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Sunday, 31 July 2011 (dreaming of the edge of the knife) 3:31pm Marta and I had dinner with Davina at Basil Thai, which is probably going to be our regular pre-Perverts Put Out dinner place for however long I'm continued to ask to read at it (and for all I know, this may be the last time). The show itself was pretty great, and my gym buddy Rita came to see me. She enjoyed herself, though she was surprised by the relative lack of sleaze—usually there's at least one nude person in the audience, but there was no noodlety to speak of. I bought Davina's belt off her, since it's a style I've been looking for, and she said it was too big on her anyway. Buying a belt off a cute girl at an erotica reading? That right there, that's hella sexy. (We also got a little smooch time in as well.) A close-talker with an odd accent cornered me after that show and insisted that he'd seen me at the old Center for Sex and Culture, but that I not only looked very different, I read a long and rhyming poem about my life story, and that I'd mentioned in that I "used to be into girls." Not matter how many ways I tried to explain that he must have been thinking of someone else, since I don't do poetry or rhyming and I would most certainly never to say that I used to be into girls because of the fact that I've never not been into girls—shooting meaningful looks at Davina, who was standing next to me, in hopes that he'd make the connection—he would not accept that he was thinking of someone else. Later, I realized that this guy had seen me read before, and had in fact cornered me at Transtastic way back when and made me explain to him the difference between gender and orientation. Apparently he's still hung up on that, and just can't grasp that I like girls. Alas. Marta and I took Davina back home, coming up for a while to have a martini with her and Mouse, then returned to the Black Light District to crash. We had lunch this afternoon at Curry Village, an Indian restaurant in her new neighborhood, and she met with her ex-boyfriend/still-roommate and their new landlord to take care of some stuff about their new apartment, which they're moving into next weekend. Marta and I are at Borderlands now, because it's Sunday afternoon. 11:44pm Oh, hooray. Great turnout at Bad Movie Night for Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated The Lord of the Rings. I still remember being dragged to see it when I was five years old because everybody else in my family was into Tolkien. Me, not so much. | ||
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Saturday, 30 July 2011 (folded space) 10:52am Davina will be joining Marta and I for dinner before the show tonight. And then the show itself, of course. Should be fun. | ||
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Friday, 29 July 2011 (premonitions of circular clouds) 9:13am Bootcamp never doesn't feel like the most brutal one ever, but damn, that felt like the most brutal one ever. I deserved it, though, as my nutritional discipline has not been good this week. And it was the boy instructor, who I'm warming to a little. I might as well, because he's going to be around. 5:28pm Holy cow. I just got asked to be an arts blogger for one of San Francisco's weekly newspapers. Paid, even. Not a lot, and certainly not enough to live on, but it all adds up, and it'll be both great exposure and resume food. I'm not sure yet what the time commitment is going to be, but I can make it work, even with school and everything else (including writing for Pretty Queer as well). I dropped out of the Star Trek play because it's just not the best use of my time for the next few months, since theater and acting is not a priority, but this sort of thing—a paid writing gig, and in my own voice under my own name—is. I do believe the road has risen up just a little to meet me. Thank you, road! | ||
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Thursday, 28 July 2011 (mantis intentions) 11:23am Worked out with Rita this morning. She said she's going to be at Perverts Put Out this Saturday night. I think she'll enjoy it. Continuing to burn through this week's work in order to get my paycheck into an acceptable range, while shit continues to get real: I just had my first email exchange with one of my SJSU instructors regarding textbooks. Scary. 10:22pm On their way to me from Amazon: The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and a soft-rubber full cheek snaffle bit. That sums up 2011 in a lot of ways. | ||
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Wednesday, 27 July 2011 (carapace hides the delicacy) 9:07pm Got a few of the new set of articles done this morning, did some erranding with Marta and dropped her off at her place, and now I'm back home and continuing to work-work. I'm really trying to develop a "be productive for a couple hours after dinner" discipline, because I know I'm going to absolutely need it in the monts (and years) ahead. | ||
