  amber flickr photos 345 wall, the bitchinville broochtastic noise comissioner coat furnace, the inbetween intermeddler matters of little... melancolin... oh, bitter dicta raefried beans red elephant sherrying worldwide starlets...  07/01/2003 - 07/31/2003 08/01/2003 - 08/31/2003 09/01/2003 - 09/30/2003 10/01/2003 - 10/31/2003 11/01/2003 - 11/30/2003 12/01/2003 - 12/31/2003 01/01/2004 - 01/31/2004 02/01/2004 - 02/29/2004 03/01/2004 - 03/31/2004 04/01/2004 - 04/30/2004 05/01/2004 - 05/31/2004 06/01/2004 - 06/30/2004 07/01/2004 - 07/31/2004 08/01/2004 - 08/31/2004 09/01/2004 - 09/30/2004 10/01/2004 - 10/31/2004 11/01/2004 - 11/30/2004 12/01/2004 - 12/31/2004 01/01/2005 - 01/31/2005 02/01/2005 - 02/28/2005 03/01/2005 - 03/31/2005 04/01/2005 - 04/30/2005 05/01/2005 - 05/31/2005 06/01/2005 - 06/30/2005 07/01/2005 - 07/31/2005 08/01/2005 - 08/31/2005 09/01/2005 - 09/30/2005 |
Tuesday, August 31, 2004 things   Sunday, August 29, 2004 question of the day Without asking anyone and without looking it up: How many Baldwin brothers are there? And can you name them? ...so far nobody I've asked has been able to name all of them. pictures of the day    of the day that was a few days ago    Saturday, August 28, 2004 leaf the questioning for the... Sometimes, when there's a plant with a stalk of leaves, only certain leaves will turn yellow, as though one leaf in an area is less healthy than all those surrounding it. I want to know why. I can't see any rhyme or reason to this. Friday, August 27, 2004 4 months to the day... Today is Emily Parker's birthday so a shout-out to her. Emily was my best friend starting around age 5 and even though we went rather separate ways post age 12, we have always been in touch on our birthdays, regardless of circumstance. I am exactly 4 months older than her. She lives in Hong Kong now and is an editorial writer for the wall street journal. Measuring time by the tides.  I came across this photo in an album recently: Emily and I in birthday spirit. This photo is of my 7th birthday party, not hers, but close enough. Thursday, August 26, 2004 am-beer-vision     from yesterday's bizznizz meeting with Richard (Big Pimpin') Hollander, which digressed into beer and digital cameras internal protest I'm not going out to protest the RNC but I appreciate these ads, c/o PrintCritic   Wednesday, August 25, 2004 platform: mantis    almost there I finally launched the new Desmond Tutu Foundation website! (I did the U.S. side of things, but not the S.A. site) It's not ALL done, though. I still have to put the credit card processing stuff in place so people can make donations online and I was rushed to get it done so it's not laying out properly in all browsers. Boo! Time to recode. But it's a relief to be as done as I am. Things got pretty tense recently, trying to make the whole thing perfect all by my lonesome (save for my contact Vanessa at the Foundation who got me all materials and feedback I needed along the way). There was a major push to get it all done because they sent a letter to the Oprah asking for her support and the old site wasn't cutting it. Certainly I wish I'd had more of a heads-up on this instead of just the resulting stress imposed upon me. In any case, I guess Oprah will be looking at my work. The content of this blog gets indexed by search engines VERY quickly and so I must sometimes be wary of proper names, dates and places, lest they become searchable to the internet community. It's happened several times that I write about something one day and then a few days later I'll start getting emails from random people regarding things I've written about (Tasti-D-Lite: the anorexic girl's nasty-ass mecca, and the head of Chucky from the movie Child's Play are popular ones) because they found my blog searching something or another via google or yahoo. At the same time, the vindication aspect of this can be quite lovely. I hope my slander of my old, evil boss has been seen by some looking for info on him. Finally I got some new music today, although not as much as would have been ideal (never is). I've been listening to The Wondermints, The Misfits, The Afro-Cuban Allstars, Beck's 'Midnite Vultures', T. Rex, Pierre Henry, Air, and the new Grandaddy album, ad nauseum. Mostly old favorites. As a gift to myself for getting through the summer semester of classes I bought myself the latest Grandaddy album which I deemed too poppy at first but it's totally grown on me now. Midnite Vultures is an album I hadn't listened to much before, as I had filed it into the mental catergory of mainstream and overproduced (because I'm a snob like that) but I've been finding it to be really good. Today I got a record of early Pixies recordings, Kid Koala's 'Some of My Best Friends Are DJs' and the Saddle Creek comp which has that song by The Faint that I've been wanting so. I really wanted to find a vinyl copy of that Peaches album that's synonymous with Colin's car ("fuck the pain away... fuck the pain away..."), but no dice. Sunday, August 22, 2004 family snapshots   finally some recent pictures of me and sis-o. those who don't already know often can't tell who's older and often think that she is. cute. there's a b&w photo booth at magnetic field now. ...and in other news, Holly finally got hired (like fulltime with benefits rather than perma-freelance) at Teen Vogue! Right now I'm about to launch the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation website which I've been perfecting for quite some time. Even after almost 7 years of doing this stuff, I am still newly surprised at how much goes into it. Once I hear back from my contact that everything is a.o.k., I launch. Hurrah! Friday, August 20, 2004 G(g)od? I finally understand the impetus behind god/jesus freaks