hungry/thirsty/tired, then I stopped at an amazing bakery called Tartine to sit outside for a glass (OK, maybe closer to a bottle) of red wine and a ridiculously delicious prosciutto and provolone sandwich.

I sat down next to a girl with blond dreadlocks who weighed about 75 pounds. She struck up a brief conversation with me, something that people seem to do all the time here, which I actually find really refreshing. Coming from the heart of puritanical frown-at-strangers land, it's been so nice to find that people here are genuinely friendly (and not half as pushy as they are in Boston). We were both peacefully drinking and reading our books in the sun when her obnoxiously hipster friends walked across the street from the laundromat and sat down across from me, blocking my sun and loudly fawning over the "energy" of the vintage Russian Army hat they had just bought at one of those stores I just mentioned. They were arguing over who should take the hat - one of them had bought it for herself but decided that it matched the other girl's "spirit" better. I wanted to puke. But it only got worse.

I like to think I'm an open-minded person, I do yoga (when I'm not busy smoking and drinking and eating meat) and love my neighbors and all that. But these girls pissed me off so much that had I not been completely fascinated with their vapid conversation, I would have gotten up and left. It's hard to do the experience justice through the written word, I even tried to explain it to a few people on the phone and it was impossible, you just had to be there.

A homeless and somewhat not-quite-there guy had apparently followed them from the vintage clothing store to the laundromat, and eventually found them across the street at the bakery. he came over to the table and asked them for a cigarette. I was smoking at the time and he probably thought I was with them because we were all sitting so close together, but I kind of ignored it because at the time I thought he was a friend of theirs. Instead of saying "No, sorry," they went on an interminable tirade of cutesiness, throwing out gems such as "smoking isn't sexy," "we don't kiss boys who smoke," and "why don't you go to the public library and take out a book about yoga?"

Honestly, this poor guy was just confused by their egging him on. Like I said, there was something a bit off about him, I'm not sure if he might have been a little slow, or maybe just a little mentally ill, or both. But either way, their tactics were not constructive. They kept rolling their eyes at each other, and when he would wander off to ask someone else for a cigarette, which he did several times, they would say stuff like "oh that poor lost soul, I feel so bad for him, but I wish he would just leave us alone." But every time he came back, they kept going with their quasi-flirtatiousness and led him to believe he was getting somewhere. At one point he asked for one of the girl's phone numbers and she told him "I don't have a phone," although she had been texting a minute earlier. He said he didn't either, but he used a pay phone sometimes. they laughed, and i wanted to punch them. he asked them about their parents, and one girl said her father was an astronaut, winking at the other girls. again, I felt a twinge of violence. what they were doing was cruel, not kind like they thought.

after what seemed like forever, he gave up on them and asked me if he could have the rest of my wine. I said "no, sorry," and he said OK and rode away on his bike. After he was gone, the girls practically wet themselves laughing and saying "oh my God, i can't believe you just got rid of him like that!" Then, to top it all off, one of the girls felt some remorse and confessed that she felt like they might have been messing with him. NO FUCKING SHIT, YOU DUMBASSES. The other girl said, "no, you're just so kind, but people like him need to be with other people who are on his same level." Same level? Thank GOD they got up at that point, because that was seriously the last straw and I was about to break the bottom of my wine bottle off on the pavement and assault them with it.

before they left they told me they hoped I wasn't insulted by their "smoking isn't sexy" comment, saying that they all actually smoked. Like the pleasant person I am, i said "no problem," because in the end I'm sure they were nice people, just a little misguided.

sorry for that little rant.

day two: wednesday

In addition to the dopeness of having the room right off the courtyard, my room is also right next to the hotel kitchen. It's a regular kitchen like you would find in a house, with all the regular kitchen stuff like plates and glasses, ice, a dishwasher, and best of all, food. Food you can eat any time. Delicious food, like cheese danish and peanut butter and wasabi snack mix. On my second morning in SF, I discovered the awesomeness that is being able to roll out of bed and get coffee in my pjs. Instant gratification, and because my room is so close to the coffeemaker, I didn't even have to worry about anyone seeing me skulking around the kitchen with my ubiquitous morning cowlick. After four or five cups of coffee and four or five danishes, we went to a meeting at the office where our first training was.

