suggestions?

I need summer jams 2009. what are you listening to?

Suspending Disbelief

When I think of suspending disbelief, I picture Muggles floating eerily over flocks of Death Eaters...muggles=beliefs, Death Eaters=...me? Bad analogy.

I love movies that are completely unrealistic. Examples:
1. The Emperor's New Groove (how did we get here before them? by all accounts, it doesn't add up.)
2. Stardust (falling stars, men turning into goats and vice-versa, captain shakespeare who catches lightning)
3. Up (can't tell you anything, don't want to give it away--GO SEE IT.)
4. Gilmore Girls.

I know Gilmore Girls is not a movie (why didn't they ever do that? SJP and her crew did it, Hannah Montana did it, the Lorelai's could definitely do it), but it does involve suspending belief for a few reasons. a) No one is that clever. No one I know is that clever. I hope no one is that clever, because relatively that would make me very unclever. b) No one can love junk food that much and be that skinny. They act like they eat doughnuts and french fries and danishes. PLEASE. c) No one is like Kirk. If you know someone like Kirk, introduce me.

I would like to finish this post with a few tips for fellow unemployedees.
- send out billions of applications so that you lose track of how many jobs you never heard back from.
- when you email your resume to potential employers, make sure you erase the data fields so that your name shows up instead of ADDRESS FIELD.

- when they ask you, at a summer camp, what your "weaknesses" are, don't mention being shy and possibly cranky in the morning. In other words, don't be honest. Follow your competition and make stuff up like My biggest weakness is a desire to overachieve. or I am just TOO passionate.
- try not to be spacey on the phone. or in interviews. or in emails. (aka stop daydreaming about gilmore girls.)
It beats me why my type suddenly switched to italics. Try not to mention lack of computer savviness either, especially when your resume has a little bit about computer savviness and yet has ADDRESS FIELD at the top instead of your name.
The first picture is a simulation of me being spacey while I daydream. Consider it an opportunity to suspend belief. The lower two pictures are some that I just saw in my photo booth after a long time apart--love these photos. David's nose looks like a mix between Prince John on the Disney Robin Hood, and that part in the snowman movie where they look in the ornaments.

Riding the 72

I picked it up in downtown Oakland. Sat next to a man with a gray beard who didn't look at me. She got on at fortieth, a strange incarnation of the woman who got off under the overpass this morning (the slight woman with purple socks who carried two bulging black garbage bags over her shoulders like she was carting water), but this woman wore a flat-billed cheap cap and pulled her cart of bulging bags behind her. Both moved slowly and shuffling. The woman in the cap had hardly made it down the aisle when the bus started again and with the lurch, she skipped forward a few steps and made the smallest squeal. I made the smallest motion to catch her, so small even I didn't see it, but she didn't fall. She rode it out. I don't know where she got off or what she carts or who normally catches her. I do know that two others got off with me, a boy and an old man, who both seem to be my neighbors and who don't walk in crosswalks. I seem to be the only one who walks in crosswalks round here. I wonder if anyone on the bus liked Bob Dylan and how many of them are also trying to find a job.

I am one of the unemployed. This morning, I went to the training for my first position through the temp agency. My table swapped stories of hardship (one girl has applied for 86 jobs in the past 2 months!) and I tried to mimic the jaded veteran faces I saw. I think people secretly like being in the fray, being part of something, even if that something is the disillusioned masses scrolling through pages of craigslist postings and pretending that the person next to them at the temp agency isn't competition. Reading the mags lately, it seems that economic CRISIS is giving my generation some authenticity, substance, battle wounds. But all it takes (for me) is a trip into downtown San Francisco to see that the middle class is still the middle class, the poor are still poorer than crisis will make me, and Diesel still employs a full-time DJ to entertain the one customer per hour who enters its store.

I sat next to a guy with the watch the size of the moon, lined with rhinestones and Obama's face as the background. His time reads half past left ear, aka time for CHANGE. I try to resist my over-symbolizing the world, but I kind of like this one...Obama as the ticking clock, the measure of the passage of time--he asked for it, right?

I can't take pictures of woman who got on at fortieth or man with Obama watch. I did snap one of the canada geese that live on the high school playing field next to my house, and I got one of the moon. I'll put some up, but you've all seen SF before.