on an empathetic level rather than just a distantly judging intellectual one: Wanting so much for something to believe in. Delusion out of desperation. (this doesn't mean I'm going to become one of them) There are so many things to try to or want to believe in. All these possibilities of where to send our subscription cards, even for those of us (like me) who are liberal and disparaging towards religion and the like: myers-briggs tests... the enneogram... palm reading... astrology... christianity... islam... judaism... hinduism... zoroastrianism... scientology... mormonism... the ecstatic church of rock and roll... trepination... voodoo... he said... she said... anarchy... the unidentifying dissidents... This grand scale desire to know the meaning of it all is such a pointless quest. We're here. It's just existential, in two senses. Thursday, August 19, 2004 cat scratch fever In addition to Polly's health problems of late, the vet just informed me that she tested positive for the feline bartonella virus which is the cat scratch fever virus. She must have contracted it from that time Ted Nugent bit her. Otherwise she seems to be doing well. pioneers for international peace can be totally cute too   Tuesday, August 17, 2004 ...  Saturday, August 14, 2004 ... Amber got an A in her critical thinking class. Some people have headgear. Fran could play linebacker for the Raiders. The vet was speculating that Polly has some sort of inflamed bowel thing OR stomach/intestinal cancer. The ultrasound today was not enough to diagnose, and the exploratory surgery/biopsy route strikes me as severe (at least at this point). She came home today with 10 days worth of steroids and the possibility of getting worse and puking and leaking all over the place once again. the past bunch of days       lucas showing rae his knobbed up pink noise box; at the neo-con block party; Polly in her vet's office cell; random unfinshed art in the basement; too much rain Friday, August 13, 2004 feline tears I am very sad right now. My Polly-cat has been sick for 4 days now with no end in sight. She's my special one... my super-evolved fluffy butterball with the extra toes. She's been at the vet's office for the past 24 hours and the vet says she can't come home cause she wont eat and she'll die without the IV or whatever he's giving her. They have no idea what's wrong with her. At first they thought it was a stomach virus but when the antibiotics didn't work they thought that maybe she swallowed a foreign object but now they've ruled that out. I haven't heard any new hypotheses. So far the vet bills have cost over $500 and this doesn't appear to be nearly over. This brings up the interesting question of how much time and money does one spend repairing a pet? I LOVE her so much and I am completely dedicated to her and her health, but feel very pessimistic right now since everything has been inconclusive so far. Recently I've been saying that 4-legged furry pets are too high maintenance and I would only have goldfish from here on in. Prophetic. I think I'm gonna go visit her at the vet's office... see if I can get her to eat something or at least cheer her up.  We were so young together (6 years ago). Thursday, August 12, 2004 I (don't necessarily) want to be sedate(d) I fear that I am becoming someone who deflects feelings of frustration, sadness and anger with humor; a mode of behavior which I generally look down upon. Lately I sometimes become so frustrated that I find it difficult to speak. And on that note, the NYPress has a really funny mock interview with Osama Bin Laden this week: NYP: What's the best thing about being the scourge of Western civilization? OBL: The food. The prosthetic limbs. Getting high and making scary videotapes to send to Al Jazeera. Inventing one's own fucked-up moral calculus and forcing others to live by it.... Tuesday, August 10, 2004 planet rock part of the reason that Grandaddy's music resonates with me more than most bands because of the way the singer sounds as though he misses his home planet but perhaps doesn't know exactly where it is or how to get there. Monday, August 09, 2004 visuals         part of Merry's birthday gift; a pic that got nicely digitally corrupted; the go-go dancer at smashed blocked; beer goggles; 3 sibs; lychee again; inadvertent matt's table photo; amanda and I almost exactly a year ago damn that freud! honesty comes through in our President "[Our enemies] never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." -- George W. Bush, Aug 2004 "This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world." - George W. Bush (Source: The White House) "Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods." -George W. Bush "We cannot let terriers and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile." -George W. Bush "The great thing about America is everybody should vote." - George W. Bush "The important question is, How many hands have I shacked?" - George W. Bush santorum I thought most people knew about the whole santorum thing, but apparently not. Something that I learned this weekend is that if you search 'santorum' in Google, the substance comes up as a result before the senator. Perfect. smoke and crackle Yesterday I put out a fire in the basement of my building. I threw a bucket of water on the fire and the fire jumped back at me so I jumped back, all in a charred and smoky haze. Thursday, August 05, 2004 lychee as jewelry  Wednesday, August 04, 2004 I hate poetry I had not previously known that Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' was a huge and direct inspiration for Ginsberg's 'Howl', particularly in the way lines are broken open to allow as much space and time as needed to express ideas. Despite the fact that