My arrival at UCSC when I was seventeen was eye-opening in so many ways. I met my first out-of-the-closet lesbian on my first night in the dorms, who lined up a group of frosh on her bed and lectured us on proper fisting techniques. I got my first roommate and met my first anti-shower campaigner–unfortunately the same person. I played my first drinking game and called Dad and the Moms triumphantly the next day to tell them all about my first hangover. And I met SoCal natives, and realized for the first time that not only is Southern California winning the NoCal-SoCal war, they actually have no idea it’s happening. I came fully prepared to hate every SoCal resident I met for having big boobs and stealing our water,* but they were all perfectly friendly to me and claimed ignorance of any intrastate blood feud.

Since attending SFSU, I’ve discovered another one-sided war that I’m on the wrong side of. Everyone knows about the Cal-Stanford war, but how many of you are aware that there is also an intense rivalry between Cal and SF State? Well let me tell you, everyone at State is fully committed to this. Lecturers, professors, and students fill class discussions with snide little digs at Cal, with its “research” and “budget” and “white people.” (Since attending SFSU I have chosen to become a sympathetic person of color, because frankly all the cultures here are way more interesting than the one I grew up in. You might be offended by this, but your opinions are meaningless to me, whitey.) Unfortunately, no one at Berkeley has any idea that this conflict is happening. Which only makes us hate them more, of course.

I’m starting to take some pride in my state education, though. SFSU is one of the most diverse campuses in the world, which is very important to me now that I have voluntarily renounced my colonialist white heritage. We may not have Nobel prize winning professors, or a lot of money, or good grammar, but we…actually I can’t think of an end for that sentence. We don’t have those things. But I like it there, anyway. And we started the campus protest movement in ’68, whatever Berkeley claims.

Ok, I will now return to my high-paying job here at Cal.

*Amusingly, my non-showering roommate hailed from SoCal. What are they doing with all our water if they don’t even bathe?

We’ve gotten a few pieces of mail addressed “To The Estate Of” for the guy who used to live in our apartment. I, in my ignorance of polite euphemisms, thought this meant he was just, you know, rich, with an estate, but the Lad says this means he is dead.

You might begin to wonder, did he die in this very apartment? You might be sitting on the red couch (which for various complex reasons is referred to as the white couch, despite the actual white couch sitting next to it), hating yourself for watching Dark Angel and eating a cupcake Kati Vol left in your fridge. It would be around 10:30 at night, and the Lad is in Boston, and all the other lights in the apartment are off, when you start to think about that adorable little window between the living room and bedroom. You start to imagine the benevolent, slightly pale face of a very old man suddenly peeking through that window, just watching you silently, terrifying only in this context but still terrifying. You might try to decide whether it would be more or less terrifying if he were to say hello. Or maybe the ghost of the old dead man will be angry, angry because the landlord remodeled the kitchen for us after he died, or angry because we’re using the mirrored closet for the Lad’s monster shelves when the old man would have put them somewhere else. In any case, his angry face would contort and scowl and roar and the difficulties then would be

1) trying to get past him to either the front or back door in this ridiculously circular apartment where he could come at you from either direction, and

2) trying to grab shoes and your wallet on the way out so that you will be able to hop on a well-lit and populated train to the Moms in the far east, and

3) trying to break your one-year lease by explaining that your apartment is haunted by a benevolent (or maybe rageful) dead old man.

…that anyone is reading this whom I or Brian have not already emailed, Mac needs a home by 4:30 today.

If you are interested (and how could you not be?), complete info can be found here.

I just started looking online for coverage of yesterday’s big NY protest during Bush’s speech and I’m not finding a whole lot, even on commondreams.org. Can anyone give me a link to an in-depth story with maybe some critical thought behind it? Or if those of our crew who are actually there make your way to this site any time soon, I’d love to hear your stories.

This is a story about pants. Not just any pants: new pants, the scariest kind of pants there are. In case you don’t want to read the whole darn thing, the salient info is this: Tracy Miller is an amazing fashion consultant. If you want her to come work for you, check her out here:

The Closet Shopper

Email: theclosetshopper at gmail.com

My best jeans finally gave up the ghost while I was kneeling down to clean up toddler pee a few weeks ago at work. I guess they split from trying to contain all the good karma I was earning by mopping up after someone else’s kid. I tried to Frankenstein them for a while with my own special brand of sewing, but like a determined athlete after a car wreck they just kept splitting their stitches and eventually I had to give up on them. Then my second-best jeans split, possibly from trying to contain all the karma that I now store in my ass. So I was left with a choice of enormous raver pants or grey army pants. It was time to do the unthinkable. It was time to shop.

