ghosts are good company

i just got out of a hot bath and into dirty clothes. tonight my mother and i are staying at the serrano hotel, which has lovely deep bathtubs - with enough hot water! at my apartment, you have to turn the water to its hottest possible to get anything near a nice bath, and then pretty soon it’s cold.

when we started planning my move, she booked this room with two beds just in case i wanted to stay. it’s good she did, because everything i own is now stuffed into a cheerful ten-foot u-haul truck. a year ago i drove my car down to san diego to sell, and now i’m driving my whole life down there. from here i can see the building in which everything i own is parked, but i can’t see my truck. it worries me - but not as much as parking the truck in front of my tenderloin apartment does.

i should sleep, as i need to be up in five-and-a-half hours to clean (after three hours sleep last night, awesome), but i wanted to check in and tell you that, hurrah hurrah and hallelujah, there will be no ore packing updates from me here. for now.

oh! and my mother was a sweetheart, after me bitching all day, and took us out to dinner at the tonga room. she mentioned as we walked in that she expected birds to start talking - and it was indeed as awesome as hoped.

i hurt everywhere, folks. soon my move will be over, and the world will be happier.

my friend amy is not feeling super awesome today, so it is for her that i have uploaded this photo (hard work on this connection!) and set down this poem from it.

The Mirror Poem

No mirror’s big enough for Snuff
    to see all Snuff at once.
He could try doing it in bits,
    but that would take him months.
So I walk all around him
    and tell him what I see.
And then, because he is my friend,
    he does the same for me.

i’m not sure if this book is from when snuff was still an “imaginary friend” or not… that would make the meaning quite different. i think my favorite part of the image is snuffleupagus’ eyes in the bottom left of the right-hand page.

hello.

i’ve packed thirty-something boxes thus far. i’m running out of time. half of those boxes that i’ve packed are books. whoops.

i went out to dinner tonight, at millennium, with the two people here to whom i really needed to say goodbye. i didn’t really, though - at the end it was just goodbye hugs, not Goodbye hugs. dinner was tasty and filling, but is now on the sidewalk. the good thing about living in the drunkard’s neighborhood is that nobody looks at you strangely as your anxiety disorder causes you to puke down the block. i still always feel bad for my companions, though. and today, my shoes and dress. ew?

it’s amazing how used one can get to puking. i’ve been doing it unintentionally for six years now. six years?!

eventually, maybe, i will be able to navigate the world without making it messier. for now, i’ll continue packing.

yet again, patches emulates life. tomorrow is the “monsters of accordion” tour (well, two days from now - there’s still all of thursday to go), and i’m sourly tempted… but there’s the whole way that even though my last post was about not spending money? i’ve been spending money.

on:

• the patches book (mentioned in the past post)
• both anna oxygen albums, because i have found that her music makes me immensely happy.
• wreck this journal. there’s a grammatical error on that page. perhaps it is not the best journal for me after all. but, to quote strongbad, “oooh, if you want to be possessive, it’s just i-t-s, but if it’s supposed to be a contraction, then it’s i-t-apostrophe-s. scalawag.”

i’m feeling self-conscious because maybe two new people have said “hello, i am reading your blog!” and that makes it so many more people than the one person who was reading it before. i’ve been blogging since (this is the part where i count on my fingers) 2000? but i’ve been doing it mostly privately until last summer, when i took a class called “art of the blog” which was pretty awesome, but also really scary. the class was mostly blog design, truthfully, but it also asked me to step out of the protected space bubble and take credit for my thoughts and opinion and overabundant rambling on google, which i’m still rather afraid of (speaking of bad grammar).

i took another class with arlen this summer, and faced somewhat the same challenge - this time it was just basic web design. it was different for me than the rest of the class, because i started designing web pages in (finger-counting again) 1998 or so? maybe 1997? and they were crappy. i was very young, and this was right before/at the very begining of css, so all of the resources available were all about table-based layouts and… it was messy, is the moral of the story. still i lean toward the very simple design, so it was somewhat embarrassing. i ended up making that page and this mini-site for my ex-boyfriend, cubbie.