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Tuesday, 26 July 2011 (achilles' last stand) 3:48pm At Borderlands. My article pitches were accepted, and I'll be getting started on them tomorrow. Now, I work on the story, and tonight Marta and I are going to watch Breaking Bad with the Goldies. Among the things I did this morning to be productive while I couldn't actually work-work was to check in on the Leather-Levi Weekend 2011 attendee website to see if we could finally sign up for our volunteer shift. We're paying to go, as is everybody, but of course everybody still has to volunteer for something because that's how these things are. Not many people have actually signed up for their shifts yet (probably because the system was down for a long while and they weren't all checking it as obsessively as me), so Marta and I were able to snag a couple of cherry spots in setup—specifically, helping to load a truck in San Francisco on Thursday morning before it actually heads to up to Saratoga Springs for the event. It'll be nice to get the volunteering over with right off the bat and not have to worry about it for the rest of the weekend. | ||
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Monday, 25 July 2011 (can't get away) 10:14am This new work-work project is another one of the ones where I have to pitch the articles—shouldn't that increase my pay rate or something?—and I've done so, just enough to bump my check up to a liveable amount, and not more than I can reasonably expect to finish by the end of the month. Now, waiting. And by "waiting," I mean working my own writing. I could start working on the work-work articles, in theory, but there's no guarantee that pitches will be accepted, and therefore no point. 1:26pm For graciously putting up with Janeway's rambunctiousness last week, the boy upstairs has given me a thank-you card and a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream. Sure, why not? My new article on PrettyQueer.com is live. It's essentially a rewrite / expansion of this diary entry from February, but everything comes from somewhere. 9:35pm Done with the story. The current draft is 4,460 words, so, some editing is going to be called for to make a version that firts into the twelve minutes I'll have at Perverts Put Out. But this version is valid creature, too, and will most likely end up in a book. | ||
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Sunday, 24 July 2011 (vanilla and beyond) 9:33am A little better today. Better enough that I can sit up and write in bed, though I don't think I'll be hitting Borderlands today, and I'm out of the house by six either way for Bad Movie Night. 4:28pm Shows how much I know: I'm at Borderlands after all. I'm in full "go on about my business and act like I'm healthy in order to fool my body into being healthy" mode. I forgot my favorite pair of noise-blocking earmuffs, unfortunately—and right after Marta fixed them for me, no less!—but that's okay. One of the reasons I get so much work done at Borderlands is that they don't play any music. At all. God, that's nice. I can't really think of going back to Green House at this point, because for all the other great things about it, it was always far, far too loud. Silence is nice. Also, I am old. 6:22pm Over 3,100 words into the story, and not quite done yet. 11:33pm Ugh. Extremely minimal turnout for Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, disappointing after the crowd at Conan the Barbarian last week. Daisy did show up her with her oldest son and Davina's daughter, though, so that was cool. After running the show for five years, it's lovely to think that I may finally have friends who are regulars. | ||
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Saturday, 23 July 2011 (down by the seaside) 4:03pm Just got back from taking Marta home. I'd considered pushing my luck at Borderlands, and brought my laptop along just in case, but decided against it. Better to try to rest up and heal. And probably finish watching the first season of The Wire, which I've been slamming through lately. | ||
