Does this mean you're on the verge of an emotional nervous breakdown when this song gives you crying jags?

Malibu by Hole

Crash and burn
All the stars explode tonight
How'd you get so desperate
How'd you stay alive
Help me please
Burn the sorrow from your eyes
Oh, come on be alive again
Don't lay down and die
Hey, hey
You know what to do
Oh, baby, drive away to Malibu
Get well soon
Please don't go any higher
How are you so burnt when
You're barely on fire
Cry to the angels
I'm gonna rescue you
I'm gonna set you free tonight, baby
Pour over me
Hey, hey
We're all watching you
Oh, baby, fly away to Malibu
Cry to the angels
And let them swallow you
Go and part the sea,
yeah, in Malibu
And the sun goes down
I watch you slip away
And the sun goes down
I walk into the waves
And I knew
Love would tear you apart
Oh and I knew
The darkest secret of your heart
I'm gonna follow you
Oh baby, fly away,
yeah, to Malibu
Oceans of angels
Oceans of stars
Down by the sea is where you
Drown your scars
I can't be near you
The light just radiates
I can't be near you
The light just radiates

The cute strawberry blondie boy was in my bible class this morning, and I was so shocked and freaked out. I was thinking I should've plunked my fat arse right next to him and start up a conversation but I'm way too stressed about my grandma dying to be thinking about getting to know some guy.

At least I was dressed okay, with my thigh high silk short skirt, two inch heels and hose, and semi-fitted sweater. I would've been felt worse if I was dressed like a slob, and at least I looked good I think.

Then after class he was right there in the social hall before the service started, and I was willing myself to go over to him and say something, but I just can't deal with the stress of having to meet someone new right now.

That old bible phrase kept going through my head, "knock and it shall be opened unto, seek and you shall find, etc". I had a perfect opportunity to introduce myself to the cutest single man I've seen walk into that church in years, and I blew it because I'm stressed out.

I'm bad, I'm so bad. So what do I do instead? I start talking to the ex-catholic brother guy who attends church, and I start telling him about the bad catholic sermon I heard on Thursday.

It was a total missed opportunity on my part, and another example of how my timing is so bad when it comes to men most of the time.

My only hope is he comes to bible class next couple of Sundays, and hopefully I'll get used to him being there and I'll calm myself down enough to introduce myself.

Too bad ex-catholic brother man isn't that attractive because I really like him. He's so spiritual, and really, really smart and really, really sweet guy to boot. Who knows if he even has thoughts in that direction anyway, since he was a catholic brother for 25 years.

This is all a moot discussion for me anyway. I'm like way to stressed out to even be thinking about starting a relationship.

I know when I go see my grandmother, I think I am leaving in two weeks, that emotionally I'm going to be a mess. I'm already an emotional mess as it is, and it can only get worse because even though I know I'll still see my grandma while she's still alive, it's only a matter of time before she dies.

And when she dies, I know I'm going to turn into a basket case and need time to mourn and reassess my life, and do all the things you need to do when someone you've loved all your life dies.

The next three months are definitely going to be an emotionally trying time for me, just when I thought my life was starting to calm down a little bit. The last thing I need is to get involved with some guy right now.

Grandma Update

They took her off the respirator yesterday, and she seems to breathing fine. Angioplasty was successful, and now they just need to watch her. Still it's touch and go I guess, until the doctors say she can fly home.

I'm planning a trip home in the next month or two, depending on what happens next with her care.

After 9/11, the media reported that people were feeling the urge to merge and were merging like there was no tomorrow, I guess because that's how some people felt.

I had the opposite reaction. If things had gone from bad to worse after 9/11, I knew I would survive better on my own than with someone I barely knew.

Now with this family tragedy, I'm feeling this overwhelming urge to merge. But I've had crisis boyfriends before, and although they've provided wonderful soft landings, the question becomes what do you with them after the crisis is over.

Because after every crisis, I started to not like every crisis boyfriend I was dating. It's not like I did it on purpose, it just happened that way. Crises tends to impair my judgement in a serious way, and I'm not sure I want to go through a stress of a lapse of judgement.

I just saw the movie "2 Fast 2 Furious", and I totally loved it. I think I'm going to have get both "The Fast and the Furious" and it sequel "2 Fast 2 Furious" on DVD.

