Pox Americana

lunchtime adventure

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:23:03 GMT

So, a few days ago, I was lunching outside with the lovely branawyn , when we were approached by a guy who was clearly selling something. He was perfectly polite, but had that religious zealot look in his eye. branawyn and I exchanged glances, and he said "excuse me, but I was hoping I could give each of you a free book..." we simultaneously tried to decline, but he just started talking over us "It's in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's 'The Origin of the Species'!" This, clearly, was a game-changer. He had a whole backpack-full of these things! And yes, I checked, and it's not a bible with a deceptive cover. Who knows. it's probably covered in anthrax, or something, but whatever. I'm still marking this as an Auspicious Moment.

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:32:45 GMT

Saw (and Heard! and Met!) David Sedaris on Monday! Aspects of this which were expected:

1) He's totally awesome.
2) I was driven to tears laughing through a carefully constructed mixture of hilarity and extreme emotional discomfort (my guess is 80%/20%).
3) I made a complete fool of myself when I met him. I was expecting this to such a degree that I spent the whole day up to that point speculating on the precise method I'd use for my inevitable humiliation.

Things I did not expect:
1) The bottle of Purell he kept beside him on the table. Sensible, and probably customary, but still unexpected.
2) He kind of laughed at his own jokes more than I expected him to! It came off as charming more than anything else.
3) He read from his upcoming book, rather than his latest book. And he read his own diary entries!
4) I think I was kind of rude to him! He was signing my book, chatting about swine flu, and I was determined not to gush at him. But as soon as he wrote "Hamthrax is for lovers" in my book, I just started babbling about OMG my initials spell HAM, isn't that funny? It's so funny you wrote that blah blah blah! Eventually I strengthened my non-gushing resolve, and he asked me my middle and last names, and (so I heard) whether I was a Virgo*. To which I responded, in my best jr. high school girl's voice, "Ummm... NO." Like I was all offended, like he had asked me if I was a Celine Dion fan, or something. Ashoo has since named this the "Virgo? NOOOOOOOOOOOO!" exchange. So, sorry David Sedaris! I hope you weren't offended, and if you were, I hope you put me in a story someday!

*Yes, I now realize he probably misheard my last name and was asking me to clarify, or something, but still.

New psychiatrist post!

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 01:27:59 GMT

So, my beloved former psychiatrist has moved overseas. I knew it would happen because I DRIVE THEM AWAY. Seriously. I have had five mental health professionals either retire or move overseas in the past 8 years. If this had been my track record with relationships, I would probably be crying and asking Dr. Phil to fix my life and watching Nora Ephron movies on repeat. But instead! I bravely soldier on, wearing my heart (well, psyche) on my sleeve, expecting the best. This, my friends, is the power of psychopharmaceuticals over reason!
Anyway. I liked the new psych at first sight. Imagine you're casting the role of a grandfatherly doctor for a TV show. That is my man. Mustachioed and old-fashioned-fastidiously-dressed. He wore a stethoscope around his neck the whole time. Love! I tried to remain reserved and objective, however, until he started talking about which psych meds were OK to take during pregnancy, and which were not, and he said:

"Many medications, like lithium, are not recommended during pregnancy because they can cause damage to the feces."

At which point his eyes got really big, his face turned bright red, and he said "fetus! I mean fetus!"

Oh, l'amour! I expect terrific things from this relationship!

hello!

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:52:09 GMT

I'm here! Here are some things that have been going on lately:

1) My uncle's funeral. Was sad, but lovely, and it was good to see my awesome cousins. It wasn't really a traditional funeral at all- just family hanging out together in a GORGEOUS park in Seattle, on the hottest day on record. Followed by a yummy dinner downtown. It was also my cousin's 40th birthday, so I hope it was not an overwhelmingly sad day for him...

2) Other than my uncle, it seems like all the other people I know who were hospitalized a couple of weeks ago are much improved and homeward bound! Excellent.

