christmas morning and Ippoc wants to know when i will complete my "assignment". so before the coffee high wears off, here goes:

1. I still have a baby tooth that has yet to come out. and when it does, i do not want this fairy to come and touch anything.












2. the movie "a star is born" with Barbra Striesand affected me profoundly. i did not perm my hair like some people (little voice: ippoc) but after seeing the film, i was a changed person. i knew my life would be meaningless unless i became madly famous and found myself one day onstage singing a very moving song while the audience held up lighters for me.
i knew this was my fate even though i had no musical talent and planned to be deathly ill the day my oral report on the Oxbow Incident was due.



4. i lived in scotland for three years. in a town called Linlithgow with a palace in the center of town. that's it there. i had a friend called Gillian Sprout. we would meet on Sundays and wander around town looking for empty bottles to turn in for cash to buy white pudding and chips. it would take us all day. sometimes during our search we'd wait for trains to pass by on the tracks overhead. and when they roared past we would stand on our hands with our feet up in the air against a wall and flash our underpants (those with "underpant issues", substitute the undergarment word of your choice.)




3. when i first started highschool i had no friends. at lunch i would pretend that i was going home for lunch. I would stride out of the building as if i had somewhere to be in case people who did not know me and who i did not know wondered where exactly i was going in such a rush. i would cross the street and walk through the residential section for exactly twenty minutes then turn around and head back, returning just as the bell rang.



4. my first cat's name was Bruno. (you didn't know that did you?)


5. sometimes i pull clothes out of the dirt laundry pile and wear them to work.

i just ate a current scone, and i swear i feel my ass growing. not a nice sensation...anyhow, i wanted some underpants for our cruise so we went to a mall in L.A. JCPennys was like some giant garage sale at the end of the day when the people having the garage sale start hauling everything and anything out to the side walk hoping to make some extra cash. pyramids of shiny, colorful bottles of gooey, goby stuff that looked like chain lube were stacked eye-high right in the entrance. piles of the stuff. it may have been bath soap, detergent, lip gel, antifreeze, who knows. but JC Pennys sure as heck wanted to move it. and all those rotating jewelry wheels, ladened with the sparkly junk i used to swipe when i was a kid. i'd hide the stuff in my room in a plastic bag because i didn't know what else to do with it until my mother found it and paraded it before my eyes asking, "what's this? where did you get this?" as if she hadn't seen all this crapolla when she told me to "wait right there and don't touch anything," at the pharmacy when she picked up her meds. i told Linda i'd only be "one minute. i'll run in and run out," which i should never have said. Linda's a very literal gal. you say "one minute" and she rotates the little wheel on her watch and gives you one minute. and there's no running in department stores at Christmas. There's full-body slams, side-ways shuffling, small child hurdling, definitely no running. i read somewhere that department stores are designed to disorient. i dunno, when i find myself muttering such things as "get me the fucking hell out of here," i'm maybe a little more than disoriented. and is there some unspoken rule that during the Christmas shopping period (which for me is roughly Dec 24th) if you pick up something only to discover that it's the wrong size, wrong color, wrong price that it's completely okay to chuck it into the air and let it fall wherever it lands? Hmm? anyhow, i found 4 pairs of underpants for $14 dollars and according to linda it took me 23 minutes.

my boss (a most cool lady) just popped her head over my cube and said she's going to sneak out to get her hair cut. "See you at two for our meeting."

uh, it's 10 a.m.


love this time of year at work. it suits my work ethic, of which i have none. i came into work this morning and said to myself: today i will do nothing. i did indeed.

but alas, the better side of me (which is a trembling, half-starved creature that Ippoc throws scraps to) said, do just a little.

so i processed a few copyright notices. i can do this task without thinking.

in fact, i work best while not thinking.

think i'll run for president.

Okay first off, blogger is bugging me. Maybe I need another vacation. I can't seem to organize these pics and it's late so maybe i'll just leave them all iggly piggly. One of these pics shows the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Can you spot it? Where's the boat? Where's the boat? There you are you nutty cruise ship trying to hide beneath that bridge. Our (first) room is right there up on the right side of the boat on the eleventh floor. There are 15 all together, floors that is. There are 2 billion rooms. The balcony in our first room was only a half a balcony with no see-through glass to the water. We harrassed the staff until finally they let us move into the empty room right next door to us. Finally we had see-through glass to the ocean (and just a couple of smudges on the glass beyond my reach that I obsessed about just a bit...not a lot).

Once we had our deck we did a lot of this. Just gazing. reading, eating breaky, drying our swimsuits. On one occasion we dined overlooking a parking lot.
Nice!



Most days though, we awoke to the boat slowly chugging into a new port and we watched the sun come up.



Ah nicer!