They're probably the kind of movies I should be embarrassed to own, but I love them like I love the movies "Predator 1 & 2". I don't know why, and I don't really care either.

"2 Fast 2 Furious" definitely makes it to my top chick flick list, along with "Black Hawk Down". "Top Gun", "Matrix", "Matrix Reloaded", "The Fast and the Furious", "The Crow", "Triple X", and both "Lords of the Rings" movies.

Wow, the blondie boy was so cute, and Tyrese had this unbelievable body. And all those great racing scenes, car chases, and car crashes, and a killer soundtrack with bump and grind rhythm and groove. What's a girl not to love?

I'm starting to doubt whether I should order shoes online. I ordered a pair of shoes which I just received, and I specifically ordered them because the website said the heel was 2 inches. I love 2 inch heel shoes; I feel so tall in them and they look fantastic with short skirts.

I received the shoes today, and the heel is not 2 inches but 1.5 inches. I even measured it myself with a ruler and compared them to my other shoes with 2 inch heels.

So I'm on the phone with customer service, and a guy answers, and I'm like having a apoplectic fit because I don't think he gets that half an inch makes all the difference in the world for a woman's shoe.

He then tells me that if I had ordered the shoe by phone, I would have gotten the correct the heel height because his order screen said the shoe had 1.5 inch heel. And I'm like, why is it wrong "your website", is that my problem or yours?

So of course, I had to order another pair of shoes with a 2 inch heel, and I asked him three times to make sure the shoe had a 2 inch heel.

The shoe I ordered with the wrong heel height is so cute too, that I can't decide if I want to return it. I'm thinking the shoe might look great with pants or jeans but never with skirts, long or short.

I'm sure the male customer service rep was thinking, half an inch, what's half an inch on a shoe. But half an inch makes all the difference in the world on a shoe worn with a very short, thigh high skirt, and even a long skirt as well. Ask any woman!

Here's the shoe, Isabel; stylish but from a comfy brand.

Facing the death of a loved one and silly childhood thoughts

My aunt in Florida got me started on this track. My aunt is convinced that if she goes to see grandma, that grandma will die. She said that grandma told her she wanted to see her one last time before she died, and that was two years ago.

My aunt got me all freaked out, because here's what grandma said to me. She said she would stay alive until I got married again. Grandma is old fashioned, and she thinks that women can't survive in the world unless they're married.

So I'm thinking, because this is what you do when you're indirectly staring death in the face, that I wonder if I've stayed unmarried all this time to keep grandma alive.

It's a silly thought and very childish I know, but I wonder if this belief is living somewhere in my brain. I mean after all, who wants to see their grandma, my second mommy die.

See the problem is, when you have two mommies you have to experience your mother's death not once but twice. Mom # 1 is dead, and that experience haunts me to this day.

I know there's some childish part of me that wants to delay the death of mommy # 2 as long as possible, and if mommy # 2 said she wouldn't die until I get married again, why not just not get married. Then mommy # 2 will live forever.

Childish, isn't it?

My friend, who I went to West Virginia with and who I play "spot the mullet with whenver we go out, are going to see this movie called American Mullet.

My friend always wins because she's totally into mullets. She even sends me mullet haikus whenever she finds them on the Net.

West Virginia was fun because we could play "spot the mullet" every day. Best places for mullet sightings in the SF Bay Area are at sporting events like Giants and A's baseball games, football games, and county fairs.

So that was my bad catholic sermon rant.

Things I miss about the Catholic Church:
beautifully decorated churches
all that wonderful stained glass
the statues
the stations of the cross art
prayer candles
altars to various saints galore
lots of services to attend because there are times in one's life when you have to go to church every day
kneeling - I always found kneeling very spiritual, don't ask me why. We don't kneel in protestant churches.

