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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
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3:31 pm - Twit bits
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I have spent the last few months finally entering the 21st century. I made myself available on chat during work hours so that my co-workers would not have to cross the office to ask me questions. I bought a phone with a decent camera and the ability to send text messages. I joined and fled any number of social networking sites. And finally, as of last week, I have completed my descent into the bowels of New Media: I started a Twitter account.
I didn't want to do it. I've seen those compilations of the day's twitter posts turns my friends list into incomprehensible one-line blog haiku. I've seen perfectly eloquent writers lose the ability to post any thought more than 140 characters long. I've seen the best minds of my generation wandering lost -- twittering about their breakfast from their iPhones. It is only a matter of time before I get a full-sleeve tattoo and a stupid(er) haircut and start riding around the Mission on a bicycle without any gears.
I didn't want to do it, but here I am with Twitterrific twitching in the upper right hand corner of my computer screen, spitting out ads and twitter errors and the contents of Scott Beale's inbox. Here I am, searching other people's following lists for the faces of people that I know and sympathizing with the complaints of strangers and perking up with interest when somebody replies to my work-related ramblings or my plans for robot world domination or my intention to get a latte at Coffee Bar.
#ambivalence Save me @myreaders. Save me from this terrible thing.
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| Thursday, May 8th, 2008
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2:53 pm - Road trip
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According to the almanac, the moon is waxing tonight. It should be just a tiny little waxing sliver up there in the sky. So much for my theory that the craziness waxes and wanes with the cycles of the moon. If my theory was correct, I would be expecting a full moon in tonight's sky. In fact, I would expect a second moon to appear in Earth's orbit. It would be full too.
Today, I have achieved the Tin Foil Hat Trifecta: three walk-in crazies, one persistent FAX crazy, and a defamation case with twenty-something different defendants all before lunchtime.
Walk-in crazies are the rare and extraordinary creatures. They usually come alone, but sometimes they come in pairs -- a folie au deux. This time the crazies were two middle-aged women, one short and dark, the other tall and blonde.
Short Dark Crazy Woman: Hi, I called you yesterday about a constitutional law case involving government surveillance.
Lil' Miss Never: Can I get your name, please?
A lot of people call me about constitutional law cases involving government surveillance, so I check yesterday's notes. Sure enough, there is SDCW's name and "requested office address." I'd assumed that she was planning to mail us a package.
SDCW: We drove up from San Diego.
Lil' Miss Never: Just to see us?
SDCW: And to bring you these materials. The rest is in the car. Our phones have been tapped and our email has been intercepted since before September 11th! We couldn't be sure they'd get to you otherwise.
The crazy box, where I keep the many and varied materials that the crazy people send me, is directly behind my desk. It is at times such as these that I am glad I have not labeled it. Tall Blonde Crazy Woman produces a CD full of mp3's. 73 messages left on her answering machine. Many of them are in Spanish.
TBCW: Did you hear that?
Lil' Miss Never: Someone called and hung up.
TBCW: But they don't hang up right away. There's another thirty seconds on that message. You hear that? Those are gunshots!
Lil' Miss Never: That is the sound that my phone makes on other people's voicemail when I forget to lock the keyboard and it accidentally calls someone on my speed dial. What you're hearing is the inside of someone's purse.
SDCW: What about these?
Lil' Miss Never: These are printouts of spam. This is an ad for free prescription drugs.
SDCW: But do you see these words on the bottom? That's a government code. I managed to decode it.
It takes me nearly ten minutes to convince her to stop reading the spam aloud and explaining all of the "code words." I am only able to stop by allowing TBCW to launch into a tale of financial skullduggery that involves the bank losing all of the paperwork for her mortgage, which could only have happened because she knows too much and the government is trying to keep her quiet.
Lil Miss Never: Aha! Well, there isn't a lot we can do to help you about that surveillance problem, but it sounds like you should see a consumer rights organization about this mortgage issue. They'll want to hear all about this. Here's the URL for their website. Here's their phone number. Maybe they would be interested in seeing these materials.
SDCW: Where are they located?
Lil' Miss Never: Their offices are in Washington, DC.
Somewhere on this nation's freeways, at this very moment, two crazy women with a car full of print-outs of spam are at the beginning of a very, very long road trip.
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| Monday, May 5th, 2008
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4:04 pm - Oh, the things you can do!
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I understand now why people have children. Not that I am about to pop out some awful Littlest Never, mind you, but I know what makes people suddenly go feverish with the desire to hear the patter of little feet: Maker Fair. People want children so they can take them to the San Mateo fair grounds in May (ideally without waiting in completely dead-stopped traffic on Highway 92 for the better part of an hour) and watch their eyes go wide at the sculptures that catch fire and the adorable little robotic dinosaurs. They want those children to wander the fair armed with measuring tape, announcing "this robot is 48 inches tall!" and "I'm the only one in my class who knows what a sphere is!" People want children who will decorate rubber duckies and marvel at blinking LED lights and launch rockets one hundred feet up into the air. They envision a time when these children, all grown up, go all misty eyed and talk about how their parents used to take them to the power tool drag races and explain Platonic solids and teach them how to solder on the dining room table.
