Yesterday at work I got a really deep paper cut on my thumb, and the air conditioning in my building went out.
Yeah, I know: wah, wah, wah.
How to pretend you’re Amélie:
- Live somewhere relatively close to Canada (actually living in Canada also acceptable).
- Buy products labeled in both French and English.
- Read the French bits aloud, and use them gratuitously in your weblog.
How to pretend you’re Camille:
- See 1 above.
- See 2 above.
- See 3 above.
- Cough a lot.
On the last day of my vacation I finally got around to some much-needed housekeeping. While I was at it I found a note in my handwriting that said, "Large live rats are also on board."
It took me a minute to recall that I’d written it during my flight back from San Antonio when the attendant said, "Large life rafts are also on board" through a particularly inadequate intercom.
Today I took out a piece of Trident, and for the first time in all the years I’ve been chewing that particular brand of gum, I connected the name to Poseidon’s pointy stick of choice. I guess I’d just been too busy associating the "dent" with four out of five dentists.
I’m not sure which is weirder: that I never thought about that before, or that I'm thinking about it now.
So I've worked every day since the last entry, and now I'm running off into the woods to recover. I'll be back in a few days.
It’s 2:00 a.m. I just got home about a half hour ago after working for 16 hours straight.
On my way home I thought up an elaborate narrative about the piece of formerly-sushi-grade ahi in my refrigerator, and how I was going to cook it and eat it even though I should probably just go straight to sleep, because I was not going to let that ahi go to waste, dammit, and also because I was hungry, and isn't it a shame that it's now too fishy-smelling to eat raw, because then I could eat and avoid cooking.
But now that I have cooked and eaten this piece of fish, I know it wasn't worth the trouble to cook and eat, let alone narrate.
What was I saying? Oh, yes: I worked a lot today.
There’s a place down the street from my building called Second Avenue Pizza - they sell pizza by the slice and very tasty, ridiculously cheap green salads. They also host odd little art and music events, and for years now they’ve been putting random doodles on their to-go boxes.
Yesterday I noticed that they’d branched out into text. One of the boxes I took home with me said
"Nostalgic" even though I hate Evan D.
while the other simply declared
Does well in school.
I’m naturally inclined to support any establishment that’s ready to make my dining experience a little more surreal.
I got back to Seattle on Saturday night, after four days of working in San Antonio and one night of playing in Austin.
San Antonio
I never actually made it to downtown San Antonio (I spent all my time either working at the hotel or in an office in a generic industrial park), so I won’t venture an opinion about the city itself. Still, here is a list of things that were not, in my experience, bigger in Texas:
Bathtubs in a Marriott
12 oz. bottles of beer
Hair
Where was the big hair? I was told there would be big, big hair. Granted, I saw more blue eye shadow in one week than I have in the previous five years, but I was promised big hair, dammit.
Also, I was expecting hard water in San Antonio, but apparently the hotel overcompensated with excessive amounts of softener in the water system. It was like showering in Downy. Ick.
Austin
One of the last things I did before I left Seattle was send an e-mail to my friend Karen in Austin confessing my ignorance of Texas geography and wondering if I’d be anywhere near her neck of the non-woods. When she told me she was within reasonable driving distance, I switched my flight out from Friday morning to Saturday afternoon, went back to my fourteen hour work days, and waited for Karen to rescue me.
And rescue me she did. She came Friday, and we drove to Austin, spending the first half hour or so in a thoroughly dramatic thunderstorm featuring hail and, later, what we were pretty sure was a funnel cloud.
On the way she explained many things about Texas, including the fact that I was more likely to see big hair in Dallas, where there is both lower humidity and a higher commitment to hair spray.
Later we hooked up with a big group of her friends at a Cuban restaurant, where there was excellent food and nifty conversation. Afterward we went to the Continental Club and saw Elizabeth McQueen (I bought her CD, and I’ve been listening to it since I got back) and then Wayne Hancock.
At the end of the evening, on the way to the car, Karen pointed out a few members of the famous Austin bat colony, although at first I thought some clumps of garbage dangling from a roof were the bats, and bats were moths.
It was just that kind of fabulous, bat-addled night.
Sometimes, if I’ve seen the word “interface” too many times in one day, I’ll start pronouncing it inside my head as if it were Italian.
I like to think of it as sanity maintenance, and not erosion.
I lean over to set the alarm clock in my hotel room, and noticing that it was previously set for 9:00 a.m. I think, “Lucky bastards.”
And yet I’m suddenly off to San Antonio for a week.
Man, I hate it when I’m done packing but I keep thinking there’s something else I’m supposed to remember...