Things that I liked about this catholic church:
a very racially diverse congregation (way more than my protestant church)
the church has a sunday mass in cantonese and one in arabic
confessionals that say "Hearing Aid"
confessionals in languages other than english
confessionals that say "face to face"

Things I like appreciate more about my protestant church:
sermons that remind me of my childhood catholic church
bibles in the pews (catholic churches have no bibles in the pews)
great music and choir
for a protestant church, mine has a ton of stained glass windows and a giant mosiac of Jesus, and yes the fact that we faintly resemble in decoration a catholic church does come up once a year. Most protestant churches are very plain.
My church has communion every other week, which is way more than a lot of protestant churches

One last thing. If the catholic church believes that during the communion the bread and wine actually turn into the body and blood of christ or transubstantiation, can the priest act like the miracle that this is, instead of a "I'm so bored with communion" delivery.

Transubstantiation is a "miracle" darn it! Like the resurrection, it's like "amazing, glorious and unbelievable." Can't we at least treat it like the miracle that it is, instead of delivering the service in this "haven't we done this is all before and isn't it boring" way. I hate rote robotic delivery of the church service, no matter what the religion is.

See, this the fault of my childhood catholic priests. They took their catholic service rituals and their religion deadly serious. Communion was like delivered in a hush, like "this is such a miracle". In fact, the whole service was delivered in this, what I can only describe as totally spiritual.

My childhood catholic priests did everything during the service with gratitude and they preached that church and service was something you should feel priveleged and grateful to attend.

I still feel that way. I go to church on Sunday, and sometimes I still feel that I feel blessed that I have faith and that I can sit in a Sunday service and worship with other people.

There is no feeling to describe going to the church of your childhood, and hearing one of the worst sermons you've ever heard in your life. I'm sitting there thinking, this is why I don't go to catholic church.

In a good way, I feel totally vindicated in deciding to worship at the church that I do, and in a bad way, I cannot help but feel sadness that I cannot worship at the church of my childhood.

Maybe I just had priests growing up who were black sheep, different from the typical catholic church priest. My childhood priests preached great sermons, preached the biblical text and showed how to relate it and make the ancient word of God viable in our current life.

My childhood priests never ever politicked from the pulpit in the form of a sermon. They preached the word of God straight from the biblical text, much like a presbyterian priest does. And when my presbyterian minister tried to politic from the pulpit, he gets dinged for it by the congregation.

Okay, so here's what the priest at the 8:45 am mass sermonised about today.

The old testament text was the Genesis story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar. Sarah couldn't get pregnant, so she asked Abraham to produce a child with Hagar. Hagar starts getting all haughty and everything, so Sarah throws her out. Hagar gives birth to Ishmael, and according to one recent author, Abraham through the birth of Ishmael gave birth to the Arabic race.

There are lots of way to preach this problematic piece of old testament text. Here's what the catholic priest chose to talk about.

1) the pro-life position
2) why the catholic church opposes not only stem cell research, but genetic engineering and research science in general, because it's tinkering with God's plan for us.
3) why luxury is bad and poverty is better.

How he got these three points from the Genesis story, "only God knows", but then he went on.

Tomorrow the church is having a mass for Father Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, so the priest talked about that.

The priest He was in Rome for the canonization of Father Escriva de Balaguer and had a ticket to even go to the canonization, but he didn't go because 1) it was cold in Rome since it was October and 2) Father Escriva de Balaguer is a controversial saint.

The priest decided to take the train the Milan instead. But he concluded his sermon by saying that what he liked about now Saint Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer was his emphasis on the centrality of Eucharistic thought.

Thank your Mr. Priest.

My catholic roots are showing. There's a big catholic church six blocks from where I now live. It must have a big congregation because it has four services on Sunday. That's a lot.

Anyway, I checked it out yesterday on the way home from my own church's Wednesday service, where I lit a candle for my grandma and asked the congregation to pray for her health.

But old childhood habits die hard, so I'm off to the 8:45 am service at St. Anne's. They had an earlier service at 6:30 am, but that was way too early for me.

I'm going to have get used to attending catholic services again anyway, because if and when I fly home I'm probably going to be attending catholic mass ever yday with the family.

The family back home is very, very catholic, and yes they know I attend a protestant church, which is so sinful and scandalous in their eyes. But they don't bug me about it too much, because I've always attended catholic services with the family when I'm home. I just don't take the communion, which totally freaks them out as well, but I think they're just happy knowing I'm at church with them.

It's 94 degrees in downtown San Francisco, and it's pretty hot here at the coast as well. Wow, a real summer day in San Francisco.

