michele

this morning i went all the way to work in order to discover that the office was only going to be open for ONE HOUR this morning and NO ONE TOLD ME.

i am now back home, sleepy, irritated, and making cherry cobbler.

i just got an email from a girl who goes to UPS, (my undergrad school) asking questions about my japanese animation thesis because she’s doing work on education in anime for a class at UPS. how crazy is that?! i mean, i’ve gotten emails from this professor dood in germany and students in the US and the UK about my thesis, but one from a fellow UPS student? this is breaking new ground. new delightful ground. stupid german guy never wrote me back. i wanted to know what he wanted the information for. possibly he was just using me. i bet he wasn’t even really german.

on sunday when we went canoeing i want always to remember what it felt like to be a michele sandwich gazing at jason’s back framed by these tree covered hills rising out of a russian river ravine, listening while he sang to me about susannah coming down to the river, how she touched his body, and love. jason, i love it when you sing.

it’s hard to argue with cuteness like this.

in singapore where kristen tried to kill us all. i’ve been meaning to write it up, but never had time. so here it is.

in the beginning of the dream there were these two alien twins wearing red and green sari like outfits (the ones with the pants and the long tops). they caused bad things to happen so that people would die. sort of like the gravelings in ‘dead like me’. well, not sort of like, exactly like. most people couldn’t see them (unless they were dead) and those who could see them, couldn’t touch them.

they tried to kill several of us, including kati vol, kim, and one of the little girls that erica babysits. kristen saw them kill a woman in the street where they caused a car to swerve and run her over. kristen called me then and begged me to come and help fight them as everyone was banding together to oppose them.

so i flew in from wherever i was and cody met me at the airport and then took me to the group headquarters. as soon as i got there the twins started killing more and more people. kim managed, sort of accidentally, to save a woman in the street from them and so they targeted her. but i came outside then and saw them. i ran towards them and kim and they got these horrified, angry looks on their faces since they couldn’t believe that i could see them. they started running away, so then there was this zig-zag running chase scene until i caught up with them and beat the shit out of them. (which was odd since no one was able to touch them, and also because, why didn’t they fight back?)

so i beat them up and they turned into dolls at which point kristen could see them too, but still no one else could. we put them on separate operating tables on the sidewalk by the headquarters, and kristen and i started ripping them apart. the little girl erica babysits asked what we were doing and i told her. she said that she couldn’t see anything, to which i replied that you had to be dead. i should have known then that something was wrong with kristen! (or myself for that matter). the little girl said she wanted to see them too, that she wanted to be dead, and i had to explain that we would miss her too much.

kristen and i took hammers to the dolls and ripped off all the coverings, the trappings of skin. inside of the twins was just paper, like brown wrapping paper, and stuffing. but where the brains would have been, there were brown envelopes. i realized that we had to burn everything inside the envelopes in order to destroy these creatures. if anything was left they could come back and they would be programmed differently depending on what was in the envelope/brain. we couldn’t risk trying to build their personalities ourselves because once built, we wouldn’t be able to control them.

so kristen and i each took an envelope and went to seperate tables and started emptying them out. everyone else started collecting all the other stuff connected to the twins and gathering it on the tables and in the garbage cans. a man i didn’t know had found a book and was researching the origins of the twins. the first thing we found in the envelopes were a lot of pictures of a black girl from a really long time ago with her father, farm-animals, and some rustic farm buildings in the back.

there were also pictures of other people who the twins had caused accidents to happen to, coins, and scraps of paper with writing or pictograms on them. it became apparent that the black girl had created the twins and programmed them to kill all those people. what was odd though was that the pictures she was in were from centuries ago and cameras didn’t exist then. plus all the pictures of people who hadn’t even been born yet. the man researching the book hadn’t found out the particulars yet, just that the girl and her father were slaves in biblical times.

so we’re emptying the envelopes and i finish fishing out these final old coins. then i go over to kristen’s table to see how she’s doing and she says she’s done as well, but her envelope still looks fat so i suggest that we should check each other’s work and try to switch envelopes with her, but she won’t. she says to let her check it one more time and goes to the table with her back to me, concealing the envelope on the other side. she says in a small, bewildered voice that she seems to have left pictures in it and she turns towards to me slowly, looking distressed. i stepped around her really quickly and grab the envelope which has in it pictures of everyone at headquarters and a ton of pictures of me. in fact, my whole wallet is in there.