3) It's my dad's birthday today! Happy birthday, Dad! We will celebrate tonight with pizza (and, I suspect, some beer).

4) T and I were both kind of sick with some mystery ailment this weekend. We both felt kind of hung over, but hadn't had anything substantial to drink within recent memory. No fun. At one point T had the genius idea that playing some Wii tennis would help shake the bug out of his system. I know you're all on the edge of your seats to know how that experiment turned out, so I'll save you some anguish. It was a FAILURE! A failure which sent him back to bed for a while longer. Poor misguided T!

5) Despite the Mystery Ailment, I managed to see TWO movies this weekend! Like, actual movies in the theater! Julie & Julia (to which T accompanied me) and Funny People (to which he did not). I must say, I think he chose poorly. While the actual Julia Child Meryl Streep parts of Julie & Julia were SUBLIME, the (normally wonderful) Amy Adams parts were EXCRUCIATING. Like, I started out feeling "Wow, this makes me kind of ashamed to have a blog!", and ended up feeling "Wow, this makes me kind of ashamed to be human!" in that way that Nora Ephron films always do. But Meryl Streep was beyond wonderful, and it inspired T to go home and make me Croque Monsieur for tea (two nights in a row!), so I really shouldn't complain.
As for Funny People, all I can say is yumyumyumyumyumSethRoganyumyumyum. And it was pretty fucking funny. So: win.

6) I also, in a fit of insomnia, watched Tarnation, which I had greatly anticipated when it was in the theaters. And I have to say? It was kind of boring. Like, blahblahblah, more mental illness and queers into experimental film. Seen it! Jonathan Caouette, you should have just turned your footage over to Citizen Rahne. She would have made that a MOVIE!

7) We have resurrected my Roomba! It was like Sleeping Beauty all year, waiting for someone to wake it up with a kiss (well, not literally- its job is to hang out in close proximity to a whole lot of dirt, so it will have to forego the typical expressions of affection), and so it spent the weekend roaming my livingroom floor like a mad trilobyte! I swear, Hello Kitty has nothing on my vacuum cleaner in terms of cuteness. Or cleaning power.

...she's back!

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:42:28 GMT

And she's married! Wedding turned out great, with only a few hiccups. Like, we only got through not even half of my carefully-crafted dance mix before our time was UP and they turned on the lights and we all had to go home. Oh, and all the buttons fell off of my dress. Thankfully, said buttons were decorative, rather than structural, in nature, so it was fine. But T looked AMAZING in his tux- just like James Bond, but T has the sense to prefer his martinis with gin (sensible fellow). We're still waiting on the photos from the professional photographer, but the sneak-peek slideshow I saw was pretty incredible.
And now I'm exhausted. Got back from Bali on Saturday, but haven't been able to get much sleep since then.
Ok, time to get back to work. wish me luck in getting myself to update this thing regularly!

random boring list mostly because I feel guilty for neglecting my LJ:

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:28:29 GMT

1) There is this nice Japanese lady who comes to my office every week, gives me chocolate, and reminds me *intensely* of my grandmother. This is her last day coming to the office, and I'm really very sad about it.

2) The Young Alumni party last Saturday was fun! I got to see a bunch of people I don't see enough of. And I won a bottle of wine and a pound of coffee, both of which I have sorely needed this week.

3) I woke up this morning unable to move my neck! Which is inconvenient, to say the least. Perhaps this is payback for moving furniture all weekend.

4) Tony and I had a lovely Friday night, eating sushi, drinking our anniversary bottle of Perrier Jouet champagne, and desserting with two cakes from Satura. Yumyumyumyum!

5) The wedding dress fits! And I'm picking it up on Saturday. Huzzah!

Saturday post!