I'm thinking I need to write about my whole family history. It's so complicated, and I've been trying to piece it together for years.

Let's just say my biological mom was a "hippie lettuce smoking, drug taking air headed hippie chick" type, except she was born way too early for her type. And when you're a pioneer in a still somwhat scandalous type of woman, born into a "good family", well it gets complicated, real complicated, very fast.

Let's just say my mom was the type of person who experimented with more than her fair share of whatever illegal drugs were available at the time. Today, she'd be a normal college girl. Back then, she was a pariah to everyone and especially to her snobby stuck up family.

My mom is really why I have "inner hippie" in me. It's in my genes.

I just found out my grandma is in the hospital. Maybe that's why I've been feeling homesick.

So here's my weird family story, although I understand this situation is becoming more common.

My grandparents practically raised me, because of issues with my mom, my dad and my step-dad. It's all very complicated, but it worked in a way that situations like this have to work.

My grandma is like my second-mom, probably more my mom than my real mom. I'm sure this is the way that divorced kids feel about their step-moms.

Anyway, grandma had heart failure and since she's old (she's 88) and has other health issues, heart surgery is a problem. What they can do is an angioplasty, which will clear the blockages in her veins thereby extending her life for a little while longer.

I have a feeling she's going to be okay, that she'll pull through. She is a strong woman, but I'm praying for her. Of course, I'm in a strange mood now because this all brings back long forgotten but never really quite really forgotten family issues so much of which happened before I was born and in my very early childhood.

I'm not sure how much I want to blog about this issue, because like any family issue it's so very, very complicated.

But if you read this, send healing thoughts to my grandma, my second-mom.

It was fun to be at this one particular gym, which is located about 10-11 blocks from Pac Bell park, watching the baseball game on TV and then hearing everyone cheer when a homerun was hit at the bottom of the 6th. It was almost like being there.

Except we're not. We're at the gym and not at a bar because some of us: 1) don't drink on school night; 2) need to work out constantly because of the gut we have from having spent too many years at the bar watching sport games and drinking beer; 3) are recovering alchies; 4) don't give a hoot about baseball and we're just there to work out or to cruise the gym scene; or 5) Tuesday is our regular gym night.

Of course 20 minutes later as I'm in my car at 10th and Folsom waiting for the light, I realize that I am now 8 blocks from Pac Bell park and need to get the hell home before the game lets out and I get stuck in traffic.

Things I shouldn't tell people because it's like kind of embarrassing, but I do it anyway:

Temptation Island was one of the best TV shows in the last 3 years.

I've seen The Matrix ten times.

I've seen A&E's "Pride and Prejudice" 15 times, and like in Bridget Jones' Diary, can endlessly discuss Mr. D'Arcy and the actor who plays him, Colin Firth. I've seen all his movies.

I can endlessly discuss Keanu Reeves and his movies as well.

I love musicals.

I love sappy hollywood endings.

Most indie flicks are ego driven self indulgent pieces of drivel that tries to pass itself off as "alternative art".

I think I've read all of Danielle Steele's books, and Stephen King's as well.

Political correctness is evil, and a mind control tool which tries to eradicate all that's great about being human and being alive, which is to express exactly how you feel about life. Life is sometimes not that great and people think and do evil things ... what's wrong with expressing that in art.

I went to library last night to write. It was like pulling teeth. I probably should have stayed home and typed the story I finished into my computer, but I wanted to get myself into the habit of writing at a certain time every week.

I was there for 2.5 hours and I did everything but write.

I ended up reading a book called "The Time is Now" by Rabbi Daniel Wouk. It was like a self help book to get off our duff and get on with your life. The last chapter was kind of depressing because it was letters that dying people sent to the Rabbi about how much time they wasted in their life and how they wish they had done certain things. It made the point though, didn't it? Nothing like hearing from the dying about how not to waste your life.

Then as another time waster, I wrote up the intro to a christian based writing class which I might someday want to teach. I'm calling the class "Riffing on the Bible: Adventures in Christian Storytelling".

Here's the class advert to be posted in some church bulletin:

"In jazz, musicians improvised on a melody and created riffs to make great music. Using well known biblical texts of disciple interactions with Jesus as jumping off point, explore the art of storytelling to your stories of your own faith journey in in a non-judgmental environment. While you are required to write, sharing is optional but come with an open mind to see how the Holy Spirit and the bible can inspire your creative writing.