The food was so good and there was so much of it that we made ourselves do this three times. It got quite competitive. Linda had the best spin if I do say so. I wanted to hurl just once due to the boats swaying.

We accidently wandered into the middle of a Mexican national festival and found ourselves pleasantly surrounded by hundreds of people who were not wearing t-shirts tucked into kakhi shorts with tube socks up to their waists. All the little boys wore these cute painted on mustaches. It was really very lovely.

What a lovely birthday pressie.

ippoc's got me thinking about the many bad jobs i've had and all the times and many ways i've been fired.

DerWeinerschnitzels, corner of Blossom Hill and Branam Lane, San Jose, 1980. I was told to stay at the fry station. There were no customers that moment. I didn't want to stay at the fry station. It was hot. I wanted to talk to Alison, the cashier by the cash register. Tim the, day manager, told me to get back on fries. I said i didn't want to get back on fries. it was too hot. after i flipped off Tim the day manager, i was asked to hand in my orangey brown apron and kerchief and to clock out. my days of free chili-cheese dogs were over.

Apple Slide and Design, San Francisco, 1987. I was hired as a stat camera person to do camera work for a business card and letterhead company. I had some previous experience, very little of it, however, in stat camerawork. the owner looked at my portfolio while he argued with a customer on the phone. when he hung up, he asked "you want job?" i said yes because no one else was asking me that question. for the next two weeks he walked past me and shook his head or peered into the garbage can at the wasted photo paper and said, "you not know nothing," which wasn't exactly true. i knew some things, just not too much about stat cameras. my sister would sometimes drive me to work. we would drink our coffee in the car in the parking lot. "shouldn't you be going in?" she'd say,when i didn't get out of the car. everday i wanted to quit. the work piled up. orders came in. his wife usually worked the sales desk, taking orders, but sometimes if there was a rush job, she'd come over to the camera area and take the picture herself. "faster, i do it myself," she woud say. in the end he canned me on a tuesday morning just after i'd entered the building. i can't say i blamed him. i only wished he'd done it before my sister left the parking lot.

Account Temps, San Francisco, 2000. During another unemployed period, i worked temp jobs. one job all i had to do for eight hours was staple forms together. everytime i thought i was done, they brought me more. they marvelled at how fast i was. another temp job was for the Golden Gate Ferry Service. I worked in a trailer by the golden gate bridge. it was smallish this trailer like something to transport race horses. There were five of us in there. my job was to enter in the responses from a survey: "If there was a faster ferry would you prefer it? Yes? No?" At lunch the other trailer dwellers would each heat up their food products in the microwave by my desk. i would open the window to let in some fresh air but it smelled like exhaust from all the cars rushing by. The woman who hired me was former military. SS, i think. she said she'd had some problems with the previous temps. Something about the tight-lipped way she said "problems" made me curious. Had they done drugs out the back of the trailer? Stolen one of their dot-matrix printers? "I don't want you on the Internet", she said, "that's not what you're paid for. You understand?" she asked. I said i understood but there's only so much data entry one lonely temp can do in a trailer filled with exhaust and Top Ramen fumes. i lasted two days before i was told to take my things and leave. i think she'd caught me looking at cat pictures on craigslist. sometimes when i cross the bridge i look for that sad trailer.

i didn't race yesterday because i wanted to save my body.

i have much heavy lifting to do next week.

this day is done and she sleeps
go on now go, if you must
and gather up
all you came with
but please, could you leave us this
the persimmon tree beneath the sun
the pink contrail
nicked by the wind
though i never really expected it
to last. and all those red
and fragile leaves
waving like happy ladies
in a parade,
take it all for i have hope
that you'll be back
though the night winds rumble
and shake the house
the siren's wail of a final breath
is no concern to me
right now

there has been much fretting lately. i suspected the source but didn't know for certain. i tend to share my frets with the world. if you ask me how i'm feeling during such moments, i will tell you that i feel blue, that i worry. her way is to fret in silence, or what she perceives as silence. but oh the noise of silent fretting. it fills the house. i hear it shuffling around the place. i want to pull up a chair and sit and talk with it. i want to offer it some tea, get to know it better. make a little space for it.

so i was happy when she sat at the desk before the computer one evening. a glow lighting up the room as she tapped, tapped, tapped. i sensed the fretting was spilling out. her back arched, her lips moved as she re-read her words. i made several fly bys to try to get a glimpse of the post. but she shood me away.

but alas when i logged in the next morning, nothing new was there. had the fretting been let out to wander, to stretch its scrunched up legs and then hauled back inside?

there have been times when she has posted something and i noticed a typo, a little error, something amiss. log in as me, she would say. make the change, do me a favor. and so i would.

so was it so very wrong of me to log in and read her unposted draft, her secret fret?

am i a terrible, terrible snoop?