Nyotaimori

i am so excited to go home today. after three days of work i am ready to throw in the towel. pathetic though it may be that i can’t even get thru a week of working, i find it difficult to rail against my own apathy. this is probably because i’m too apathetic. it’s obvious that i have to marry wealth. if only i wasn’t also too apathetic to attempt dating.

2 unpleasant conversations which highlight my last point:

december:

doctor: when was the last time you had sex?

me: uh, before the turn of the century?

yesterday:

bookstore manager: how’s your hotel?

me: it’s nice. really big. the bed is enormous, i don’t know what to do with it.

BM: you’re not married! take someone back to the room!

me: eep.

theoretically making $15.60/hour to sit on my ass, read my book*, and play on the internet should make me happy, but really what it makes me is bored.

i took some pictures of the lake this morning for kim who emailed me asking how i would make her jealous. of course, kim also called me (the wrong michele) accidentally at 6:30 this morning and made angry demands about some training program or test or something. so, basically, she is the devil.

*i’ve moved on to the masque of the balck tulip. nuala, it’s by the author of the secret history of the pink carnation! sequel! we read the pink carnation in new zealand, fyi. i thought it would be lame and i would get to leave it behind and have to carry one less book home with me. but no, it turned out to be brill and i had to carry it home and get reprimanded by the check-in lady for having over-the-weight-limit baggage.

i’m in south lake tahoe. it is weird because it’s actually winter here. there’s snow everywhere and it’s supposed to snow another foot tonight up in the mountains. it’s possible i’ll be trapped here. i can’t really say i mind as it’s so beautiful and i have a lovely hotel room with a king size bed. which is just insanely too much bed for me.

i spent yesterday sprawled across the king bed chortling with horrified glee as i read eldest by christopher paolini. the only person i know who’s read this besides me is nuala. and i’m willing to bet she liked it more than me. this boy started writing book 1 of the series when he graduated homeschooled high school at the age of 15. he’s now 21 and just published the second book in 2005. it’s modeled (aggresively) after lord of the rings. and in some ways–the horribly drawn-out descriptions of travel/places and the made up, really bad, poetry by elves–are quite similar. though a lot else is just way more juvenile and the plotline is so easily deduced it’s laughable. which is not to say that i haven’t bought and read both books already in the course of less than a week. it’s just that i’m ashamed of it. very, very ashamed.

now i’m back to reading lamb by christopher moore. a book i had to stop reading a couple weeks ago because i’d overdosed on moore reading bloodsucking fiends, fluke, and island of the sequined love nun one after the other. if you haven’t read c. moore, i recommend him wholeheartedly.

my current job buying back textbooks at this community college is very slow. so far i’ve had one customer in an hour who chatted me up about being from san francisco. how did he know where i was from? freaky. the one other boy who was almost a customer abandoned me and turns out to work here. in a tibetan shirt and very silly hat no less. this looks to be a very boring 3 days.

today i entered my brother’s old bedroom. he has left a lot of stuff behind. i steeled my nostrils and packed up all the clothes on the floor. it was mostly gross with a side-order of delight when i found a t-shirt of my own in the pile.

i put up some pictures from my christmas in oregon. not as many as i put up last year so you can all breathe a sigh of relief.

christmas was good this year. i was allowed to make my sweet potatoes. john and katherine stole my stocking stuffers. (i know you’re reading this katherine and you are a thief. ha, why don’t you comment now?!) i have a video of myself can-canning in the kitchen while wearing an apron and singing a song with lyrics such as “baby butt lICKer, i’ve never been sICKer!” which none of you will ever see. emphasis goes up on the ‘ick’, keep this in mind if you’re trying to sing it to yourself. and i won at monopoly. not just won, but won impressively with the other player owing me about $11,000. last, but not least, not only did i try pot cornbread for the first time (i don’t recommend it) but we also played a brilliant card game called “weed” that i bought in new zealand wherein you try to grow your own pot garden. though watch out for potzilla (“potZEERA!”) who will trample your whole crop (unlike the damn dirty hippies who will just smoke up one plant). seriously, best game ever.

today i spent a great deal of time trying to peel off my fake fingernails. no success. it was incredibly boring.

today i took gene to the bart station. he “SPENT THE NIGHT!!!”

not like that. don’t be crude.