morning after

I hoped today I would wake up to a new morning. It's beautiful and sunny, but in a way much like every other morning these days, the dark cloud has not lifted despite the sunshine. I'm trying not to be discouraged by the fact that my countrymen gave a popular mandate to this. More war, more polarization, more religion, more action based on ideology with no regard to how the Other Side feels. I'm sad that so many voted against their own interests, that so many prized empty words over actions, that we remain divided by a giant red swath, both geographically and ideologically.

Michael is wearing his USSA t-shirt today. Most of my friends are still drunk or nursing hangovers from last night's election binge. Most of them are walking around like zombies, discussing whether to move to New Zealand or Canada.

For now, I'm resisting the temptation to join my friends in alienated bitterness and discussion of friendly foreign countries. I'm not giving up. I know things have swung one way or the other before, that things can get horribly bad before they get worse, but I still hold out hope that maybe, just maybe, things can still change for the better if we don't give up. My religious faith may not match that of some of my fellow countrymen, but I have a deep and abiding faith in karma, and I am very patient.

"Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against George Bush -- Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain -- all of them ambushed and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining about it."

back, sort of.

Forrest, kind one that he is, has moved bossanova to a new server, which means also my blog moved to a new server, which meant, for a time, that I didn't actually know the password to my blog, which lead to a long period of not updating it while the comment spammers splattered messages about C1AL!S!! and P3N15 ENLARGEMENT all over the place. Now I'm tidying up and trying to actually do something with my website for the first time in six months. Six months.

A lot has happened since my last post.

I graduated with Honors from Art Center College of Design. I got married. I went to northern California with my husband (husband!) and relaxed and rode horses and did everything touristy I never did when I lived there. I learned how to take apart a Vandercook 4 proof press and put it back together again. I had a mega giant garage sale in which we sold about 300 pounds of records and almost all my books and everything we ever took to Burning Man (which means we will have to buy it all again when we inevitably decide we're going back one more time after all). Miz Beca had a beautiful baby girl named Annika, for whom I made baby announcements - my first press run. I found a studio space in Santa Barbara, which means there is no longer any reason for me to be in LA, and if there was any question of whether I should stay or not, over Labor Day weekend a drunk driver crashed through my front gate, totalling my housemate's parked car, the entire front fence, a concrete block wall, and the only tree left in the entire yard - well, that made my mind up for me.

So alas, I'm no longer an Angeleno.

I'm not sure whether that means I'm retiring this blog, or changing it to something else, or starting something different altogether. Looking back on my old entries, I'm realizing how much it actually motivated me to do more creative work so I'd have something to post. Now that I'm out of school I think I'll need that outside motivation even more - in the six months since I graduated, I've scarcely picked up my camera other than to take pictures of my lovely niece, and other than the relatively consistent series of unglamorous design projects I've done since, I haven't really done anything to further my career as a photographer, designer or artist.

I think that should start to change soon, though. The electricity gets turned on this Thursday, the press arrives next Tuesday. I'll have an actual studio for the first time, ever. 300 square feet of tiny creative oasis.

Let's hope this works.

road trip: arizona

Saguaro Cactus off I-8, Arizona

Highway 111 meets up with Interstate 8 just south of El Centro (it is in the center.. of nowhere, that is), where we hung a left and headed for the Algodones Dunes, Yuma, and Tucson, Arizona. We stopped to look at the huge white sand dunes on either side of the highway, and probably would have spent some time exploring them if it weren't for the fact we had to battle roving packs of RVs towing all terrain vehicles for a parking spot at the rest stop. After a trip to the foulest portapotties this side of Black Rock City, we decided to keep going. Probably a good choice, since the ATVs and Border Patrol agents crisscrossed the dunes like so many swarming ants.

Truck stop sign, Southern Arizona

Speeding onward past Yuma, where we reset our clocks and availed ourselves of some quality Church's chicken, a tank of gas and a bottle of aspirin, I-8 turned into I-10 and we started seeing signs for The Thing? -- which we, in the spirit of the Road Trip, couldn't not go see. In case we hesitated, there was another billboard about every quarter mile reminding us that yes, we needed to stop. Our Inner Parents screamed Noooo! Don't stop! You're making good time! Stay on the Interstate! but we laughed, pulled into the parking lot, promptly purchased a The Thing? t-shirt, a The Thing? shot glass, and paid a dollar each for admission to see The Thing?, which is out back, through a set of double doors, behind the gift shop.

A thing (not The Thing) The Thing?, Cochise, Arizona

There are a lot of things at The Thing? -- all of which are very dusty and labeled "this is a very expensive/rare/unusual example of a farm implement/automobile/deer antler chandelier/we're not sure what this is". At the end of a long trek through several well-lit sheds full of various things in various states of disrepair, you actually do get to see The Thing. I won't give it away though. It's worth the dollar, and surely someday you'll find yourself on I-10 outside of Tucson. At the very least, you can see the taxidermied armadillo holding a beer for free in the gift shop.

Roadside grove of trees Southern Arizona

We arrived in Tucson just as the sun set, and decided to stay for an extra day. This may or may not have been related to finding a cafe with free wi-fi (why hasn't this caught on in Southern California?). The next morning we dropped by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and they had the nerve to be between shows. We tried to satisfy ourselves by pressing our noses against the glass and trying to see what was sitting out in the print viewing room, but it just wasn't the same. Damn you, University of Arizona! Your timing is horrible! We consoled ourselves by heading south to Green Valley, in search of the Titan Missile Museum. We wanted to see an ex-nuclear-missile-silo up close.

road trip: slab city

We stopped a few miles south of Bombay Beach, in Niland, a town just large enough to merit a post office and a general store that's open most days of the week. Also, it's the gateway to Slab City, named after the concrete foundations left over from when the area was a military training facility in World War II.

Salvation Mountain Sign Slab City

Slab City is a thriving community of temporary and permanent residents: retirees in RVs, hippies in buses, anti-government militia members in makeshift tents, and just about anybody else who can find a spot to squat and call their own. There are no utilities -- no water, no sewer, no trash, no electricity, no water -- but there's a dirt 18-hole golf course, a singles club, a fishing spot and even a pet cemetery. Nearly abandoned during the summer when temperatures hover around 115 degrees, in winter it's a haven for snowbirds from places like Wisconsin and Minnesota and Alberta. The land is still owned by the government, but nobody seems to mind the thousands of squatters living there year-round. The squatters don't seem to mind the government ignoring them, either.

Leonard Knight, in front of his mountain. Slab City

It was a busy week in Slab City when we arrived -- there were garage sale signs up all over, and a sign pointing off into the brush saying "hitchhikers meeting this way". While we were parking, a stream of RVs and buses drove back and forth down the road to the Slabs, and a few residents idled on the side of the road to chat. As M pointed out, it's like a permanent Burning Man, minus the portapotties. They even have their own website. Several, actually. We didn't end up going to the garage sale. M chickened out on me.

Really, we weren't in Niland to see Slab City anyway. We were there to see Leonard Knight. I wanted M to meet him, and to see the mountain he is building in the desert next to the Salton Sea.

