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Saturday, 31 December 2011 (the dreamer is still dreaming) 11:21am Tonight's going to be all about adventure. Marta and I will be meeting with Daisy and Liam at Davina and Mouse's place, and the six of us will the venute via public transportation across the City and into Berkeley for the annual New Year's Eve party that I declined to join Ilene at last year. I doubt tonight's excurison will be as exhilarating and/or painful as 2007, still the banner year, but I'm sure it'll be memorable in its own right. 8:17pm A stranger on the 5 Fulton just offered us glitter. Aaaaand, New Year's Eve has begun. sometime after midnight Turns out limo drivers drive just about as recklessly as taxi drivers. The guy's probably just pissed about having to drive people to the Richmond District. | ||
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Friday, 30 December 2011 (skiffing across the water) 1:37pm Well, that's typical of me. I spent the night and much of the morning at Marta's, then decided to come home for the rest of the day to work. When I sat down to work, however, I discovered that I left my flash drive in her computer (we were watching teevee on her computer from the drive last night, barrelling through The Larry Sanders Show and Cougar Town), and for better or worse I do all my work off my flash drive, so I'm going back to her place. Oh well. I never mind spending more time with Marta, and at least I got a chance to check in on Perdita. | ||
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Thursday, 29 December 2011 (the disappearing dislocation) 9:15am The first of the history-of-kittypr0n articles for the weekly is up. So that's exciting. 4:51pm At Dash with Marta, working on one more work-work article for the marketing guy. Y'know, a lot of people have been bemoaning how awful 2011 was, and I'm the first to admit it had its sucky parts, but it was also the first year I could call myself a professional writer. That's a good year, as far as I'm concerned. 7:15pm Hiyashi for dinner at Hotei. Even by Hotei's standards, there are a ton of kids here. It's still the holiday season, I suppose. | ||
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Wednesday, 28 December 2011 (a list of betrayals) 10:14am That worked out nicely. I did indeed spend the night, and got to get to know Marta's mother a bit better, which is never a bad thing. Now, productivity. 8:32pm Producitivity has been more or less achieved today, including a work-work article for the marketing guy. Now I need to figure out what I'm doing with myself tonight, since my tentative plans to hang out with Ilene fell through, as often happens with tentative plans. 8:47pm New plans! Going to Pete and Sarah's place to watch stuff. I'm going to attempt to turn them on to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, in hopes that the you know how you laughed when you first heard that the new battlestar galactica was actually a great show? this is the same situation, honest logic works. 11:13pm They both laughed in my face several times (nothing new in my life there), and Pete left before we started because had his radio show to do, but by the time we got through the first three episodes, an incredibly resistant Sarah admitted that she was not only enjoying it, but that she was relating to it and it was speaking to struggles in her own life. She also copied over the rest of the episodes I'd brought along on my flash drive. I'm calling that a win. sometime after midnight Well, this was bound to happen. My posts for the weekly are usually based around very short YouTube clips, the vast majority of which I've edited and uploaded my myself, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, there's no problem. It'll get flagged as thrird-party content, but there won't be a problem otherwise, beyond getting blocked in Latvia or whatever. Only once have I had to file a Fair Use claim, and it worked, because what I was doing was fair use, since it was a minute-long clip in a critical/journalistic context. It didn't work this time, though, because the copyright holder rejected the claim, the two videos (minute-long clips from a 1962 Russian sci-fi film that I was using in an article about how the history of the public domain movie we're showing at the SF Sketchfest edition of Bad Movie Night) were pulled for good, and I got this message: Dear lndgnwtr,While filing a counter-notification would get the video back up, it would also allow Lenfilm to sue me. Y'know what? Not worth it. So. | ||
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Tuesday, 27 December 2011 (a precious green notebook) 9:49am As always, I'm heading back to San Francisco just as Perdita starts getting really brave and making herself comfortable at my mom's house (even more comfortable than she was in teh planter.) . I know my mom wishes I could stay for a couple more days, but the time is right to leave. I do feel a little anxious about the fact that I'm still not going to get to see Marta (who's already back in San Francisco, with her mother) until Thursday, but I'll manage. It's Wednesday night that I'm feeling more worried about, since her and Alicia are going out dancing, but I have tentative plans to hang out with Ilene (maybe even dancing somewhere, who knows?), so here's to hoping. 10:26am Oh hai, tule fog. It's been a while. 1:17pm Home! And I may get to see Marta this evening after all, depending on how things work out with her and her mother going to tea at the Ritz and then to Walnut Creek. It's a whole big thing. 8:32pm Heading to Marta's place. She's said I can even sleep over, provided I don't mind the combination of us sleeping in her ex-boyfriend's room (with clean sheets) and with her mother in the other room. What the heck. | ||
