ghosts are good company

well, let’s see. i’ve had a fairly lovely, if odd, birthday so far - i’ve been sent many well wishes, as well as treats and surprises.

one of the sad surprises, though, is that the tonga room - where i told everybody to meet me - is closed for a private event. le tear. so i’m not sure what to do now - cubbie and i might go out and hope that people who have my number actually use it, or we might stay in and do something nice here (that would be nice for cubbie, who hasn’t really had any time off lately). he’s on his way home, so i guess we shall see.

if we stay in, it’ll be kind of sad, because aviva alexander and i are all dressed up!

ok internet, i have decided on what i want to do for my birthday. it will include a staple from both queer and hipster culture: camp.

that’s right, folks, it’s the tonga room. it must be recalled that perhaps one of my favorite things ever is the enchanted tiki room at disneyland.

then i wanted to go to either bonkers or portal one, but since happy hour at the tonga room ends at the same time bonkers closes, it seems like portal one. some other time, bonkers? you seem like a good warm afternoon place to go, but that’s just because i’m thinking you’ll be overly air conditioned. portal 1 is open until eleven.

hopefully cubbie doesn’t work too too late on friday (i’m afraid he works until ten) - if he does, can we make these thursday plans? that might be better, anyhow, with the less-busy, ja?

so, if you’re in san francisco and interested in doing these things starting at five on thursday the 26th, let me know - either in comments or by email. hurray!

edit: it’s friday again, actually. same plans, just change of date. xo

it’s a hundred-and-one years since the 1906 earthquake that burnt down much of san francisco, killed around 3,600 people, and left more than half of the city’s then-population homeless.

there’s a 67% chance that an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or higher will hit this city between 1990 and 2020. that’s not a small chance.

i remember the nisqually earthquake in 2001; i was in choir, and nobody knew what to do. that was the scariest part for me - not the shaking or the danger, but that nobody knew how to respond.

so, i’m taking part in a local neighborhood emergency response team (nert) training series. i’ve only had one class, but i’ve learned a lot - partially through their training manual, which is the second link here. nert’s premise is that, because emergency services will probably be tied up for the first few days after a major disaster, people should have the skills that they need to support themselves and their families and neighborhoods.

this is especially important because i live in one of the neighborhoods of san francisco that would probably be ignored like the ninth ward of new orleans.

the point of this post, is that i’m all in favor of emergency preparedness. it’s part of my crazy, a little, but i think that this is a good aspect of it i want everybody i know to work hard to educate themselves - i don’t want my loved ones to die in stupid coincidences or accidents.

i’m trying to figure out a way to anchor our heavy shelves to our walls, but we’re not allowed to make holes in the walls. do any of you have advice around this?

what other emergency preparedness thoughts do you have? what are your disaster experiences, if you want to talk about them?

i haven’t updated many things in the back end of the blogs recently - nor the front end, for that matter (this is the part where i look shiftily at my “it is beginning to be autumn!” image). but! today, tonight, i updated wordpress to 2.13 (apparently 2.2 is coming out very soon and has tags…) and i created a tag cloud… list… for our categories. hooray! while i was turning off all of the plugins so that i could do the installation, i got seven spams in two minutes! insanity. thank goodness for the amazing spam filtration of akismet.

so, those are things.

also, i made a marble cake today. except that i don’t know where the baking powder is, and the molasses/baking soda suggestion… worked, but not so much. so it’s a half-risen cake, but that’s *much* better than my not-risen cakes of late. i substitute things much, and it’s a bad plan. i need to either recipe or not, i think. at least when it comes to baking.

do any of you want a blog here? especially those of you without blogs - i keep meaning to ask. there’s plenty of space.

what else? oh! i’m almost done listening to my music in alphabetical order by song. that means that i can return to listening to biased random mixes. i’ve been missing some of my favorite artists, who just don’t have as much music out as other folks.

i really want to go to daiso! my mother trained me to adore asian things by first doling out infrequent trips to uwajimaya, and then moving us into the fringes of an asian neighborhood in san diego (not *the* asian neighborhood, although i spent time there after school sometimes, but definitely a neighborhood that had lots of asian groceries). so, i miss mostly the shiny cookie aspects of these communities, and chamalyn, although amazing, isn’t doing enough - it’s too tiny. besides, where else could i get dinosaur origami paper? or mini bamboo furniture for aviva alexander?