Salvation Mountain & Leonard's Car

To find Salvation Mountain, you turn left off the highway at Niland, and drive about two miles east down the main road, toward Slab City. You'll see Salvation Mountain before you see the sign. GOD IS LOVE rises up like a mirage out of the ubiquitous brown dirt just as you cross the railroad tracks. As long as the weather is good, and unless he's gone to town for food or supplies, you'll see Leonard Knight there, building his tribute to God out of mud, hay bales, abandoned cars, old tires and countless donated gallons of house paint. Leonard, who is well into his seventies, has been doing this for 25 years, since he crashed his hot air balloon next to the Salton Sea and decided to stay. If you walk over and say hello, he'll offer to give you a tour, and that is what we did.

Leonard shows us his museum.

There are two things you should know about Leonard. First, he is a profoundly kind and gentle man and a Christian of the best kind, meaning he isn't going to tell you you're going to hell and preach the gospel to you as soon as you so much as glance in his direction. He's going look at you with his piercing blue eyes and tell you that God loves you and that he is building his mountain because he let Jesus into his heart, and he will smile and take you to the painted truck he lives in and show you his newspaper clippings and give you as many postcards as you want without so much as asking for a donation. Second, he only tells you about God if you talk about God, and he hates it when Christians of the other variety try to talk him into their way of thinking. If all religious people could be a little more like Leonard Knight and a little less like Jerry Falwell, the world would be a different place, indeed.

View from the top of Salvation Mountain

The main part of Salvation Mountain, and indeed everything else in the immediate vicinity including the cars and the ground and Leonard's truck, is covered with painted passages from the Bible. He's painted trees and waterfalls and a yellow painted stairway to the top of the mountain, where there is always somebody standing under the cross taking a photo of somebody else. All day long, artists and pilgrims and tourists and journalists come from all over the world to see Leonard and his mountain. And all day he graciously shows them around, endlessly enthusiastic about his construction efforts, which have expanded to several rooms with windows and a grotto filled with religious images. He has volunteers to help him now -- there was a man mixing mud with straw to make adobe for a new wall when we were there. Leonard says his mountain has been on TV all around the world, and artists have been coming to help him, and people have donated hay bales and gallons and gallons and gallons of paint in every possible color.

Inside the Museum

Leonard walks back to his camper.

So, if ever you might consider a visit to the Salton Sea, Leonard says for me to tell you, "Get down here! And bring paint."

back in hellay

We're back, I've started my last term at Art Center and M's started his second at Santa Barbara CC, and our drive to Austin and back already feels like it happened last year. It was really really nice driving out there the slow way, and spending quality time with Kyra and Bug and Justin and David and Hank and Marianne and Fing and the Michaels and all the other nice people who came to eat dessert and see Batman and the audioanimatronic LBJ and let me sleep on their futons and pointed out all the good record stores and taught me how to play frisbee golf (poorly). By the end of the third day in Austin, M was wondering out loud if he should apply to the University of Texas. We left (it was really hard to leave Austin) on a Wednesday afternoon. By Thursday morning we were both sick with a horrible cold and it was pouring rain so hard it was impossible to see the road through the windshield in the predawn light in San Angelo, so we ditched our mission and drove back to LA from Texas in two days of solid driving on I-10 with one strange, short, almost accidental stop in Quartzsite, Arizona.

I still haven't downloaded all the photos off my camera, but I'll start posting them reeeaallly sooon. Promise.

motels with wifi

I'm in Abilene Texas, geeking from a motel bed on my iBook via a really flaky wireless internet connection. M and I took off from Santa Barbara after New Years and have been driving vaguely toward Austin, through Palm Springs and the Salton Sea, through southern Arizona, a one-hour detour to Nogales, then back up to Las Cruces and White Sands, New Mexico, and then to El Paso and Carlsbad Caverns and then a really, really, really painfully dull drive across northwest Texas. We'll be driving to Austin tomorrow at the same exactly-the-speed-limit pace we've done since we crossed into Texas. Damn state troopers.

Many, many photos to be posted soon.

my preciousssssss

So this weekend, M took me to the Sycamore hot springs up in San Luis Obispo, and then to a lovely dinner.

After dessert, he told me he didn't want me to be his girlfriend anymore.

He wants me to be his wife.

I love him very, very much. I said yes.

Girlie girls can look closer at the sparkly here and here. Wedding date's set for July. Bridezilla has not yet made an appearance, but I can't stop hissing like gollum every time I look at my hand.

red's in the funk zone

Just as the rollercoaster goes down, it goes up again. Three weeks has resulted in lucking into the most amazing apartment ever, two freelance gigs that actually pay something, and lots of work for Michael slinging espresso at Red's, a little coffee bar and gallery in what some would call "The Funk Zone" near East Beach in Santa Barbara. Only the artists call it the Funk Zone though. The city takes itself much too seriously to have a neighborhood called the Funk Zone. Better to call it something vaguely Spanish and expensive-sounding. "Playa de los Artesanos" or something. It has no official name. It needs one.

Anyway.

The Funk Zone is the strange industrial area between Garden Street and State Street on the east and west, and Montecito Street and the beach to the north and south. It is filled with hole-in-the-wall artist studios and scrapyards and shops, surrounded by an encroaching ring of pricey vacation beach rentals like the new misleadingly-named "Villa del Mar" development (million dollar condos directly overlooking the 101 freeway onramp, by the way). Only in Santa Barbara could anyone ask with a straight face for a million dollars for a two bedroom condo advertised as being "by the sea" though the beach is several blocks through an industrial area frequented by transvestite Mexican hookers and homeless people looking to score heroin. Maybe you can pretend the whoosh of traffic on the freeway 10 feet outside your window is the crashing surf. Half the neighborhood is also about to be demolished this winter to make way for "La Entrada" - another Spanish-themed, outrageously overpriced, multi-block all-timeshare monstrosity. But I digress.

A few days ago I went out for a walk around the neighborhood with Michael's boss, Dana, who was at the time trying to avoid the amorous advances of one of the homeless schizophrenic regulars who enjoys circling her place of business on his bicycle while muttering incomprehensible phrases to nobody in particular. Occasionally he comes in and tries to play the piano before we shoo him off. One time, in a moment of clarity, he walked in and asked her out to a movie. Predictably, she said no, but he's still circling the block all day on his bicycle, even in the rain. We're all a little creeped out. So we go for a lot of walks.

On every walk, even though we're only covering about a 3 square block area, we seem to find something new. Every door in every alley in that neighborhood leads to a different studio space with that permits-be-damned kind of decrepit charm. There are studios behind bushes, studios behind wooden plank doors, tiny yards with kilns and glassblowing shops and surfboard shapers. Everybody knows everybody else, and everybody knows the Big Secret of who lives in their studios in violation of zoning codes because there is no way to afford a place elsewhere. I could go in on a rant about affordable housing, but I won't. It's the same everywhere. Artists live where it's cheap, fix it up, it becomes trendy and dangerous and hip, and then the lawyers and real estate speculators move in. The Funk Zone is ripe for this sort of gentrification. Thus the million-dollar condos next to the Rescue Mission.