I wouldn't be any good with children. For one thing, I'd hog all of the good toys for myself. When I am not busy explaining some subtle, Jesuitic detail of net neutrality to fresh-faced, sincere-looking pro-nerds, I spend my time at Maker Fair wandering around in a daze, convinced that whatever awesome thing I am seeing right now, there sure to be something even more awesome just at the edge of my peripheral vision and I'd better hurry up because oh my God I'm missing it right now. Yes, there's the Neverwas Haul and some steam-powered carriage and that stream-powered motorcycle built by some boy that looks almost exactly like M. There's the camera crew from something Yahoo-related asking me questions about Steampunk as if I am some kind authority on the subject and there I am talking into the camera praying that something sensible is coming out of my mouth because otherwise I will get so much hate mail. There are the things made of silver art clay and N's things made of felt and little stuffed pillows shaped like meat products. There are the belly dancers - what do belly dancers have to with making things? I've missed the fashion show and that Abney Park band everyone is talking about. There's Suzanne's painting (buy a print! buy a print!) and that guy that swears he has a power source for vacuum tubes the size of my thumbnail (oh the stair sticks and pins and I will make! Broaches that display e!) and bowls made of old vinyl records and so many robots. My house lacks robots. This is a very serious problem - how can I live in the future without robots? There's a blacksmith from the Crucible and the Fire Truck that spits fire and people making glass beads and a car covered in pens and motorized cupcakes with giant Prozac sprinkles.
I come home swearing mighty oath that I will build things. I am certain that this feeling with not last, but it feels good to come home to my bunker, wide-eyed and full of plans, just as long as I'm making robots and not children.
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| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
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12:37 pm - Holiday in Siberia
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There is almost nothing the Eastern European Squid-Crested Never loves more than books. I say "almost," but the truth is that if there is anything greater than books, I have not yet discovered it. If you should ever ask me what I am reading and my answer is "nothing," you should take out a gun and shoot me in the temple immediately. This is a sure sign that I have been replaced by a doppleganger or that my life is no longer worth living and you should perform a mercy killing.
Last week, I was very excited about Jeff Noon. I had just finished reading Vurt, which is beautifully vintage mid-nineties cyberpunk of the read-too-much-William-S-Burroughs school. I don't know how I had avoided reading Vurt when I was a teenager. I could have sworn that I read shelf after shelf of science fiction, some clever, some trashy, some priceless, some of it not worth re-reading, but I somehow skipped over Jeff Noon entirely. Vurt aged well. Aside from the author's decision to set the story in Manchester, there is no sign of sad, outdated, dance-music-obsessed, nineties hipsterism. It had been a long time since I read any science fiction I enjoyed. The air grew positively soggy with nostalgia.
Next, I will read Pollen.
I lied. I didn't read Pollen next at all. I had a copy of Anna Ulinich's Petropolis to get through - post-Soviet farce. I don't know if I can get recommend Petropolis. This isn't to say that it wasn't a good book, but for a book written in English by an author approximately as American as I am, the text is littered with contextless Russian words. This is all well and good if you are Vladimir Nabokov writing Ada, or Ardor, but Vladimir Nabokov is dead, Annochka - stop it. Still, Petropolis is charming. Aside from that sprinkling of unexplained Russian words, Ulinich comes awfully close to writing in a way that straddles both languages. The mis-heard words, the Russian prefixes and suffixes, the peculiarities of English articles - this is the closest that most English-speaking people will ever come to experiencing what it is like to be bilingual.
And now that I've finished Petropolis, I still am not reading Pollen. I have this copy of The Prestige at the bottom of my bag. And then there's Baltimore and small pile of political books. But after that, Pollen. I'll read it - I swear.
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| Thursday, April 24th, 2008
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4:23 pm - The Aubrey Beardsley School of Aerial Arts
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| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
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3:47 pm - Like a Broken Record
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Who am I kidding? I don't talk about anything but aerials anymore.
Today I learned a new move. Today I mastered an old move. Today I have blisters or calluses. Today I have a circular bruise around my thigh and a rope burn where my neck meets my shoulder. Conditioning is killing me. My hip flexors ache. Today I am weak and sniffly and my muscles refuse to stretch. Today I am flexible and strong and I will take over the world. I forgot I was on a bungie and hit my head at the bottom of that drop. I stood on Tom's shoulders. I based a two-high. I did a salto. I missed the rope on my salto. I tried out Autumn's foot corsets and they make the hip key drop tolerable. There's new music. There's new choreography. I have a costuming idea. My vest has arrived - it is so beautiful I swear that I will never take it off. Today, I am training. Today, I am running. Today, I am stretching. Today, I am feverishly exchanging emails with my instructor. My brain is choked with rosin and chalk dust.