cubbie and i went to see the simpsons movie today, speaking of cubbie and spending money and evergreen (when i was a tour guide at evergreen we were always encouraged to mention groening. i was always kind of embarassed, not by his work but by how proud evergreen was of him). the movie was surprisingly good - i’m always afraid of things like that (vague, um, tv shows that are pretty good turning into movies? the simpsons’ potential for either greatness or sludge? things that are marketed explosively?), but i laughed a lot and waved my hands gleefully even more.

we were at the grand lake theater, where the matinee was affordable and the popcorn was free (mon.-thu. for the summer)! it feels like a good deal, even if i did have to pay seven dollars to cross the bay and back - one of us would have had to anyway. ho hum.

the theater is absolutely beautiful. we sat in the balcony of theater three (balcony because it reminded me of the capitol theater in olympia), which is decorated in a faux-egyptian theme, with paintings on the walls and statuary. all of the entrance wall has hieroglyphics stenciled on to it - i wonder if they say anything. my favorite part of the theater by far, however, was the ceiling. i looked up and… stars! cubbie’s analysis was “that’s how they do stars at disneyworld,” but mine was just “ooh, shiny.”

after the movie we walked around for a while, exploring, and found many places to have our nails done. had we, you know, wanted to get our nails done. eventually i came home and procrastinatorially puttered, although i was successful in emailing the derby dolls about my interest in them.

also i was successful in pouring a whole glass of water onto my bed. i had thought i would get to bed “early” tonight, too.

i’ve somehow managed to become nocturnal again. it’s interesting, rather like the world is hanging upside down. it’s not very good, though, because by the time i’m ready to be productive, it’s late and my mind tells me that i should be going to bed, so then i’m not productive in hopes that i’ll go to bed, but i don’t.

today i made gross scones out of strange mexican pancake mix (it was “tres estrellas” brand; i should have held out for cinco estrellas) and pumpkin. i ate one, but i still have two more sitting there and leering at me.

i also made quiche. i think that quiche is somewhat the perfect food, as it combines lots of different foods and also has protein! which is important and i don’t get enough of. however, my pie crust skills are currently lacking (they used to be good, but have declined for want of materials such as real butter). this is the second quiche i’ve made since getting home from seattle - i bought a dozen eggs and distributed them evenly. hurray quiche.

there are twelve days left to pack up my house, after which i will be moving to san diego. i’m getting panicky because i’m having a very hard time getting started. i’ve been acquiring boxes and i’m pretty sure that i have enough, and most of my stuff is actually already in boxes, but i’m still super-overwhelmed.

i started a savings account for my amsterdam trip. i’m getting 5.27% interest or something, so that’s nice - and also it’s preventing me from giving in and buying these amazingly attractive shoes that happen to be on sale and only available in my size. i love fluevogs and don’t currently have any particularly femme ones - just these boots and these in pink and black. i might still have them in white and black as well, but i wore those out pretty quickly my first few years of college. oh fluevog, you do hold claim to an extensive piece of my shoe-loyalty heart. when you’re on sale. and now you’re working on lovely vegan shoes as well? quite tidy.

that was an extensive shoe-related tangent. i have a lot of shoes. this is a problem that comes with being deeply invested in many gender presentations and having an obsession with shoes. perhaps if i picked just one gender presentation, i would have just as many shoes pertaining to that one as i do now. of course, i could just have more (of course we would, we’d just eat more).

i’ve recently come to adore this comic. usually when online comics release books i manage to convince myself that their online presence will be enough for me, but here… a bit of me aches to hold suspenders and glasses tangibly in my hands. i’m a little bit too much like suspenders. seriously. the author has an art show in san diego that’ll still be running for two or three days that i’m there. maybe i can go.

i have to decide if i want to, on saturday, go to a blythe doll meetup in san jose or to a flashmob dance party at the ferry building or to watch clueless at cubbie’s house. i’ll probably end up at the latter, because (can you have latter if there’s more than two items? if not, final) it’s people i know, but it’s so so weird trying to be his friend.

recap since last entry (if just because that’d be a sad note to end on): i did not go to ground kontrol, instead i went to a store called collage (i think), where i purchased things to make a thank you card for the folks’ at whose house i spent the night. i did go to see the bishop allen show, and it was delightful. i am still obsessed with roller derby, and the san diego derby dolls have their bouts a mile and a half from where i’ll be living. hurray!

i hope you all are doing well. recommend me good podcasts, if you want to.