We got on the subway to Oakland with bags and bags of cleaning product ingredients that I had shopped for on Tuesday night. It was quite a hike to the train station, and holding the stuff, which included two five-gallon jugs of vinegar, made the train ride itself into yet another workout. Between tooling around the city buying supplies and then taking them places, up and down these crazy hills, my muscles have been in a constant state of achy breakiness. But all the exercise makes is a lot easier to justify eating gelato twice a day.

After the meeting we went to Union Square - picture Downtown Crossing plus two thousand additional tourists plus cars. Pretty nuts. We ate at a New York-style deli, which wasn't nearly as New Yorky as anything I've experienced on the East Coast, but still pretty good. We got some latkes, and they were $10. This place is nauseatingly expensive. More on that later.

I left my boss and decided to walk back to the hotel. This took about two hours, what with my stopping at various antique stores and jewelers trying to find tarnished silver (to demonstrate our green silver polishing technique). When I asked, people generally looked at me like I had twelve heads, each one crazier than the last.

I stumbled upon a really cool farmer's market in front of the Civic Center. A lot of the produce was stuff I'd never seen before, mostly Chinese and Mexican vegetables and fruits. And yes, there was Durian fruit. I would have bought some, except it's heavy to carry, smells like ass, and tastes worse than it smells.

I was a little bit luckier finding liquid castile soap. When I finally got back to the hotel I decided it was time to stop fucking around and just go to a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. The point of this part of our training is to utilize ingredients that people around here can easily find at local (and cheap) stores, so I was trying really hard to not wuss out and go to a yuppie chain store, but my feet were killing me. So I mapquested the closest Trader Joe's (two miles away) and set out for Haight-Ashbury (on foot, not really solving my achy feet problem).

Well I never quite got to Trader Joe's, because I got distracted by gelato and then found castile soap at one of SF's many many MANY vitamin/herb/other hippie crap stores. I did end up walking almost all the way there, and I got to see most of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in my wanderings. All of the stereotypical legends about the neighborhood seem to be true. The whole place smelled like nag champa and cloves, alternatingly (I know that isn't a word.)

I walked up many a steepass hill through the Lower Haight and up to Buena Vista park (good views, as the name would suggest) and then Duboce park, where there was a doggie play group thing going on. In a word, it was f-ing idyllic. The area where Duboce park is is pretty much what the intro to Full House looked like - long rows of tall, skinny Victorian-ish houses on a steep hill, with wholesome-looking young family types all over the place, their kids in expensive jogging strollers and baby gap clothes. It was a far cry from the neighborhood where I'm staying (which I'll get to later).

I got back to the hotel, made some phone calls to my loved ones, and collapsed in a heap on my bed. I was going to just call it a night, but it was only like 9pm, plus I needed a burrito, like, asap. So I headed deeper into the Castro district, where I'm staying. By all accounts it's the most vibrant gay neighborhood in the city, which is really saying a lot. I was tempted when passing by bars like The Men's Room and Moby Dick, but I kept going in search of a sweet taqueria.

On Castro street, which is like the main drag (yes) of the neighborhood, I found a place that met all my needs, i.e, eggs and avocados. The B&B is awesome but severely lacking in the egg department. I got huevos rancheros that would bring tears of joy to your eyes. Fresh eggs, cooked juuust over easy, right in front of me, with warm corn tortillas, Spanish rice, black beans, some kind of delicious fresh green salsa, and a WHOLE avocado sliced over the top. And for san francisco food, it was actually pretty cheap. I ate the bejesus out of that thing and passed out cold.

day one

san francisco is the dopest. I am blogging to you from the courtyard


of my fabulous (in every sense of the word) bed and breakfast in the heart of the most fabulous (again) neighborhood I've ever seen. My boss' wife and I are the only two females in the entire place. We just might be the only two females on the entire block. There's a "wine social" every afternoon in the "sunroom," which as you can see from this picture of my fabulous room, is right outside my window.