I am proud of my body. I am irritated by the limitations of my body. Why doesn't this shirt fit? I hate my body. Have you seen my biceps?
Come back later when I can talk about something else. Come back with a massage and a hot bath and a cup of tea.
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(45 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, April 14th, 2008
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3:05 pm - Addendum
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"Hi, I'm the guy who came by your office last week. You looked at me like I was crazy."
"I explained that I couldn't talk to you because you had arrived two minutes before our weekly staff meeting."
"I was just checking to see if you'd had a chance to look at those documents I dropped off."
"Yes, I have."
And no, you have not discovered secret government spyware on your Compaq. CIA stands for Compaq Installation Assistant. FBI stands for File Based Installer. I am only telling you that I am passing this vital data on to our in-house crack team of computer hackers so that you will hang up and commence bothering someone else.
In other news, I went to Yuri's Night and I saw many tin foil hats. The best tin foil hat was a Sputnik helmet. I was delighted by the Sputnik helmet (and that's "SPOOT-nik" not "SPUT-nik"), even more so when I discovered that the helmet was being worn by the lovely and talented Slim. He lost the costume contest to a pretty, attention-grabbing hippie girl dressed as a bird, but in my heart, he is the winner.
Airplanes defied the laws of physics. Fresh Thai coconut in the summer heat was delicious. The Ames director dressed up as a Soviet officer and the Soviet national anthem was played. Buzz Aldrin was a crotchety old man and no one could argue with him because he's walked on the moon -- have you walked on the moon? No, I didn't think so. Two aerial showgirls performed and I missed them. Amon Tobin went on late. The lines for food were very long. Capacitor was very good, but strangely non-compelling. Bad Unkle Sista was surreal and quoted the Rocky Horror Picture show a lot for reasons that I was not entirely able to understand. There were many robots and yet another preview of Spore and vast piles of tired hippies snoozing the shade of airplane wings. There was a girl who made a fantastic bustle by hacking a black petticoat in half and sewing one layer over the other. If you are that girl, know that you are extraordinarily lucky that I did not lure you into a dark corner and steal your clothes. I was fairly certain I could take you in a fight. The Flaming Lotus Girls brought their latest sculpture and everyone talked about how much they miss Burning Man and how they might have gone this year if the theme was not so wretched.
I came home warm from spending all day in the sun, tired and foot-sore, and happy. I'd like to say that I dreamed of space, but I didn't: I was dreaming of the Sputnik hat.
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(19 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, April 11th, 2008
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10:46 am - There's no conspiracy, there's only you and me
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Dear Tin Foil Hat Lady,
You are not a "computer expert." You have not uncovered a vast conspiratorial botnet run by the Department of Justice through the mighty powers of "WHOIS." You do not have special knowledge about the internet because your ex-husband was a "super user," and you remember using DOS 1.1. The DOJ does not "own" the IP 127.0.0.1, thus secretly logging all of your internal network traffic. That guy in the Adult Friend Finder "Over 50" chat room (which you have certainly never visited! It is filled with the worst kinds of filth!) is not the secret botnet mastermind just because he can discern your geographical location based on your IP address. Adult Friend Finder is not ignoring you because they are in on the conspiracy. Neither is the FBI. Neither is the technology reporter for the Washington Post.
I do not know why it should take nearly thirty minutes for you to tell me all of this. I took great care not to encourage you. I showed little interest in the many reports that you have written, which you cannot send to me because the Department of Justice has hacked into all of your email accounts and is actively intercepting all of your physical mail as well. I explained that we are a small organization with limited funds and resources and we could not possibly take on a case of this magnitude. Oh, but the New York Times surely would be interested in hearing about this bombshell. I do hope that they will give this important story the exposure that it so rightly deserves.
Unless, of course, they're in on the conspiracy as well.
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(49 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, March 31st, 2008
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10:18 pm - Four.
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Today, I did four pull-ups.
Somewhere, people...well...men...are reading this and shrugging. My male readers are surely thinking of the number of pull-ups they can do, a number which is probably higher than four. Perhaps they are wondering what is keeping me from doing five pull-ups - am I encumbered by Oompa Loompas hanging from my legs?
Somewhere people...other people...female non-aerialist people are slack-jawed with wonder. I have lifted my own body weight using only the power of my arms! Then, when I didn't die or explode, I did it again. Of course, then I had to do another one, just to make sure that the first two weren't a fluke. By that time, my legs were kicking a bit, so I decided that I would do one more and then declare myself a superhero. I am a superhero. My super power is upper body strength.
Tomorrow, I may try to do more of these "pull-ups." I may go as high as five.
