Strep and Sneakers

Suck a little dick and get strep throat. Goddamned still-intact tonsils. I should’ve known better…

I know that’s not really the reason, but it was handy. Fortunately, this particular case isn’t nearly as bad as the ones I used to have during my period of “semi-annual strep” a couple of years ago. I don’t feel great, but neither do I feel like I’m going to die. Experience breeds early diagnosis. And do you have any idea how hard it is to get a prescription for Erithromycin on a Saturday afternoon, especially when you don’t have health insurance?

Yes, I know I’m an idiot for not having health insurance, so you may skip all horrified comments on that subject. I’m working on it, OK?

I stocked up like crazy on easy-to-prepare soft foods, ice cream, and orange juice, preparing to be socked in for a few days. Luckily, I’d already bought books on Friday when I had lunch with Sarah. I’m almost disappoined; I was ready to be sick. Maybe I should shut up before my optismism proves misguided.

Old, smelly, and disgusting…

New, shiny, and exciting…

Health insurance, no, but what I DO have is new shoes! My old and trusty Adidas were getting a little smelly and disgusting, so I’ve upgraded. Maybe I can unload them in the fetish items section on eBay; they were featured prominently on a porn site after all. Anyhow, I thought I deserved to have my shoes on the front page just like Sarah

Enough of this. I’m taking another pill now…

Sucky Day

What an absolutely, totally sucky day. And I rarely use the term “sucky”, because it sounds, well, sort of dumb. But today, jeez. Drama at my part-time job (none of which really affects me, but drama all the same), misunderstandings via email, and I cannot stop eating.

This is not just nervous snacking; all of a sudden I’m just perpetually starved. I eat breakfast and then, two hours later, I’m ready for a full lunch. Nervous snacking only makes it worse; I try to grab an snack and it just leaves my little tummy frustrated that it didn’t get its fifth full meal of the day. I think it’s a tapeworm. Probably from the corned beef.

Things I like today:

Things I hate today:

  • Smoking
  • Street-cleaning night
  • Allergies

Nighty night, or, if you prefer, good morning…

Corned Beef and Early Rising

I am drowning in corned beef. Three pounds of it following a cooking jag this afternoon. I’ll be eating it for days. Anyone want a sandwich?

No, I’m not really offering anyone a sandwich. That would involve more of an emotional closeness than I’m able to admit right now. And there’s the potential for rejection. I offered my landlord a sandwich earlier tonight and he said he didn’t like corned beef. I don’t think I can take that twice in one day.

Odd day. I was up at a startlingly early hour, one which I haven’t seen in many months and have no intention of seeing again anytime soon. Among my discoveries at this ungodly hour was the fact that the 12-Folsom bus doesn’t start running until 6:30. This was not something I really wanted to know.

At least it’s quiet early in the morning. PG&E has not yet arrived to do whatever the hell they’re doing at the freeway on-ramp. The workers who have been renovating the building next door for the past five years have not started sawing wood out back and hammering the wall behind my bed. The piledrivers and traffic helicopters are still at rest.

All the same, I don’t want to get up that early ever again. I am completely and utterly baffled by the thought that people get up at 5:00 in the morning to drive an hour or more to work, spend ten hours or more there, and then drive an hour or more home. I can’t imagine any job which would ever be worth it to me. Call me a lazy slacker if you like. I’m comfortable with that as long as it means my life is my own.

And as long as I can occasionally spend a Monday afternoon cooking corned beef and then trying to get rid of it on the web, all while watching old movies on AMC.

Maybe I should give up being a moderately-lethargic worker and try to become a moderately-active housewife. Any takers? A dishwasher, washer, and dryer on-site are absolute requirements. And I don’t get up at 5:30 in the morning for any man…

No Phone

It was so quiet and calm here.

I hate using the phone, but I hate even more not being able to use it when I need to. For the past two days, I had no phone, no internet connection, no nothing. My front doorbell was probably the most effective way to contact me. Thanks Pacific Bell for being there when I needed you, TWO DAYS AFTER YOU FUCKED UP MY PHONE.