I've met more cool people since Michael started working at this coffee place than the entire time I've been in Southern California. It's the polar opposite of LA 'artist districts' like the Brewery, which on any given Saturday night is full of drunk Art Center students and assorted hipsters wearing ironic trucker hats and namedropping. There's a refreshing lack of poseurs here. Everybody just does Art and lives in their little workshops and they don't make a big deal about it. After being in LA for (and I cringe saying this) three years, this is a mindblowing revelation for me. I'm in love. I never thought I could be in love with Santa Barbara, tarted-up Yoga Jogging Stroller Mercedes SUV Whore that it is. But I am.

I'm lacking Photoshop on this computer, thus making it difficult to go through any of the photos I took of the neighborhood, but, for your enrichment, I'm including a couple of pictures I took of Michael's place of employment, Red's Espresso Bar and Gallery, on the corner of Helena and Yanonali Streets, conveniently located near the train station and only a block from the tittie bar. Enjoy. And come in for a latte, they make 'em better than Starbucks.

whitewash

When I was a kid, I almost drowned. More than once, actually - it's not hard to almost drown when you are nine or ten or so and trying to paddle around in overhead-high surf every day.

You never expect you're going to drown, it just happens to you. You're paddling along, trying to make a wave, or paddling out, trying to get past a wave, and you slip or misjudge when it's going to break, or you catch the wave and bail too late or your leash tangles around your leg when you fall off and suddenly you are in the ocean spin-cycle and you forgot to take a deep breath first. Then it's like a car accident, or a big fall, or any other event that takes long enough for you to realize o h s h i i i i i i t g o n n a d i i i i e. Everything slows down and gets choppy at the same time and you have a moment, probably a second or two, where your brain hits 'record' and 'play' at the same time and your reflexes kick in and you become both acutely aware that you're fucked and wow! time slowed down! just like in the movies!

You're spinning over and over and over and the only sensation or sound is that of the wave crashing, full of grit and seaweed, battering, churning, pushing you under. The sea takes you, and you know it, and you stop fighting it. You stop swimming because there is no more up direction to swim toward, or because you are being dragged backwards by a very buoyant hunk of foam attached to your ankle.

This is where I usually got lucky and ended up spit out, shaken and unsteady, in the whitewash ten yards from shore. Once or twice, though, that spin-cycle lasted an infinity and a half, tumbling over and over and over and over, head over feet, side to side, lungs full of salt and god-knows-what-else.

It's a strange sensation, being trapped underwater. You don't want to, but the first thing you do is open your mouth when all the air rushes out of your sinus cavity and the seawater and sand and salt rush in - snort - to replace it. When you're sleeping and you can't breathe, you wake up with a start and begin breathing again. When you're under water and can't breathe, almost the same thing happens. You reflexively breathe in through your open mouth. You can't help it. The wave pushes into you, into your chest, seeps into your lungs, fills your mouth and your nose. Everything within you strains for air, grasps for it, wants it. And there is none.

There is such pain in being underwater, unable to breathe, lungs full of liquid and grit, and such relief when you finally breach the surface and feel air on your skin and cough even though there is nothing in your lungs to cough with and take that one hard, cold, rattling breath.

I was sitting in my car this morning, practicing how I was gonna ask for money to help pay for a tiny studio apartment we can't afford, car full of rental applications and maps and bank statements and my one billable invoice for just over two hundred dollars and my stellar credit report which allowed me to see in detail just how far I've gotten myself in the hole so far, and I thought of those moments underwater, spinning, directionless, uncertain.

I am wondering when I will catch my first breath.

sangria

A recipe for a gallon of sangria that will disappear nearly instantly:

2 bottles Spanish wine (sangre de toro is good)
2 really mongo navel oranges
1 lemon
1 lime
1 apple (or two if they're small)
1 nectarine (optional)
1/3-1/2 cup sugar (to taste)
1/2 cup cointreau
2-3 cups orange juice (to taste)

Slice the oranges, lemons and limes into thin rounds, removing the seeds, and slice the apples and the nectarine into thin wedges. Put them in a bowl and add the cointreau. You can let it sit for an hour, or if impatient just immediately add the sugar and orange juice. Then add the wine. Ideally let it all sit in the fridge for a few hours before drinking, but a half hour will do if alcoholic housemates are involved.

Serve in a red plastic cup that you got at the 99 cent store, preferably on ice, remove the fruit if your boyfriend's a freak and has nightmares involving oranges with teeth. Drink outdoors, at night, preferably when the ambient temperature is above 82°. Will make Altadena seem like paradise. Momentarily.

happy birthday to me

Today is my birthday. My 27th birthday, to be exact. I was born just after the Bicentennial in 1976, which means that every year my birthday falls on the day after everybody gets back from their 4th of July holiday and goes back to work. It also seems to fall an inordinate number of years on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I'm not sure how that works, but I suspect that Leap Year is trying to screw my party plans.

I was supposed to be born in June, but I missed the Bicentennial by a few days, being that it took me almost a whole extra month to cook. Mom got sick of being pregnant and they induced labor and took me out via caesarean (with a full head of hair, no less). I think it is a metaphor for my whole life. This might also explain why I have been in college for 7 years. I think I would still like to cook a little longer. 27 years does not feel like it has been that long.

My baby book has a 70's style illustration of a chubby-cheeked baby Betsy Ross on it, sewing an adorable little American flag. Everything surrounding my birth has little American flags on it, or stars, or cute baby eagles, or smiling wig-wearing baby patriots holding fifes. There are no cute little American flags or baby eagles anymore. Now they're all stuck to the back of big, menacing All-American pickup trucks, angry cartoon eagles pissing on Osama Bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein, or the French. I hope at least on my 50th birthday, at the Bicenquinquagenary (it's a word! I looked it up!) there will be cute baby eagles again. I miss cute baby eagles and non-threatening, sweet little American flags. The bellbottoms and muttonchop sideburns can stay in the 1970's though. No need for those to come back.

Age 26 did not have much to offer in the way of the good life, so I am hoping that 27 will be better, more glamorous, more exciting! Less filled with Oh Shit! and more filled with No Shit! I'm going to be a Graduate of Art Center! I'm going to start my Whole New Exciting Life! I'm going to be a professional Somethingorother! I'm going to go into student loan repayment! Hm. Better not to think about that part.

For my birthday present to myself, I bought a new shower curtain. To celebrate, tonight I'm going to do my homework that's due tomorrow.

This does not bode well.

following

My papa died this morning. He followed Ammie pretty quickly. He was on oxygen and they were giving him morphine.

I called my other grandma this morning to give her the news. She sighs and says "Well, two down, two to go!"

My grandma is really morbid sometimes.

the only good thing that happened today

From dvb:

"the Saturn Cafe in Santa Cruz is temporarily changing the name of their fries to 'Fuck George Bush fries' and 5% of the profits go to the impeachment fund."

Also, one of my instructors this morning called me a pinko feminist.

halfway eulogy

My grandmother died this weekend - my dad's mom, my Ammie, Evadne Johansen.

