Pop Culture Weekend

So yeah, being fully informed as to its location, we went and drove by Jimmy Stewart’s apartment from Vertigo last night after dinner…

Before dinner, of course, we’d relived our respective childhoods, me in the living room with a Banana Splits marathon on Boomerang, and Mark in the office with his new Robotech DVDs. I must admit I’d forgotten how good Jan-Michael Vincent’s ass looked when he was parading around Danger Island in those 1969 pants which gave him the perpetual wedgie. And how stupid those Arabian Nights cartoons were…

Dinner seemed a bit of an afterthought in the midst of all that, but it was pretty good too…

Where Alfred Walked

Sometimes it’s not enough that I married the cutest, geekiest boy I could find. Yes, sometimes I need to commune with large groups of obsessively geeky people in one room. Last night was one of those nights, and I found myself in the main library (being geeky, I live only four blocks away) watching a slideshow and presentation by the authors of this book…Yeah, it gave me a stiffy. They’ve painstakingly researched the geography of every Hitchcock film even vaguely related to the Bay Area, added maps and recent photos, and generally created by new favorite bathroom book. In short, they’ve done the same things I do when watching “Streets of San Francisco” reruns, all 120 of which I have on tape, and when researching supermarkets…It was exciting…

Sloppy Social Science

As a Geography major and a bit of an obsessive about all things urban, I’m bothered by sloppy social science. Tonight’s example involved my participation in a research study where one of the questions was “how many cities of over one million population have you lived in?”. She just didn’t understand that I needed a concrete explanation of whether she was referring to central city or metropolitan population, and she couldn’t see why it mattered…

While I’ve never lived in a CITY of a million people (San Francisco is just shy of 800,000), I’ve lived in METROPOLITAN AREAS of over a million people for all but the three (sucky, miserable) months of my life spent in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 1986…

Am I just being anal?

Mark‘s back from Fresno in a few minutes with presents and clean laundry, and I’ll be able to sleep better tonight. Funny how he should mention in his new “100 Things” essay (currently on the front page with no perma-link) that he sleeps better when I’m in bed with him. I was just about to do a journal entry on the same subject. It’s amazing; I’ve never been able to sleep with anyone in the same room with me before, much less the same bed…

This from the one who used to pick up boys in bars, bring them home, have sex, and then force them to leave, baffled, by telling them “it’s too bad you have to go now”, even when they’d previously expressed no such need…

Rainbows and Reactionaries

Lots of stuff on my mind lately, much of which has made it into my personal journal, but not the online version. My personal journal is cool. It’s in Filemaker, as is so much of the rest of my life. Filemaker makes me happy. OS X-native Filemaker makes me even happier…

Poor Rainbow Grocery. They’re losing customers left and right over the decision by several departments (everything there is, after all, a collective) to boycott Israeli products. While recognizing that there is, ummm, room for improvement on all sides in the Middle East, they wanted to show their support for the “most oppressed” group. And it apparently hurts them deeply that so many people are so upset about their decision…

Not me. I don’t shop there in the first place…

This letter to the editor says it all:

What a great idea for certain departments of Rainbow Grocery to make up shoppers’ minds for us and exile Israeli-made products to the wilderness. Surely their logical next step will be to banish matrioshkas and black caviar, to demonstrate our pique at Russia’s war in Chechnya. Of course, if they do that they would also need to expel their Jasmine tea and bamboo shoots to protest China’s repression in Tibet. But why stop there?

Lest they send the mistaken impression that they support India’s actions in Kashmir, the store’s nan and curry should be cast out. And they should have no problem evicting Egyptian hummus and babaganoush to show their solidarity with Cairo’s imprisoned gays and lesbians. Don’t forget a boycott of U.S. goods while they’re at it, because that would break the back of American-Zionist imperialism and bring about the second coming of Che Guevara.

After Rainbow Grocery is through, it will be the most morally pure shop in the world, offering items exclusively from Norway, Sweden and Iceland. Bon appetit!

