|
Monday, 31 August 2009 (something of a catalyst) 8:03am Doing research for Landing on Water, I'm happy to see that sfgate has archived the Chronicle's big feature article from 1999 on the local goth scene, which I was just beginning to enter at the time. And then there's the somewhat unintentional and definitely unfortunate post-Columbine followup. Both are going to come in handy. 2:11pm Judging from the notices I've been receiving in the mail from her vet, Perdita's long overdue for a checkup. Time to remedy that. Thankfully, they can see her tomorrow. | ||
 | ||
Sunday, 30 August 2009 (what with the whirlwind) 6:59pm Back in town. Marta and I did a lot of swimming in my mom's pool, both on Friday night and on Saturday during the family get-together proper. I was a little self-conscious about my appearance, largely because I'd hoped to be in much better shape than I was, and indeed if I hadn't gotten laid off from Cubik I probably would be because I would have still been going to Gold's a couple times a day not to mention working with Raphaela and hitting Tyrol's spin class. But I've lost that momentum, in a big way, and I haven't even been going to my regular gym these past couple weeks due to an attempt to save money however possible, and that includes buying gas. I probably used up mroe gas than I should have on the way back today, since Marta and I detoured into Santa Cruz for a late sushi lunch at Pink Godzilla, but sometimes you gotta splurge. And that feels like it's going to be my last splurge for a while. Anyway, I'm back in San Francisco just in time to host Bad Movie Night. The feature is Tango and Cash, which is enough to make me want to start driving agian. | ||
| ||
Saturday, 29 August 2009 (the benefit of being true) 2:05pm Thrift-shopping for crockware and canning jars in Fresno. I think I'm officially a grownup now. | ||
| ||
Friday, 28 August 2009 (monkeys braiding thread) 8:01am Wow. Both Ani DiFranco and The Indigo Girls are playing The Tower Theater (on different nights). I like it, but when did Fresno get so dykey? 9:02pm Nightswimming deserves a quiet night. Though a warm night helps, too, and it's not quite as warm as a late-August night should be in Fresno. It's a bit more muggy than usual, too. But Marta and I are swimming in my mom's pool all the same. | ||
| ||
Thursday, 27 August 2009 (monkeys braiding thread) 7:51am From a publisher: Dear Sherilyn, thank you for sending Bottomfeeder. Having lived in SF many years, you've written about a world I once knew well. However, I'm afraid the book is not the right fit for us at the moment. I wish the news were better but the market being what it is has forced us to be especially judicious about acquisitions. But I do thank you for allowing me to consider your work.Dumb stupid Global Financial Apocalypse. There's still a few other publishers I'm waiting to hear back from (particularly the one with the helpful intern, which I suspect is my best bet), and a couple agents as well. And I'm a first-timer, after all. Statistically, I'm right where I should be. 6:26pm Tomorrow, Marta and I go to Fresno. Perdita will not be joining us. | ||
| ||
Wednesday, 26 August 2009 (faux revolution) 11:17am Though my toes have healed enough to allow me to wear my gym shoes, driving out to my gym (and potentially paying a few bucks for the meter) isn't really an option right now, so I went running out at the beach. Power-walking, anyway. I really prefer to be on a machine so I can read and make the time go by much faster and not have to watch out for other people, but that's not how things are right now. Meanwhile, my Victory Garden's green bean plant (provided by c0g) is starting to get productive. My immediate thought, of course, is to pickle it. 12:01pm NPR says the hiring outlook is brighter for the next twelve months. They wouldn't lie, right? 3:31pm This job is so right for me, and it shall be mine, oh yes it shall. Claws out, preparing to pounce... 5:05pm A lot has changed this past decade, but by god, "Skull Time for Kids with Captain Jack" is still on KFJC! Marta's coming over after she gets off work. | ||
| ||
Tuesday, 25 August 2009 (turning points) 2:37pm The intern emailed me the manuscript this morning with her changes, mostly typos and dropped words and such. (I implemented all her suggestions except for one: I still think "invocation" is a better word in that particular context than "invitation.") After an emergency trip to Walgreens to get more printer paper, it's all printed out with a brand-new cover letter for the editor, and now I'm heading to the post office to send it on yet another transcontinental journey. 8:11pm The woman at the Post Office was kind enough to insist on stuffing the manuscript into a five-dollar flat-rate Priority Mail box rather than the ten-dollar one I was prepared to shell out for. I used the savings to go to the hardware store in West Portal and stock up on more mason jars, since I'm definitely using them. I have three new jars of sprouts going, plus I've begun a new batch of kimchi. And, of course, the kombcuha. Things are growing! 