If we are all disciples of Christ, how much can we ourselves in actions of the original twelve disciples in the New Testament.

The class will be riffing on the following new testament texts: (of course, to waste more time, I had to go through the bible to find some relevant texts to riff from)

1. Matthew 4: 18-22, Jesus telling the first discples "Follow me and I will make you a fisher of people".

2. Matthew 14: 25-34, Jesus walking on the sea and saying "Take heart, it is I, do not be afraid."

3. Peter's Denial of Christ three times (Matthew 26, etc)

4. Luke 9: 18-20, Jesus asks the disciples who he is and Peter says "you are the Messiah of God."

5. John 20-21, Doubting Thomas (my biblical favorite!)

6. Acts 9: Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus.

I wonder if I ever taught the class, if anyone would even be interested in showing up. Writing is such a private experience, and I wonder if writing about faith is just way too private to be talked about in a group.

It doesn't matter anyway because the exercise was just a way to distract myself from writing. I hate teaching classes from what little I've done of it. God did not give the "teaching is a good experience" gene.

I did manage to write up an outline for a new novel called "The Unsettler", but I'll discuss in another post.

So no, I haven't bought the new Harry Potter book out yet even though I did see it at the bookstore on Saturday.

The bookstore here only sells the Scholastic americanized version, and I own the children's box set paperback version from Bloomsbury.

If I want to read Harry Potter, I'm going to have to buy it through Amazon UK, because they have the Brit version with all the cute Brit words like lift for elevator and jumper for sweater.

What's the point of reading the story of an english wizzie boy named Harry Potter, if you're not going to read it in the original dialect of Britspeak?

Speaking of Britspeak, I watche the movie "Sexy Beast" last night. It was brilliant with Ben Kingsley, whom I still think of as Ghandi, playing Dan Logan a nasty git of a gangster with this unbelievable cockney accent. It had shades of some other brit dialect I've heard as well, like it had traces of Welsh or something.

Like I would really know the nuances of Brit dialect, but he definitely didn't have a scouser accent like the Beatles. And the only reason I know what "scouser" is because I dated an english semi-professional soccer player, and he was from Southport scouser cutie!

So I had my first brush with a "liberal christian scholar", Marcus Borg. A friend from church was raving about him, and since the church was doing a video seminar series on him, I decide to attend a session.

The guy has some good things to say, but his underlying assumptions just freaked me out. One of the things he said was, he didn't think that people could fully believe in the resurrection of christ. That really steamed me. Maybe he can't in his mind believe in the resurrection, but that doesn't mean other people can't.

Thank god, the ex-catholic brother guy was in the seminar because he's really smart and knows his jesus stuff. Steve said that Borg represented a minority viewpoint, and that Borg didn't even represent the mainstream of christian thought.

Steve then went on to talk about a couple of other biblical scholars, and said we needed to study their views as well. I was so happy when he said that.

I wish I'd written their names down though, because now I'm going to have to attend the rest of the seminar to get their names. DARN!

I don't know if I can sit through another seesion of some bible scholar telling me I'm psychotic for believing in the resurrection.

I hate when Bible study freaks me out.

So I think I have a "strawberry blondie boy virus". I saw the cutie red head stud muffie boy at church, always stunningly dressed in a suit that looks great on him, and I'm like "oh my god, he's so darned cute!"

I feel like I'm 13 years old and I'm having a crush on a rock star or something. It's a virus and a sickness, this school girl crush thing.

I think he was staring at me, but of course, I was engaged in conversation with someone. Strawberry blondie boy must be on my mind, because I swear to God I saw him walking down the street when I took Muni to see "Wicked".

Talk about a triple double take. There he was, or at least I think it was him, walking down the street and of course his great dress sense in suits applied to his casual dress, and he was looking mighty fine.

I think some guys just know how to dress themselves to look good and leave women with their tongues hanging out, and some guys just don't. There is no in between.

I think he's even cuter than marina hottie screenwriting guy, and C was hollywood movie star cute and every woman in screenwriting class was after him.

