30mar00

Happy Birthday Kate! Kate is my sister and part of the 50% of my nuclear family that does not have a web page. I put a photo of her in last year.

When I first moved to Seattle, I was suprised that most of the places I lived were within a few blocks of a 7-11. Since I grew up in the country, I didn't have 7-11s around much. This place is equidistant fom a 7-11 and a Kinko's. My new place is real close to a Kinko's and nowhere near a 7-11. I bet that if I ever live anyplace else in Seattle, I can expect this trend to continue. Late at night I tend to think that this switch has some metaphorical relationship to society's transition from a service economy to an information economy, but then I get up in the morning and think I am ridiculous.

Today someone stole my free table, despite a sign specifically saying that the table itself was not free.

My uncle is getting married in May at some movie star's house. I am going, but I cannot bring a date. My previous scheme was to auction off a date with me to this event on EBay, but now I am thwarted. Sorry fellas.

28mar00

I went to the liquor store at 10 am today. This is the best [and pretty much only] time to go if you want to get some good boxes for packing. I was the first one in as they opened the door and got eleven more boxes to put the remainder of my stuff in. It seems like after I packed all the books and kitchen stuff and blankets and whatnot, everything that was left could be best categorized as "miscellaneous". The bad news is that miscellaneous stuff accounts for about 40% of what I own, it seems.

The weirdest part about getting the boxes was that while I was doing it, about five more people came into the store, just to buy booze. I think I seriously underestimate the extent to which our society's addictions drive the actions of our citizens.

27mar00

The ravers never showed at Odd Stork, which was probably just as well. The party was amazing and fun. Friends from high school, college, library school and last week packed into the Odd Fellows Hall for what may be the last Rent is Theft event. I'll toss up the set list once I can wrangle half of it away from Supreme MC Robert Smith [other Fantastico MC Ken Thompson was more forthcoming with his list]. Thanks to everyone who performed and attended.

Then I slept for four hours and watched the Kingdome blow up from the parking lot of the Saigon Bistro. About a year ago, six of us were eating dinner there and said "Dang! This would be a great place top watch the implosion" So we made reservations -- good tip on how to get down streets that are blocked by police "but officer, we have reservations" -- and five of us were there this year to watch it. Boom. Amazing.

Then I watched my uncle announce the Oscars.

It's a good thing that this was a spectacular weekend because now I am faced with a week of work -- still full time, still alive -- and packing all the stuff that didn't make its way into boxes already. There is a Free Table in front of the hall that has been filling and depleting at regular intervals.

23mar00

I just spoke to two people significantly younger than me and gave them the okay to spin records [is that how the kids say it?] after Odd Stork on Saturday until 4 am. I really think you do not want to miss this party.

22mar00

Dear Person who left this cup in the Salvation Army box for me to find...

I have been a bit overworked and overtired lately. I spent a lot of my day helping my friend pack up her house and while I was driving home realized I had to be at work at 5 and not 6 so I was hauling ass to get home, so I could open up for the Daughters of Norway and then haul ass to work. I was frazzled. I still have my own house to pack. I stopped to drop off some of my friend's clothes in the clothing drop box and realized that I was too short to push the bags all the way in. I had to enlist the help of the Domino's pizza guys who were both a head taller than me. When I was crawling around manipulating bags of last decade's clothes, I spotted the orange tin cup amongst the detritus. I have recently been on an all-coffee diet at home and every single coffee mug is dirty. Do you ever buy new socks because you can't bear to wash the old ones? I took the cup home -- why would you get rid of such an excellent cup? why? -- and cleaned it out and had a fresh new approach to my morning coffee today, when I most needed it. Thank you very very much.

19mar00

Quite ironically, the weekend before I am set to start full time work, I get interested in Idle Theory. Or, rather, the philosophy behind not having or wanting a workaday job. As I'm sure you all know, I am either terminally unemployable, fiendishly lazy, or obstreperously principled to the point where I have only held a regular full time job for about three months of my adult life -- and even that one was a temp job. Having some money in the bank helps with this, but not spending the money you do have is even more important.