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Monday, 26 December 2011 (these escape attempts) 10:32am It's taken a few days, Perdita's finally found a place to plant herself at my mom's house. (Geddit? Because she's in a planter, and...) 12:26pm Just saw this bumper sticker: One Big Awful Mistake, America. In other news, I am still in Fresno. 4:21pm I've been having trouble with two of the articles I've been working on for the weekly, but I managed toswitch gears and slam out a third, about the restoration of Manos: The Hands of Fate. (I have no idea when it'll actually be posted.) | ||
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Sunday, 25 December 2011 (...and the ambulance died in his arms) 6:48pm And we're keeping the other important Christmas tradition, that of having Japanese food for dinner at Edo-Ya. Very important, that. Unfortunately, the service was kind of horrible, but that'll happen, and my sushi (when it was finally delivered, about twenty minues after my mom and her boyfriend got their food) was delicious. As always, I gave the multitudes of people in the teppanyaki room plenty to talk about when I walked through to use the restroom. The actual Christmas-y stuff went pretty well today, all things considered. Nobody from Tom's family was present, which was both sad and a bit of a relief for me, since while I'm usually amused by Tom's wife's openly mixed feelings about being in my presence, the awkwardness would have been beyond even my threshold. My mother insists that Tom's wife—who is a genuinely nice person—cannot possibly have a problem with me because she (Tom's wife) has a gay adopted son that she loves very much. That logic does not hold, because I am not (and have never been, ever) a gay boy, and gay boys are not at all the same thing as trans girls. Apples and oranges, as they say. And, really, I think the issue is less to do with me being trans and more to do with my open weirdness and profane-ness and un-Christian-ness. Might explain why Tom's wife totally blocked me on Facebook. But it doesn't matter either way. | ||
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Saturday, 24 December 2011 (the somnambulist in an ambulance) 7:13am Woke up to this email from Jonco, sent out to the family, to the effect that our brother Tom was in a car crash last night slash early this morning. He's in the hospital awaiting surgery on his leg, doesn't remember what happened, and the car is totaled. Yeesh. That's a lousy way to start Christmas Eve, especially for him. 8:22am Turns out that in addition to driving with a suspended license in a car that only had his wife's name ont he registration, Tom had been drinking in spite of being officially clean and sober thanks to the grace of his god since the mid-90s, and has been doing so on the sly for a while now, in addition to other behaviors unbecoming of a married Christian man who wears his religion on his sleeve (and has never been particularly humble about how he's saved and everybody else isn't). Whooboy. And it's all hitting my mom extremely hard. She's always had more faith in him than the rest of us combined, and this is tearing her up. I'm mostly just digusted with him. Not very Christian of me, but then again, I've never claimed to be. 2:22pm The incident made the Channel 30 news (hey, I remember Channel 30! Except they were CBS when I was growing up, not ABC, which was very important to me once upon a time), including video of the crashed car. Tom's name is not mentioned, to my mother's understandable relief. FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- A pursuit by Fresno County Sheriff's Deputies ended when the driver crashed his car in Central Fresno.Meanwhile, he's out of surgery and in stable condition, and isn't even in the Intensive Care Unit, in spite of the severity of the accident—which, by all rights, should have killed him, and it's an amazing stroke of dumb luck that nobody else was hurt or killed. In any event, a rib, his clavical and a femur were all broken (and the latter now has a shiny new rod attached to it), along with various cuts and bruises, and most ickily, fluid around his lungs. Jonco and our mom have been to the hospital a couple times already—including around four this morning when one of Tom's step-children showed up on our doorstep—but I haven't been asked to go, nor do I expect to, and most importantly, nor do I want to. I would not bring the correct energy, not by a long shot. 5:52pm I haven't been able to focus myself enough to get any substantial writing done today, but I've still been determined to be productive, so I've finally uploaded all twenty-two episodes of kittypr0n to YouTube and put them into playlists. That's something. 