Categotry Archives: General

today was my last day of house-sitting in both oakland and lafayette. i was watching kill bill vol. 2 for the first time since i saw it in the theatre this evening while i whiled away the hours before i could depart from o-town. this was after i fell asleep for 4 hours in the middle of the day when i was supposed to be attending matt’s birthday party. (matt – i am so so sorry! i will put your present in the mail though and when you get it, you will totally forgive me).

back to kill bill, the scene where budd and elle talk about whether she feels regret or relief struck me as i walked away from the oakland apartment door for the last time. was i feeling regret or relief? and which one more? and would i have to get bit in the face by a black mamba for the truth to come out? the answer to that last one had better be ‘no’. but i was feeling a little bit of regret about my performance in oakland and the last view of those dogs that i will carry with me. sure, i hated them, but also maybe a small part of me wanted to love them. as i want to love all fuzzy things. so maybe i did like them a little as my relief at being out of that crappy apartment does seem a trifle tinged with regret.

which is not to say that i will ever, EVER agree to house-sit there again. EVER.

in lafayette, i feel relatively certain that i will be seeing katie and sarah the cats again when the home-owners leave to go shoot more things in africa. so there was very little regret there. mostly regret over the pool. but the lack of floaties in the pool made the parting a little less sorrowful. my sadness at never having rocked out to the ben folds songs, ‘zak and sara’ and ‘kate’ while staying there, however, is immense. i could have held up the little paws and made them dance around with me to their songs. i probably would have gotten some severe scratches for my trouble.

tonight, perhaps in celebration of being done with oakland, i spent the evening at the KALX radio station with gene. there is the normal, every-day gene who i know, and then there is apparently the much more exciteable DJ gene who is only trotted out on rare occassions. thus, my time at KALX was a whirlwind of me tracking wild-time gene with my eyes while my mouth remained slightly open in shock. at one point he asked why i was being so quiet and i had no response but, “guh gug eep.” which loosely translated means, “run around some more and find cds and coach spazzy tech guys and uber-late cute band boy from lafayette and be all hyper-alert and i will sit here with my head on my arms and watch.” all around, it was good times and i enjoyed the live band performance by ‘love like fire’ very much. particularly the members from lafayette and boston. ho ho ho.

i currently have 3 jobs. the last time i had 3 jobs was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. that was also a cat-free summer. much like this summer as one of my jobs is house sitting. i missed cats then and i miss them now.

SUMMER 1999 SUMMARY OF EMPLOYMENT

bookstore receiving clerk (20 hrs/week)

admin assistant’s assistant (20 hrs/week)

and paper delivery girl (godawful early mornings)

i think i lasted at delivering papers for 3 weeks. then doug (boy-friend) got in a bike accident and i spent the night at the emergency room. brian and theresa (friends/house-mates) had to do my paper route for me. they fucked it up so badly that i got reprimanded. recriminations piled on top of my complete lack of sleep and the fact that i could still picture my boyfriend covered in blood caused me to snap and i quit that job.

SUMMER 2006 SUMMARY OF EMPLOYMENT

internship at chabot space and science center’s archives in an oakland warehouse (12 hours/week)

editorial assistant for USF (140 hours contracted till i finish)

house-sitting (24/7 mopping up of dog pee)

it’s only a matter of time before i snap and force-feed a dog his/her own bodily fluids with a turkey baster.

but still, these jobs are all so much better than that paper delivery job. what the fuck was i thinking in 1999? do you think in 7 years i’ll have a job doing something totally weird** and be questioning what i was doing in 2006 house-sitting?

**i attempted to find a weird job to replace this with, but all i found of interest was this online quiz which told me i was boring. i think if i had answered yes to more questions involving toothpaste i could have qualified as a toothpaste tester.

in college erica worked with an autistic kid. as the infamous story goes, she would constantly be yelling “HANDS!” at this girl because the girl was all the time with the mastubatory experimentation.

dogs don’t have hands. and if i yelled “TONGUE” at her, she might touch me with it. i really, REALLY, want to avoid that.

i’m currently house-sitting in oakland with 2 hyperactive dogs in a tiny apartment. it’s basically my own personal hell. but add to that then the fact that one of the dogs is CONTINUOUSLY masturbating, and you’ve got like 7th level hell here, people.

all right–at least level 2 with the other sexual offenders.

i told kristen tonight at baseball about the self-licking dog. she regarded me baffled and was all naively, “but how do you KNOW she’s masturbating.” under my fuzzy hat, i awarded her an unflinchingly honest peek into my voyeuristic trauma, “because of the sounds she makes and the way she moves while orgasming.”

my life? it sucks.

i had a small BBQ today at the house where kim originated. well, she didn’t actually move here till middle school, so not so much ORIGNATED. but whatever. also, you know what, kim, happy incredibly late birthday. i suck and i’m sorry.

in the last couple days in the kim old house, she had a party with a ouija board. at this point people were not so convinced that i was moving the thingy. and so we talked to a boy who died in the 1906 SF earthquake and had ghosts rate us on a scale of 1 to 10 of beauty. i was always a 10. this should have been the first clue to those foolish girls. though the ghosts were also really good at guessing the number of fingers a girl was holding up in the bathroom. i like to think i was psychic. OR THAT GHOSTS WERE ACTUALLY TALKING TO US.

somehow we need to incorporate the idea of badminton (cock in the poop tunnel) and trains (cicada trains) into the standard phrase, “OMGBBQLOL”. i don’t know how this should be accomplished, but it is a bit of an imperative. i mean, there are so many pictures of flying shuttlecocks from today (thanks to dianna and christine for taking photographer duties), though admittedly absolutely none of cicada trains because jason wouldn’t go get me my camera. if only a ghost had been around, i’m sure he would have managed to ectoplasm it to me somehow.