I haven't seen her since Christmas three years ago, when her Alzheimer's had gotten to the point that she no longer remembered who I was, but before she had forgotten the faces of her children and her husband. My dad seems relieved. I always know when he's been to see his parents at the nursing home. He'll come back on a sunny Sunday afternoon, feeling morose and halfway joking about wanting to die young. He always tells me he doesn't want me to have to see him like that. This is when I plug my ears and chant lalalalalala until he changes the subject. I don't like this particular part of growing up. I don't like knowing that people that I love are going to be gone soon. It makes me feel incredibly, horribly lonely. I wonder if this is why everybody I know who's my age is baby crazy.

Vadie was always a little bit strange, and despite the fact I spent a lot of time with her when I was younger, I know next to nothing about her. I knew that my grandmother grew up incredibly wealthy, she was a Lloyd Jones and her father had owned a string of polo ponies and a big house in Beverly Hills before the Depression took it all and left her with only a nanny. Her nanny was a family friend until the day she died, and I remember her coming to my birthday parties when I was small.

My grandmother went to Canada during the war, where she met my grandfather, a Danish merchant marine who, along with the rest of the men on his ship, had escaped the Nazis and joined the Royal Norwegian Air Force. He had no money, but he had bright blue eyes and a wicked smile and he smoked a pipe. They got married and went back to Denmark after the war was over and had two children, my aunt and my father, then came to the United States and had a third child, my uncle. She worked at Camarillo State Mental Hospital in the years before it closed, in the children's ward. My grandmother had a brother, and I think a sister who lived in Vancouver.

I remember when I was little how she would sit all of us down, me and my five girl cousins, and show us her collection of ghosts. She had snapshots of dust clouds and blurs and light leaks from everywhere she'd ever been. She knew about haunted houses and how to make Danish meatballs and all about our zillions of distant relatives. If you listened to her elaborate genealogical tales you would know that I am related, through her, to everyone who was ever famous in any way. She told us of our relation to Abraham Lincoln, and Confederate generals, and the old family connections to the Rockefellers and the Gettys. I've never been able to find anything about that particular side of my family tree except for my father's signet ring, which she handed down to him after my grandfather Kaj crushed part of it in a machine at work. By the time I was old enough to know to ask about it, that part of her mind was gone.

This is all I know about her. She wasn't the kind of grandma who calls once a week to ask you if you've flossed and whether your doors are locked and sends cookies and birthday cards. I saw my father's parents exactly once a year for most of my life, even though they lived in the next county over. When I saw my grandmother on Christmas, she would just look at me with her cloudy blue eyes and smile at me and pat my cheek. She was kind. Once I remember she cried at Christmas breakfast, remembering something from the past, unable to articulate exactly what it was. All she could say was that it was beautiful. That was the last time I saw her.

Now she's dead and we will put her history and her secrets and her stories in the ground with her, gone forever. I'm sorry I never knew you Ammie. I hope you are at peace.

R.I.P. Little Cambo

Not long before I started school a couple years ago I saved my hard earned (ill-gotten?) cash and bought myself the cheapest, simplest 4x5 camera I could find, a Cambo 45NXII.

Right in the middle of a shoot last week, I'm trying to get the focus right on a dessert with mint leaves that literally wilted in about 30 seconds, and my focus knob falls off. Like, completely. I turn it and it comes loose and falls on the floor. And it won't go back on. Something is stripped. Something that is probably very expensive to replace. In the meantime? I have a camera that I can't focus.

This camera always sort of sucked. I bought it because it was cheap, and it had completely simple controls. I really didn't know anything about shooting large format at the time except that you could make really weird out of focus parts in your picture if you swung the front and back standards different directions. I didn't see the point of "yaw free tilt" or "geared fine focus" knobs. After all, I was going to be a fine art photographer. How things change.

Needless to say, after almost three years of screaming obscenities at this thing when I have to shove the front standard too far one way and then shove it back to focus instead of turning a little knob that moves it a half millimeter at a time til it's perfect... well, I'm beginning to see the point of all those thousand dollar features. That, and the fact that those nice ones? They probably have focusing knobs that also stay attached to the camera, unlike mine.

This is like the decision to fix your shitty old car one more time when you know it's going to break again. When do you finally just bite the bullet and get the shiny new one you know you can't afford?

I'm back.

What I did on my winter vacation:

Slept.

Ate Mom's food.

Slept more.

Ate Grandma's food.

Watched TV movies.

Passed out on couch.

Ate leftovers.

Slept.

I didn't get to go anywhere more exotic than a 48 hour kamikaze trip to San Francisco to see Ms. Rebecca Leckman and her furry menagerie (no, not you Tad). However, I think I accomplished what it was I was trying to do over break, which was a lot of nothing.

I think I'm ready to do something now. Maybe.

l.a. in winter

The other day, driving through Burbank on another fruitless mission for still life props, I looked up and saw a sun dog.

I was dumbstruck when I realized that this is the first cloud I've really seen in six months. I don't mean the wispy cirrus clouds you always see in those fabulous LA sunsets, or the tops of the billowing thunderheads just visible from this side of the San Gabriel mountains in August, or the dark clouds of smoke or torrential rains that have consumed the sky for days. It was a little, tiny, fluffy cloud in the middle of a blue sky - a luminous, multicolored cloud, even.

I paused to wonder at this freak of nature for the few seconds it took for the light to change and the driver behind me to honk at me and flip me off, whizzing around me on the right with the reckless urgency I've come to expect from high-end BMW drivers.

Anyway.

I love LA in winter. Everything seems to regain a sort of clarity with the cooler temperature and shorter days. The mountains reappear from behind a curtain of smog, the sky turns blue, and the color comes back into my front yard, which has all summer been colored in varying shades of dirt. I regain my ability to think in sentences longer than "where is air conditioning" or "give me cold drink now". Everybody is nesting. People occasionally smile at me on the street, as the Christmas season has not yet turned into competitive shopping season.

Most people come to California in the summer. I always looked forward to my trips south for the holidays, weeks invariably spent lounging in 70 degree weather at the beach in January, a brief respite from the cold and the rain and the dark of northern cities. Christmas in Southern California is golden and breezy and warm.

You can have Los Angeles in June, July or August. I'll take the winters.

foul mood

I've been in a miserable mood all weekend. I'm sick of the heat, I'm sick of the constant, beating, oppressive sunshine. I sit inside all day doing nothing because it's too hot to go out, and when it's finally cooled off, I'm too tired from sitting in the heat all day. So goes my life in Los Angeles. No wonder everybody here lives in their cars. It's the only way to actually go out and see the outside world while still remaining in the relative comfort of air conditioning.

Leek sent me a link to an op-ed piece in the Seattle Times today about fall in Seattle. It made me wanna cry. I would happily trade a year's worth of LA sunshine for just one drizzly Seattle afternoon.

a letter

To the 3,025 people who died on September 11, 2001:

I'm sorry that you died for this. You worked hard, you came in early, you were just at your desk, you were just getting on a plane, you were just minding your own business, and you were killed for reasons that had nothing to do with you, nothing at all.

