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Friday, 20 January 2012 (cut into pieces) 9:49am I can officially declare a lack of pilates ache. Either my body has re-acclimated to that kind of exercise faster than I expected, or I stretched sufficiently yesterday morning, or both. Whichever it is, yay. 11:34am Well, it's about damned time: according to the greensheet for this semester's class, I'll finally get some Dewey Decimal awareness. 3:12pm Marta is back home from school, so I am at her place now. 6:30pm It's cold and raining outside, perfect weather for hot food, but Marta and I are at Hotei and I'm having the cold hiyashi ramen, because I can't not. | ||
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Thursday, 19 January 2012 (please take your hand away) 2:36pm Ha! My post about Further Confusion is now a citation on the Wikipedia entry for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Another avenue for popularity for the show came from the furry community, whose ranks include a large number of animation fans.[67]Dig me, I am reference! (And, perhaps, weep for the further decline of information-gathering in this country.)67. ^ Connelly, Sherilyn (2012-01-17). "Meet the Furries and Fans at 2012's Most Unconventional Convention". SF Weekly. Retrieved 2012-01-17. 9:41pm I had tickets (or at least a vague assurance that I wouldn't be turned away at the door) for tonight's SF Sketchfest kickoff Rifftrax show, but it was sounding like way too much stress, so instead Ilene came over and we watched And Everything is Going Fine and had dinner at King of Thai. That was much more where my mood was at. | ||
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Wednesday, 18 January 2012 (how brittle the bones) 10:05am Finally getting back to work-work, Wikipedia blackout (which is for a very good cause) be damned. 5:21pm At The Grove Fillmore again before Raphaela's pilates class, because it seemed to work out well (so to speak) last time. And, if all goes well, Marta will be joining us after her first evening class. She's goin' to fashion school! 10:16pm She wasn't able to make it to the class, but we hooked up afterward and returned to her place. Meanwhile, I am determined to stretch sufficently to keep last week's monster pilates ache from returning. | ||
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Tuesday, 17 January 2012 (can't take it anymore) 7:41am Wasn't able to get to sleep until after midnight, and I couldn't sleep past seven. That's how my body's been lately. 10:41am The bloodwork is done (after a never-depressing wait in the lobby), and I am now at It's Tops breaking the fast with Susan's Spicy Spuds. From here, shopping and erranding, because I am out in the world and there is shopping and erranding to be done whether I want to do it or not. 12:01pm Nothing unleashes my inner Communist quite like shopping for laundry detergent. Too many choices. 4:59pm I had to nudge my editor some—mainly because he didn't notice it in the queue—but my post for the weekly about Further Confusion is now up. It's my first article since September to be Featured, which means a brief period on the front page of the website, because of the wearing-a-fursuit angle. And why not? | ||
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Monday, 16 January 2012 (one particular moment) 6:31pm This past weekend was incredibly fun, but I'm now looking forward to going to bed well before midnight. (Bonus points if I sleep more than seven hours.) And I also need to not forget that I have a bloodwork appointment at Lyon-Martin tomorrow morning, one of the ones where I have to fast for eight hours beforehand. I think I can manage that. | ||
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Sunday, 15 January 2012 (a thousand details) 5:11pm At Marta's place. We spent the night at the Black Light District, and there was some crankiness between us, largely because we got a late start to the day and I was feeling that anxiousness that I get when there's something I really want to write—in this case, the post for the weekly about Further Confusion—but am not able to. (I even heard Marta comment to Chairo and Jimmy, while was I in the bathroom of the hotel room changing into the nylon bodysuit that I had to wear under the fursuit, that I would probably be all i have to write down my notes NOW when we got home that night. She knows me well.) We got it all worked out, and we've made up. Plus, I have the majority of the article written and the graphics cut, though I'll probably continue to work on it tomorrow morning. Hopefully it'll actually go up tomorrow, but it's Martin Luther King Day, so I have no idea how that'll work. Tomorrow's the last day of the convention anyway, so it would be fine for the article to go up on Tuesday, too. Now, we head into the Mission for Bad Movie Night. Marta's coming with me for the first time in a very long time, plus Ilene and others will be there, and we're going to karaoke at Divas afterward. Why not three late nights in a row? I ain't forty yet. sometime after midnight Holy cow. Nearly full house for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Not as many people as Snakes on a Plane, but more than last week for Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Not getting my hopes up, but here's to hoping we've found a wave. Ilene had a migraine, so the Divas excursion didn't happen, but Marta and I had drinks with Porter at a friend at the Phoenix, so that was next best thing. (I don't think it was quite the table that Ripley and I misbehaved at those many years ago, but it was close.) Porter says that next year, we're going to do Further Confusion right: the four of us will get a suite at the hotel, checking in the night before the convention begins, and leaving the morning after it ends. Sounds good to me. | ||
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Saturday, 14 January 2012 (hidden in the snow) 1:21pm Marta and I had a lateish brunch at Cybelle's, where a sports event of some persuasion is on the teevees. Swell for them. We're now going to work for the next few hours at her place, then return to San Jose for the evening's festivities. Plus, I'm determined to get a new set of ears, which will require getting there before the vendors' room closes. 6:43pm Made it! And, I got the ears. There was also a hat that I was intrigued by, but of course the ones they had at the table were too small for my ginormous head. They do custom orders, though, so I'll be measuring my cranium after the next squidtightening. But we're set for the rest of the night, though I intend to take lots more pictures, and maybe even a few videos. 7:06pm Having dinner at Good Karma Vegan House, which is crunchy even by San Francisco standards, never mind San Jose. 10:32pm We attended the first half of the Masquerade—which was a cotillion, for all intents and purposes, a word I wouldn't even have known if I hadn't read at the TGSF Cotillion for a few years—then Furry Karaoke, and are now at Frolic at Brix. It's a nice enough bar, but it's not The Stud, and even with the presence of so many familiar fursuits and NeonBunny's "Yiff" tapestry, it took us a while to acclimate. Dancing is happening, though. sometime after midnight Sad to be leaving. That's the sign of a good time. | ||