We got here a little later than planned, after the weight of the plane crushed the tow bar that was trying to pull it away from the gate. So that sucked. I tried to sleep a lot on the flight but I was sitting next to a ridiculously lovey-dovey newlywed couple who kept making loud, gross (and they thought, hilarious) sexual innuendo jokes to the male flight attendant.

After we arrived we took a taxi to the hotel but our rooms weren't ready yet so we went to have lunch with my boss' daughter-in-law and granddaughter, who is a super-cute seven month old baby. My first California food was exactly what i expected after a lifetime of absorbing stereotypes about California food... lots of fresh vegetables in weird yet attractive combinations, avocado everywhere, sourdough bread, arugula, fennel, other assorted whole-foods-yuppie things, all on plates that were so "rustic" they bordered on precious. I forgot my granola bar in the morning and slept through boxed lunch time on the plane, so I found it all incredibly delicious and ate twice my body weight in snap peas that cost $15 a pound.

Then we walked up the hugest hill I've ever seen in my life, walked down the hill, and went to the hotel where I discovered the fabulousness that is my room. I messed around for a while unpacking and whatnot, then feeling a little parched, I decided to explore the neighborhood in search of cold beer. I learned that beer, like everything else, is crazy expensive in San Francisco. After looking at the menus posted outside a dozen bars, I settled on a huge can of PBR from the Chinese grocery on the corner. It was superb. I even took it in the shower with me.

Boss and Mrs. Boss went back to their son's house for dinner, and I stayed in, or so I told them. I was really exhausted from waking up at 5am and wandering around on foot all day, but I really just needed a break from the company. I ended up taking a super long walk from the hotel to a supermarket, where I did a little research to see which green cleaning products were available. I found only one, and took a picture of it:

good stuff. It was still kind of light out, so I tried to get used to the layout of the city by taking my super long walk a little further. But my feet were KILLING ME so I headed back to the hotel, made some phone calls, and passed out before midnight.

i'm oot

I'm leaving for San Francisco tomorrow morning for three weeks of alternating business and pleasure. I'm super excited, because I've never been to California before, and super nervous, because I'll be attempting to work en español.

Depending on my ratio of boredom to stress while I'm out there, this means I'll either be blogging a lot more or a lot less than normal, which recently, hasn't been much. Anyhow, I'm going to try to at least take a lot of pictures and put them on my Flickr, if I can remember to pack my camera cord...

dolla dolla bills

"what I learned in grad school" is popping up all over the place these days. here's an interesting tidbit from an article in the NYT. so interesting, in fact, that I'm not touching it with a ten-foot pole.

a brief foray into what I learned in grad school

kind of. in lieu of working I've been doing a lot of thinking, due in large part to Ben's recent post about commuting and unhappiness, followed by Amanda's incendiary comment about living in Lowell, and my recent discovery that I'll be living in Lowell for at least another year, if not longer.

so public transportation in Lowell basically sucks. the bus system is completely out of touch with the needs of people who would actually take the bus to get to work and back. the buses don't run often enough that you could take them and get to work on time, so the buses are often pretty empty. since there aren't enough people riding the buses to justify more routes or more frequent trips, the problem is kind of a vicious cycle.

the bus and train station used to be downtown (good) but when they expanded route 3 and the Lowell Connector, they moved the station to a weird location that's right off the highway, but a long walk from downtown. so ironically, the public transportation is now convenient only for people with cars. although I can't prove it, I suspect that a lot of these drivers live in the suburbs and spend their money outside of Lowell.

so the bus sucks, driving sucks (especially my car), there's no subway, and Lowell isn't especially bike-friendly. however, it's pretty easy to walk places in my neighborhood, and even more so downtown. There used to be a supermarket pretty close to my house, but they closed it and opened a shiny new one directly across the street from another supermarket, in a fancy neighborhood. apparently the hannaford brothers felt that maximizing their profits and squashing the competition were more important than my personal hunger. but there are a few convenience and liquor stores, a 24-hour Walgreens, plenty of restaurants, and some other good stuff within a few minutes walk, and another supermarket about a mile and a half away.

on a related note, I found a cool distraction called Walk Score that calculates the "walkability" of your address. you put in your address and it lists grocery stores, schools, parks, bars, libraries, movies, etc. within walking distance of your house, and rates the address on a scale from 0-100. my house got a 48 out of 100, which is better than I thought, but probably due to stuff like the claim that "Christine L. Allum, Independent Herbalife Distributor" is considered a "grocery store."