The spectacular, terrible moment of your death made us look up for a moment from our People magazines and our sitcoms and our trips to Walmart, and for one day we sat weeping in front of our televisions, or on our rooftops, watching in disbelief, mouths open, speechless except for the expletives we whispered when the towers collapsed in front of us, over and over, replayed in slow motion from a hundred different angles on the TV. We watched, helpless as you as you jumped from windows, holding hands as you burned, as you suffocated, as you suffered in fear and pain and panic. We could not believe what we were seeing that day, just as you surely could not have believed what was happening to you in those last moments of your life.

I'm sorry that your deaths have become an excuse. Your names have been cheapened, taken in vain over and over, to sell stickers and flags and cars and toilet paper, to justify imprisonment and torture and fear. You are an excuse for liberals to say "I told you so" and an excuse for conservatives to parade the flag and push a war that has nothing to do with you, or the people who killed you. The place where you died has become a sightseeing destination, happy tourists waving, smiling into a camera in front of the place where you last breathed, terrified, lungs full of smoke and dust.

We pick at the scab of our pain today, not the pain of your friends, your relatives, your survivors, who know what it is to have lost you, but our pain, the pain of watching others die in front of our eyes. We want to feel something too. We fetishize those moments we saw on television, fetishize that loss as meaningful and at the same time strip it of meaning by not understanding, not asking why it happened.

The television tells us to remember September 11th. Should we remember this each year, on this day, remember to re-live the horror and fear and shock as we listen to the eulogies and speeches and memorials? Or should we remember why this has all happened, and question why it happened, and determine how to stop it from happening again?

I'm back.

I'm back. Back in the real world, back in school, back in LA. This seems like it should be such a small thing, coming back from a few week's vacation. Instead I feel like I've been forced to leave the place where I belong. I'm not alone in this. My friends all tell me of their post-Burning Man depression, that initial shock of returning to the real world, to jobs and responsibility and television news.

Sitting here at a desk, in front of a computer, I feel like I imagined the whole trip, that this city in the middle of a dry lakebed in Nevada never existed, and I half doubt that I ever saw a burning temple of plywood lace, a whale that breached five hundred miles from the ocean, a hundred strange automobiles that spit fire and hurled flames, a city that grew from nothing to something and back again in a week's time.

I'm still having dreams about the desert, dreams where I am riding my bicycle across an endless expanse, lights twinkling on the horizon, city lights like no other. I dream that I am under a sky full of stars so close I can touch them. I reach up and the Milky Way is like mist through my fingers, the night breeze cool and dry against my skin. In my dreams, I am home.

desert life

It's getting down to the final days before Burning Man, and of course I have about five million loose ends to tie up. I have procured and learned how to properly drape a sari and I made a battery operated tutu that glows three different colors. I have the necessary supplies for a fully operational desert black and white polaroid photo studio. M has an official English bobbie's uniform and full tea service for 8, with extra shortbread for Kyra. Between the two of us, we have more bizarre costume stuff than we know what to do with. We will probably never, ever use it outside of Black Rock City, Nevada.

I am looking forward to a week spent in 108 degree weather. I'll be back with pictures and a lot of playa-dusty stuff that will end up sitting, still packed, in the garage until next year.

See you in September!

selling plasma

My brother just sent me a link to One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately. I'm proud to say I only own 2 of the top 25 albums, but I'm not telling you which ones. I'm not that proud.

My brother is one of those little brats who repeat their little MP3! MP3! mantras and buy iPods and roll their eyes when I say "but CD has better sound quality!" as they happily download emo band after emo band on their parents' fat broadband cable connection. I stood my higher ground. That's stealing! I dutifully bought a lot of CDs which I listened to once or twice and then put away forever, because, quite frankly, they were bad albums.

I have to say, I'm coming around. As I was purging my CD collection last week, getting a pile of stuff to sell at Amoeba, I finally began to understand the purpose of the MP3. The MP3 was invented as a way to store and listen to single songs when the rest of the album sucks. Why pay for and keep a whole CD when you can only listen to two of the songs while the rest make you want to stick an icepick into your eardrum to stop the pain? Rip the ones you like, ditch the CD. They're also useful for songs you sort of like but are embarrassed to own and would never, ever pay for. Songs like the Nike commercial Elvis remix of "A Little Less Conversation," or the Minnie Ripperton cover of the Doors' "Light My Fire". This is the only explanation I can find for why I couldn't find any copies of, say, Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied Cello on Limewire but I had no problem finding 5,000 copies of the new Britney Spears single. Granted, this did not stop me from spending 10 hours straight looking for stuff like, oh, Minnie Ripperton's cover of "Light My Fire" (featuring Jose Feliciano. No shit.)

The RIAA should stop whining. They have nothing to worry about. They just have to stop banking on singles from talentless one-hit artists and start putting out some decent albums. I went to Amoeba, and with my hard-earned trade-in credit I bought Suba:Tributo and Verve Remixed, both of which were very good listening, all the way through.

it's official.

I'm going.

My favorite miracle client apparently sensed this, and called on Friday with another job. I'm also cranking out a lot of show posters and flyers this week. I like it when work appears at a well-timed moment.

I was still on the not-going side of 50/50 when we went to Muddy Waters in Santa Barbara this weekend for a pre-burn party. Hypnotized by a succession of a) fire dancers, b) house music, c) trapeze artists and d) an art car consisting of a Volkswagen bus that has had its top removed and has been converted into a full bar with two giant manually controlled propane torches on top, not only did I decide I wanted to go but so did M, who up until this point had been in the "never going back" camp.

It cemented the deal when M's Dad offered the use of his truck and camper trailer. We have tickets. We're doing a road trip through the Sierras, up highway 395, ending up at Burning Man probably somewhere in the middle of the week.

I hereby vow not to blow any money on glow sticks, camo netting or shade structures. I am bringing my 4x5, a roll of white seamless paper, and a lot of film.

Anybody got some spare kimonos?

microwave cooking

People freak out when they go in my kitchen and realize I don't have a microwave. Nobody can understand how it is possible to reheat leftovers in the oven, or melt butter on the actual stove. I don't like microwaves. I think they are bad.

My parents, on the other hand, are masters of microwave cooking.

They got their first one in the 70's, before anybody else on the block. In fact, they still had the same one until my mom remodeled the kitchen last year. It was big and heavy and harvest gold and had a dial on it that you had to crank around. It occupied an honored spot on the counter near the built-in microwave that actually came with our tract home. It was better. The other microwave served as a place to keep things like muffins and coffee cake warm on Sunday mornings, and sometimes as a place to forget about muffins and coffee cake until they became so stale they were like petrified baked goods fossils.

When my parents got their microwave, my great grandmother kept sticking cups of water in, over and over, amazed at the magic device that boiled water instantly without actually getting hot. My dad became master of the microwaved corn dog, and demonstrated to anyone who would pay attention. My mom, however, merely realized her chance at becoming a modern mom, liberated from the drudgery of conventional cooking. Our whole family could be fed in mere minutes, using no more than some glass dishes and a good portion of plastic wrap!