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| Monday, March 24th, 2008
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4:27 pm - Before I kill you, Mister Bond
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Dear Kingfish,
Remember that time I shook my fist and claimed that you conspired to make the Hubba Hubba Revue go-go dancers wear the most unflattering costumes possible every month? Oh no, I cried, I cannot possibly wear a black cat suit! I spend an embarrassing quantity of time prancing around in a leotard during aerials class and I can attest to the fact that no one, and I mean no one looks good in a leotard. This is a piece of clothing designed to induce eating disorders in ballerinas, and here you are, you cruel and heartless man, making your intrepid go-gos wear very nearly the same thing!
I was wrong. In fact, I am seriously considering wearing a shiny black cat suit at all times - especially if I am going to wear it with big black boots, a black leather corset, and that Skin Graft leather garter belt that looks like the world's most expensive climbing harness. Oh shiny black cat suit, I think I love you. I love you so much that I was willing to brave the terrifying zentai fetishists of eBay to find you. I love you so much that it doesn't even matter that you you were far, far too large in the torso and I will have to perform surgery on you with needle and thread to make you as hour-glass-shaped as I am. When I'm wearing my shiny black cat suit, I look as if I should be scaling walls or cracking safes or gloating over a hero's certain doom. I could point and shriek, "Seize him my minions!" while wearing my shiny black cat suit and minions would appear.
Oh Kingfish, I am eternally grateful. You will be spared when my army of bloomer-wearing steampunk robot spider-minions is loosed upon the Earth. You will be spared.
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| Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
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9:56 am - Roaming Hands
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I am a bad blogger. I have not written a single word about E-Tech (informative) or San Diego (pretty), my inability to remember to pack my gym pants (vexing) or Control (Ian Curtis, just kill yourself already). I have not written about my two days of fine dining (Bacar and Orson), when I really ought to. There were clever cocktails. Service was attentive and sweet, which is one of the things that endears San Francisco restaurants to me forever: the food may be snobby, but the staff never is. Orson served small food on very large plates and things covered with foam. French fries were fried in duck fat, leading me to believe that all things must be fried in duck fat from this moment forward. There was a bacon dessert called a "pigwich" which was described as "what happens when you're having bacon and pancakes for breakfast and the bacon gets covered in maple syrup." Oh, I wanted to hate it all, dear readers! I wanted to shake my fist and cry out to the heavens, but the damned food kept insisting on tasting good. Once upon a time, a chef friend of mine served me a salad comprised of a single piece of lettuce covered in grated blue cheese. I wanted to laugh (okay, I did laugh), but it was the single tastiest piece of lettuce I have eaten in my entire life. Orson pulled the single-piece-of-lettuce trick repeatedly and with varying levels of success. Eat there, but don't show up hungry.
But this is not about Citizen Cake-related, Orson Wells-derived restaurants. This is about my morning.
I am not a morning person. I am even less of a morning person when I am faced with the horrors of Daylight Savings Time, and yet I stumble out of bed and roam the streets of SOMA at ungodly hours (before 9:00!) so that I might be the first (okay, usually second or third) to greet my co-workers with bright-eyed cheer. I was not entirely awake, standing on the corner and waiting for the light to change, when I hear a voice mutter "Hey baby," behind me and some strange hand grabs my ass. I was not entirely awake and I was in a great hurry to get to the BART station, which is the only possible reason that the kick I aimed at Hey Baby's kneecap did not connect. Hey Baby then proceeded to turn around, arms flailing, and take offense at my attempt to do violence upon him.
Dear People of SOMA: what the Hell is wrong with you? In what crazy parallel universe do you exist, where women are portable squeeze toys? What, exactly, do you think I am going to do when you reach out and grab my ass - thank you for the fine compliment? Do you think I am going to giggle and blush like a Japanese schoolgirl? Here on planet Earth, us woman creatures respond to random groping by aiming a boot at the part of your body most likely to buckle under and knock you over in the middle of oncoming traffic.
Now, this is not the worst thing that has happened to me in the Flatlands. I have been flashed, masturbated at (not in the context of the Folsom Street Fair, where that sort of thing is regrettably expected), had my hair pawed, been followed around by a homeless person who insisted that I was a witch, and vomited upon. But just because no one is vomiting on my head does not mean that I will stand for this sort of behavior. People of SOMA: please stop. I am not a gropable object. I am covered in poisonous barbs. I wear very large boots and I will hurt you.
I never thought it would be such a relief to get to work, where there are no jerks, only paranoid schizophrenics.
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| Monday, February 25th, 2008
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11:55 am - The Accidental Orgy
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Ladies and Gentlemen of the winged jury, let it be known that I try to leave to SOMA on the weekends. I try not to spend my entire life standing by the bar at the DNA Lounge with a Mandarin Cosmopolitan in my hand, shouting unkind things into the ear of my fellow man. Life is short, you see. And hearing loss is permanent. This is why, after having spent the day wandering through the comic book convention (Storm troopers! Cobra Commander! Clever tee-shirts! Props from Angel! R. Black! That guy who played Boomer in the original Battlestar Galactica! Really bad adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz! Previews for slasher movies about meat! People taking pictures of me even though I am not dressed up in any way!), J consulted his social calendar and announced that we would be attending M's housewarming party in the Mission.