ok. now i’m going to have trouble sleeping. stupid ghost memories.

while i yelled and cried at four episodes of 7th heaven last night, i had a chance to reflect on my life–in all its varied and impressively bad television viewing choices. which is how i recognized callisto in the third episode. callisto, for those of you not in the know, is an arch-nemesis to xena, princess-warrior, in seasons 2 thru 7. well, really she’s only a nemesis up to season 5, i think. then she’s dead/an angel and then she’s the reincarnated soul in xena’s second child–livia, the empress of rome/eve the destroyer of the greek gods. xena has livia through immaculate conception with callisto, this dude named eli, and the archangel michael. they quicken xena’s womb from heaven and callisto’s soul gets inserted as xena wakes up from being dead after she got nailed to a cross. all this ridiculous midwifery business aside, callisto is generally an insane warrior with a thirst for blood. occassionally she’s an insane warrior goddess after eating ambrosia. the point is that she kicks ass.

now on 7th heaven, on the other hand, she plays a 6th grade science teacher in an episode where the moral is not to run away from what scares you. even if what scares you is your autocratic 6th grade science teacher. i think what this episode really needed was callisto.

simon: “if i show her my disembodied doll head model of the universe, she’ll be mean to me!”

ruthie: “if i go on this field trup, the group will lose me and i’ll get left behind!”

mary: “if i play basketball again, i’ll throw a lousy pass that gets intercepted and then my knee will give out!”

matt: “i’m really good looking.”

lucy: “no one cares about me–michele especially despises me–and i am a whiner.”

reverend camden: “at least they’re not on drugs.”

mrs. camden: “if you run from things you’re scared of, you’ll miss out on some great experiences, kids!”

callisto: “Experience this, Kids!”

mrs. camden’s head rolls, reverend camden loses his limbs, lucy’s tongue is cut out so i don’t have to listen to her whine any more and then she gets lots of shallow cuts so she can bleed to death slowly and be in more pain, mary’s chopped in half lengthwise, ruthie’s too young and cute for me to harm even in my imagination, matt’s hair gets mussed, and simon gets spattered with blood and mussed hair.

callisto: “Curse you, Simon for Being Afraid of ME! Curse YOU!”

xena: “you’ll pay for this, callisto.”

gabrielle: “you killed my husband! i’m a lesbian now, but it still stings!”

callisto: “How about I Switch Bodies with Xena Again and We have Sex. THREEEEEEEEsome!”

Gabrielle: “why did i cut my hair?!?”

Xena: “come on, gabrielle, i like your dyke look.”

gabrielle and simon: “WHY?!?!?!?!”

callisto: “My Moral Is–Kill Everybody and Suck their Marrow! I Eat Rats in Hell!!!”

it makes me a little sad that no one will get this. but only a little.

i have a job, i have a job! and by job, i mean unpaid internship in oakland! i’ve been waiting all week–since tuesday, stupid monday holiday–to hear back from the boss-lady about whether they could hire me for this internship since i’m not technically a student at san jose state yet. however, she just emailed me and said it was fine and i get to work tuesday and wednesday from 10-4! in oakland! in a warehouse! by the docks! best job ever!

but seriously. the job is actually for the chabot space and science center in oakland. and what i will be doing is working at the off-site holding facility of the chabot archives in a warehouse in oakland. which is kind of alameda really, but whatever. at the warehouse, i get to process a collection of some important chabot woman who used to be president of mills college–which entails cataloguing all the letters and documents in her file folder box and organizing them chronologically and in groups. in addition they have 6 or 7 boxes of glass negatives of photographs from expeditions sent around the world by the first president of chabot to document solar eclipses. all these negatives are housed poorly and completely uncatalogued so i get to go through them, captionator them, and rehouse them in a more protective environment. i saw some of the negatives at my interview and they were wicked cool, so i am wicked excited.

sure it’s unpaid, but it’s also only for the summer until i start school. and sure i still need to find some part-time employment to sustain me otherwise, but whatever. i’m riding high on this chabot train for the mo and am going back to sunbathe in the backyard. yes. because i need to be more tan to work in a warehouse. and i’ve got trashy young adult novels to read and a leg to itch. fucking poison ivy from angel island, i hate you.

yesterday i called jason, bored out of my skull. there is only so much reading and tanning one girl can handle. he hemed and hawed for a bit and eventually was all, “let’s go to angel island tomorrow!” to be frank, i was startled by this idea. i mean, it was so sudden and unplanned. but i got behind it once i did some internet research. all i need is a plan, dude, and i am good to go. and to be fair, the impetus for this plan WAS gay porn that jason read about a guy “discovering” angel island. a euphemism for his partner’s butt-hole? i’m not saying. anyway, how can gay porn not predate the most brilliant of plans? i’m just saying.

i went over to my mom’s house to get my backpack and tennis shoes and told her about the crazy plan jason and i were undertaking to hike 5 miles around the perimeter of angel island for 4 hours and have a picnic. her response was immediate and envious. she’d never been to angel island. even i’ve been there–with nuala’s work once on a staff appreciation trip where she got to bring a friend on the chartered yacht. so i invited her to come too. thus it ended up being jason, my mom, and i rising at a godawful early hour of the morning and taking a ferry over to angel island and proceeding to hike around that mo-fo. i have blisters, a sunburn, and a happy smile because i have now conquered angel island and never again have to return. suck it isla de los angeles.