“kristen, what have you done?”

“nothing.”

“what happened when you were working on this? what did you do?”

“nothing happened. i was just emptying it.”

a crowd of people are gathering as i demand answers from her and she gives me nothing. cody and brian danny are there and i ask them if they were working with her on emptying the envelope. BD says that she was working hard and it seemed to be going well, why am i so upset? while i’m focused on him, kristen escapes and runs off and when i turn back to where she was standing, she’s disappeared. i exclaim that we must find her and everyone sort of splits up to go look.

kristen comes back thru the doors, only she’s walking funny (like the tv girl in ‘the ring’). when she speaks, her voice is no longer kristen’s, “here i am, you’ve been looking for me.” the creator of the twins, the black biblical times girl, took possession of kristen’s body. at which point i freaked out and woke up because it was pretty obvious that we were all going to die and i really didn’t want to watch kristen kill everyone.

this is jeff (the boy living in my room right now), adam (the 27 year old birthday boy looking brooklyn pimp), and me.

this is a picture of adam’s hedgehog. hedgie. or hedwig. or turpentine.

after dinner tonight i stabbed myself in the finger with this ingenious device where you put in disposable needles and push a button and it pops up thru this plastic lid and pricks you. then i put the blood on this little strip which hooks into a tiny little machine which measures blood sugar. generally one is supposed to be between 80-100 all the time, though after a meal you can be up as high as 145 and still be ok, blood sugar wise. i am always (so far) under 145. once i ate this huge handful of taffy, some chocolate, and a BLT with avocado and was still only a 114. tonight i ate masses of tasty thai food and fried banana with coconut ice cream and was still only 99. it’s amazing that my blood sugar level is so low considering my eating habits. but there you have it. one of the fun things about me doing this every time i’m at my mom’s house is the cringing cry-baby fit i have every time i try to push the button to stab myself. i am such a wuss.

part #1: pam, (ady’s friend who was also at the DMB concert) sent me a link to her pictures. I am putting my favorite two up here for you to see.

part #2:

mark cunningham is going to be at a book signing/store birthday party TOMORROW (Saturday, September 18) at Orinda Books (Kim’s mom’s store) from 11am-3pm. if you can go, you should, to be supportive. also to celebrate the bookstore b-day party and meet other celebrity authors such as Michael Chabon, James Dalessandro, Sheldon Siegel, Ayelet Waldman, David Corbett, and Adair Lara. all the authors will be available for signings. if you need a ride, i am going out to the east bay tomorrow but not coming back till late, so you’d have to bart back. but i can pick up and take anyone who is interested.

also, cake and balloons! delicious and helium-induced gagging!

last weekend was a weekend of visitors. they were fun, frisky, and flirty. and i took pictures of them. in the sun. because that is where we spent the whole weekend. except for that small interlude under the stars.

with marina on saturday, we had a picnic at the palace of fine arts. which was lovely. and then went to ocean beach for a bonfire with marshmallows which i managed to boil and bubble. plus there was some wonderful flinging of ourselves around and to the ground in dead faints and being buried by rugs as we acted out poems from the amphigorey. to the amusent of all present, and the complete lack of amusement of the glass bottle police patrol. sucked dry by leeches, suck this.

on sunday with nuala and ady (and ady’s friend pam), i went to the dave matthews band concert in golden gate park to celebrate charity. i lay on the ground and ate everyone else’s food. DMB was delightful, as was the happy sun shiny singing audience. (i don’t have pictures of this but) then we went out to dinner (joined by marina and jason) to sushi where i ate everyone else’s food and we laughed at lushes to the left of us. or right, if you were nuala. um, or jason. well and really, ady was sort of diagonally across from me. but still to the left. whatever.

all the pictures are in the same folder. the saturday ones are pages 1-4 and the sunday ones are pages 5-7.