Nevermind that my last foray into the Mission during the weekend was disastrous. This time, I would stay out of the bars. This time, we would be on safe ground: a nice, calm, civilized housewarming filled with smart, interesting people. So, having dressed myself in relatively understated cocktail attire, we ventured across the Flatlands.
Damn it. Where is M's house? I am not a very good friend. M has lived in this house for several months now I haven't come over to visit even once. There's supposed to be an enormous kitchen, which none of the housemates appreciate because they subsist on a diet of take-out. I have spent many months threatening to sneak into the House of M and stage a dinner party. J and I wander up and down the block, looking lost and forlorn, reading the house numbers out loud until a man in coveralls, leaning in an open doorway tells us, "You're here for the party. Through the door, on the right."
The matresses in the hallway give me pause. And the rope lights on the floor. And the sound of bass...oontz oontz oontz...coming in from the other side of the door. It's going to be that that type of party. For a moment, I think this is what it must be like to walk into my house on New Year's Eve. There's a full bar, with a naked blue girl dancing on it, and one of those portable stripper poles in the corner. There are three or four screens stretched across the living room with something or other being projected onto them. People are dancing on platform and rolling across a giant, makeshift bed. M, pupils dilated to the size of saucers, steps out from behind a pile of very expensive sound equipment while the small blonde thing he is dating turns upside down on the stripper pole and says, "What are you doing here?"
"We're here for the housewarming." By the door, there's a man at a canvas nonchalantly painting the party as a mishmash of blurry pastel people.
"Oh, I canceled that. This is my neighbor's play party."
The screens are showing porn, and not the good sort of porn either. People are having sex, but they're platinum blondes with enormous fake breasts. I take back anything I might have accidentally thought about this place being like my Concrete Bunker.
"Yes. I can see that." I cannot decide what is worse: an orgy filled with people you know, or an orgy full of people you don't know. The kind of people who want to have sex at parties are inevitably the kind of people that I most emphatically do not want to see having sex at parties. The whole thing is rather soulless, like the scene in Eyes Wide Shut when Tom Cruise finally gets into the big, secret, bacchannal, and all that I could think was, "That's it? Naked women in feather masks? That's the wildest, most erotic thing this guy can think of? Did someone sneak into Stanley Kubrick's brain and remove his imagination with a scalpel?" These are not my people. I can tell because there are men wearing silver hot pants without irony.
I am perfectly dressed for a civilized house party. I am not dressed for an orgy. We flee. We flee the Mission and we retreat to the DNA Lounge, where I stand by the bar with my Mandarin Cosmopolitan and shout over (admittedly clever) mash-ups. Why do I ever try to leave this place? Why do I ever try to do anything else with my time? To leave SOMA on the weekend is folly - folly and the occasional accidental orgy.
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| Friday, February 15th, 2008
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11:03 am - Vast conspiracy: party of 1.
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Today, for the first time since starting my job at the Mysterious Workplace, I hung up on a caller.
He started out relatively lucid. He had gone to a prestigious, politically-active university. He had written some political papers there. Now, there were people following him.
What kind of people are following you?
The NSA.
At this point, I stop taking notes.
And how do you know it's the NSA?
The NSA has contracted with Israeli intelligence and they're following me everywhere.
Who?
Local people in the Jewish community. I can name them. I went to the police, but they already knew all about me and they wouldn't help. You're not Jewish, are you? I've found that once I tell people that the Israeli intelligence is involved, Jewish people refuse to help me.
What, exactly, do you want me to do?
Get me an attorney.
What do you want the attorney to do?
File a lawsuit.
Against whom?
I already told you, the NSA! Israeli intelligence! You're Jewish, aren't you? It's always the Jews that...
Bye bye.
And that's how I became part of the Zionist conspiracy. I will be expecting my newsletter to arrive in the mail any day now.
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| Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
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11:45 am - Total Mortification
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Get Mortified has a fantastic premise: people read from their teenage diaries. On stage. Right in front of you. And somehow magically fail to die of shame. They read about their plans to have sex with every member of Def Leopard and their love of Bible Study, their misunderstood genius and sex with the high school football coach. Sometimes there are pictures. Sometimes there are videos. Sometimes there are mullets and unfortunate facial hair. You listen and you hoot and you holler and sometimes you look away because it's as if someone dug up the corpse of your 14-year old self, all glasses and braces and feathered hair, and made it dance.
I don't know what happened to all those things I wrote when I was fourteen. I might have thrown them out when I went to college. They might be at the bottom of a box in my parents' house somewhere. I might have burned them. I hope I burned them. No one needs to know about my habit of writing like whichever low-grade science-fiction author I was reading at the time. No one is interested in hearing about all of the time I spent at the game store and how much I hated everyone my own age because I was smart and mature and they couldn't even begin to understand me. I may have written poetry. Some of those poems may have been sestinas comparing high school to a madhouse.