We used to eat microwave meatloaf at least once a week. Recipe: put one pound of ground beef in glass dish. Microwave for 15 minutes. Cover gray mass in ketchup, serve with frozen vegetables. I was 15 before I realized vegetables are not supposed to be identically-sized mushy cubes (with peas, of course, for variety). Breakfast was a concoction my dad optimistically dubbed "Super Eggs". Take one coffee mug. Break one egg into mug, add margarine, salt, and pepper, scramble and microwave. Yields one coffee mug sized column of yellow substance. Feed to kids. The sound of Super Eggs sliding, fully formed, out of a coffee mug, is etched permanently into my memory. My brother still refuses to eat eggs in any form.

Usually, though, we'd get a Swanson's dinner, or maybe a Lean Cuisine lasagna, which when microwaved formed a hard, bubbly cheeselike substance around the edges which could probably cut glass. If we were really lucky, though, we'd get one of those microwave pizzas that came with a "crisping sheet", a strange and mysterious substance that looked suspiciously like the silvery stuff on scratch-off lottery tickets. On days that our neighbor, who claimed to be a nutritionist, took us to school with her kids, we got microwaved Eggo waffles, floating limply in a sea of syrup. I don't know what happened to their toaster.

In fact, I ate so many microwaved meals as a child that now, when I go to the supermarket, I can't even venture past the ice cream in the frozen foods aisle. I get post traumatic stress flashbacks.

People still wonder why I don't have a microwave.

Two words: Salisbury steak.

completely random

I have a class with this girl who has really bizarre toes. I guess really it's only one bizarre toe. Anyway. Her second toe is a whole toe-joint-length longer than the rest of them, and pokes out in a jaunty sort of way before going for a full 90 degree turn at the very end. This girl wears nothing but open-toed sandals, so I am completely mesmerized by her mutant toe, and this makes it very hard to pay attention in what is usually a painfully boring class. The teacher drones on about postmodernism, I stare at the mutant toe. The teacher drones on about appropriationist art. I imagine the foot with the mutant toe, flipping me off, because, well, that's what it looks like it's doing. The teacher starts a lengthy monologue about 1960's architectural movements. I stare at the toe. The teacher addresses me directly, and suddenly I am torn away from my mutant toe reveries. I realize everybody in the class knows I'm staring at this girl's foot. But I can't resist! It's so freakish! She has a giant silver toe ring ON THE MUTANT TOE, fer chrissakes!

I try really hard not to look at it anymore.

birthday presents

I went up north this weekend for the first time in a month, and cruised by my parents' house to pick up the usual pile of junk mail and misdirected bills.

On top of the usual mail pile were two boxes from Amazon.

Inside these boxes were three books, sent to me by two hot babes in San Francisco: Ms Heather and Ms Beca. These sneaky vixens found my amazon wishlist and surreptitiously sent me birthday presents. Since last time I did anything to my wish list I was in Santa Barbara (long story), it sent them there, and my beloved parents and my beloved brother neglected to mention anything had arrived. So, girls, I'm really really sorry I never said thank you! I didn't know! Thank you! You rock!

I have spent all morning reading Comfort Me With Apples and drooling over fantasies of pho and spicy noodles and birria and other culinary delights I appear to be missing in Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles. Later I'll go to the Y and climb imaginary stairs while reading Monkey Brain Sushi. I sense an all-day reading binge coming on.

rich will powers

Rich Will Powers flew back East this week, frustrated with school, frustrated with his housing situation, frustrated with his endless dealings with psychiatrists and new medications and treatments that never seemed to help. He had a constant battle with depression. His problems always seemed larger than life. No matter how small they were they overwhelmed him, and he seemed helpless against the turning tides of despair and ecstasy. He wrote about it, and he told us about it, often in frantic missives in the middle of the night.

Yesterday his body was found in a hotel room in New York City. He left a suicide note, and some phone numbers for the staff to call when he was discovered. He left behind a community of friends who would have done anything to help him if he would have allowed them to help. He didn't want it. Maybe he was tired of trying.

We'll miss you, Rich. I hope you finally found peace, wherever you are.

the panama hotel

In Seattle, we visited my dear friends Maki and Rob. They are just the kind of crazy artistic couple that makes me wonder why I don't spend more time making robotic light-sensitive baby doll heads and recycled soda can incense burners with my boyfriend. Anyway, it just so happens that one of Maki's many talents (aside from being a master printmaker and writing for nifty Japanese webzines) is making tea.

This talent, combined, no doubt, with her utterly infectious smile, got her a job working at the tea house in the Panama Hotel, an old brick building which dates back to the early 1900's, on Sixth and Main, right on the edge of the International District in Seattle. They have tea of every imaginable variety, prepared with exactly the right temperature water for exactly the right amount of time, served in glass teapots and cups that are so delicate I wouldn't dare to use them at home. We drank oolong tea that was very nearly clear. I expected it to taste like hot water. Instead I tasted a thousand different subtle flavors. It was kind of like drinking real beer after being raised on Miller Lite. I will never look at tea as brown water again.

Anyway, the most remarkable thing about the Panama Hotel isn't its tea house, but its history. The Panama Hotel houses one of only two remaining traditional Japanese osento, or public baths, in the United States. The Hashidate-Yu bath house has remained essentially untouched since it closed in the 1960s, and the changing rooms still have the original ads for local businesses above the lockers. The floor of the teahouse, which is upstairs, has a hole cut into it with a window to see into the basement below, which is stacked floor-to-ceiling with suitcases and other personal items that Japanese residents left behind when they were forced into internment camps in 1942. Many never returned for their belongings after the war ended, and so when the building was bought in the late 90s in order to save it from demolition, the new owner inherited an entire history of the residents of Seattle's Nihonmachi. Thankfully, instead of throwing everything out, she has preserved them there and in loaned collections to several history museums.

There is a book called Sento at Sixth and Main, written by a professor at the University of Washington, about Hashidate-Yu and other historically significant Japanese-American cultural landmarks throughout Washington and California. It is for sale at the Panama Hotel and is also available on Amazon.com. M bought a copy - it's really an interesting read - full of vintage photos, historical research and firsthand oral histories.

It makes me happy that there are people dedicated to preserving the few remaining sites which are unique to our international cultural heritage - that there are still magical places like the Panama Hotel which have not yet been bulldozed and turned into identical franchise restaurants and chain stores. If you are ever in Seattle, be sure to stop in at the Panama Hotel and have some tea and look at the old photos and the hole in the floor.

shiatoru

M and I are just back from Seattle. I think I cannot remember three more perfect days in my entire life. I don't know what to say, other than how grateful I am to have such wonderful friends.

Also, I am never going to forgive Rob for giving Michael the link to insect-sale.com. He's already formulating schemes for mini-RC-car-powered remote control stick bugs. I'm scared.

at war

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt

Independence day is coming up, and the more I think about it, the more I get angry.