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Friday, 22 July 2011 (over the hills and far away ) 9:04am Nope. Still have the cold, even post-Bootcamp, at which I sweated a lot. I have a sneaking suspicion that it's stress-related from the Jury Duty ordeal, combined with being in Santa Cruz on Wednesday—which was a great deal of fun, but also involved a lot of walking in the sun, and the net result was my defenses being lowered and the nasties sneaking their way in. That's how it goes. But I will be productive today, work-work-wise. 12:42pm Yeah, or not: my supervisor just wrote to say that the current project is officially dead. He'd been hinting at its dying status all week long, but I kept at it, because I have to get paid, and my current invoice is extremely eager, even by my standards. 3:11pm Okay, whew. He'd said I might not get a new assignment until next week or the week after, but I politely explained my situation, and he's letting me in to the new project early. It's good to have a good relationship with one's mysterious employer. The problem, of course, is that I'm sick and just keep getting sicker. That's making it difficult to sit down and work. I'm picking up Marta in a little while anyway. 7:31pm We made chili spaghetti like my father used to make, but using fake meat, of course, and watched the first two episodes of My Little Pony® Friendship Is Magic™, which we keep hearing good things about, both from likely sources like people at the Roundup as well as slightly less likely sourches, such as the The AV Club, whose comparison of it to the new Battlestar Galactica (in the sense of it being an excellent show which it's difficult to convince people to watch because of the baggage carried by the title or the ludicrous-sounding premise) sold me. And it is far better than it has any right to be, though it'll be best in small doses. Next up: Close Encounters of the Third Kind one of the many movies on the Marta-has-never-seen-but-should list. | ||
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Thursday, 21 July 2011 (stay down) 3:05pm Back to the gym this morning. Didn't go on Tuesday morning because I hardly slept on Monday night when I remembered that I had to go the courthouse on the next morning, and I was still plenty stressed on Tuesday night, so no bootcamp on Wednesday morning. Though I'd promised Rita over email that I would be joining her this morning, I almost didn't, for what I think is actually a good reason: the backyard hose turned on at five this morning, right as I was getting up anyway. But it's not when Marta usually gets up, and at first we thought that it was one of my upstairs neighbors' housesitters—the kids themselves are out of town right now—but it turned out it was Janeway who did it. And when wolves, or even their non-union domestic equivalents, learn to turn on water faucets, opening doorknobs can't be far behind. She was spazzing out, thus making it impractical to climb through the window into the backyward to turn off the water, and it was still running when I left for the gym. And when I returned, though by the time we were leaving the house for real, one of the sitters arrived—the boy's mother, to be precise, who took such a shine to me before, and she was more than a little apologetic, both about the fact that Janeway turned on the water and also busted through the wood that was put up under the stairs to keep her out of the entryway. Oh, wolves. On the plus side, I got out of jury duty. I wasn't among the first twenty people they called to be interviewed (out of the seventy or so of us), but I had to sit and wait while they prosecuting lawyer interviewed each of those twenty, which may well be one of the most boring things I've ever encountered. (Thankfully, I was able to read Buy The RV, We Start Tomorrow on my iPhone's Kindle app.) The judge made it very clear that if anyone needed to ask for a hardship dismissal, they needed to do it right now or forever hold their peace. I hadn't been plannning on doing it, but Marta had been encouraging me to do so, so I gave it a shot, citing both the fact that my livelihood depends on how many words I produce on any given day, plus the fact that the trial is expected to last through the first week of August, which is also my first week of SJSU classes. That was apparently enough, and I got excused. Hooray for small miracles. I'm aware of the fact that it's only a six-month deferral and my name goes back into the pool after that time period, and that if I'd simply waited out the process and not been selected I'd be out of the pool for a year, but, well. Couldn't really take that chance. Headed into the Mission afterward, where I had lunch with Marta and half-dozed at her place. I'm stupidly tired today, but I'm not going to let that stop me from being productive. I've declared today a wash as far as work-work goes (though I pounded out a few articles on Tuesday and Wednesday), but it's time to get started on my story about the Roundup, especially since I'm going to be reading said story a week from Saturday at Perverts Put Out. The circle of life and all. So I'm at Borderlands now, soy latte at my side, attempting to put the words in the right order. 5:05pm 1,414 words into the story, probably none of which will actually be part of what I read at Perverts Put Out since it's all buildup and exposition and details so far, but it's an important start. Homeward now. 8:24pm In addition to be tired all day, I think I'm developing a bit of cold. Hopefully, I'll burn it out of my system at Bootcamp tomorrow. | ||
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