I would not be fourteen again, not for love or money or the promise of eventual world peace - not even so that I might get up on stage and wave some artifact of my childhood around for you to hoot and holler and look away from. My purely imaginary readers, I am simply not that brave. But I'm glad there are people who are.
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| Monday, February 4th, 2008
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3:41 pm - Lost Weekend
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You don't want to know about my weekend. You have absolutely no interest in the carefully reconstructed timeline of Groundhog Day or late-night sushi or trying to clean the filthy, filthy kitchen floor mats in my Concrete Bunker, the porn at Agent Provocateur, my epic grouchiness at having missed aerials class, or what I think of Amy Chua's Day of Empire.
To be honest, you don't really want to know about New Wave City either, but I am going to share it with you anyway. This is your last chance to look away. Close your eyes. Scroll down. Take a walk. And don't say I didn't warn you: there is a monster at the end of this post.
The DNA Lounge is essentially Cheers for computer nerds who wear too much black. A few days a week, we all slip into its warm and comforting embrace to dance on boxes, drink for free, and complain about the music, even when the music is good. It doesn't matter that New Wave City is Saturday night. It could be any night at the DNA where Depeche Mode is playing and Sixteen Candles is being projected on three of the walls.
The most important thing about Saturday night is that it is not Bondage-a-Go-Go. This becomes important when I see a man approaching the bar that makes me wonder if there is something wrong with my eyesight. His face is, well, warped - squished into the sort of configuration I would expect to see on one of Star Trek's aliens-of-the-week. It's got to be a mask...a mask with some sort of head harness. Oh god. I am wrong. I am wrong and I would really like for one of my taller companions to stand between myself and this man so that I can stop looking at him. He is dressed in nothing but a pair of black leather hot pants with several bar towels tucked into the waistband and a head harness that features two enormous steel hooks that latch on to his nostrils and pull his nose up like a pig's. He is dancing. Oh god, he is dancing behind me and I think I can feel his sweaty back. I am going to have to wash this shirt immediately. I may have to burn it in cleansing fire.
Terrifying Nostril Hook Man proceeds to unzip his leather hot pants and demonstrate his heavily-pierced penis to the crowd. I think I see a Masterlock in there. Now, I am a woman of the world. I have seen many strange and terrible things (please refer to Giant Inflated Saline Penis Man), but Terrifying Nostril Hook Man with his penis on display in the middle of New Wave City - in my safe and comfortable place - is unconscionable! I don't even know which part of him to look away from first. I do what any brave and forthright woman of the world would do: I hide in the upstairs lounge.
Damn you, Terrifying Nostril Hook Man. Put your penis back in your pants and get out of my Cheers.
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(59 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, February 1st, 2008
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10:04 am - Into the Box
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"Good morning, this is a message for Lil' Miss Never. I'm calling about RFID chips. I'd like to have one removed."
I wasn't expecting that. The paranoid schizophrenics rarely combine complete lucidity with such clear and unmistakable signals that they are insane and I should not return their calls. Truthfully, it is a mercy. I was expecting to do battle with irate right-wing talk show listeners all morning, people who would tell me that I am clearly a good American, and if I would just listen for a moment, I would come to the realization that Muslims are all jihadi terrorists that don't deserve the same protections under the Constitution as we do.
Fortunately, the talk show fans have gone silent. My MEAT-related hangover and I are great fans of silence. I spent the first hour of the morning sitting at my desk, drinking water and praying for death - a nice, quiet death that won't make my head hurt too much. I don't know what has happened to me. At some point, possibly in the middle of the night, gnomes have crept into my concrete bunker and stolen Club Girl Liver. This new, weak and useless organ is unable to handle two Cosmopolitans. Granted, these were Cosmopolitans mixed by DNA Lounge bartenders, the most vicious and over-pouring bartenders known to man, but it is rare and strange for two drinks of anything to make me stagger so.
If you happen to see my Club Girl Liver, please kick those nasty little gnomes in the teeth and return it to me. Quietly. With an aspirin and a glass of water.
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| Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
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12:24 pm
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One day, when it is safe, I will write a brilliant novel about my job. In the meantime, I am writing a handbook for my successor, a work that will guide the neophyte through the strange and murky waters of my occupation.
"Here," I will say, bestowing wisdom upon some international bright young thing. "Read this. You are going to need it."
In this book, there will be chapters on net neutrality, warrantless wiretapping, RIAA lawsuits, and workplace privacy! There will be chapters on patents and neat little flow charts detailing the elements of defamation. My replacement will learn to explain packet forging and data splitting with grace and ease. Some wide-eyed creature will learn to dread Rossi v. The Motion Picture Association of America and how to tell the 4th Circuit from the 9th.
