i have a strange addiction to letters to the editor, especially in smaller newspapers. the people who write in are nuts half the time, and the remind me of who i'd never like to meet and attempt a conversation with, ever. i was telling chris that someday i'll meet someone and their name will sound familiar, but none of their other associations, so i'll have to ask them if they wrote a letter to the editor.

anyway, today there was a particularly obnoxious letter about how the city of olympia has gone overboard with gay rights and the boy scout thing, blah blah blah. the writer ended her letter with the following departure from logic (well, that train left at full speed awhile ago):
"The danger of being so 'open-minded' is that your brains might fall out."

fucking hell. homophobes can suck my dick.

"hey, who are you?"
"santa claus."
"no, really. is one of you joanna?"
"uh, no. who's joanna? how old is she?"
"you should know! this is miles."
"miles from where?"
"pioneer!"
--chris and i and some stupid kids in the dark at the centennial playground

SHIT! they're showing the house tomorrow at 10am. that means we have to be UP AND OUT by then. suck! but it's the first showing, and i guess that's good.

chris is here. josie's coming up tomorrow, then we go to seattle for webley. today it is fucking hot. almost 90, i think. REDUNKULIST! i tell people on n00n that girls are staying in my room and they first ask for lesbian sex. (!) one-track minds, my goodness. i think it's time to take a nice walk, since it's sunset and not going to kill us anymore. then maybe we watch more videos. or something. maybe lesbian sex. ONLY NOT.

today i was reminded of a couple things i saw/read and really enjoyed..i was browsing my mom's copy of "culture shock: india" and remembered salman rushdie's midnight's children, which was a fascinating novel of epic proportions...and a conversation with kk, the first since i got on a plane to go home in phx, reminded me of high fidelity. hurts so good? not really. but our hands are not tied. life goes on, however confusingly.

other notes: i finally saw becky socially today. we played badminton on a tennis court with rackets and a birdie from the dollar store. the birdie kept getting caught in the rackets and blown off-course by the breeze. we were constantly blinded and overheated by the raging sunlight. oh, how can we stand the 80 degree heat. we quickly gave up and headed for greener pastures, quite literally, with a large pink rubber ball to kick around. this, too, quickly exhausted us as we realized our impending need of water, lots of water. then we gave up entirely and went home.

later this evening, i danced to pain mp3s for about twenty minuts until i felt frazzled and ridiculous and had to remove all items of clothing because they were so sweaty. i dance like the dorky silent girl in the breakfast club, a movie that, despite claims i should have seen it at sleep-overs or high school parties or something, i have only ever seen late at night on the usa network. you can still tell what the swear words are that they edit out. i think i got the gist of it.

don't let go, ooh whoa whoa.

"emily, i believe in you. know how? because when i put my finger RIGHT HERE..."
"i don't need to hear the rest of this."

this weekend will rock. both chris and josie are driving up for the webley show in seattle and crashing at my house in olympia. so there will be the concert, and there will be seeing my friends, and there will be going to seattle. of course, in two months, that will be kind of inconsequential, since we'll be living together in seattle and within neat bussing distance of any show we'd probably want to see, but right now, it's kickass.

oh, and there will be a really nifty meteor shower saturday night.

i think i am also meeting chris, her friend adrienne, and adrienne's girlfriend kendra for breakfast or lunch tomorrow. maybe they will want burrito heaven. because it really is heaven. mm.

yay for seeing oregon people!

i should also get together with becky while it's her days off. i never, ever see her, and that is very bad. we shall go exercise. *nods a lot*

i have the beatles' "and i love her" stuck in my head. i don't know why. it has a sexy feel to it, though the lyrics are cheesy. hmm, i wonder if that's one of the tracks on my mom's beatles love songs lps. it would be much sexier on vinyl than mp3 or cd. or tape. tapes are so unsexy, except mix tapes. mix tapes are more romantic than sexy, but they have decidedly more character than mix cds. much more effort goes into mix tapes, because you can't just drag and drop and hit 'write cd,' and as we all know, effort is sexy.

i hate it that i always miss /msg windows in irc unless i've previously desktopped the messenger. and especially when i always, always miss winnie's /msg. asdf. winnie, i love you, i swear it's not on purpose!

and yes, i know that "desktop" is not a verb.

as a child, i tried to believe in elves. or, at least, what i thought of as elves at the time. i know there's supposed to be a big difference between elves, gnomes, pixies, etc., but no one has ever properly schooled me on the differences, so as a kid, i considered little people about 2" tall to be elves. they were not to be confused with christmas elves, which were more like small humans with funny ears. they also lived in my backyard.

my house from the ages of about five to fourteen was set on a large yard that included a segment of a small creek. the creek's width varied in our yard from about two feet across to six inches on average, and it was in the very back of our yard, at the bottom of a somewhat steep slope. i used to waste massive amounts of time playing down there in the mud and in the water. we'd catch critters living there (frogs and crayfish were special treats, as were large schools of minnows) and build miniature elf villages in the mud. one such town, which is built on the slope overlooking the creek, was called elfville.

elfville was founded many years before by a famed elf named elfin. his statue, depicting a happy wanderer of an older elf relaxing on his side, stood at the center of town. the rest of town was a sleepy little borough, with shops and homes carved into the hillside with dried mud and the occasional plant (really, transplanted weeds). i spent hours perfecting the village. sometimes i would go to the shore of the creek and find a bed of mud-clay and create a small fishing village there, but these were usually attacked by mud wasps and its residents scared off from their chosen lucrative but dangerous careers as fishermen.

elfin, of course, was a cheap lawn gnome my mom probably picked up at goodwill when my interest in elves and the backyard was growing. over the years, his paint has faded and chipped off, and so now, with the house on the market, mom suggested i repaint him with her enamel modeling paints. that she bought in the 1970s for $0.25 a bottle and haven't been touched since approximately that time. in this collection of paints, there was nothing remotesly skin-toned; the green was beyond tacky dried up; every bottle needed to be dipped in turpentine and twisted in frustration until there were blistered fingers before it would open. a formerly faded red-suited, green hat and shoes-wearing, brown bag-carrying, white bearded gnome was painted bright red with a blue hat, black shoes and bag, and shiny metallic silver beard.

it's a strange end to a strange gnome in a new home without any villages to guard.