In the days after September 11th, when the flags sprouted from every freeway overpass and waved from every front porch, I was moved. We're all in this together, we're Americans, we will be strong - I felt like it was a message of unity, a way to show each other that we would be OK. When I went out on September 12th and saw the flags everywhere, I was moved to tears. I felt proud to be an American. I felt like I was one of many.

But then weeks went by, and Our President (as my dad now insists on calling him, even though he didn't vote for Bush, and neither did I) declared "war on terrorism", and I started seeing those tattered plastic car flags in the gutters, and the flags on the overpasses started disappearing one by one. Instead, I started seeing bumper stickers. Giant waving flag stickers, almost always attached to oil-guzzling raised trucks and SUVs, were everywhere. THESE COLORS DON'T RUN. GOD BLESS AMERICA. LET'S ROLL! As things went on, that flag suddenly became a symbol not of unity but of war, blind patriotism, poor gas mileage, conspicuous Christianity and, well, being a Republican. Suddenly I started not feeling so good about this flag thing.

Then I started seeing people who disagreed with the party line being silenced. Bill Maher lost his show, Politically Incorrect, for making a (gasp) politically incorrect statement. The White House, via Ari Fleischer, has given us "reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is." Students at Ohio State were threatened with arrest and expulsion if they turned their backs on Bush during his commencement address. Several journalists have been fired for disagreeing with the White House stance on the "war on terror". Jose Padilla has been detained as an "enemy combatant" without ever being charged with a crime, even though he's a U.S. citizen. The ironically-named USA Patriot Act gives the government more power than ever to read my email, listen to my phone conversations, freeze my bank account, and even search my house. I don't have to be a terrorist. I just have to seem like I might be one.

I think I'm getting the message now. The message is: Wave the flag. Agree with Our President. We are at war, and we will be at war indefinitely. There is no room here for people who disagree with or question us openly. All this will make us safer. Be patriotic and accept everything we have to tell you or you're just as bad as those awful, awful terrorists.

We are supposed to celebrate our freedom this week, just as our freedoms are being taken away. This makes me angry, and afraid - and I don't know what to do about it. I just know that I don't feel OK waving a flag around this week now that I see what it stands for.

"They that can give up liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

birthday

In one week, I'm turning 26.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

That's all I have to say about that.

plants

All my plants are diseased.

I've had most of them since I lived in Santa Cruz, when Eden and I would run houseplant rescue operations, buying up all the withered, anemic-looking pothos and philodendrons they sold in the back of the local Rite-Aid. Pretty soon every horizontal surface in the house was covered in potted positive chi, and our rooms looked more like greenhouses than crusty student rentals.

I took them to San Francisco, where the landlord almost kicked us out as soon as he saw me moving in with so many plants - he was terrified of water damage. The plants stayed, but I eventually left.

When I left San Francisco, I took cuttings from all my houseplants, wrapped them in wet paper towels and plastic, put them in a suitcase, and flew to Seattle. They lived in leftover milk bottles for three months until I found my own place, an apartment I picked almost solely because of its southern exposure. My plants loved the humidity and the sunlight. I even managed to cultivate a maidenhair fern, a species which even Eden had given up on as impossible to keep alive. I got a cat. He constantly chewed on the little palm that had sat in my bathroom in San Francisco. I went on a three month trip to Austin and most of my plants survived the chewing instincts of two cats and the sporadic watering of the housesitter.

Before I moved to LA, I made a separate trip in my car, with the cat on my lap - I couldn't see out the back window due to the sheer amount of foliage in the back seat. When I passed the agricultural checkpoint at the California border I promised, scout's honor, that my plants had never, ever been outside, and they waved me through, just as my cat chewed through the last remaining palm frond. The cat stayed at my parents' house. The plants came to LA.

I don't think they liked the climate change. My huge, 10 foot long, bushy pothos stopped making new leaves. The cuttings turned a sort of sickly yellow. A bush outside got an infestation of fuzzy white webbing and louse-like white bugs. We finally had to hose the whole thing down with Malathion to keep the bugs in check. Slowly, my indoor plants started dropping leaves, even though I got a skylight installed in the bathroom just so I could keep plants in the shower. Now most of my older plants are withered away, covered in that white fuzzy stuff. It doesn't seem to matter how often I water them or clean off their leaves with soapy water. Every week I cart another one out to the yard waste bin.

I don't have the heart to go out and buy new ones.

benihana

It was so hot today that I drove around in my car for an extra hour after running errands just so I could take advantage of the air conditioning. Summer in Pasadena is oppressive at best, and I always come home feeling like I've been rolled in sticky smog coating and deep fried.

I discovered a thrift shop today that I hadn't been to before, and so took some time to pillage the record section. M introduced me to the art of thrift store record hunting a while back and I've been hooked ever since. He has a formidable collection of 25 cent records, and now neither of us can pass a thrift shop or a yard sale without gripping each others' arms, eyes wide, and whispering, "RECORDS!" It's sort of amazing watching him go through albums, wiping the dust off, plopping the needle down and raiding a record for samples in sixteen seconds flat. Me, I'm partial to the covers.

Anyway, today's score: a bunch of Dean Martin 78's and a 45rpm "DJ Only" copy of Marilyn Chambers' (yes that Marilyn Chambers) disco-rific hit "Benihana". From listening to the song (selected lyrics: "oh honey feels so good benihana yeah oooooh ahhhh baby you got it ah ah ah ah uh uh ahhhhh aauuuuhhhhhhhhhhAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!") I can't figure out what exactly it has to do with Japanese chefs who cook your food at the table. Somebody enlighten me?

beep at me and do nothing

<bug> i just whistle my postscript into a modem i have connected to my printer
<bug> its way easier than quark

I'm currently struggling with the book layout for my Pacific series. Why is it that every time I have to sit down and lay something out in Quark XPress I suddenly feel like a complete idiot? I hate using Quark almost as much as I hate Microsoft Word. Granted, it's no dancing paper clip, but Command-+ means "zoom into my document" not BEEP AT ME AND DO NOTHING. Who designed the interface on this thing? The same people who invented those ingenious Floridian election ballots? A focus group consisting only of people who have ten thumbs and no knowledge of Macintosh programming guidelines? People who think it's okay to charge an ungodly sum for a program with an interface that makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a fork, the same people who refused to give price breaks on upgrades, and required a floppy disk to install a program that is run on computers that almost never have floppy drives? People who have no consideration for poor designers who might possibly also use other kinds of software? Oh yeah, them.

I dream that someday I will never have to lay out anything that's more than one page, so I can use Adobe Illustrator until the end of time. I really hate Quark.

rear window

Hate of the day: DVDs that poop out on me HALFWAY THROUGH THE MOVIE. I mean, it would be one thing if they died within the first five minutes, or wouldn't play at all, especially if the movie isn't that good. But it's unforgivable to suddenly stop playing fifteen minutes from the end of a Hitchcock classic. Especially one that (I'm ashamed to confess) I haven't seen. Now my computer doesn't want to admit it could ever read the DVD at all.

So uh, how does it end? Does Mr. Thorwald hack Jimmy Stewart to death or what?