Some of the chapters may be more pragmatic: the location of the mailbox keys; the care and feeding of the voicemail system; how to fix the front door when it is stuck; chasing down the postal worker who seems determined to avoid contact with us at any cost; the location of the best coffee and the cheapest burrito.
Finally, there will come the most awesome and eldritch lore, subtleties of this job that can only be learned through months of non-stop communication with people who may or may not be insane, diving into a river of sewage and plucking out the perfect, pertinent, on-message test case.
There will be crazy people. Oh, what crazy people there will be. Please refer to Figure 1a, which charts the levels of craziness in your Inbox against the phases of the moon. Feel free to abruptly end any conversation that includes the following elements: RFID chips implanted in the jaw, Mossad agents installing surveillance equipment in dental work, microwave mind control, or a fixation on people repeating phrases that "they only could have known if they had been listening in on all of my phone calls." Feel free to ignore any written communication that is composed entirely of newspaper clippings and/or form letters from Senators or Congressmen. Single-spaced, handwritten letters have, to this day, been a 100% certain sign of craziness, but they deserve at least one reading. Feel free to stop reading if the writer claims that their plea is hand written because of they are at the center of a government conspiracy that makes it impossible for them to plug in any electrical appliances.
It may sometimes be difficult to distinguish the crazy people from people with a highly creative understanding of the law. You may find yourself patiently explaining that no, the First Amendment does not guarantee you the right to have your site indexed by Google. The First Amendment also does not guarantee the right to communication between a man and his truck. Conversely, you may have to explain that the First Amendment does protect the right to speak anonymously. You may have to explain that as much as we disagree with existing copyright laws, downloading copyrighted material without paying for it is not legal and may result in your being sued for downloading Big Tit Anal Whores 6. Then you may have to act surprised when you learn that you could have purchased terabytes of porn for what it costs to settle the Big Tit Anal Whores 6 case out of court.
Sometimes the people will not be crazy and they will have a fine understanding of the law. Sometimes these people will come to you with interesting border search cases. In this situation you must remember that no matter how promising the case may look, you need to ask two questions:
1. When the bad people searched you, did they find anything?
2. If so, was it child porn?
For reasons that pass beyond my understanding, computers being searched at our borders are simply riddled with child porn. I don't know where all of this child porn comes from. Child porn is a deal breaker. You may feel free to find other people to help defend this person's 4th Amendment rights, but this is not your golden test case.
Oh, there are so many things you do not yet know, young non-profit worker. There is so much left for you to learn, and I will tell you all about it as soon as I get off of the phone with this irate right-wing radio fan who is asking me why I hate America.
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| Monday, January 21st, 2008
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11:58 pm - Off Day
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I was pleased, for a moment there. There I was, standing outside of MacWorld, saying goodbye to my various and sundry co-workers when I said, "See you on Monday," and one of them said, "No no, remember, we have Monday off." My weekend was going to be a festival of productivity - or at least productivity wedged between go-going at Creepshow Peepshow, drinking absinthe at MEAT v. Deathguild, posing for the painter (twice!), and hanging from ropes. Productivity includes all those things I never quite get around to doing during the week, like taking down the Christmas tree or going to the bank or making an appointment with the optometrist.
That's where I got into trouble. That's how my day off cost me $700.
Oh, I knew that the optometrist was going to cost me some money. I probably shouldn't have spent all of that time at work, squinting at my computer screen. I shouldn't have gone two years without renewing my prescription. I shouldn't have lost my glasses in 2005. I even suspected that there would be extra tests and new machines that take digital pictures of the inside of my eye and a lot of wandering around the eye doctor's office with my contact lenses off while the optometrist's assistant said things like, "Here, take a look at this," and I answer, "I can't. You just checked my perscription and you know that I couldn't see the big, sideways E if it was ten feet tall and on fire." I was vaguely aware that I would spend at least an hour meticulously picking out every pair of thick black plastic square-ish frames and trying them on while soliciting some poor salesgirl's opinion: now which is better, A or B?
Which leads me to a brief, yet crucial, tangent. Dear salesperson: I realize that you are not aware that my prescription requires lenses so thick they could be used on the Hubble Space Telescope, but I am picking out the heaviest frames I can for a reason. Trust me on this one. Trust me and put the cute little rimless frames down. Also, notice that I have not chosen anything with rhinestones or little silver ribbons or Dolce & Gabbana written on it. I'm walking a fine line here. Dame Edna is over there, on your side of the line. Over on my side of the line, I'm just trying to find some black frames that don't make me look like Groucho Marx in drag.
I knew that it was going to be bad. I just didn't think that after paying $100 for an eye exam, $250 for glasses, another $50 for lenses, and approximately $300 for a year's supply of contacts, that I would discover that my health insurance does not include vision coverage.
I have seen my future and that future contains a great deal of ramen.