Strawberry blondie Jesus man is physically not that cute, and I know that intellectually, and that's why I have to conclude that my crush on him is a virus, an illness, something I can't control. And I hate that, because I think I'm like such a control freak.

If I ever end up talking to him, I know I'm just going to babble and blow it because my crush level is at 125% and that's bad. I'll get nervous and I'll end up giggling like a teenager, because that's the way he makes me feel. It's ill, it's totally ill.

Like I really enjoyed being 13 years old and want to be reminded what a stupid airheaded space cadet teenager I was.

I'm going to have to calm myself down, if I really want talk to him and get to know him to find out if he's even worth more than a minute of my time. But I can't. I'm like in a full throttle school girl crush, and I've already picked out the name of our child and decided what he'd look like (I want his babies), fantasized what my mother will think of him, and am debating if I want to be a June or July bride.

And I haven't even met the guy or been properly introduced. I hate feeling like a 13 year old.

I never fantasized having children with the marina hottie boy, and that's an interesting sidenote to this school girl crush of mine.

A friend from screenwriting class just found he was a first round finalist in a contest. This means he was chosen for the top 45 out of 550 screenplay entries.

Wow. I didn't think his screenplay was that good. I mean it was good, but it wasn't great.

I definitely need to finish my screenplay and start sending it off. Julie my screenwriting teacher said she thought my screenplay was contest ready, and I know she said the same thing to my friend, and now he's a first round finalist on his first screenplay.

If you want to be hip, you'd better start drinking "PBR" or Pabst beer, or so says The New York Times in an article entitled The Marketing of No Marketing.

It's actually a good read on the philosophy of marketing or how or how not to gain market share.

The best bit -

"But any trend with even the slightest commercial implications in the American marketplace immediately becomes subject to two iron laws. The first is that it will attract a swarm of consultants, marketers and journalists, trying to deduce the trend's origins. Second, efforts will be made to amplify and prolong the trend, profitably."

The barbeque was fun, but I hate when the host does not cook the meats thoroughly and it's all rare. Don't they know that some of us want our fish totally cooked.

Do other people have friends like this, who in the middle of a conversation find a way to say, "By the way, I'm a direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell". Isn't that special?

My friends do know their wine though. I had a great wine called "Santino Satyricon". Besides being a great wine, the label has a great story.

The original wine label had a nekkid woman on it, but apparently our federal government regulates what goes on wine labels. Like doesn't the government have anything better to do than to regulate what goes on wine labels?

Anyway, the Santino winery had to put a white dress on the woman courtesy of our federal government. And no, this isn't a John Ashcroft, let's put dresses on the nekkid justices statues. The government wine label regulations predate Ashcroft.

Check out Bloombury's five-year financial summary. Now that's a graph any CFO would love.

Thank you Harry Potter!

Bad and Good Business Decisions

I watched last Sunday's 60 Minutes interview with JK Rowling. She said four or five publishers turned Harry Potter down, as well as a few others before Bloomsbury picked it up.

Guess those publishing house which turned Harry Potter down are totally kicking themselves today.

I found this on the Yahoo UK & Ireland site.

""On the basis of sales of 'Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix' to the UK and international booktrade for the launch at one minute past midnight tonight, the board of Bloomsbury now expects that its pre-tax, pre-goodwill profit for the year ended 31 December 2003 will be not less than 15 million pounds," the publisher said. "

I'm going to a barbeque tonight in the burbs filled with some friends who are total wine snobs. They love to talk about which wines they've bought, their cellar, which bottles are almost "fit to drink", etc. BORING!

Anyway, so I'm looking at my haphazard wine collection and trying to decide which wine to take. It's a barbeque, and they asked me in advance if I wanted to eat red meat or chicken/fish. I said chicken/fish, so I'm thinking I should probably bring a white wine to go with my meal.

I used to be really into chardonnay, but I'm not that into it anymore so I mostly buy pinot noirs, cabernet sauvignons and merlots.

The only whites I have that don't look that bad are a french white wine called sancerre and a chardonnay. I don't even remember why I bought the sancerre or where I bought it or how much it cost. I bought the chardonnay after having it as a restaurant, and I remembered that it didn't taste too bad.