This is driving me nuts.

seattle in summer

Catching me in the middle of another particularly bad Seattle-homesickness moment, M called today and asked what I wanted to do for our second anniversary. Second. Anniversary. Two years ago I lived on Capitol Hill in an apartment with my cat. Two years ago on the fourth of July M came to visit me in Seattle and we watched the fireworks over Lake Union and got all gooey and cute - totally disgusting all my friends who didn't think I had it in me.

So, long story short, we're going to Seattle. I'm overcoming my completely-irrational-September-11th-airplane-phobia and we're flying there on the 4th. I get a romantic weekend with my boyfriend! I get to see actual people who like me! I'm salivating just thinking about the deliciousness of summer in Seattle - the dusk that lasts half the night, blackberries growing on the side of the road, the ferries crossing Puget Sound, the incredible wonderful Capitol Hill freak parade, Espresso Vivace (eat your heart out Starbucks), Six Arms cider, no smog. I can listen to KEXP on the radio instead of on MP3 stream, and I can read a copy of The Stranger on real paper.

Note to angry terrorists: Please blow up the plane on the way back so I can die happy.

north on 101

After spending all day Saturday in the studio shooting corn on the cob I decided that I couldn't take it anymore and went up north for the rest of the weekend to visit M and my family. I got a whole day off.

M and I went and saw Undercover Brother in Santa Barbara. I laughed so hard I was afraid a Juju Bee was going to shoot out my nose, and I didn't even eat any Juju Bees.

not one ray gun

I have discovered that it is pretty much impossible to find retro B-movie sci-fi props for rent anywhere in the entire city of Los Angeles. WHY IS THIS? Is this not the movie capital of the universe? WHERE DO ALL THE PHASERS GO? I'll even settle for a space helmet! Even a broken dalek knockoff! I'll take a voltmeter with a gun barrel hotglued to it! I don't care! Why is it that I was able to find P. Diddy's mailbox, a 10 foot high plastic chicken, several hundred pounds of plastic sushi and a veritable arsenal of rubber AK-47's, but not a single ray gun? Why? WHY?

The reason for all this is my brother is designing the CD cover for the currently-being-recorded new album by a talented yet little-known pop-punk band called Staring Back. And like most of the stuff he does for Lobster Records, they a) have no budget and therefore they b) hire the art director's sister (that's me) to shoot stuff for cheap. So, after I got us lost somewhere near the Burbank Airport, we went to Lennie Marvin, ISS, Apex, and History for Hire in a fruitless search for anything vaguely retro sci-fi, and then just gave up and started calling around to the Hand Prop Room, Modern Props, and some other places I'd never even heard of before. NOBODY HAS RAY GUNS! NOBODY! Where does this stuff go? Are there really that many rabid Battlestar Galactica fans? It baffles me.

angeleno

I had the sudden, horrible realization today that I've now lived in LA as long as I lived in Seattle. Up until recently I could almost get away with telling people that I was from Seattle, just down here for a little while, getting a quick BFA in photography and I'll be outta here in no time at all. It feels like a jail sentence now, and even though I actually bit the bullet and bought a house, I still tell myself it's temporary, a short blip in my life before I go back to living somewhere real.

I've lived here two years and I still don't know anybody, anybody at all. I see thousands of people every day, on the 210, the 134, the 10, the 110, some other numbers with "the" firmly attached to them - all pissed off and whizzing by each other in little hermetically sealed suv, sports, luxury, economy size compartments with wheels that want to go 90 miles an hour, even though we're stuck crawling by at rush hour, 30, maybe 40, all within 10 feet of each other, millions of us, all alone in our cars. When traffic is really slow, I like to look through the divider at the people stuck in traffic going the other way, and I make up stories about them. I wonder about the Armenian guy on the cellphone, the balding entertainment-exec-looking guy in the convertible BMW M3 with paper dealer plates, the woman driving a beat-up white Fiero who is polishing her nails in traffic, polish-bottle between her knuckles, the woman singing along to the music in her car. I only see them for a second as I pass going westbound on the 101 and they go east, and I wonder who they are talking to on their cellphones, who they're thinking about, what it would be like to meet them if I lived somewhere it was possible to meet strangers, like waiting for the bus, or in line for coffee in the morning. We don't do that here. We need to get back to our cars. No time for idle chatter, we've run to the parking lot, hit the button on the car key to unlock the doors, chirp-chirp, and we're driving away before there's any time to say hello.

The Angelenos don't like me. They let me know this, usually by alternating between cutting me off and flipping me off through the windows of their hermetically sealed cars. They let me know they don't like the fact I used my turn-signal before changing lanes, or the fact that I left enough space in front of me for an actual whole car to fit. I'm not Their Kind. I don't wear nice shoes or go out to fabulously trendy places with surly maitre-d's and expensive drinks or get manicure-pedicures or know about the latest industry gossip. I have nothing to offer in the way of movie deals, real estate deals, or business deals. I'm the daughter of Nobody Important. I'm not skinny. When I smile at them, the Angelenos glare back, as if I've invaded their personal space. How dare I try to connect. Don't smile. Look straight ahead. Drive. If you have to talk, talk into your cellphone. Drive like you have somewhere to be five minutes ago. Don't smile. If you're going to smile, at least have the decency to get your teeth done.

Living in LA has been like living a Twilight Zone episode where I have suddely woken up and found myself in junior high again, age 13 and so helplessly uncool, chubby and flat chested with glasses and unfashionable clothes and that bad poodle-perm my mom gave me. Only this time I don't have The Polish Girl and The Fat Girl to sit with in the cafeteria. Those people don't exist here. They've been exterminated - liposucked and nosejobbed out of existence, or at the very least, Los Angeles has made them so aware of their uncoolness they moved back to places like Oregon, or Iowa, where there are people who couldn't give two shits about Mahnolo Blahnik or getting into the Sky Bar. I resent that I even know about Mahnolo Blahnik and the Sky Bar. But these things can't be helped. I live in LA.

So I go out by myself a lot. I drive around aimlessly sometimes, picking some random street in the Valley, or maybe downtown, just looking at the storefronts and the sidewalks. This is the part of Los Angeles that I appreciate, its endless sameness and endless diversity, continuous wide streets that go on almost forever, Burbank to Woodland Hills, Venice to Malibu, Chinatown to Pasadena. Strip malls, warehouses, run-down bungalows, palm trees, spanish-style villas surrounded by high walls and gates and security systems, car dealers, burned-out buildings, dead lawns. The endless variety of decay and wealth fascinates me, the endless contradiction of this city that isn't a city, the crust of poverty that clings to the edges of those gated zip codes we've memorized off the TV. LA is a big puzzle to me, how this could have formed, really, in less than a hundred years, more like fifty. I wonder what happened to this city that everybody is in such a hurry to get somewhere, so I feel like I have to be driving somewhere, anywhere, even though I have nowhere to go.

I shouldn't say I live in Los Angeles. I live in my car, punctuated by brief moments when I set foot on the LA asphalt, but it's never for long. I have somewhere to go. And I was supposed to be there five minutes ago, I'm sure of it.