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:26:17 GMT

Wedding-prep stress has proved TOO MUCH for me recently, and has taken a toll on my back. So I booked myself a long-ass massage (not, as my homies on Facebook pointed out, a long ass-massage) at the Well Within in Santa Cruz. Massage therapist had my same name- I asked for her specifically because I knew that when I showed up for the massage they would ask who I was seeing, and I always end up forgetting the name of the person, and then feeling like an asshole. I figured this would just maximize the chance of me remembering her name. And I was handsomely rewarded! With 80 minutes of really superlative massage. I mean, seriously- my shoulders still feel kind of squishy to the touch, and I feel like I could, if I wanted to, turn my head 360 degrees, Exorcist-style. Nice.
Apres-massage, I walked around downtown for a while, and I must say that Santa Cruz was in fine form. Sunny warm weather always brings out the best calibre of freak on Pacific. Notably non-freakish were as really great acoustic guitar trio who played only Beatles tunes. They had maybe 20 people completely captivated- I stayed and listened for maybe 10 minutes, and I clearly left before the party was over. Other wonders I witnessed: two excellent panhandlers, one of whom held a sign that said "lazy pothead needs cash" (I always give points for honesty), the other of whom was wearing a green alien mask and held a sign that said "spaceship out of fuel". Just a few blocks down, I overheard a woman holding an intense argument with some guy dressed as a clown. Parfait!

Journal neglect!

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 05:06:57 GMT

quick update, because that's all I seem to ever have time for these days. But! I just wanted to say! That I got to try on my wedding dress on Wednesday, and it was great. Of course, it still had a bunch of pins holding it together, and one of them STABBED me directly in the center of my palm! So now I'm walking around with stigmata* that I received on Ash Wednesday. If only I had waited to see my dress until Good Friday, yes?

*ok- the language nerd in me (and we all know that joie_de_livres are composed almost entirely of Language Nerd) needs to clarify that I *know* that it's actually a "stigmatum", since there was only one)

More pics of my evening!

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:19:06 GMT

I am currently drinking champagne from my favorite glass:

And watching Waking Life for the eleven-thousandth time:

As I've said before: I've seen this movie eleven-thousand times. And this time, the thing I'm taking away from it? That I have had the exact same inner monologue for EVER! Blah blah, nature of reality, blah blah, evolution of language, blah blah. I guess if I'm going to be in a rut, this one is OK. Especially since it often involves champagne!

My day in pictures

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 05:18:02 GMT

I did it! I successfully cooked a bona fide meal! Bona fide, as in it was not a sandwich, and it did not involve anything on toast! This involved an actual recipe for dal, provided by poetofthefuture , and I did not die from fire or food poisoning or starvation!

first attempt, burned beyond redemption:

Fortunately, I took the Poet's implied advice and bought enough ingredients for two batches!

Just in case, I had provisions for disaster:

and:

But thankfully, I didn't have to use either of them! Because I ended up with this:

And this:

which turned out like this:

Believe it or not, I didn't even *eat* the naan, because the dal was completely superior (if undercooked).

Earlier on today I got bored and decided to try some (fairly tame) eye makeup!

I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out, especially since I'd been looking at Bono on the cover of Rolling Stone, and the eyeliner makes him look like he has a black eye, and I was cautious of avoiding that particular pitfall. But maybe that's just because I hadn't actually seen Bono's eyes in, like, 20 years. Anyway, tomorrow I go to rachbomb 's house to get test wedding makeup done! And in retrospect today's eye makeup will look amateurish and silly. But it served its purpose today: I felt all hot while shopping for bikinis at Target (no pics of actual bikini becuse it is SCANALOUS and suitable for viewing only by future husbands and anonymous Balinesians. Also: putting on new eye makeup and going to Target is totally one of those thing that Should Have Been In Dubliners, am I right?

Homeless!