11:31pm I've come across something which I was vaguely aware existed but didn't expect to ever see: pictures from the Black Mass Vash and I participated in a few years back, and which I describe in some detail in Bottomfeeder (the story "Malediction and Pee Play," which can be found on my essays page). It was a remarkable experience, one of those rare opportunities that makes me grateful that I've gotten to live this particular life, becuase such weird stuff can happen. I'm glad that there's photographic evidence, even if it's mostly blurry due to the low light, and I'm doubly glad they weren't taken in infrared or whatever setting it is that makes everyone green with shiny eyes, because so much of the ambience would have been lost. In any event, this may be my new favorite picture of myself, and certainly my most Pris-like. (By way of reference, this picture was taken earlier that same evening at my company's holiday party, and was my press photo for a while.) The wide shot is pretty neat, too. | ||
| ||
Monday, 24 August 2009 (you were so close) 9:14am Ugh. So much work to do. (Including finding work.) 4:14pm We really weren't sure what to expect from the event. It's a twice-monthly sex party, one I'd heard about but never actually attended, other than Sadie and I once swinging by many moons ago when her and I used to hang out and do things like swing by parties. (Those were different times.) Marta had been there more recently, and for a longer period of time, and confirmed that it's it's queer-friendly but not at all queer-oriented, which is to say it's generally attended by straight people. Straight, fairly well-to-do people, what some other than myself might be inclined to call yuppies. Hey, I was once youngish and had a professional job in an urban setting, so whatever. And it found that it being a largely hetero crowd wasn't a big deal to me either way. Oddly enough, I find I tend to be more comfortable in an (accepting) hetero scene than in one which intended to be queer—or, worse, dyke-oriented, which generally translates into a majority of butches and/or trannyboys, where I (also oddly enough) tend to feel even more like a second-class citizen. I pretty much cover why that is in my oh-so-controversial Lesbian Podcast interview, but essentially, when there's no room left for you in your assigned ghetto, you might as well walk down Main Street. Anyway, each month is a different theme, and this month's theme was cats. They called it a "Pussy Party," just one of element of it which seemed to annoy an acquaintance of mine who seemed like the type who would otherwise. The sex community is fairly small in this town, especially in terms of events, and I know she's close to the people who run the event. In this case, however, she said she was giving it a wide berth. She didn't like the name of it, how promises one thing—you know, the vaginal sense of the word "pussy"—but delivers another. Then she said in a rather derisive tone: and i can't stand those cat women. you try to talk to them, and all they do is meow and lick their hands. Her distaste was palpable, and I just nodded and tried not to laugh, and marveling at how little she knows about me. Not that I was especially surprised, since I've long been aware that the further one delves into the City's sex community, the more provincial people get, so it made perfect sense that for as one-track as she tends to be about her own scene, she would turn her nose down at another. As a result, Marta and I weren't certain to if the event would actually involve animal roleplaying—those awful women who just meow and lick their hands when you try to talk to them—or if it would just be a lot of people in kitty ears. I pretty much dressed the same way as I always do for anything cat-related, which is not especially sexily, but with the foreknowledge that spending any significant amount of time on my hands knees is rough on the joints. (My toes are only just healing from the show at The Garage few weeks back.) Marta, meanwhile, was also ear-and-tailed, and looking tres sexy to boot. We got there at ten, just as the doors were opening. Marta had a volunteer shift from ten to half past midnight which allowed to her to get in for free. We'd tried to get us both signed up to volunteer, preferably at one of the two-person jobs so we could stay together, but wires got crossed and only Marta got signed up to volunteer. Since the cover charge is a bit steep for me right now—for the first time since I got laid off, I'm really starting to scrape the bottom of my bank account—Marta very kindly paid for me to get in, and I stuck close to her as she went on about her