"because i could never put my pants on like this." [makes a motion like pulling something over his head]
--paul, on why he tried on one of mom's dresses at age 6 when no one was looking

i haven't done anything destructive to my fingernails for about five days. that was when i put on a coat of Sally Hansen Hard as Nails, followed by a coat of some glossy matte maroon-colored wet'n'wild. this combination has the effective tendency of preventing me from biting my nails, at least until the colored polish chips off too much.

i won't let them get much longer than they are, though. my nails are naturally crappy, thin, and, at least as evidenced by my mother and sister, both of whom are similarly affected, will grow warbly and possibly up-curving (!) if they get much past the "comfortable guitar-playing" length. besides, you know, that length is much more practical for things. it keeps typing simple and, you never know, i might take up the guitar again. or, uh, other, more intimate things, because bleeding is bad.

my nails are, i think, the only part of my anatomy to which i semi-regularly apply colorful cosmetics. i have a few tubes of lipstick that get used occasionally on a lark, but i only obsess over my nails. even then, it's only when i'm not on the 'out' phase of nail growth. it really is a cycle, you see: bite nails down, decide they're fucking ugly, trim neatly and file, apply clear polish, allow to grow for a week, apply colored polish, enjoy, trim occasionally to maintain appropriate length, nails decide they are tired of polish, allow to wear off, bite nails again. lather, rinse, repeat.

so, yeah, i was at the facial care aisle of shopko today and i felt very unfeminine because i use approximately one product in that aisle out of a hundred. i've never used a biore nose strip, though they look disgustingly fascinating. i don't know what you're supposed to use an astringent for. i don't apply strange gels to my t-area or my g-spot or whatever else they make strange gels for. i use the st. ive's apricot scrub on my face once or twice a week. that's it. and i have pretty nice skin. then i went to downtown olympia and into a couple vintage/used clothing shops and felt completely unhip, which is also puzzling.

on a totally unrelated note, why the hell would mountain dew use a crouching tiger, hidden dragon takeoff to advertise? the fucking thing has "flying" fight scenes and subtitles and everything. it's ludicrious. almost as annoying as the ones for 1-800-collect with carrot top. what a fuckhead.

i enjoy grocery shopping. i know, i'm sick. there are worse things to enjoy, though, and i've probably enjoyed some of them, too.

ok, so like, i'm feeling very 'wtf?' at the moment. my day has been totally wasted getting home from vancouver because we got stuck in traffic at multiple locations, so instead of less than four hours from vancouver to olympia, it was more like six, not counting a couple stops (value village, gas, food) but including the desperately-needing-Flying-Pig-from-kids-in-the-hall lineup at the u.s. border. jeeebus.

yesterday, i think a storm must've blown in, because the rain was very hard in the afternoon as we explored kitsilano. we didn't even go to the beach, it was so nasty. we did, however, seek shelter in a futon shop and a greek restaurant, both of which turned out to be truly pleasant respites. we bought a futon for my sister, who's been asking for one for quite some time now, which was fun because the salesman was just..kind of a character. he was very canadian. he said "eh" and "aboat" a lot. he knew a lot about futons. he had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of futons. they made the goddamn futon mattresses in the store, using very large needles. he also used to be a tap dancer, though you'd never guess it from talking to him. the greek restaurant just involved lots of super yummy greek foods and whole wheat bread products. yay for whole wheat!

we also took the skytrain (for the only time this trip) out to new westminster for dinner at a seafood restaurant. it was good. very good. i ate very slowly because i ordered the garlic garlic crab, and crab is a tricky thing to eat, especially when the still-in-their-shells crab legs are sauteed with butter and other sticky, greasy, delicious things (i need a boy who finds garlic breath as unobnoxious as i do, hehe). you have to really work at opening up the shells to scoop out all that sweet, delicious meat. mm.

anyway, back to my 'wtf?' feeling. i'm slowly regaining the ability to type with this pos keyboard and trying not to feel just braindead. we're supposed to do productive things tonight, like pick things up off the ground for the carpet cleaners coming tomorrow and paint the front door red and grocery shop and reply to email and stuff. and i'm tired.

whathuh?

i (heart) canada.

i'm typing this in a net cafe because our dialup account said we are not authorized to use the internet in this country. well, I'LL SHOW THEM! ha!

it's very cloudy. it's even been kind of rainy. that's ok. i'm a northwesterner. i understand the rain. sunshine and i don't get along. i have to smear lotion on my body that counteracts the effects of sunshine. while the price tag of said lotion sucks, sunburn hurts more. the only bad thing is that we don't see the mountains very often. there are wonderful mountain views in this city.

well, anyway, this is exciting. i kept thinking of things to blog about so badly that i almost had to write them in pen ink on paper, but now that i'm at a terminal... i forget them all. oh well.