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:27:32 GMT

Ok, not qutie. But we have had TWO houses just taken from under us! Original move date was April 17 (eek!), but we're hoping our current landlords' offer to keep renting to January still stands. I guess we'll find out soon enough, right?
Other news: we have booked our honeymoon! In Bali! We're only staying two places: 5 days in Sanur, 5 days in Ubud (for the Bali-familiar), which I'm hoping will be a nice relaxing combo. Many thanks to fiatlouis and his lovely bride for the advice! We did not manage to book the awesome-looking Ubud hotel they recommended, c'est la vie, but T made up for it by booking a bungalow ON the beach in Sanur. mmmm.... beach...
T has been in Europe for almost a week! And he'll be there for 5 more days! I don't like this at all. Which is silly, because when he was in Phoenix we would routinely go weeks without seeing each other. Just shows how quickly you can get used to something good. This lonely weekend, the plan is to clean house (!!!), watch Man On Wire, buy some new swimsuits (!!!), visit rachbomb to get my test wedding makeup done(!!!) and play with her doggies, and perhaps write my wedding vows. For a lonely weekend, it looks like fun will be had!

more update!

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:20:37 GMT

...in no particular order:

-I will be all on my lonesome for two weeks, while T is on business in Germany! Am imagining him drinking beer with chesty women with blonde braids. Am feeling mostly just jealous for the beer.

-we had a house stolen out from under us! Which was perfect, except for the lack of dishwasher and garbage disposal! We were literally at the rental office filling out the application when the realtor discovered that it had been rented the night before. Damn! Cheap, big, all original 1950s cabinets, etc, but everything was in superb condition. It had a basement full of spiders, which I found charming rather than scary. Damn you, mystery renters! Although the rental agency S-U-C-K-E-D, no one had their shit even remotely together on this one- took the original rep 2 weeks to call me back about seeing the house. What if the plumbing broke and it took them 2 weeks to respond? NO THANK YOU. Basically, I'm just trying desperately to not want this place anymore.

-But! There is a chance! (a chance, which I have probably now jinxed!) that we will be able to continue renting our current place, which is small but very cute and has a hot tub. There would be worse fates! And moving all of our shit six weeks before wedding and honeymoon etc is going to be a nightmare no matter how you slice it.

-we found a caterer! yay!

-my project while T is gone is to cook (and eat!) some dal, thanks to recipe and encouragement from poetofthefuture . I have been wanting legumes like a mofo (and we all no about those mofos and their legumes, don't we?), and am kind of looking forward to regressing to that college-student-with-a-kitchen phase than I never had: make a big pot of beans, eat it for several days. Yum!

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:59:55 GMT

...long overdue!
Friday was my actual birthday, which was lovely. I got moderately dressed up and went to work and treated myself to a slice of chocolate cake. One of the lovely portal monitors bought me an almond croissant, which was superb. One of my coworkers gave me a gift, even though he didn't know it was my birthday! Sometime over the weekend, a MYSTERY COWORKER made me a sign, printed in color on photo paper that says HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOIE_DE_LIVRE, with pics of a bouquet of roses and birthday cupcakes. I don't know who it was, but THANK YOU, MYSTERY COWORKER!
After work I met T at my parents' house for fondue and champagne! I must say: I was absolutely spoiled with gifts this year. Mom and Dad gave me a place setting of my (I must say) gorgeous wedding china! Love, love, love it.
And T completely outdid himself- He gave me the Eton hand-crank radio that they give away for NPR pledges I can only dream of affording! I have been lusting after this particular trinket for YEARS. Yay!
And then he told me that he wasn't sure if the radio would arrive in time, so he got me a backup gift, too. And then he pulled out a little blue bag. And inside the little blue bag was a little blue box with a little white bow! And inside the little blue box with the little white bow was this:

Ok, my wrist was not in the little blue box. But isn't it cute? I guess the salesperson at Tiffany suggested that he should get a heart-shaped charm for me, but he said "No! Joie_de_livre doesn't like hearts! But she does like puppies!" and the rest is history.
I will eventually get around to posting about other stuff (like an awesome party on Saturday), but for now this is it!

Silly photo time!

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 01:44:05 GMT

Spotted by T, while we were out house hunting.

He's got a sharp eye, my beloved.