Speaking of people who don’t quite understand that free speech is not without price or consequence, how about this group of Petaluma high school students who were told in advance that they’d be suspended for participating in a walk-out? Imagine their surprise when, after participating, they were suspended? Who saw that coming? It was, like, so totally unfair. Really. Uh huh…

OK, so living in San Francisco is making me more and more bitter and reactionary by the day. You should have seen me this afternoon when I got home from work and found myself spending 45 minutes looking for a parking space…

Winter Cleaning

Funny, those projects you just sort of get started on even when you had no intention of doing so. Tonight’s involved cleaning up the old bookmarks file. I killed off a few I’d had around since about 1995 (many of which havn’t worked since 1996) and organized the rest. I keep a pretty organized set of bookmarks anyway, but it was getting a little hairy in there…

Now if I could just do something with the “in progess” directory on my hard drive…

Working

Great time this weekend in Fresno at the fair, but don’t expect to hear about it for a few more days. It’s suddenly become a very busy week at work. Visualize me playing with REALLY large Excel spreadsheets and pretending I know how to do budgeting and forecasting. It’s kind of amuzing, actually, and it does sort of stimulate my inner geek…

Randomly Wednesday

Today’s baffling bit of email from a Planet SOMA visitor:

i am looking for a motel that has accomodations for a couple. i am requesting that the hotel room be furnished with a large round waterbed(preferably w/satin sheets)and mirored walls and everything that it entalis.

About the only response I could come up with was “How nice for you. Hope you have a lovely time”. Really, how am I supposed to answer something like this?

Hint du jour: if you ever need to go to the emergency room in San Francisco, try St. Francis Hospital on Hyde Street. I took my boss there today and, to my amazement, found that I was the ONLY person in the waiting room. I’ve never seen such an eerily calm hospital in my life…

Chafe du jour: why were there no coasters or stickers in the new Mac we got at work yesterday like their were in the one that showed up at Mark’s office?

100 Things About Me

I’ve tried to list things which were not necessarily obvious nor readily apparent from other parts of the site. I may have failed.