Walk Score can't tell you that the nearby bar is a super-shady dive, or that the supermarket closed a year ago. also, it seems to calculate distances "as the crow flies" as opposed to how you would actually walk there (you know, on streets and stuff). I MapQuest-ed a store that Walk Score said was 0.66 miles away, and found out it's more like 1.39 miles. anyhoo, I wouldn't use this to scope out potential places to live, knowing the reality of where I live vs. what Walk Score thinks, but it's a really good idea in theory. check it.

dante said

the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis

what is...

black and white, black and white, black and white and green?

three nuns fighting over a cucumber. I've done a lot of non-work "reading" today, some things funnier than others. First the Not Funny, lifted from Scott's blog:

A recent Pew Research Center study shows that people who watch The Colbert Report and The Daily Show correctly answered 54% of questions about current affairs, whereas viewers of regular TV news correctly answered only 35%.

I do love the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, but it still strikes me as kind of a sad state of affairs.

And now the funny, meta-funny in fact, because I found these jokes on a facebook group started by one of my old philosophy professors from college. I'm glad to see this guy and some of my other old professors are spending just as much time doing non-work as I do. I guess I really could grow up to be just like them.

From a Latin American Studies professor:

Q: How many atheists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None: "Light bulb? What light bulb? Clearly this "light bulb" is a construct of your primitive imagination to help you cope with reality. I know this is darkness and I can deal with it. Obviously, you can't because of this light bulb delusion of yours."


From one of my Human Rights Program professors:

This cowboy is in a bar and talks about how lonely he is. "You know, it's just me and the horse out there. Now my horse is very smart, but you can really have a philosophical discussion with it. You know, you just can't put Descartes before the horse."


A seal walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a drink.

The bartender asks the seal, "What's your pleasure?"

The seal replies, "Anything but Canadian Club."

roo roo's meme

What were you doing 10 years ago?
I was 15 and had just started working at my very first real (not my dad's store) job. It was a truck stop/diner/bakery on route 20 in Worcester. It was actually kind of cool, in the front we served meatloaf and american chop suey, but in the back they were making these incredibly elaborate wedding cakes. I started off washing dishes and eventually got to wait tables. ah, the beginning of my long and illustrious waitressing career. good times, free food, learning dirty jokes from gnarly truckers. then right before school started, I got fired because the owner's daughter was back from 'maternity leave.'

What were you doing 1 year ago?
It was my first summer off the Cape in 4 years, and it was motherfucking hot in Lowell. I had just inadvertently signed myself up for a world of pain, working two impossible jobs at the same time, yet still managing to accomplish very little. I was at the office for like 9 hours a day, the first three of which I spent on email or the phone with boss #1, trying to coordinate a seminar series that never quite went according to plan. The rest of the day I sat outside writing in a notebook, pretending to work for boss #2 and freaking out because she was coming back from vacation and I had done nothing in weeks, making phone calls and socializing with passersby.

Kelly had just had Croix, so that was pretty exciting. there was a girl from Spain who had just arrived to live at my house for a month. Amanda and I spoke drunken Spanish to her at the Folk Festival. she kind of sucked, but there were way better foreign exchange students to come.