A STORY

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 02:32:30 GMT

In which our heroine is told by two different people, within the space of two minutes, that it is her Lucky Day. It is suggested that she should maybe buy a lottery ticket! So, having never done such a thing, she inquires as to how to go about this. Eventually, she makes her way over to 7-Eleven and buys a single scratcher ticket marked YEAR OF THE OX, and wins absolutely nothing. But then on the drive home, she sees a Jogging Man in Loose Shorts scratch an itch, and inadvertently show her his ass. She smiles the whole drive home, thinking: that man has no idea that I've seen his ass.

FIN

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:48:19 GMT

So, there is this lady I work with once a week or so who reminds me OH SO MUCH of my grandmother. I'm not really sure why, because this lady at work is Japanese, and with quite a pronounced accent, and my grandmother was not Japanese, and had a fairly standard-issue American accent. Anyway, it's always a little bittersweet talking to this woman because I get all nostalgic and grandma-missing, but she's totally great. So we were working away, when I hear Nice Work Lady gasp, and I look over:

NWL: this magazine! It's full of pictures!
JDL: uh huh?
NWL: pictures of Naked French Women!
JDL: !!
NWL: I can't believe this, Why isn't this in the Locked Stacks?
JDL: ...
NWL: Oh, but look at her- she has a very lovely figure! They *all* have very lovely figures!
NWL: [shows me a picture of a naked lady in a cage]
JDL: um, it looks like someone's keeping *her* in the Locked Stacks!

FIN!

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:51:27 GMT

Ok, I just had a cooking-induced panic attack, complete with hyperventilation and racing heart and dizziness. Yes indeed.

Milk

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 15:14:21 GMT

Watched "Milk" last night! And honestly? I was kind of disappointed. I mean, it was fine.* I'm not saying it was "Ray" bad, or (dear lord!) "Philadelphia"! No! But I was pretty disappointed that a movie about being different and making radical changes in culture, essentially turned out to be *exactly* like every other biopic I've ever seen. Ok, admittedly this is not my favorite genre (tho I did quite like Kinsey, but mostly because it was SEXY!), but I can't really think of a biopic I've seen that I can truly, wholeheartedly endorse. Maybe if Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry made one some day?
Some day when it's on DVD I will probably watch it again, with an eye towards nouns and adjectives. I mean, inevitably the two players in this story end up being Harvey Milk and Dan White, right? What does it mean that "white" really does describe "milk"? Like, is the first adjective that kids learn to apply to milk? (that is, unless they have good vegan parents, in which case the first adjective they might learn to apply to milk is "soy"). Except that the idea of White just describing Milk, whereas Milk actually was Milk just kind of leads me into the whole latent-homosexual-defense (see: American Beauty, etc. etc.), which to be honest just bores me.
One other thing: I kept confusing the names "Dan White" with "Dan Brown", which is of course terribly unfair to Dan Brown. Except that "The Twinkie Defense" does sound like a suitable sequel to "The DaVinci Code", no?
Wait!! What do you think the connection is between "Twinkie Defense" and just plain "Twink"?? See, MORE boring latent homosexual crap!
Also: [TINY SPOILER HERE], the little memorial description of Harvey Milk at the very end of the film says his friends scattered his ashes along with bubble bath (who doesn't like bubble bath, really) and grape Kook Aid (WTF Jonestown!). That *had* to be a Jonestown thing, right? Because the two sets of murders were, like, nine days apart? Gus Van Sant: Why would you throw that in there without even a hint of a mention of Jonestown in the film? WTF?

*and Sean Penn was just transcendent! As in, he was so good that I found myself forgetting that he was Sean Penn, or even that he was an actor. I mean really, really good- "I drink your milkshake" good!

a little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:12:43 GMT

This is what comes of knowing a tiny bit of French. I have a phrase from what I think might be a Leonard Cohen song stuck in my head on repeat. It could be many things, but my brain can't decide whether it wants to be:

Les morts, aidez chez moi!

or

L'amour, aidez chez moi

or

L'amour etait Chinois

Quel conundrum!