  1. I’m as surprised as any of my friends to find myself with a live-in boyfriend.
  2. I never quite got the knack (nor saw the appeal) of swimming.
  3. My first post-puberty sexual experience was in a booth at an adult video arcade.
  4. I have all 120 episodes of “The Streets of San Francisco” on videotape.
  5. Exactly half of the six cars I’ve owned have died violent deaths, one in a crash that was my fault, one in a crash that wasn’t, and one in a fire.
  6. I’ve been obsessed with old supermarkets since I was about eight years old.
  7. Danny Elfman once rode in the front seat of my car.
  8. When I was a kid, I repeatedly got crushes on boyish red-headed girls, starting with Penny on “To Rome with Love”.
  9. It took me a disturbingly long time to learn to tie my shoelaces.
  10. I will not, under any circumstances, eat pickles.
  11. I have a mild phobia about driving on crowded freeways in the rain.
  12. I’ve never left my home continent, but I’ve visited forty of the fifty United States.
  13. I haven’t had a moving violation since 1989.
  14. I often eat cereal at night and rarely eat it for breakfast.
  15. In a fire, I’d try to save my books before my CDs or DVDs.
  16. I am circumcised and am of more or less average size.
  17. I have been known to spend the occasional evening drawing large maps of imaginary cities on poster board.
  18. At home, I usually drink either water or Safeway Select Diet Grapefruit Soda.
  19. I haven’t smoked marijuana regularly since I was 16 and not at all since I was about 21.
  20. My family had cable TV long before most of the other families on the block.
  21. My favorite comic strip ever is “Bloom County”.
  22. I still believe Beta was better than VHS, although it’s a moot point now that both formats are essentially dead.
  23. Among my most prized possessions is a plastic bank replica of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant which I’ve had since I was a small child.
  24. I’ve never been in jail, although I’ve bailed out two people.
  25. The fact that I use my middle name rather than my first has caused me any number of problems ever since first grade.
  26. My parents and my boyfriend’s parents have almost exactly the same phone number (area code excepted); the first six digits are identical and the seventh is exactly one number off.
  27. I always sleep with earplugs.
  28. I do not own a wireless phone.
  29. I haven’t walked into a queer bar in over six months, even though there are about eight within a few blocks of my apartment.
  30. I prefer pizza with nothing but pepperoni.
  31. I am an only child.
  32. My most frequent footwear choices are my black and white Adidas and my black combat boots black Nikes and brown Docs.
  33. One of my biggest sexual fantasies is to have a three-way with a pair of brothers; I’ve actually had sex with two brothers, but separately and at different times.
  34. I have never camped and I fully intend to keep it that way.
  35. I’m good at calculating numbers in my head.
  36. I am not at all comfortable in large crowds and I tend to avoid them.
  37. I’ve never paid for sex, but I have been offered money for it (I declined).
  38. I once broke up with a long-term boyfriend in a McDonald’s.
  39. I’ve been a groomsman twice and a pallbearer three four five times.
  40. I lived in the south until I was 28 but never had sex in a trailer until I moved to California.
  41. I am fiercely allergic to cats.
  42. My websites have been discussed in both the San Francisco and London Guardian newspapers.
  43. Sunshine depresses me; rain makes me feel happy and secure.
  44. I am thoroughly uninterested in sports, both as a spectator and as a participant.
  45. I’ve only been on a motorcycle once, at age 32, for about three blocks.
  46. I’m one of those people others always ask for directions.
  47. I was a double major in Geography and Sociology.
  48. I’ve never seen “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” all the way through, and I don’t particularly want to.
  49. Some of my friends often think I’m taking extreme positions on issues when I’m in fact just nudging them to use their critical thinking skills and examine their own hypocrisy.
  50. I never plan to have children.
  51. I was teased mercilessly by the other kids when I was young, which is why I sometimes don’t react well to it as an adult.
  52. I’ve always been a bit overweight.
  53. Since I had no brothers nor sisters, I was very close to several of my cousins when I was young, but I no longer am.
  54. My grandmother gave me her dead husband’s wedding band when I was about 8. I lost it, and I’ve never worn a ring again until this year.
  55. My feelings get hurt more easily than I let on, especially if I think I’m being ignored.
  56. My dream car is a 1964 Corvair convertible, but I’d settle for a 1964 Dodge with the push-button transmission.
  57. I have a few mild obsessive-compulsive habits, one of which is that I’m repeatedly checking to make sure that I have my wallet and keys when I’m outside the house.
  58. Another is that I absent-mindedly twist my body hair into little knots.
  59. A third has to do with toilet paper, but I won’t discuss it.
  60. I do not wear a watch, even though I’m mildly obsessed with knowing the time.
  61. I don’t dance.
  62. I believe that an occasional swat on the behind does most children a world of good.
  63. I believe that parents should be dragged into jail and spat upon for anything more than an occasional swat on the behind.
  64. I am particularly annoyed by “faux retro” which bears no resemblance to anything that existed in the actual past.
  65. It is absolutely necessary that I spend a good bit of time every week alone; otherwise, I get cranky and neurotic.
  66. I’ve had sex, upto and including anal intercourse, while as many as fifty other people were in the room, but not recently.
  67. I am a tomato snob.
  68. I rarely do caffeine anymore, but when I do, it’s almost always in the form of iced tea or soda pop.
  69. If I tell someone I love them, I mean it.
  70. I love and trust my parents, but I’m very selective with the information I give them about my life.
  71. I’m a firm believer that a hot fudge sundae should only contain vanilla ice cream.
  72. I do not like parties, although I can tolerate very small ones.
  73. I get extremely annoyed anytime I drive in San Francisco, and this has only developed in the past few years.
  74. Actually, I get extremely annoyed when I do almost anything in San Francisco these days.
  75. I very much wish I lived in Seattle.
  76. I’ve been to three World’s Fairs: Montreal in 1967, Spokane in 1974, and Knoxville in 1982.
  77. I do not give money to street beggars and I do not believe that they have a “right” to be supported (nor to a $395/month cash stipend) just because they decided to be homeless in San Francisco rather than in some other city.
  78. I was a very well-behaved child, and I expect other people’s children to be as well-behaved as I was.
  79. The older I get (and the longer I live in San Francisco), the more my left-leaning tendencies are overshadowed by my nagging respect for personal responsibility and private property.
  80. Yes, it’s really true that, before I had a boyfriend there, I sometimes used to drive 180 miles to Fresno to do my laundry.
  81. The one place I’ve ever lived where I would NEVER consider living again is Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
  82. When visiting a new city, I always spend a good 45 minutes leafing through the telephone directory, usually in the bathroom of my motel room. I sometimes even steal it when I leave.
  83. I’ve had sex in each of the four time zones of the continental United States, but I’ve only had sex with three four boys in more than one time zone. All of of them were from the midwest.
  84. I’m not into leather, bondage, pain, SM, nor any form of torture other than slowing down to 10MPH when someone is tailgating me.
  85. I read nonfiction almost exclusively, except for smut stories.
  86. I am a Leo; I do not believe this fact has any partcular bearing on my life.
  87. I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.
  88. One of my earliest childhood memories is of walking around a shopping center in Florida while “Hey Jude” played on the loudspeakers.
  89. I was a TV obsessive as a child, and at age 11, I knew the difference between network and syndicated shows and could easily distinguish between film and videotape, both of which are things most adults can’t decipher.
  90. I’ve always been fascinated with roadmaps (particularly city maps) and I have a collection of new and old ones, as well as several road atlases from the 1950s and 1960s.
  91. I do not have an instant messaging client nor any chat software installed on my computer; I find live chat even more annoying than talking on the phone.
  92. My first apartment in Charlotte rented for $230/month; it was large and air-conditioned, and had parking and its own patio. When the rent went upto $265, I moved out.
  93. My biggest hobby is commercial archaeology: determining the history of older commercial and retail buildings.
  94. Briefs, not boxers. And usually none at all on weekends.
  95. I have a rather foul mouth, or so I’m told.
  96. I hate flying. It’s not that I’m scared; it’s just that the whole process is so damned annoying. If I can drive, I will.
  97. Unlike most former San Franciscans, I do not hate Los Angeles and I recognize that it is — nationally and globally — a far more important city than San Francisco.
  98. The climate there is much better, though.
  99. It’s even better in Eureka.
  100. I can talk about myself endlessly, given the opportunity.