Next, I tried looking up both wines on Google but could only find the reviews and prices for the chardonnay. I was surprised to find the chardonnay selling for $20. Did I even pay that much for the bottle?

I so want to bring "Chuch for a Buck" white wine, that Charles Shaw wine that was in the papers and retailing for $2-3 and is so hip to drink in the SF Bay Area right now. It's supposed to be really good wine for the price, but I don't think my wine snobs friends would appreciate this fact.

I think the best piece of information I've ever heard about bringing wine to party was "when in doubt, bring the wine the costs the most." Guess it's going to be a chardonnay night - La Crema 2000 Chardonnay.

So I thought I weaned myself off of Craig's List Missed Connections, but it's so easy to get hooked. I almost got hooked on watching Real World Paris, but I didn't watch on Tuesday so maybe I'm saved.

I forgot how fun MTV's Real World is to watch. They've got some southern guy from Georgia who is really cute. They've also got a guy who says he's the son of someone from that group "The Commodores", for the star connection. Then there's the usual assortment of people; a slutty cute chick with a hot body, an inncocent cute chick with a hot body and that tough city guy with a rough background who is sort of cute depending on my mood.

It's fun watching them hook up or try to hook up, break up, freak out, and then confess and whine to the camera. It's like watching "Jerry Springer live in a house".

The show has gotten so slutty and sleazy over the years, that it's almost become campy and kind of fun in a very sick, sick way.

Googlism for: elfgirl

elfgirl is very cute
elfgirl is magnificent
elfgirl is a 1/8th scale kit from kitbuilders/mojoresin kits
elfgirl is becoming an advocate for the anti
elfgirl is off at a consignment sale spending my paycheck

On my lunch hour I decided to watch the new reality tv show I taped last night, "Boarding House: North Shore". It's from the guy who created the "Survivor" show, and it's about 7 professional surfers living in a house on the North Shore of Oahu and competing in this famous tournament called the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing.

Wow, watching it made me feel like I was back in high school again when I used to dream about dating surfer boys and wore barely there bikinis.

All the guys in the series are so cute, but I think I have like a genetic weakness for surfer boys because I was born in Hawaii. The women are all young and blonde and can surf too.

But what I like most about the show is the surf scenes! Oh my god, they are so killer! I love watching surfers surf. I spent most of my life watching surfers surf, and it reminds me so much of home and growing up.

I love the way the guys talk too. They all sound like guys I went to high school with or guys I met when I spend that one summer down in San Diego. Guys don't like that up here, or if they do I'm not meeting them.

I did go on a blind date with a surfer once, and I probably only went out with him because he said he surfed. He wasn't really my type, and I was so disappointed because I thought he would be like the surfer guys I knew in high school.

I thought he'd be tall, tanned, have that valley boy voice like he could be in the Jetsons cartoon or something, and have this great body and looked like he worked out. Instead, he was short, not tanned and didn't even look he lifted weights or went outdoors in the sun or anything. It was such a bummer!

I'm sure the guy did surf at some point in his life, but like not in the last five years of me meeting him.

Even if he was true surfer guy, dating him would probably be an un-fun as it was high school. Surfer guys live for surf. Surf comes before anything else in their life. Say for instance you'd had this date planned for months in advance. If killer waves were breaking, surfer guy would dump you to go surfing.

One thing that the surf show got right, which was very surprising, is they have a christian surfer from Florida. There's a whole segment of the surfer population that are born again christians, and that group has been around since I was in high school.

You'd only this fact if you follow the surfing scene or have been around it for a long time. The producers must have done their homework.

From CBS Market Watch, another article on the chinese yuan and its effects on the US dollar and the global economy, The yuan heard round the world.

This is interesting. A friend from screenwriting class sent me the following email.

"I’ve been thinking of you and your script as the Giants this season have had several personal scenarios similar to the one you have in your script: Barry bonds’ dad suffering from cancer; barry not hitting well because distracted by dad’s illness and dad not giving him hitting advice. Spooky close to your premise!"

I think my screenwriting friend was referring to the following article from SFGate.com, Re-living glory days Following famous dads offers perks, pressures.

Here's what the article said about Mr. Bonds.

"Barry Bonds, the most famous second-generation sports star in the Bay Area, declined to be interviewed for this story, saying after 18 years of baseball he's talked on this subject enough. But his father's influence on his baseball career is well-known.