Also: I know this is a rather silly thing to post after being radio-silent for such a long time, but this is what I've got. That and, although I love Facebook, the possibility of FB-style communiques replacing LJ-style makes me impossibly sad.

good/bad/ugly

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:59:40 GMT

The Good News: I bought an iPhone! hip, hip, hooray! It probably won't be delivered until Monday, but still. Craptastic Cell Phone of the Beast: your days are numbered!
Also good news: I get a discount on cell phone service, and so with that and a slight rearranging of my minutes, my new voice + data plan is ~$10 cheaper than my old Verizon voice plan.
The Bad News: the plumbing in my house has turned out to be merely a *rumor* of plumbing! This time, it's the showers. And the plumber can't come until Monday! I took the world's shortest shower last night- maybe a minute and a half? Maybe.
The Ugly News: Did I mention I have to wait 3 more days until I get my new iPhone??

OMG I LOVE HSM OMG LOLZ PON1EZZZZ!!!

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:43:26 GMT

So, on the advice of poetofthefuture , I am watching High School Musical. yes! And it is kind of totally amazing! I'm only halfway through, but I'm telling you: there is some rich soil here, in, like, *every* scene! At first I thought it was going to be kind of a standard coming-out parable, but no! It turns out that it's also about gender expression, and stars a miniature drag queen named Sharpey! Who totally gets all the best lines, and is in love with her gay brother. Hooray!

I'm going to hell for laughing at this:

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:44:57 GMT

http://xkcd.com/527/

stuck!

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:23:51 GMT

I went in for my couple-of-times annual lithium level blood test yesterday after work. I was in the waiting room for about 20 minutes, which seemed like an *eternity* (sick people, screaming babies, one overly-enthusiastic woman who kept telling her two nearly-teenage sons that they are SO GREAT and SUPER PATIENT in babytalk). UNTIL! I was called back by this completely hot, charming, young phlebotomist. So I gave him my usual schpiel about how I have terrible veins, so he'll probably have to take the sample from the back of my hand, and how I *will* try to pass out, so I should probably lie down. And he was very nice about it. He even brought me a couple of fliers (one about the power of positive thinking, the other advertising CPR refresher courses) to read so as to distract myself from the actual blood-and-needle nastiness going on. Except, of course, he couldn't find a vein. So he called in for some backup! This time, a completely hot, charming, young lady phlebotomist! Who told me stories about getting all squirmey when she had to get shots when she was in the air force, and whose first name was "Sultana". Nice. But she had no luck, either, so they called in a *third* completely hot, charming, young phlebotomist (who kept calling me "ma'am", but whatever). It was just like Scrubs, you know? They each kept referring to themselves as the "Three Musketeers", which was cute, if a little codependent. In short: it took NEARLY AN HOUR to find a suitable vein! Even after running hot water over my arm, etc. etc. Finally they had to take it from the underside of my wrist (eeek!). When phlebotomist #3 was bandaging my poor wrist up, he made a crack about how it was going to look like I had escaped from the psych ward, which was probably not something he would have said if he had known I was getting my lithium blood levels checked, but whatever. Despite its protracted nature, it was certainly the most entertaining blood draw I've had in a long time.

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:14:54 GMT

came across a book at the library, entitled:

"Ethnic Cleavage in a California School".

I suspect this book is not about what I want it to be about.

Lucy Liu

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:52:44 GMT

Standout part of yesterday: T and I went into Sur La Table looking for a nice fondue pot and were helped out by a totally faggy Sur La Table worker with the words "Lucy Liu" tattooed on his forearm. He had been talking to us for a little while when his supervisor came over and kind of bitched him out for whatever reason. As soon as she turned around and walked away, he whispered to us "get it at Crate and Barrel! Their stuff is WAY better!" Hahaha! Thank you, Lucy Liu!