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| Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
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3:59 pm - Out of the closet
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They say confession is good for the soul, so the time has come to stand up and confess: I am Lil' Miss Never and I love clothes. I love clothes more than I love sushi or fog or a new word that I've never come across before or an elegant argument or a Blue Bottle latte. I think I may love clothes more than books - well, maybe if they're really great clothes. Or not particularly good books.
I love clothes as a mode of self-expression. I'm wearing that black velvet scarf with fringe or that 1950's New Look shirtwaist or bright red Victorian boots not just because they prevent me from freezing (I do not function well in chilly climates) or being arrested for public indecency, but because I am try to tell you something. I used to think that that something was, "I am like nothing you have ever seen before," but that isn't it. That isn't it at all. When I get dressed in the morning, I am trying to manifest a creature inside my head. I am trying to manifest an aesthetic - and maybe you've seen that aesthetic before - maybe I'm wearing Spanish hair comb because I've been looking at Goya's Duchesses, or a bullet bra because I've been watching re-runs of Mad Men, or I'm answering the door in a slip and a kimono because in my head I'm Auntie Mame or Sally Bowles, or I've left the house looking like a post-Apocalyptic Elegant Gothic Lolita. Clothes cheer me up. There is no more reliable gage of my mood than the amount of time and care I take in getting dressed before I exit the Bunker and face the world at large. Some people self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. My poison of choice is vintage silk velvet.
Not everyone feels this way about the clothes they wear. I know it may seem obvious, but this is a very big step for me in the theory of mind: people do not experience the world in the same way. It is not merely a matter of preference for one style over another, but a completely different relationship with the entire concept of style. There are people whose meticulous dress stems not from the need to express some deep-seated personal aesthetic, but a need to display one's status (are those Manolo Blahniks?), or a compulsion to conform to whatever look is being flogged to death this season in some fashion magazine. There are people for whom the notion of clothing as a form of self-expression is just plain weird - people who express themselves in painting or writing or code - people who regard the human body as an inconvenience and attention to dress as vanity. There are people who love fashion - people who can tell you that saphire blue is in this spring or what the hottest teenage models are wearing in Milan or why Verace is totally irrelevant but Catherine Malandrino is a genius.
I hate fashion, but that is a story for another time.
The world is wonderous and weird and encompasses a bewildering variety of attitudes. For a very long time, I accepted the fact that J views clothing in a largely utilitarian sort of way. Pants are jeans. A good pair of jeans is the kind without too many holes in the pockets. Shirt are tee-shirts. Tee-shirts are purchased at concerts and are used as a marker of your scene cred and musical taste. Tee-shirts come in Size Large, even if you are J, who is decidedly Size Small. This is alright. We do not have to love all of the same things. We can love cooking and submarine movies and cryptography, but I do not have to understand why he must always have the latest, shiniest gadget and he does not have to spend his afternoons at the Vintage Clothing Expro in the Masonic Center searching for an alligator purse with the alligator's head still attached.
The other day, J purchased a pair of Shawna Hoffman pants. Then he went back to the store because there was another pair that he wanted, but they were out of stock and he had to wait for the next shipment to come in. He opened up a Ted Baker jacket and saw the contrasting silk lining and I think that for the first time, J might have felt something very similar to what I feel when I'm looking at beautifully-made clothes - that they can be art and that by wearing them, you become art. And then he said the words that made my heart flutter like a bird in my chest: "I'm going to need a shirt to go with that."
Oh my friends, we lived happily every after - happily ever after and immaculately dressed.
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| Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008
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12:22 pm - Mixed Blessings
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If I were a superstitious sort, I might be a little worried about 2008. They say that the way you begin the year is an indicator of how the rest of your year will pan out. If I were superstitious, I would just go ahead and christian 2008 the Year of the Death Cough.
The good news is that I greeted the new year at home in the company of friends, hosting a somewhat-more-sedate-than-usual party. At the stroke of midnight I stopped arguing about the RIAA with the owner of a record label for just long enough to raise my glass of champagne and toast. A few minutes later, J interrupted the argument for the ritual end-of-year exchange of germs. Eventually, the record label owner and I agreed to disagree about copyright and moved on to NSA warrantless wiretapping, which we agreed was evil and should be opposed with great vigor. We continued to agree until my voice gave out and all I could do was gesticulate wildly and croak like Kate Hepburn. The bad news is that I have ingested nearly all of the cold medication in the house and I have coughed until my lungs felt like they were on fire and that on the 1st of January, I could not speak at all.
Now, there are those of you (my father or my brother, for example) who can go days without speaking and not even notice. I have a deep admiration for thoughtful silence precisely because I am incapable of achieving it. And because the gods of irony, the only gods I can bring myself to believe in, are always looking for a good laugh, I am regularly afflicted with a rib-shattering cough that destroys my voice. So here I am: twitchy and fuzzy-headed, hopped up on green tea and Thera-Flu, with a relentlessly ringing phone that I cannot answer. I could scream, imaginary readers. No - wait - I can't.
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