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Friday, 13 January 2012 (what if we could?) 2:14pm As Marta and I were leaving finishing lunch at Cafe Primavera in the San Jose Tech Museum before heading to the Marriott for the convention proper and the tour from Chairo, a very polite tourist came up to us (probably because of my tail and Marta's ears) and asked us very politely what exactly the deal was with all the people she'd noticed the neighborhood with with various bits of animal paraphernalia. I explained it as best I could, though I probably leaned on the it brings lots of money into the local economy! angle far more than I really needed to. 4:31pm I have now worn a full fursuit, never mind the pilates ache. I was a little worried when the head went on that a latent claustrophobia might kick in, but once my brain acknowledged that I could in fact breathe—and Jimmy Chin, whose fursuit "Blip" I was wearing, also confirmed this rather important fact—I was fine, even though it was already stupidly warm in the twenty-second floor hotel room where I did the changing. The temperature was much better when we returned to the convention itself on the first couple floors and walked around. As soon as the head went on, though, either I had an allergic reaction of some kind or my cold from last week suddenly decided to return, because my left nostril turned on like a faucet. I tried to keep the sniffling down to a minimum, but I also tried to not fill the head with my mucus. I think Jimmy had a pretty good idea of what was happening, given the glances he gave me at somet of the louder sniffles, and I apologized profusely when I took the head back off later. He assured me that it would be properly cleaned. And the weekend's just gearing up, though we sadly won't be able to attend the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic events, neither the emergency party tonight nor the official event on Sunday. Not even sure yet if we'll be coming back tomorrow, considering how dead to the world I'm already feeling (only slept for a few hours last night, surely unrelated to the coffeee), and we still have late-night commitments out in the world evening. But it's been super-fun so far, there's more fun and spectacle to be had tomorrow, I don't really feel like I have enough to build a decent article on, and most importantly, our cool media badges are good all weekend. So. sometime after midnight Marta and I returned to her place, had a quiet dinner, and then caught up with Davina, Mouse, Daisy, Liam, and Porter at Little Baobab for Daisy's official birthday pub crawl. We'd hoped they would be in the Castro by then, but no such luck. Even though it's literally (literally!) around the corner from The Dark Room and I've parked in front of it countless times, I've never actually been in Little Baobab before, and I'm in absolutely no hurry to get back. I can't remember the last time I was in a place that felt so aggressively heteronormative. Hell, I can't remember the last time I used the word heteronormative. But this place was it. Great for the straights and the norms, they're welcome to it, but it didn't agree with me at all. From there it was to The Café, which is extremely gay, but also very loud and crowded and still filled with an inordinate amount of straight people. But mostly it was too loud and crowded for our tastes, but Marta and I stuck it out for a good long while, and after wrestling witht he unpredictability of the N Owl, took a cab back to her place. We earned that right. Now, sleep. | ||
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Thursday, 12 January 2012 (pinned and mounted) 11:07am The Q&A with the fursuit maker Chairo (who'll be giving me a tour of shindig tomorrow afternoon) is up. I'm not crazy about the headline it was given, but that's the biz, pretty much. And dig me, I'm in the biz! 1:37pm Oh, there it is. The pilates ache is kicking in. 9:41pm Marta and I had dinner with Davina and Mouse this evening. And tomorrow we go to San Jose for Further Confusion. The muscles I worked out last night are now officially killing me, so that's going to make it all the more interesting. | ||
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Wednesday, 11 January 2012 (people lie all the time) 11:41am My old trainer Raphaela just sent out a mass text about a bootcamp-sounding class she's starting tonight at a place called Athleta on Fillmore near Clay. It's free, at least for the next couple months, and while part of me is smarting a little bit about the fact that she hasn't replied to my previous attempts to get in touch with her (it's not so much Josie all over again so much as it's many, many people all over again), I think I'm going to go. It's scary because it's at a place I'm not familiar with, but that's all the more reason to go. Plus, getting back on the horse and all that. 6:05pm At The Grove Fillmore, getting some work done before Raphaela's class. This part of town feels alien to me, but most do. I'm also experimenting with something I read about for the day job, a jolt of caffeine an hour before an intense workout. Whats the worst that can happen? 9:44pm Raphaela seemed very happy to see me, and the class turned out to be essentially a pilates class with some yoga thrown in. No real cardio to speak of, at least not the kind that requires space and/or machines. Still very intense, at it sucked at times, but that's of course the point. My cognition of my body has always been a tad dissonant—not because of the gender thing per se, but because my residual self-image is six inches shorter and several dress sizes smaller—but when I'm working out, my sense of left and right evaporates. As always, if I'm in a class where a left-side limb and a right-side limb have to do two different things simultaneously, I'm pretty much hosed unless there's someone in my field of vision I can imitate, and barely even then. Keeps it interesting, though. And, as always, the endorphin afterglow makes it all worth it and I'll be going back next week, and as many Wednesdays as I can until the class stops being free. | ||
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