8/21/00

Well, I had one of those hectic weekends where I hardly had any time to just veg out and recharge, and as a result, I was not at all mentally prepared for the beginning of yet another work week. Of course, I was at work for about 5 hours on Saturday and 3 more on Sunday, so the concept of a "work week" doesn't really apply. That's the problem with working with live animals--they don't care that you need to get your passport renewed and buy toothpaste and take all those cardboard boxes to the recycling center and then just sit around for a while and maybe watch some stupid TV.

The weekend started out really badly. As I mentioned last time, I stayed home all day on Friday waiting for stupid Covad to come and set up my DSL line. They never came. At 6 p.m., I called Earthlink customer service to complain. They put me on hold for 25 minutes, and then when I finally got to speak to someone, he told me that he couldn't find my information in the database. He told me that they would send me an e-mail today telling me what happened (they didn't--what a surprise!).

All that fuming over Earthlink made me hungry, so I walked to a neighborhood café to get a salad for dinner. When I went to pay for it, the total was $5.22 and I gave the guy $6. He gave me back seventy-five cents and a shrug: "I don't have any pennies," he explained, "I guess I'll have to owe you three cents."

I don't know...I didn't even want the three cents, but it just led to my sense that everyone I encountered that day was out to fuck me over in some way. He should have at least offered to give me a nickel! But I didn't say anything, I just fumed some more.

After I finished my salad, I went in to work. I'd been out all day, obviously, and returned to find that someone had stolen my chair, someone else had stolen all my centrifuge tubes, and a third person had left a bunch of papers and other junk on my bench. I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised by this, because that pretty much always happens when you miss a day of work (people steal all your stuff and dump garbage in your space), but again, it contributed to my feelings of resentment towards the world.

I ended up spending the rest of the night in the lab and then going home exausted and still kind of pissed off.

Saturday night I had two different diarist parties to attend, so I went to Eleanor's first, and then headed over to Satya's because she lives right in my neighborhood. Jay had said that he would come along if he didn't have too much work to do that day. I sent him e-mail during the day to make plans, but he didn't respond and it was starting to get late. He finally e-mailed me at around 7:30 p.m. saying that he was on his way to work (!) and that he would be there at 8 and that I should call him when he got there. I wanted to go out early, because I had two parties to attend and didn't want to be out too late. I got dressed and started trying to call him at 8. He wasn't there. I watched the women's gymnastics olympic trials on TV and redialed his number every few minutes. At 8:30, I decided that if he was just getting to work, he probably wasn't going to make it out anyway, so I left a voice mail message for him saying that I was heading to Eleanor's party.

I got to Eleanor's party, which was being held in a popular SoMa brewpub, around 9, and proceeded to walk right past her. She called out my name and I turned around and saw that she was there. I must have been really out of it, because it took a few more minutes before I realized that a few people I knew were there, too: Lucy, Michael and Michael. (Hanging out with diarists is a pain in the ass to write about because I have to link everybody.) I spent most of the time catching up with Lucy, and occasionally chatting with Eleanor when she floated over to our part of the crowd. Eleanor was all dressed up and looked even more beautiful and glamorous than usual--even when she was drinking something called "duck farts."

I eventually called Jay, and a while after that he did show up. But at that point, it was getting late, so we said goodbye and headed for Satya's party. Luckily, it was still going strong, although Lunesse left right after we got there. I don't think we made much of an impression at the party, though. Jay, as usual, sat in the corner silently nursing his drink. I was starting to lose steam at that point in the evening, having been awake and working hard since 6 a.m. So, we didn't stay too long, and eventually staggered home exhausted.

Yesterday was again spent doing various sorts of boring stuff that needed to be done. Sunday night, I'd made plans to hang out with Alvin. It was the first time I'd seen him since we broke up. Actually it was the first time I'd seen him in more than two weeks, since before I left for Colorado (yes, we broke up over the phone). Anyway, it was fine, not too weird or anything. We watched a scary Japanese ghost story movie called "The Ring." The plot involves a haunted videotape, which sort of adds an extra level of creepiness to the whole thing, because obviously, the movie is on videotape itself.

I had actually just read about the movie earlier that day in a British film magazine called "Sight and Sound." I ordinarily don't read obscure European magazines, but this one had an article about the upcoming "Ghost World" film, which is based on the work of Dan Clowes. The magazine itself was kind of weird, because while the feature articles were all about film-festival fare, in the back they have articles about all these really stupid movies: stuff like "Bats: The Movie" and "Big Momma's House." Actually, I found the Big Momma's House article particularly amusing--it started out by saying:

"Considering past revelations of one-time FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's secret passion for cross-dressing and his hounding of civil-rights campaigner Martin Luther King, the prospect of a black male FBI agent, played by Martin Lawrence, dragging himself up as a southern momma has distinct comic, if not satiric potential."

Indeed.

Anyway, today I've spent a lot of time in Beth, Stee and Sara's new Three-way Action site. I still can't believe they managed to snag that domain name! Anyway, it's cool, you should all check it out.

As for my forum, well, let's talk about scary movies.