Randomly Friday

Yeah, I’m a black one too. No surprise there, but I didn’t like the quiz very much since there was no “none of the above” category for the movies or the TV shows…

I spent Friday morning going through all my 8mm videocassettes, getting them labelled and placed on their new shelf in chronological order, which was actually a fairly random thing to do. Pop in one and I’m having sex with some shaggy-headed boy in 1994, pop in the next one and I’m in Seattle with Mark last April, and pop in a third to find a department store in downtown Detroit being imploded in 1998. So goes my non-linear life…

I’m pretty damned happy in the current incarnation of said life, I must admit. I have the most wonderful boy in the world living under my roof, I’ll have health insurance again in December, you could eat off the kitchen floor, and Viva Rock Vegas is on this afternoon. Doesn’t get much better than that, huh?

There have been a few (very few, actually) random stresses as we’ve been getting used to each other’s weekday personalities. But we got rid of the final giant pile of trash on Wednesday night, and the last Goodwill run will come tomorrow. The place looks better than it ever has before. And I’m finding it surprisingly easy getting used to having someone sleeping next to me every night, and surprisingly easy going right back to sleep when he gets up two hours earlier than I do…

It’s quite an improvement over this week last year, when it took 11 September to get my mind off my health problems, if only by giving me something else to be freaked out about. Come to think of it, though, it was also almost a year ago that Mark and I began our regular email correspondence. I think that worked out pretty well…

Technology That Works

Technology which works the way it’s supposed to gets me all squishy and excited. I just upgraded the satellite package online, and the new channels appeared instantly. Didn’t have to plug the receivers into the phone line or anything. Somehow I never had that kind of luck with the evil AT&T

And, as luck would have it, the first thing I found in my new lineup was a documentary on Alfred Hitchcock, which made things just that much more orgasmic…

Looks like my bachelorhood ends in about ten days. I’m still waiting for that bachelor party