Since today was very hot and since I have been feeling inexplicably large and elephantine lately, today seemed like the very best time to wrap my legs in sweaty denim and stare at my bottom in various mirrors. I pretty much hate shopping at the best of times so I wasn’t looking forward to this. Lucky for me that I dragged everyone’s favorite fashionista Tracy Miller along with me. I gave her my size and price range and after that she did pretty much everything except actually try the jeans on for me. She picked a store, pointed me towards the dressing room, and then attacked me with several volleys of jean selections. It was like playing Battleship, but with pants. After every fitting, she would ask what my specific concerns with each pair were and then in the next round of jeans those problems would be magically fixed. I had a brand spanking new pair of half-off pants in under half an hour which fit perfectly, are the correct color, and were within my price range. Also, they are Diesel, which I thought was an engine but apparently is also a mark of coolness. And the best part of this whole experience was walking around the store with her as she held up various items and told me how great I would look in them and why. Nothing quite so ego-boosting as a fashion consultant.

She tried to get me into some new shoes (70% off) but I am having a low-budget month and had to decline. However, if any of you ladies out there (she hasn’t branched out yet to the mysteriously bland world of men’s fashions) are interested in an easy wardrobe revamp, I highly recommend her. Here’s her contact info again:

The Closet Shopper

Email: theclosetshopper at gmail.com

When folks started calling her chicken

She was mad that the nickname was stickin

But she was in luck

Cause we named her The Duck

And now she’s a chick in a clique…en.

I stole this picture from you, because it is so cute. Happy birthday, Grandma! I love you as only a pig can love a duck.

Charlie Hunter plays what looks like Count Rugen’s guitar and during the show his expression is an impossible combination of coolness and sincerity. This was the expression we all watched longingly from across the quad on the face of a certain boy in high school as he leaned, Jordan Catalano-like, against the wall, thinking hip thoughts. It was this expression which led some of us, not me but other people, to include versions of him in stories we wrote for college classes at Santa Cruz, stories which used dead grandmothers as metaphors and were given high marks by hyperbolic professors who used lecture time exhorting us all to spend more time dancing in the forest. All of this came back to me, watching Charlie Hunter scrunch his face up sincerely and with coolness at a drum solo and crawl his six fingered hands up and down his freakish guitar.

I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s new Oblivion, and also Zembla, which is why I’m back to thinking about sincerity. Authors have to spend a lot of time now explaining how they know that the situations they’re discussing are hackneyed and not really cool to discuss anymore (love, death, sex, etc.), but how they’re going to talk about them regardless, even though they have nothing new to contribute, and so on. DWF is a master of this, and then after all that he includes a few paragraphs dealing with the hackneyed situation in a meaningful way which makes you wish you didn’t need all the preceding post-modern nonsense because it only distracts from what’s good in the story. Except you know you do need it. You need a chance to smirk at him for writing about these things and yourself for reading about them before you let yourself enjoy it.

Charlie Hunter did not smirk, but just went on scrunching his face and occasionally bursting out with an “oh yeah!” when the occasion called for it. But he was still cool. So what’s his secret? Is it just talent? Would DFW still be a literary darling if he cut out all the apologies and just went right for the meat of things? Or would we all be slightly embarrassed to be caught reading his book on the subway? It’s difficult to even enjoy sex in an unironic way anymore, so can we enjoy a book without watching ourselves carefully? And more importantly, why haven’t I found a new job yet? Don’t any of you people work at companies that need admin staff?

It is time to start sloughing off the things which are not to come with. Me. In my move. Sometimes for talking like a translated manual.

Here is a list you of you-might-wants.

– boxy tealight holder with moon face

– assorted books including Rushdie’s Fury and some Calvino and Wallace

– A large pot for cooking pasta

– a saucepan I think also

– 2 (two) different City of Lost Children posters, HUGE, on some stiff cardboard material

– original artwork by the incomparable Melissa Vaughan, signed, featuring a blue cartoonish bald character, as all her art does feature. Cardboard. I cannot bear to throw it out myself so if anyone will do it for me I would consider it a kindness.

– various sample-sized burt’s bees and bath salt products

– assorted clothes, all more or less me-sized

I know these are small and mainly throw-away-able or donate-able, but I hate to throw out useful stuff or give to strangers when I have needy friends. So if you will be in the neighborhood of me over the next week and a half and any of this sounds grud, let me know and it is belong to you.