volunteer job of harvesting email addresses. (Which is as good a way as any to meet people.) We mostly stayed in the front section of the club, near the dance floor, only occasionally venturing to other parts of the building, now and again peeking into what Marta referred to as "the scary room"—that is, the orgy room, where the majority of the sex was taking place. As the evening wore on, the population in there grew. There was no roleplaying going on, and everyone we spoke to responded in English, rather than simply meowing and lickng and their hand. Go figure. Costumes were mostly of the ears-and-tail variety, which is fine, it works for me, though a lot of people also painted on whiskers. I've never done that, and I don't especially care to. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I find facial hair abhorrent across the board? Anyway, by midnight the place was packed, and we were told that it was a much busier, more hectic night than usual. It didn't help that they got an influx of first-timers, a field trip from a local swingers group. (I was technically a first-timer as well, but I'm hardly inexperienced at this sort of event.) A few of them had to be turned away because they were dressed in street clothes, and not even especially stylish street clothes. Some of us Even at its busiest, I only recognized two or three people, far fewer than I might have at a similar event at somewhere like The Citadel. Which was fine by me. (One girl bore a striking resemblence to Ennui, and another one was a dead ringer for Vash, which was kinda eerie—same height, build, fashion sense, and actually wearing just enough cat-ish makeup that it took me a few moments to determine that it wasn't her. Unlike other times that I've nearly run into her, however, I didn't get anxious. If she was there, she was there, even if she was there with Dietrich. Whatever. I'm with Marta now, that chapter in my life is officially closed, the manuscript is literally at the publisher, and I've moved on to new things. Been there done that bought the Zippo, as c0g used to say. And probably stil does.) It felt like starting with a clean slate, even if the only people there who expressed any interest in me were boys, and not too many of them at that. Most of the flirts were directed at Marta, and though I would be standing right next to her or hugging her from behind, some wouldn't acknowledge my presence at all until Marta made a point of introducing me. Cursory acknowledgment, and then their attention would be returned to her. I found it more amusing than anything else, and gods know it wasn't the first time I've felt like the hot girl's ugly friend. Used to happen constantly when I was out with Sadie, though that was a different situation because her and I were just friends. (Are just friends.) Whereas Marta and I are a couple, but of course this was a cruising event as much as anything else so we were being cruised. She was, anyway. And though we weren't adverse to hooking up with a third (or fourth!) person, it wasn't something we were actively seeking out, and most of the cruisers in question were men and thus not candidates. A few women seemed like they were checking us out, though it's a fine line between a flirty look and a death-gaze, and we weren't always sure which was which. The general consensus, however, was that Marta and I made an incredibly cute couple. Several people informed us of this fact over the course of the evening. When Marta was done with her volunteer shift, we danced for a while, and she asked me what I would like to do. I told her the truth: I wanted to check out the scary room, so we did. It was a large room filled with beds—mattresses with fitted sheets, anyway—most of which were pushed together, with a few aisles here and there. Most of the surface space was filled with bodies in various configurations, some having sex, some were engaging in light to not-so-light BDSM, some weren't doing much of anything, clearly trying to get their courage up. The only space we could find was in the far corner of the room. I wasn't crazy about it—we were in Rome, and I wanted to be in the middle of the action, not on the outskirts—but it was all that was available. The only real problem was that the space directly next to us was occupied by a rotating assortment of chatterers, which I found incredibly annoying. C'mon, people. This is where the orgy is happening, by some estimations the raison d'être of the whole event. There are other rooms in which you can go to just shoot the shit. Marta and I, on the other hand, got down to business. We were in the place where people were fucking, or where they were supposed to be fucking, and by the gods, we were going to lead by example, local flibbertigibbets be damned. Our energy was a little off—it felt a bit like we were going through the motions in a way that we never quite did back