8:14pm It was looking a little dodgy for a while there, but an important tradition has been preserved: going out for Italian food on Christmas Eve. (Last year it was the night before Christmas Eve, and that worked, too.) We went to Ovidio's, as we often will, joined by Heather and eventually Barefoot. As we were being seated, the waitress gushed about the squid, and I returned the favor by telling her how genuinely happy I was to see the word "tentacles" on their menu. (For the calamari, obviously, and which I didn't order because I'm pretty sure nobody else would have gone near it.) As we were finishing up, the waitress showed me a picture of her five year-old daughter with a Piccoli Doll, saying my hair reminded her of the doll's hair. I took it as a compliment, and I found it especially hilarious that before she prefaced showing me the picture with please don't take this the wrong way, but... Upon returning home, we then went for our also-traditional walk through the neighboorhood to see the luminaries, which is to say, the white paper bags with candles in them placed along the street for a several-block radius in order to guide the baby Jesus he comes in for a landing in his rocket-powered sleigh. Or something like that. | ||
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Friday, 23 December 2011 (colour sound oblivion) 12:14pm My second (2nd!) Christmas-related post for the weekly is up, this time about the It Happened One Christmas, a 1977 made-for-teevee knockoff of It's a Wonderful Life. And people say Bad Movie Night doesn't show that film the proper respect? They have no idea. Meanwhile, I'm finally trying to write about kittypr0n for the weekly. This is proving more difficult than I'd anticipated, especially because there's a lot to say and not many words allowed in which to say it. It'll be a multi-part series, at least. 8:12pm Jonco and I did our traditional drive down Huntington Blvd. tonight. The rich people aren't putting much effort into it this year. I mean, sure, recession and all, but really. sometime after midnight I should have gone to sleep by now, especially since I want to make tomorrow a productive day, but I'm still behind on The Soup as well as Modern Family and Beavis and Butt-head and The Big Bang Theory. And I'm on vacation, damnit. | ||
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Thursday, 22 December 2011 (the difference between) 9:44am Perdita's in her carrier, much to her chagrin, and we're driving to Fresno. I'm actually looking forward to it, except for the "driving" part. 4:04pm In Fresno. There's a lot to be said for getting the pronoun slip out of the way in the first ten minutes, I think, and they of course immediately corrected themselves. 8:34pm Perdita's adjusting to being here much faster than she usually does—she's already investigating the living room, and that usually takes a few days. A good sign, I think. Also, the semester grades are finally in: I got an A! I've only taken the one (graded) class so far, but this is still the first time I've ever had a 4.0 GPA—and gods know I was worried for a while there that I wasn't going to pass the class at all—so I'm gonna this hard-earned victory. I'm also determined to maintain that 4.0, even when I start taking more than one class at a time. Probably because there's not a whole lot else going on that's inexpensive, Bad Movie Night's next few weeks have been getting some decent writeups, including Christmas with the Kranks on Christmas Day on Scoutmob (which I've never heard of), and Snakes on a Plane on New Year's Day on both FunCheap SF and The SF Weekly's Night and Day section, the latter of which I knew was going to happen because I supplied my editor with the picture. Hopefully this increases the chances of people actually showing up. Meanwhile, I'm getting caught up on The Soup and cutting up Bad Movie Night graphics. Relaxing, in other words. | ||
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Wednesday, 21 December 2011 (farther into the sun) 12:01pm My first of two (again, 2!) Christmas-related posts for the weekly is up, this first one about Liberace's 1954 Christmas show. Bad Movie Night at SF Sketchfest now has its own page, complete with a blurb (which I wrote and rather enjoy) and a picture. The picture is from 2007 and Jezebel can be seen sitting next to me, but it does the job. 6:54pm Having dinner at Masala Dosa with Marta and her mother, the latter of whom I'm meeting for the first time. This was bound to happen eventually. Less likely to happen eventually is Marta's mother meeting my mother, but it's going to happen this Monday. Her and Marta are going to be spending Christmas in Merced with relatives, and then drive down to Fresno. Things are gettin' real! Earlier today, I asked Marta if should try to not make references to us having been together prior to this summer, since so far as her mother knows that's when Marta and her boyfriend broke up, and her mother is not aware that Marta and I have been dating since well before then—while Marta was still with said boyfriend and everything. Marta said I should just say whatever comes to mind and she would deal with whatever fallout might occur. I appreciated that, since I've never been happy with the downlow thing. (Okay, sure, there was maybe a night or two at the Phoenix with Ripley, but that was totally different.) 10:21pm That went well, I think, and when Marta was walking me back to Phoebe afterward, she said that I was "very charming." So there's that. | ||
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