i’m glad that you understand.

i’m sorry that the rss feed is spewing! i’m doing some work on the blogs - upgrading wordpress and reformatting the permalinks, mostly, so if you are attacked by me (and/or cubbie) again later, i very much apologize.

things are feeling a little better, planswise - i had double advice to let time figure things out, so while that’s hard to explain to people sometimes… that’s what i’m doing. mostly. :D

tonight i made seitan. well, today i made a few things. we had a stale loaf of bread, so i had some of that for lunch with garlic and butter, and then i wanted to make…. something… so i made breadcrumbs and then wanted something to fry in them, so i made seitan. it wasn’t from the ppk recipe, which i had used before, but it was very similar…. here! i used garlic instead of powdered garlic, and… we didn’t have some of the flavorings, so i used extra veggie stock for simmering. and molasses. it turned out fine, a bit soy saucey (becuase i used the high end of the suggested amount - i wanted flavrs!) and was completely underwhelming when baked in breadcrumbs. alas. now we have a bowl of seitan and a bowl of garlic butter in the fridge. i’m not sure what to do with them, but it’ll be… something. i stood on the phone with my father and cataloged things i could cook in breadcrumbs - green beans? a beet? squash? … none of them seemed appetizing. i wouldn’t have done well cooking on rations.

tomorrow i have a midterm, and then after that hopefully maybe i will go to a self defense training for trans and genderqueer folks. we discussed hate crimes in one of my classes recently, and that was a major suggestion (of course) for survival. but, i’ve never felt comfortable in any of the self-defense classes that i’ve taken. this one seems like it would be optimal, but it actually starts *during* the midterm. rawr, says dinosaur puck.

sleeping is optimal for children and other living things. and extinct things. including dinosaurs. goodnight or goodmorning or whatever works for you. xo

today was one of the super!productive! awesome. so much stuff recycled and landfilled and going to community thrift tomorrow. we spent six hours sorting. hurray!

i really have no idea, career-wise - which is scary, because that precipice is coming up. everyone keeps asking me if i’m going to graduate this spring, and… i doubt it. i would like to, would like to use that to prove that i’m not as messed up as people probably think i am, would like to use that as proof that my disabilities aren’t debilitating - but i don’t want to graduate just for proof.

the next is a rundown of my summer plans, which don’t exist. chances are you already know these things.

i’ve been waiting and waiting to see the listings for my school’s summer classes. at the beginning of march, “Summer 2007 listings will be available in March” was changed to “Summer 2007 listings will be available in April.” now it’s april and i’m still waiting. a comrade in waiting found the class schedules for summer, though - so at least i know who is teaching when, and the first forty characters of the program title. surprisingly enough, that gives me a lot of hope and eases my worries a bit.

i’m also working on an application for this summer program. it is doubtful that i could both the school of unity and liberation summer school as well as an evergreen class, but i’m hoping that i could work it out - there are a few short-term evergreen pieces that i might be able to schedule around a summer with soul.

if neither of these things work, and if the former works, for that matter, i’ll be looking for a job. i should actually be looking for a job now - temp work would be optimal - to build into the summer, but… i haven’t started. job hunts are an anxious project for people even without anxiety disorders. yippee!

another thing that i want to do before i graduate is take part in this program in the netherlands. working this summer would obviously help support that some… the application for fall isn’t due until may fifteenth, so maybe i should work on that just in case. …except that the program is full. wow.

the netherlands program would also be helpful in my work toward the modern thought and literature program at stanford, in case that’s what i decide to do. for that, “it is recommended that students begin the program with an advanced knowledge of at least one foreign language.” my spanish has always been horrible, but i want to start working on that again - however, by the end of the program i would need to have reading knowledge in two languages. still, i thought at first that it was in two languages *before* the program, so that’s good.

ahh, just thinking about this all is making my stomach hurt. and these are the touchstones, the potential knowns of my future! eep, it’s time for bed.