Tag: observations

Great post from Plastic Bag:

” I received a referral today from Google via Yahoo!. Someone
had typed in “load urge rectum girl”. I was, of course, the first
result. Which fills me with worry. Am I fulfilling the needs of the
Load Urge Rectum Girl community? Are they satisfied with the
information on my site? How can I turn their initial browsing into
a recurrent user pattern? Will they become a repeat visitor? Oh,
user behaviour analysis is so very tiring…”

4:35 p.m.

Chocolate truffles and tango music while you watch animals mount each other? Only in San Francisco:

Valentine’s Day Sex Tour (Sat/10-Sun/11)

Tiger Tiger Burning Bright

What does Valentine’s Day mean to you? Candy conversation hearts? Frilly
cards scrawled with gushy poems? A diamond tennis bracelet on your pillow?
Perhaps you are the unconventional sort who would rather watch animals mate
at the San Francisco Zoo with your beloved. Yes, picture yourselves holding
hands and sipping champagne while you roll through the zoo on your very own
private X-rated tram tour led by an animal care professional, sampling
chocolate truffles and listening to tango music. Not a bad way to feel the love. — Jan Richman

San Francisco Zoo, 1 Zoo Road, SF; Sat/10, Sun/11; 9 am and 3 pm; $50; (415) 753-7080.

(Update: Errr… Make that “Only in San Francisco and San Diego.”)

2:51 p.m.

So this guy is driving a sports car with a license plate holder that says, “Get in. Sit down. Hold on. Shut up.” Charming. He probably has a matching one hanging above his bed.

12:12 p.m.

Great post from memepool:

“Nothing says ‘My business is all about wretched excess’ more than stainless
steel business cards.”

2:41 p.m.

Short conversations with people who should be slain:

  • -Did you get your hair cut?-I got all of ’em cut.
  • -What a mistake.-You can say that again.

    -What a mistake.

  • -What did you say? I couldn’t hear you.-What?

    -I said I couldn’t hear you.

    -What?

    -I COULDN’T HEAR YOU.

    -WHAT?

2:19 p.m.

So you know, the yellow conversation hearts are banana flavored. I’ll be over here, scrubbing my tongue with sand.

2:34 p.m.

EMAIL MOMENT!

Subject: In which I send encouragement to an aspiring artist and am rebuffed.

Me: “An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”
-Charles Horton Cooley

Dave: I would posit that I must first
be accepted, or slightly talented, to actually be an artist. If all
I had to do was call myself something to also be something, then I would
suggest that I am, in fact, a raging porn star…

12:19 p.m.

This Slashdot article highlights a North Carolina service that lets high school kids call in and report students that cause them concern. (Someone has a BB gun in their locker? Call in. Someone seems bummed a lot? Call in. Someone just stole your girlfriend and you’d like to screw them over in any way possible? Call in.) The article also mentions that “81 percent of Americans said they believed the Net was responsible for the Columbine massacre.” Right. If you need me, I’ll be under my bed.

10:19 a.m.

Just got back from ladies’ night where we traded mom stories. I told Amy that my mom sends Christmas cards to people she met in the dentist office waiting room. Amy told me that she caught her mom talking to strangers on the bus about her parents’ illnesses. This reminded me of yesterday morning when I was sitting next to a guy on Muni who looked just like Prince William. I was actually turning toward him to tell him so when I realized that if I did, I’d be that woman on the bus telling a perfect stranger that he looked like Prince William. Sobering.

11:44 p.m.

From the “Yeah, I’ve done that” department. Words of wisdom from Booboolina:

“Note to self:

When picking the jeans that you wore yesterday up
from the floor in preparation for putting them on
today, check to see that the underwear you were
also wearing yesterday are no longer in them…
BEFORE YOU PUT THEM ON.”

1:44 p.m.

I just finished Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. I wanted to hate it, because it’s loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I loved Mrs. Dalloway and expected Cunningham to ruin something essential. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. Some excerpts:

  • “In school she was one of several authoritative, aggressive, not quite beautiful girls so potent in their money and their athletic confidence they simply stood where they stood and insisted that the local notion of desirability be reconfigured to include them.”
  • “Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature’s only subjects; but if men’s standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.”
  • (And a pug quote for Swen.) “Viginia’s eyes met those of one of the pugs, which stares over its fawn-colored shoulder at her with an expression of moist, wheezing bafflement.”

8:53 a.m.

I buy some daffodils on my way to work. As I’m walking, I realize that I’m carrying flowers and a book of poetry as I trot along the Streets of San Francisco. Suddenly, I’m the over-the-top “sensitive girl” and my life is a bad undergraduate play.

1:26 p.m.

EMAIL MOMENT!

Subject: Cynicism kicks in.

Excerpt:

“I swear I used to think
everyone kinda had a similar life to mine, but anymore I’m
sure
they have a lot less fun, eat a lot more bran, have
a
lot more low quality sex, and mail each other
inspirational cards that they actually read.”