I’m sure my next door neighbor, who also had no phone for two days, was equally grateful. Some day soon, I’d like to think that Pacific Bell will realize it’s no longer a monopoly and start acting accordingly.

To those of you who might suggest I get a cell phone as a reserve against these little emergencies, I must reply that it seems a pretty big expenditure since I’d be too embarrassed ever to use it anywhere other than home anyway. Strolling through the Finincial District today, I realized (remembered?) that it’s damned near impossible not to look foolish walking down the street talking on the phone.

Things I’m a little embarrassed to admit enjoying today:

  • Wolfgang Puck’s Creamy Country Chicken Soup
  • The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Things I’m not at all embarrassed to hate today:

  • Pacific Bell
  • The “layers” feature in Dreamweaver
  • Sleep deprivation

Taxes and Movies

Maybe there is a god. I just figured my taxes and realized I owe less than half what I expected. This, it goes without saying, is a very good thing, since I had precious little idea how I was going to pay the tax man this year. Of course, this is more a testament to how little money I made last year than to anything else, but I’m OK with it as long as I can eat for the rest of the month…

On an unrelated note, it’s very disorienting to watch Jessica Fletcher cavorting with Victor Mature. That’s what I get for watching Samson and Delilah on AMC while I do my taxes. It’s even worse than watching Lily Munster nudge up against Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments.

I’ll bet Lily Munster never owned a gun in her life (or lives).

Things I hate today:

  • Form 1040, Schedule C, Schedule SE, Form 1099.
  • Mrs. Paul’s Stuffed Shrimp
  • Diet Coke (I tried, I really tried…)

Things I love today:

San Francisco news personality with whom I think I’d most hate being stranded on a desert island:

That is all…

Happy 100K


10,000 Miles Ago…

My car finally hit 100,000 miles on Sunday, right in the middle of beautiful downtown Pescadero CA. Of course, since I have a Toyota, I don’t get to see “all zeroes”. This milestone won’t occur for another 900,000 miles. I feel a little cheated.

Longtime readers might remember when I bought it, why, and where it’s taken me. Or they may just not care. Which is quite understandble, but I thought my trustworthy little Toyota desrved a little recognition for all its accomplishment. It’s avoided major breakdowns (and break-ins) for three years now.

OK, I also didn’t have anything else better to write about tonight, my life having taken one of those “uneventful” turns lately. Thus, I offer random thoughts for a Monday night:

  • One thing you can always count on: if you walk by Julie’s Supper Club on a Saturday night, there will always be a drunk yuppie idiot saying something really stupid at the top of his lungs.
  • Most unexpected song heard in a queer bar this weekend; “Cool Places” by Sparks with Jane Weidlin. Runner-up: “Jesus Walking on the Water” by the Violent Femmes.
  • One more thing you can always count on: in any given week, “Back to the Future” will be airing at least once on TNT or TBS. Guranteed.
  • When I was 13 and really obsessive, I would have killed for a website like this. Even at 35, and no longer obsessive, it’s still pretty cool.
  • No, the aforementioned link has nothing to so with sex, thank you.
  • Showing my age: it strikes me that the first actual date I went on with a guy (as opposed to the first sex, which happened much, much earlier) was to see “Terms of Endearment”, which is right now showing on TBS.
  • Yes, “Back to the Future” was on right before it.

Happy Tuesday…

8 March 2000

Another rhetorical question: is it just my imagination or is Regis Philbin quite possibly the most annoying human being ever to walk the face of the earth?

I caught one of my rare glimpses of the little nimrod while changing channels waiting for the triumphant return of “Family Guy”, which my have been the one highlight of this particular cold and rainy Tuesday night. The election returns sure weren’t a lot of fun.

So speaking of the elections, I don’t really have much to say today, and this whole journal entry is more about putting something up to fill space and replace my endorsements list than anything else. Sorry. I’ll try to be more exciting in a couple of days.