The City by the Bay

Okay, so I haven't really seen anything like this yet, though there was a fullish moon last night.

I have been considering what I would write about, and I've been putting it off until this moment, when a very loud gospel choir began singing, complete with cheering and the motivational speaker in between choruses, and as far as I can tell, they've congregated in a parking garage. And I'm pretty sure it's a recording. But why? And who is listening? Other people sitting at their computers next to open windows? Now it sounds like they are rehearsing...I'm perplexed.

For those of you not in the know, I moved to California for the summer. I'm currently jobless, but optimistic. And when I lose optimism, I go shopping. I haven't bought anything yet except an ice cream sandwich.

Just a few things I'd like to do before I leave:
-Yodel as a street performer or in a BART station (thanks Marie)
-See a great variety of performances (saw the San Fran ballet last night)
-visit Coit tower, the Japanese tea garden, the seals, etc. etc. etc.

What ideas do you have for me for the bay area?

Silly, really

I imagine that lots of people have things they need to say to me. Urgently. So I check my email obsessively, and wait for these people to say these things to me, curious, of course, about what it is they so urgently need to say. And when I refresh my email and see "Wells Fargo Statement Notification" or "Interlibrary Loan Past Due" or "Cougar Mail White Out" or "SaleMail Shop-it-to-me-Alert", I feel deflated--not popped, which is important because I think my soul makes that little noise that sounds like someone farting during a baby blessing (am I allowed to say this?), that noise that balloons make when the air is being let out slowly and painfully instead of with one gracious pin prick. The automatons behind these emails do have urgent things to say, mostly WE NEED YOUR MONEY, NOW! but I'm not that interested in hearing about it, and they go directly to my trash, shouting all the way.

I am happy to see that not all is lost from the good old days ("We exchanged letters, you know--mail." "You know, I've heard of it?") and that my joy at correspondance has transferred from paper to screen, and that I haven't missed out on the irritation of opening my mailbox to find only bills, notices, and impersonal spam.

Perhaps this is a plea for emails. If you have something urgent to say, and don't have someone to say it to--my inbox is always open.

So many things to say on a day like this...

...when I'm eating homemade bread (thank you Marie) and local honey (thanks Aunt Nanny/James) and there are blossoms on trees outside and a breeze through my window;

...when I'm surrounded by plastic eggs and packing peanuts and stale peeps because the fabulous Easter Bunny tracked me down this year and showered me with candy goodness (Taylor Hawes, if you're out there: "Will you be my foam peanut?")

...when another semester is almost over, and it's time to put everything away, this being my sixth April of leaving a home behind to return to my everhome for just a few days before this summer's adventure (California.)

...but most of all, when--drat. I'm late for church.

tangential

I was just reading outside on a blanket with Davey and I remembered: the cookies! I burned not one batch but two today, and I wonder why, once they're hopelessly burned, I still rush to pull them out?

It's been a good weekend, for a number of reasons. My legs hurt every time I take a step and I walk like I have to go to the bathroom (for those of you who know my brain, this sentence is not the logical progression from the previous. Maybe we'll get there a few lines down, but I take what the old machine gives me and don't ask questions. Actually, I was thinking the other day about how I've never really thought to curb the randomness of my brain; people say either, "you are so frustrating to talk to, can't you focus?" or, "ha ha you're so random I love it" in that tone that lets you know a "bless your heart" might be coming up next. And my response is usually, "I know, right?" My favorite all-purpose response, currently. But even though my thoughts come out like people rushing from a burning building, I can't help but account for them and try to get them to stand in neat lines like we did in elementary school. My brain has been infiltrated by the MAN! For example, right now, I am aware that I haven't explained why my legs hurt (because I ran a whoppin' 20 minutes) and that I haven't given any of the number of reasons why it's been a good weekend (conference, family, yada yada yada), and I won't be able to finish the blogpost in good conscience until I trace back all the threads I dropped from my pockets. Thoughts, unlike cookies, are not usually burned when I'm late getting back to them, though they're sometimes very irrelevant. The phone is ringing, and since I'm at my father's house I never answer it. David answered it--oh dear, he's given up on me and the blankets since I've been away all this time typing on my blog about how I forget to return.)