This is not to say I haven't had weeks and weeks where I worked like crazy, or that I haven't kept some of my part time jobs for years, just that I prefer setting my own schedule to a degree that one can't when one has to commit 40+ hours of one's time to working. Even now, having worked part time since January and working full time til May for the nicest bunch of people I could hope to work with, I still feel that I have to justify every single time that I will be out of town or unavailable to them. When the mandatory meeting falls on a Saturday which is one of my days off, I feel like I'm getting the fish eye over email when I say I can't make it. Who owns my free time? Well, I kinda always thought I did....

Yeah so, I am a bad worker bee, but fun at parties, which reminds me: Odd Stork is six days away. If you haven't already signed up to perform, please do so. Otherwise, just drop by to see what's cooking. Last chance to get a tour of the bomb shelter.

17mar00

I will be working something approximating full time starting on Monday. I hope it does not kill me.

My Movie List from SXSW 2000 ..... orange means I liked it!
Blink	complicated story of Nazi turned anti-racist
Beyond the Mat	WWF madness
Rated X	the making of porn/inside the porn industry
Rats	social commentary and rats in DC
Original Diner Guys	Barry Levinson and his high school buddies
Exiles in NY	boy sleeps with mother, feels very very bad
Juvies	juvenile detention could not be as dull as this movie
Collectors	serial killer art and the people who collect it
How's Your News?	my favorite one, a news-gathering road trip across the US
The Wedding Cow	hitchhiking librarian could not save this movie

I also saw a whole bunch of little short films that I'll try to list later. I have 30 boxes packed and am ready to move on out of here

15mar00

So I went to SXSW and blew off the conference almost entirely. I had been meaning to go, I really had.... but then I missed the pre-registration deadline, so it was gonna cost a mint. Then I got to Austin and my good buddy Aaron who I was staying with had bought me a movie p ass [intentional sabatoge? who knows.] so I officially said "screw the conference" and Aaron and I saw about eleven movies, details tomorrow.

Last night I did catch one event -- the closing party and subsequent afterparty at Bruce Sterling's house [my personal hero because he says he lives in Austin because "the libraries are stil l good" ]. I got to meet and greet a bunch of very tired all-networked-out web celebs, hangers on, tireless self-promoters and general party folks who were some of the nicest people I have met lately with a lot more to talk about than computers.

I, of course, feel like somewhat of an impostor, the way I did after WTO. I mean, I was technically in Seattle during WTO but I wasn't, you know, wrecking stuff... Similarly, I was in Austin for SXSW but did not attend a single event save the one party, did not land a high-paying high tech job, and did not even get a record contract. I mostly chilled with an old college pal, left messages on many many cell phone voicemail boxes, and drank coffee at the Ruta Maya. Did you ever see that movie Slacker? I have nothing further to add....

11mar00

Despite the best efforts of Delta Airlines, I made it to Austin yesterday. My flight was delayed four hours. I missed my connecting flight in Dallas and they were all set to put me up in a hotel.... nuts! Suddenly, I had an idea: "hey, if I rented a car and drove to Austin tonight, would you pay for that? It's got to be cheaper than a hotel room..." They said they couldn't pay for it, but they could reimburse me [whatever the difference is is lost on me] so that's how I found myself on I-35 westbound between 12:30 and 4:00 am last night listening to the onboard GPS babbling at me in Italian [you can set the languages on those things] and developing a love for hard-rocking techno music.

Then I got to Austin and had breakfast. Today has been a whirlwind of movies, the best of which has been Beyond the Mat about the weird world of pro wrestling.

09mar00

I forgot this part about packing. The part where you start putting things in boxes thinking "This'll neaten things up!" and all it does is make the place look like it was ransacked by wildebeests from the time you fill up your first box til the time you finally unplug your portable radio [that you pretty much use only when you are moving from place to place] in your echoey living room and lock the door behind you on your way out.

I have fifteen boxes packed so far. I am getting rid of nearly 100 books as well as several trash bags filled with clothes. A few chairs will find themselves on the side of the road with a free sign on them, and I may leave this gigantic Boeing Surplus desk right where it is. Most of my major large bookset purchases were made after moving in here, so they t rickled in little by little [an OED here, Encyclopedia Britannica there] and now I'm getting more and more boxes from the liquor store every day and rethinking the wisom of having a thirteen volume unabridged dictionary. Ask me a word, any word.