Sites worthy of your attention on a Wednesday morning:

So please feel free to look around since I’m a little sparse today…

I’m going to have a bowl of cereal with milk and work on those strong bones and teeth, because, after all, I’ve got milk. And it does a body good. It also costs more in California than almost anyplace else in the country even though we produce more of it than Wisconsin.

Space filled. No more babbling…

28 February 2000

Why no, this picture has nothing much to do with anything. But wait. Come to think of it, I did have lunch at Burger King today. Maybe it’s a subliminal thing. Or it could just be that I liked the picture…

Either way, lunch at Burger King was about as strenuous as it got today. I’m getting a little better, I guess. I can breathe again, but my ears are still stopped up and I’m still a little achy. All in all, though, things are improving. And my gardenia bloomed.

So in case no one noticed, I uploaded a remodeled Planet SOMA yesterday. There are some subtle page layout changes, and I’ve added a search form on every page. A lot of older pages are now gone, bringing the grand total down to a still unwieldy 420. I’m still playing around, so there may still be a few minor changes. Let me know if you run into problems.

Funny thing, the hit on my front page are way up over the past few weeks. I’d been averaging about 350 a day, while it seems to have blown up to about 425-450 lately. One day last week, almost 500 people came in through the front door. Maybe this “hands off” policy, where I’ve only been updating the journals, is a good thing. Odder still, though, is that overall site traffic has stayed pretty stable, despite all the additional hits on the front page.

Now that you’re thoroughly bored, I’ll sign off, so I can attempt the sleep I didn’t get last night. Whatever I have, it’s starting to grate on every remaining nerve in my body.

Interviewed

Interviewed. Me. Imagine that. And with only one inconsequential misinterpretation regariding hits…


Still life with Kleenex, Alka Seltzer, and orange juice (Me, 1996)

So the time has finally come. I’ve managed to develop that annual nastiest cold in the world. Maybe even the worst cold in a couple of years. Oddly enough, this one seems to have moved from my chest to my head, instead of vice versa which is my usual pattern. It kept me away from my part-time job today (like that’s particularly difficult…) but it didn’t stop me from looking like a heroin addict at a meeting about some freelance work.

What really sucks about being sick in San Francisco in February, though, is having to drag your ass out in the freezing cold and pouring rain to move your car on street cleaning night. Of course, just about anyplace else, the cold would be colder and the rain would be harder, so I guess I shouldn’t bitch.

But I’m sick and I’m cranky. I’ll bitch if I goddamn well please. Why should this be different from ny other day?

Things I love today:

Things I hate today:

    • Kleenex rash.
  • That useless, tough, taste-free corned beef brisket I bought at Safeway this weekend.
  • The aroma of that homeless guy who sat down next to me at lunch today.

Surreal Things, Love, and Hate

I didn’t think it could get much more surreal than hearing “Stairway to Heaven” on a pipe organ in a pizza parlor on Friday night. I was wrong.

I was changing channels tonight and something caught my eye on one of the local PBS stations: a rerun of “The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show” from about 1961. The strange special effects in the first musical number were bizarre enough, with singers “floating” against a blue sky background (body parts kept disappearing). The “Peanuts” opening sequence as a little odd as well.

Midway through the show, though, came the piece de resistance: Ernie Ford and Tony Bennett and a full orchestra singing Hank Williams songs. This was about a strange as it gets. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” with a horn section was followed by “Jambalaya” with both the horn section and a collection of about 15 perky white singers in evening wear. All in brilliant, headache-inducing color on semi-demagnetized 2-inch videotape.

I sort of hoped it would all end in a commercial for Martha White Flour, but it didn’t…

Things I love today:

Things I hate today:

  • This chest cold, which is showing signs of getting nastier and nastier (no doubt spurred on by cheap cigarettes in San Bruno).
  • Hot, sticky weather in February.
  • Waiting until the last minute to pay my car insurance and finding AAA closed for the holiday.