ghosts are good company

i’ve decided that if i wait just a little longer without changing the layout, this blog will be in season again.

although truthfully, i’m in a web design class and i need to figure out *something* to design for my final project.

i’ve been in seattle and olympia for the past few weeks, staying with various people and seeing lots of exciting things. it’s dreadfully warm here. so i’ve been knitting, of course. i designed a little mouse finger puppet, which i adore. i gave it to a girl that i have a crush on, but she’s not dating new people right now, apparently. i learned that through observation, not rejection. thank goodness.

there’s a thing about blogging that the longer you spend not doing it, the harder it is to pick it up again because you feel like you need to say something profound to make up for your absence.

cubbie and i broke up a while ago. i get teary a lot, still.

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.

It feels so delightful to be productive, even if in small ways.

Tonight I went to an alum event for New College of Florida, cubbie’s school, and it was amazing how self-conscious the event made me feel about my strange path through college, considering New College’s reputation for its liberal beliefs on education. For those of you who just tuned in, I did a few credits of college in high school, and then I enrolled in The Evergreen State College, where I did some coursework and some summer work until I realized that I needed to take a year off to get some health stuff figured out. After that, Evergreen wasn’t really a place I felt safe going back to, so I moved to San Francisco to attend City College of San Francisco. My time at City has been largely successful, and I have learned more at City, maybe, than I did my whole time at Evergreen. So, good. I’ve been thinking about how awesome it would be to be able to contribute to this community, to teach on a community college level, so when I found out about the Grow Your Own program at City, I was excited - but I don’t think I’m eligible. The information about it is here.

Sometimes I feel like the struggle to get where you want/need to be, academically (and in terms of careers as well) can be much more difficult than the education/job itself. All I have to say to that is “bleh.”

i got this link from my friend jaci. the simple origins of this link on seattle’s social dysfunction are telling - jaci and i met online when i was in tenth grade. she was blogging out of kent(?) and i was blogging out of dash point and it took me moving away from seattle and moving back for us to meet. jaci is one of my best friends, and yet we have immense difficulty getting together (when i’m in town) - it seems like with all of my friends, there is a challenge of figuring how to go from wanting to do something to actually doing it. jaci and i talked about getting together for literal years before we did.

The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine : Our Social Disease

“There’s no sexual energy here at all,” he says. Seattle is “a city of the mind . . . a city of geeks. People here . . . they totally blow you off. And these are good friends, right? They just don’t call you. It’s unbelievable.”

i see this with all of my friends from seattle, and i wonder how it affects me as somebody who has moved to other cities but remains rooted in the emerald city (emeralds are beautiful but cold).

Seattle is like that popular girl in high school. The one who gets your vote for homecoming queen because she always smiles and says hello. But she doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care to. She doesn’t want to be your friend. She’s just being nice.

there’s been this trouble with me and people. in large communities (high school, and college), there’s this thing where everybody seems to know me. this would be great, but i don’t know them. i don’t know why i know them. but i say hi and i will chat with them… and i won’t know who they are and i probably won’t remember them the next time we have the same awkward but pleasant conversation. did i mention that i was prom king? i was just being nice.

i chat with people on the buses here. in elevators, cubbie and i have had good conversations with people. i made my best contacts in a series of one-day classes, while not really connecting to people in my long-term classes. i have email addresses for those people, but i haven’t yet contacted those folks - even though i’ve blogged about how great the last class was - and i’ll probably lose the addresses before i use them.

what is that? blaming it on seattle seems useful. cubbie talked about how much trouble he had socializing when we moved here, but i didn’t hear anything about that when he moved to seattle. more than once i’ve remarked on how amazing it is that cubbie wasn’t a native seattleite. i am fascinated.