12:04 p.m.

This guy fights with his girlfriend. A lot. So much that he has a rather lengthy page devoted to the subject, “Things my girlfriend and I have argued about.” A sampling:

  • I eat two-fingered Kit-Kats like I’d eat any other chocolate bars of that size, i.e., without
    feeling the need to snap them into two individual fingers first. Margret accused me of doing
    this, ‘deliberately to annoy her’.
  • She pours water into the back of my monitor every time she
    waters a plant, which she refuses to have moved to another, less overtly stupid, location.
  • Margret doesn’t like to watch films on the TV. No, hold on – let me make sure you’ve got
    the inflection here: Margret doesn’t like to watch films on the TV. She says she does, but
    years of bitter experience have proven that what she actually wants is to sit by me while I
    narrate the entire bleeding film to her. “Who’s she?”, “Why did he get shot?”, “I thought
    that one was on their side?”, “Is that a bomb” – “JUST WATCH IT! IN THE NAME OF
    GOD, JUST WATCH IT”!
  • She wants to paint the living room yellow. I have not the words.
  • Margret thinks I’m vain because… I use a mirror when I shave. During this argument in the
    bathroom – our fourth most popular location for arguments, it will delight and charm you to
    learn – Margret proved that shaving with a mirror could only be seen as outrageous
    narcissism by saying “None of the other men I’ve been with” (my, but it’s all I can do to
    stop myself hugging her when she begins sentences like that) “None of the other men I’ve
    been with used a mirror to shave.”
    “Ha! Difficult to check up on that, isn’t it? As all the other men you’ve been with can now
    only communicate by blinking their eyes!” I said. Much later. When Margret had left the
    house.

(Thanks, Kevin.)

8:41 a.m.

Spent Saturday night on the Haight. Mad Dog in the Fog had an “Irish band from outer space,” and Molotov’s was dank, but Nickies featured a relatively sober girl mesmerized by her own reflection. I say sober because she managed to balance on one of the benches that circled the room, and she perched there dancing with the mirror. She would grind seductively and cast furtive, flirtatious glances at…. herself. Huh. Then someone threw up on my friend’s pants and we had to leave.

8:46 p.m.

EMAIL MOMENT!

Subject: Dating woes of a friend in med school.

Excerpt:

All the girls I want to sleep with are not returning
my phone calls, and some of the ones I have slept with
now call for free medical advice. Favorite one of
the week: How much can you drink on Lithium?

2:31 p.m.

Sometimes things annoy me more than they should. For example, the small blue signs someone has taped in our bathroom stalls.

Flush early!
Flush often!
Flush freely!
Help prevent traffic backup.

Yeah. Those are coming down.

11:44 a.m.

Watching a kid’s infomercial about a spectacular new mechanical toothbrush, the voiceover exclaims, “BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!” My five year old niece turns to me smiling and says, “They always say, ‘that’s not all.'” Smart kid.

4:01 p.m.

The last week has not been so good. A few days ago, I managed to upset one of my closest friends. Last night, a violently crazy homeless woman charged at me while I was trying to find someplace to eat on Valencia. (She also called me a bitch, which–I think you’ll agree–was really just uncalled for.) In a few hours, I’m off to have several needles inserted in my currently unperforated arms, so some sleepy little diseases can have a party with my immune system. What wonders will the weekend hold? It could be anything, really: severe food poisoning, mugging, drive by, or a friend could visit and demand that I take him to Pier 39.

10:33 a.m.

“It is no coincidence that you cross your fingers when you say ‘ready’ in sign language.”

From “Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross” by Melanie Bogue.

2:56 p.m.

Another reason I love Jane magazine, this review of the “Buttkicker Shaker”:

A $700 device you can attach to your couch to electrify your movie watching and music-listening experiences. Let’s say you rent Vertical Limit. When snow roars down the mountain, your Buttkicker-enhanced sofa will shake like you were actually in an avalanche, except without the death part. When I watch movies, I never think, “I’m missing out because when the bombs go off onscreen, I don’t feel anything in my butt.”

12:20 p.m.

I had a dream last night that a ’50s-dad type was telling me about taking his family on a trip out to California: “Yeah, we went to Silicon Valley to see the Internet. I thought we’d be able to just walk right up close enough to touch it, but they kept it behind about five feet of glass. The kids were disappointed.”

10:39 a.m.

Today’s not-good thing:

My fly has been open for several hours. My pants are tan. My underwear is red.

5:03 p.m.

Thanks to this what-happened-on-your-birthday-type site, I now know that the first shipment of fresh oysters came overland from Baltimore on the day I was born. Well, about a kazillion years before I was born on that day, but still. Crucial.

12:57 p.m.

This is a seven-year-old body builder. I’ve been there once, I’m never, ever going there again.

10:42 a.m.