at the Black Light District, but of course this was a very different environment, our first time having private/public sex with each other, and it was just not helped by the people yakking away next to us. (Marta was probably able to tune them out, or was at least not as easilyed annoyed as me.) On the plus side, we were able to drive them away, if only by drowning them out—Marta and I are not quiet, and they decided to relocate to somewhere were they wouldn't have to speak up to hear each other over the down-n-dirty dyke fucking happening a couple feet away. That's my hypothesis as to why they moved, anyway. There were still a lot of people in the room talking about nothing in particular, though. Color me conservative, but I think an orgy room should be like a library: focus on the task at hand, or go elsewhere. I'm not at all suggesting being quiet. Far from it. The louder the better, really. But it should be loud sex, not a discussion of American Idol. In any event, my mellow was not fully harshed, and both Marta and I got to where we needed to be. (It occurs to me that I've only reached orgasm in a sex party environment twice, and in both cases, I was wearing kitty ears. Just one of those things.) As we were putting our clothes back on—because, again, we were in Rome, and there's no point in going to Rome if you stay fully dressed—a new couple moved in next to us, a skanky girl and a douchey-looking guy, but I kinda wished they'd been right there all along. She immediately started blowing him, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the right energy. It would have been even better if he'd gone down on her but you can't have everything. Marta and I returned to the dancefloor and spent the next hour exhausting ourselves of what little energy we still had left, and continuing to collecting compliments about how cute we are togther. (Can't help it, I suppose.) We left a little after three in the morning, and were back at my place and in bed by four on Sunday morning. We were up by ten, which was barely enough sleep for me and far from enough for Marta, though between the sun aggressively shining through the windows and coffe made in her single-brew coffee cone thingy, she was up for the rest of the day. Except when we weren't, since we ended up spending most of the day in bed, making up for all the sex we didn't quite have the night before, staying upright just long enough to make kimchi. We left the house again around five and headed into The Mission for dinner at Sun Rise with Rhiannon, where the vegan chorizo dish hit the spot in all the ways that the non-vegan huevos rancheros failed to at Los Jarritos a few weeks earlier. From there it was to The Dark Room. Marta left just before the movie started, as is her wont—I get the distinct impression movie riffing isn't really her thing—and since I wasn't actually on a mic, I left a little while after the movie started. For some reason, I was exhausted and really needed a good night's sleep. 5:41pm The leafy greens in tonight's salad are courtesy of the nasturtium and buttercrunch lettuce in my Victory Garden. 6:06pm Pete and Sarah have invited me over tonight—they finished the first season of Breaking Bad, which I provided for them, and are dying to get started on the second—but I'm trying to keep my expenses to a bare minimum, including gas, and getting into the Mission eats it up. If all goes well, I won't leave the Sunset until I head to Fresno on Friday. | ||
| ||
Sunday, 23 August 2009 (everlasting everything) 11:07am Other than needing more brine, my red cabbage sauerkraut is coming along nicely. The publishing intern wrote this morning to say that rather than mail back the hard copy of the manuscript with her edits, she's just going to send me the edits electronically. Should save us both a few bucks, at the very least. And it's good to know I'm still on her radar. 9:41pm Sex and kimchi make for an excellent day. | ||
| ||
Saturday, 22 August 2009 (sonny feeling) 11:07am Every few years, I rediscover Tom Lehrer. This is the year that was. 9:35pm Heading to a sex party with Marta to find out if what we've heard about "those cat women" is true. sometime after midnight Much like libraries (which are often loud these days), nobody respects the orgy room anymore. | ||
| ||
Friday, 21 August 2009 (i'll fight) 1:55pm Last night, Marta and I went to RiffTrax LIVE: Plan 9 from Outer Space. Today, my landlord is installing a light in the backyard for my Victory Garden, including a switch on the inside. It's requiring him to cut up my living room wall, but that's okay. 5:24pm I've received a few offers to go out tonight—KrOB invited me to join him to see Inglourious Basterds at The Castro, Pete and Sarah are watching Breaking Bad, and the Lesbian Podcast folks might be hitting Divas—but I'm staying in. It's going to be a busy enough weekend as it is. | ||
| ||