9/4/00

Augh, I hadn't realized that it's been a full week since I last updated. Time has been absolutely flying by. I can't even remember what I did on Tuesday. Wednesday was another busy work day, followed by running home to make a cauliflower and sun-dried tomato soufflé for Andy and myself for dinner.

Last year, I'd pretty much stopped cooking anything more demanding than ramen, and was largely living off of takeout burritos, subs and salads from various places in my neighborhood. But ever since classes ended in the spring, and my life got less stressful, I've had a renewed interest--nay, obsession, with cooking. My idea of a good time these days is to spend an hour browsing through my sizable collection of cookbooks. But of course, I'm only one person, so I usually end up cooking one thing and then eating it for a week. So, it's nice to have dinner guests to try new things out on. And Andy is a good person to experiment on, seeing as how he's eaten dog food, worms, and once swallowed a live goldfish on a dare. I figure anything I make has to be an improvement.

Anyway, after dinner, Andy and I rushed over for our last wine class. And then after class, I came straight home and conked out immediately afterwards.

Thursday was a stressful morning at work followed by a totally non-stressful afternoon mostly spent not at work. I'd finally gotten in touch with Molly Zero during the day on Wednesday, and since she was leaving town Thursday evening, we agreed to meet Thursday for lunch. I made her and Mark come all the way over from Oakland to meet me at my apartment. After we met up here, we went to go eat some crepes.

Molly and Mark are both very tall (well, compared to me, anyway) so I was able to talk to them more easily once we were all sitting down. We discussed the relative merits of San Francisco and Boston, talked about regional accents and traveling and a bunch of other stuff. We didn't really talk at all about diaries, but I think that's partly because we had an interloper-non-diarist in our midst (that would be Mark) and we didn't want to bore him to death.

It was actually a really nice day for the first time all week, so after lunch we went for a stroll through the park and I tried to play the tour guide. We then cut over towards Haight Street. Molly said that she could tell we were approaching Haight because of the sudden appearance of hippies in the park. We stopped in a thrift shop and pointed out several tacky items. I suggested that Molly and I buy a particularly fetching pair of twin sequined ponchos with big butterflies on them and then we could dress alike at the JournalCon gala dinner. But for some reason, she wasn't too into the idea.

After that, we walked around for a while. All in all, it ended up being a three-hour lunch. But I figure I deserved it, and it was nice to get to spend some time with Molly and Mark.

Hmmm, after that, Friday. After work I met up with Phil and we headed out towards the ocean and had dinner at a fancy vegetarian South African restaurant we'd been planning on going to for literally about a year now. We just never made it there until now. The food was really good, even though the menu tended to be centered around fake meat, which is ordinarily one of my vegetarian restaurant pet peeves. If the fake meat doesn't taste real, it's often rubbery and weird, and if it does taste real, it just freaks me out. I can't eat Boca Burgers because they remind me too much of real hamburgers.

But anyway, despite this, I actually opted to order some fake meat, and it was actually really good. It was also the second time I'd seen Phil in as many weeks, which is pretty unusual. I won't be seeing him this week because he's gone to Toronto for the Toronto Film Festival, where he plans to watch 5 or 6 movies every day, which I think sounds a bit overwhelming, but he was extremely excited.

The rest of the weekend was mostly spent working and doing errands. On Saturday morning, I cleaned out my closet and ended up filling two big shopping bags with stuff I never wear and carried it over to Goodwill. This was a somewhat painful process, as inevitably the clothes I never wear are in practically new condition--you know, because I never wear them. They're almost all things I bought on sale at Banana Republic or J. Crew or the Gap and then ended up never wearing because they didn't fit quite right or were an ugly color or made me look fat. But I really was never going to wear any of that stuff, so I gave it all away.

Last night, Andy and I drove down the peninsula to see Ingrid, another college friend of ours who just moved back here after a year in New York. She just couldn't stay away. So we spent the evening mostly catching up on everything we'd done in the past year or so. Andy also informed me that his roommate had read my entry about New Year's a few months ago, and was angry about the way I portrayed him. I guess that explains his cold demeanor towards me every time I've seen him since then. But I think what I wrote was a very objective account of the evening, and he messed up my New Year's and isn't even sorry about it! I realize it's hard to have people writing things about you on the internet that you can't control, but in this instance, I have no sympathy.

After dinner with Matt and Ingrid, I made the mistake of having coffee. After drinking coffee, I don't seem to have much trouble going to sleep, but I do have problems staying asleep. So, I was up at 5 a.m., so I decided to go in to work at 6. As a result, I was finished with all my work today by around 1 p.m. I spent the rest of the day doing a few errands, but mostly just being lazy.

In the forum: (in honor of Labor Day) do you work all the time?