I have lived in the Odd Fellows Hall longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life except my Mom's house [Happy Birthday Mom!] which I left when I was seventeen. It feels good to be making this big leap, and still weird to be leaving so much behind.

08mar00

On balance, everything was okay today. This is the result of averaging a set of extreme highs and lows....

low: woke up at 5 am when the east coast phone company [1371 subscribers!] called
high: I was smart enough to buy coffee yesterday
low: I locked myself completely out of the house on my way out the door & had to be rescued by Odd Fellows
high: I got to mess around with metal and wooden type all day today
low: completely slammed on phones at work tonight
high: I will be Speakeasy Network's first telecommuter, from VT
low: chain of command very unclear, job description unclear
high: drove to work, no taking the bus home at midnight
low: when I got home, someone had stolen the cap to my truck which had been in my parking place
high: eight acts for Odd Stork already
low: no phone call from Pete Krebs
high: I am going to Austin anyhow, for five lovely days
low: still awake at 1 am, must open hall at 8:30 am
high: still alive & going to bed

07mar00

I am having one last party here in the Odd Fellows Hall. Please join me.

If you need more info, you can contact me via the snappy new mailto form I finally got working and I'll send you the complete invite.

05mar00

You can almost feel that icky Winter stick peeling off of you as Spring approaches up the slippy back way. There were two neat things about today:

1. I found a copy of one of my favorite songs, The Springhill Mining Disaster, on mp3. I didn't know U2 c overed it.

2. Pete Krebs went home from his show tonight with my phone number in his pocket.

It's not quite what you might think; I wasn't asking him out on a date... I was asking for a ride to Texas. If you want others to be game, you've got to also be game yourself once in a while.

04mar00

A day that starts with you forgetting to put the coffee pot under the pouring thingie, pressing the on switch, and leaving the room, can only get better from there. Can you say coffee river?

Mad Max is a kick ass movie which is now playing here on the big screen in the original Australian [they had dubbed in American accented voices in the American version to make it easier to understand]. I had forgotten how much of a Western-style frontier justice flick it was. During my motorcycle phase in college, we would all get together and mink oil our leathers and watch that movie which was one of the two we owned on video [Debbie Does Dallas being the other one].

My DSL is fixed as of this morning so I have been going on a multimedia binge of sorts. If anyone wants to cruise my napster selections, my handle is librarina [not a typo].

03mar00

You just can't eat onions once they get looking like this.

My friend Shannon, besides answering some of the tech mail we get at work, also teaches grade school -- you would be surprised at how similar these jobs can be at times. Today was Read Aloud day and she invited me to come read a story to her class. I picked The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn, Donald Barthelme's only kids story. After I explained what a djinn was [besides a good scrabble word] and told the assembled ten year olds the [apocryphal] story of how Barbara Eden needed to keep her belly button covered in I Dream Of Jeannie, we got on to the story. It concerned a girl, a Chinese pagoda, a knitting pirate, a djinn, and, of course, the slightly irregular fire engine. The story went over well and provoked more discussion than I had expected. Specifically, the kids all had ideas about what was and was not legitimate when confronted with a wish-granting djinn. They decided through consenus that:

• asking for more wishes was bogus, unless you had a time limit in which case you could use one wish to ask for one more wish, to buy some time
• no fair wishing someone else dead or hurt
• going back in time is not an acceptable wish

They also determined that the best way to deal with the wish scenario would be to get the djinn to grant everyone in the world three wis hes and let them all sink or swim on the basis of their own wishmaking ability.

01mar00

Click on the picture of the broken window of my apartment to hear the story of how I got home tonight at 1:30 am to find a guy on my porch, my window broken and wound up more pissed off at the cops than anyone else. Damnit!

Otherwise, I had a really fine day. I went to my friend Jenny's house where she has a basement filled with printing presses, a hand-operated elevator -- you lift yourself up in it using a big rope -- and a monumental clean-up project that I got to help with. I am doing basement cleaning and organizing in exchange for some metal type and some know-how. I came home with a pocket full of linotype and the ink under my nails that I had been dreaming about.