Five snacks you enjoy
1. string cheese
2. granola bars
3. string cheese
4. string cheese
5. string cheese

Five songs that you know all the lyrics to
1. "shoop" - salt n pepa. no self-respecting girl between the ages of 23 and 33 will ever forget a line of that one.
2. "ripple" - grateful dead. same as above, except by "girl" I mean "hippie"
3. "meet me in the morning" - bob dylan
4. "el baile de los que sobran" - Los Prisioneros
5. all of Remain in Light - Talking Heads

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire
1. buy a regular car
2. buy the house I live in right now
3. quit my job
4. go to Morocco
5. do something, uh, philanthropic with the rest

Five bad habits
1. spending money I don't have
2. vanilla kreme donuts
3. chronic, debilitating procrastination
4. constantly indulging my desires to escape (from the house, the office, work, thesis, responsibilities, awkward situations, consciousness, etc.)
5. self-indulgence part II: drinking, smoking, eating and sleeping as much as I want, pretty much all the time

Five things you like doing
1. road trips
2. iced coffee
3. writing
4. frolicking, preferably in nature
5. escaping/eating/drinking/smoking/sleeping

Five things you would never wear again
1. champion sweatshirts over white turtlenecks
2. jelly shoes
3. bodysuits with the snaps
4. blossom hats
5. legwarmers. kidding!

Five favorite toys
1. coffeemaker
2. coozies
3. cell phone
4. the internets
5. my brand new mortar and pestle

deep thoughts

• it's f-ing hot and gross
• it's been pouring rain for 15 minutes
  
• 20 minutes ago I put a bunch of clothes on the clothesline
• I'm sitting at a window from which I can see the clothesline
• again, it's pouring rain
• and it just occurred to me that I should take the clothes down
• they are already soaking wet
• I'm leaving them on the line

• I am sweating over boring power point presentations
  
• I hate work
  
• more than work itself, I hate the fact that I'm spending a Sunday catching up on work that I was supposed to do this week
• even more than that, I hate that I was expected to do this work during 4th of July week
• 4th of July is not allowed to happen on a Wednesday ever again.

• an NPR commentator just called someone a "jackass." whoa.

• I just made some clams stuffed with
• ritz cracker crumbs
• celery
• onions
• chorizo
• white wine
• cholula sauce
• butter
• and clams
• they look delicious, but it's too f-ing hot and gross to eat
  

and another thing

the Police SUCKED when I was growing up, and they continue to SUCK now - at least as much, if not more than before. they don't suck as much as Sting does on his own, but seriously, they suck more than enough.



yes, that's a mesh shirt. I really, truly hate you Sting. But I digress.

WHY, radio station owners of the area, do you think that just because the Police are reunited, you should start playing their crappy music ad nauseum? the people who have paid money to go see them live are doing us all a favor, taking one for the team if you will. there's no need to subject the rest of us to extra Police music on the radio. STOP, please, or else I'm sending you a message in a bottle. and by 'message' I mean 'flesh-eating bacteria.'

and quit with the f-ing Bono-worship too, while you're at it. that is all.

various internets

I spend a lot of time sitting at a computer pretending to work, but others don't have that luxury. so just in time for Monday morning, I wanted to share with you, the kind taxpayers of the Commonwealth, a few of the things that have been keeping me "busy" while I'm getting paid to reduce toxics. some call it webjunk, I call it a way of life.

• Erowid: a website about drugs, "providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants and chemicals and related issues." we're talking all 'psychoactive' drugs, both plant-based and chemical, legal and illegal: alcohol, MDMA, caffeine, morning glory, cannabis, heroin, chocolate, opium, LSD, and all manner of pharmaceuticals. the stories in the experience vaults are pretty f-ing fascinating.

• Gröûp X: thanks to Mr. H for bringing to my attention the best (and probably only) fake Arabic rap group ever. The Mario twins: they look so goddamn the same, if I ask them if they want an ice cream, they BOTH say yes!

• Personal DNA: it's that colorful little box in the sidebar. You take a long-ish test (good for when you're serious about procrastinating but want to feel like you just "did" something for the past hour) and it gives you a personality analysis. Then if you're really bored, you can Psych You/Psych Me and take tests for other people. No more work, EVER!

• The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test: like the Spark tests I used to do instead of writing my undergrad thesis, the people who wrote this are pretty funny, but you get that sinking feeling that they really do know what they're talking about. They give you a painfully long analysis - the very short version of mine was: You scored 55% Non-Reductionism, 11% Epistemological Absolutism, and 100% Moral Objectivism! You are an N-S-O: a metaphysical Non-Reductionist, an epistemological Skeptic, and a moral Objectivist! yay?