I do generally hate poetry, the documentary on Walt Whitman last night proved quite interesting. Containing truth and making me laugh is that Whitman subscribed to Emerson's notion that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds which thus led him to the conclusion that it is okay to contradict the self because the self contains multitudes. heat I'm frustrated right now and it was fun to read this description of what happens when you piss off my 12th of the population in the NYPress last night: Let's talk about actions and their occasionally transformative consequences. Churning milk turns it into butter, compressing coal creates diamonds and drinking too much beer makes you fat. Similarly, if you fuck with a Taurus long enough, you get one of two fairly predictable results: The long-fused Bull either turns into a sullen, immoveable rock, or transmutes into a swift, untouchable black storm cloud. The rock is sturdy but essentially helpless; it just has to sit there and take it. The thunderhead, however, has options and power... Thank god summer classes are almost over. swingers I hate hate hate to say it, but I have never had much faith that the Democrats will win the upcoming election. It's a gut feeling and I hope it's wrong. I will knock on all of the wood in my apartment (a lofty task) after I post this. In the only way I could perceive to check out the accuracy of this notion (at this point, of course), I decided to find out more about the voting and party affiliation ratios in the swing states. Overall, it seems to be somewhat slanted towards Bush, but not overwhelmingly so. The Swing States The Swing State Project (blog) crayola alert Sunday evening I turned on CNN and watched a few minutes of the hulabaloo about this new terror threat apparently targeted at major financial districts, particularly in NYC. The reporters were going on and on about how people would be but shouldn't be afraid to go to work the next day even though the 'terror alert status' had been raised to fuscia or whatever the fuck color says: "we're not quite at red alert, but be scared". Lots of alarmist crap. But, of course, since it was CNN I was watching, they weren't declaring the bottom line (where, what, when...) so in order to become a lil more informed I turned to NYTimes.com where, after getting 3/4 of the way down in an article which seemed to paint this terror threat as material to inspire immediate fear, I found a paragraph consisting solely of the words: According to Ridge, there is no reason for this threat to be considered imminent. The basis of this elevated terror alert is apparently a computer with a bunch of 2-4 year old files captured from a man who is known/assumed to have Al Qaeda ties. I wonder if the administration is still looking into postponing the upcoming presidental elections due to terrorist threats or activity. Hmmm. Sigh. Tuesday, August 03, 2004 designer wax the quotable Holly: "the marriage of records and Chanel! It's like i dreamed it"  (ps: it's a belt) (which my sister now owns) Monday, August 02, 2004 (not so) wild police video  Friday afternoon, on my way to Amanda's house, Terence calls asking me to come and meet him because he has to call the cops on his roomate (but he wont go into why over the phone). So, I meet him in Williamsburg and, LONG story short, his roomate's a complete weirdo, pathological lying dick (descriptions of his behavior sounded preposterous until I witnessed him for myself) who changed the lock on the door and, although he was home watching cartoons with his skanky girlfriend, wouldn't let us in to get Terence's things. So we had no choice but to call the cops to get us in. Although this roomate (well, ex-roomate now... thankfully Terence had previously been aware that he hated this guy so he had already found a new place) is a lawyer who (according to Terence) had nothing (imminent) to hide (or flush down the toilet), and could potentially be disbarred, he refused to let the cops in until minutes upon minutes went by of them yelling at him through the window, threatening to call the squad that blows the door open. Once the cops finally got us in and got their report, we packed up all of Terence's stuff and moved it to his new place (with the eventual help of his mom, sister and brother-in-law, whom it was nice to see again after all these years), me packing boxes and moving furniture, in a little skirt and flip-flops (it was so fucking hot and I was so unprepared for this) trying to be as useful as possible in a place I'd never been to before. By the time I got home I was in la la exhaustion land. FYI: apparently some cops don't seem to mind being photographed or videotaped. I don't know whether there is a mandate on such things, but when they were trying to get the dude to let us in there was some exchange worthy of record so I set my camera to videotape thinking that it would be worthwhile to get the audio even if I didn't point the lens in any particular direction (less risky). But then, I got a little bolder and pointed it at them for a bit and they didn't seem to mind. Still, I didn't press my luck. I have a funny little video but the camera work is complete crap (= largely non-existent) save for a moment or two. ce weekend in photos    eew! merry birthday and Happy Birthday to Merry whether it be yesterday or today. One year I'll remember which. get your speech on After Friday's debacle (more later, still), I arrived home to find Rahmin and Jeff, stuff strewn about, having just finished the following Democratic National Covention speech remixes (really cool, esp. for the short of attention span or those who just want more palatable speech highlights. listen!):
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