one of my favorite stories to tell is about how i cope with my agoraphobia by befriending people in public. this summer, cubbie and i went to see kimya dawson and the mountain goats at neumos (why must they have a scary clown on their webpage?! oh look, mountain goats are playing there on march first. that means they’re playin *here* march seventh through ninth! delightful.). we got there early and, feeling very awkward, i wandered over to find some comfort in the presence of kimya - who is a friend, in the she - is - very - popular - and - has - a - lot - of - people - who - want - to - be - her - friends - so - that - she - is - nice - to - me - but - probably - doesn’t - remember - my - name sense. see above, i suppose (this is also such a weird time, mediawise, for being friends with your heroes). so we chatted and i chatted with people around her and i felt better, and then cubbie came back (from where?) and so we found a place in front of the stage and set up camp, maybe sitting on the floor (which is a conversation-starter in itself. on our first date we sat on the floor in front of the stage before the show and met all of our neighbors), and eventually got to know the people standing next to us, who were super cool and really helped the show be more fun. they were more into the mountain goats and we were more into kimya, so averaging that out meant that we were all super excited about everything. they offered us alcohol which we didn’t take and we all got along and had a lot of fun. which was more fun than just getting mad at them for shoving us. and the moral of the story? is that we never knew their names. and we never saw them again.

i have better relationships with strangers than i do with my friends, i suppose is the point here. i’m fascinated by what my seattle family might have to say about this. anyone? (beuller?)

there’s mariachi music wafting in the window. it’s thanksgiving. the mariachi happens sometimes, but usually we can only hear the oompah. tonight it’s in full force loud, people singing along joyfully and drunkenly.

our observaton of the day people celebrate thanksgiving was quieter, although there were about fifteen of us there eating delicious stuffed seitan (a wheat-gluten based tasty thing) and a pumpkin filled with stuffing and lots of other tasty things. we watched some of pride and prejudice, and while i was there i had three mugs full of spiced cider. num.

this weekend i am going to be writing, writing - four or five final papers, the first four of which will be for the same class. i’m a little overwhelmed.

but our neighbors are excited.

so, this is it - good old greendinosaur.net. i have high hopes, but for now it’s just a handful of blogs. at the moment there’s just my cubbie and i here, but i’m hoping to open the space up for family and friends as well. this space, for me, is going to be a fairly general overview of whatever-strikes-my-fancy, and cubbie’s blog (which is entitled “the seams of a (newly) peculiar queer”) is going to be about his experiences as a queer kid who is new to the quaker faith.

i took a class this summer called “art of the blog,” and, well - i’ve been blogging since (eyesquint) 1999, first at diaryland and then at livejournal. this is my first time (outside of the class), though, of hosting my own platform and things. it seems like a good thing for now, to be away from the whims of sixapart (which owns livejournal now) and the like. i’m glad that i’ve practiced this all before, but woah am i rusty. i’m sure i’ll have lots of challenges in the administration of this space, but heck - i’m always up to a new web-adventure.

for some reason, it feels really important to let you know where i’m (literally) coming from. i was born and raised near seattle, and spent two of my last years of high school in san diego before heading to college in olympia, washington. now cubbie and i have relocated to san francisco, where i will finish college and we will while away our days. san francisco seems very important at the moment, probably because it’s so new. still, i feel like it’s a big thig in a way that none of my other moves so far have been.

there’s a lot to get done here before i’ll even think of this as a blog. one thing i’m going to miss about livejournal is the built-in community, what with the… communities. that type of camaraderie is something i’m not sure how to build. but! we’ll figure it out as we go.

i suppose that’s the moral of the story.

oh! and the current title of the blog, “ghosts are good company,” comes from the song of the same name by bishop allen - you can find the lyrics here. the subtitle, which i don’t think is visible with this theme, is “and now the world is suddenly wonderful.” this is my new favorite song, and you can look to see if hypemachine can find you a copy of it by clicking here.

take care, folks.

xoxpuck

[oh, p.s., i’m preparing to use my categories as tags. that’s why i’m using so many of them. if you have any to suggest for any particular entry, or in general, please let me know.]