Even as he battles cancer, Bobby Bonds has made two trips to Pac Bell Park this season to offer his son counsel and a few hitting tips. On the night following his dad's second trip, Barry Bonds broke out of a month-long hitting slump to homer twice against the Chicago Cubs on April 30."

This is so trippy to me, because one of the early criticisms of my screenplay was that a star baseball player's father would never give better advice than a hitting coach. When I heard that, I was like, why not? The father birthed the son, has seen the kid play from childhood on, and probably knows the star baseball player better than any hitting coach ever will.

So now I'm like relieved, because it's nice to know that my fictional story isn't that far off from what happens in real life.

I've always thought that real life is so much stranger than fiction. I mean who would've thought that we'd watching on TV, the LAPD chasing OJ and his friend on the freeway. If you were put that in a story, the critics would have a field day.

And what about 9/11? If a fiction writer were to write a story about jetliners crashing into the World Trade Centers, and then the buildings falling down, again the critics would have just laughed and said "NO EFFING WAY!". And yet it happened, didn't it?

Tonight was the last night of my kerygma bible study class, and all I really learned is that the bible requires more intense study. I think it would be fun to be a biblical scholar or at least know the bible backwards and forwards.

The Bible is referenced so much in western literature, in plays, on tv, even in the metaphysical arts like tarot readings.

We had to write a 150 words or less statement on what the bible is about. I spent two hours trying to write my statement up, and it kind of felt like I was writing a statement of faith.

I wrote about four different versions and ended up with a fifth one that I sort of like, sort of don't like, but decided to keep because I had other bible homework to do. My statement ended up being a bit longer than 150 words, but here it is.

**********
Through stories, songs and letters, the Bible shows and teaches us as individuals and a community how to be in a relationship with God as expressed in the trinity of God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. The Bible also shows us how to be in relationship with other people, the larger community and the world, through the teachings and examples of Jesus Christ

I’ve used the Bible as a handbook, a manual, and a roadmap to deepen my relationship with God. No matter where I am in my faith experience and journey, I’ve always been able to find someone in the bible to relate to.

For me, the two most important ideas that the Bible expresses are 1) “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (NRSV, John 3:16), and 2) “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you;” (NRSV, Matthew 7:12)
**********

I really like the idea of the bible as a handbook, a manual and a roadmap in how to be be in a relationship with the trinity of God the father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, for an individual and a community.

I think the last part is my statement of faith or at least what I think is bible's most important teachings. I probably should have added a third idea of Jesus teaching "to love God", but I didn't think about that part. If I had to write it up again, I would add "to love god" as the third idea, if I could find a biblical text I liked that expresses this idea.

If this is true, what will this mean for the american economy?

China may cut its link to dollar.

Spooning with My Mother - a freewrite short story idea from September 2002

Divorce is a strange thing. You lay awake in the middle of the night lying next to the stranger you thought you once loved and now passionately hate, praying that when you wake up the next morning, that he will magically disappear. And then one day you find yourself again awake in the middle of the night, wishing that the man you once loved and still hate passionately, was lying next to you, because even he was better than the pit of loneliness that you now find yourself drowning in.

It's the only thing about divorce I really hate; the sleeping alone bit. I wish you could have an agreement with your husband, where he is excluded from every part of your life, except at night when you go to sleep. And it's not like you need him there to have to sex, because you have no desire to sleep with him anymore. No, you need him there because that king sized bed that your husband insisted on buying against your wishes, is just too big for one person.

Sometimes I tell myself that perhaps it wouldn't so lonely if the bed was smaller. But changing beds is almost as traumatic as getting a divorce. First of all, there are the king sized sheet sets I've managed to collect over the years. I'm afraid to think of how many sets there are, and worse, how some sets are incomplete. Who's going to to want an incomplete sheet shet? Not to mention all the stray pilllowcases, top sheets and fitted sheets that I've bought to replace the missing pieces of any sets, which only match if you squint your eyes to the colors run together. Then there's the bedskirts, the pillows, the comforters and blankets, all bought with a king sized bed in mind.

If I buy a new bed, all of this "stuff" for the bed will have to be sold, given away or thrown out. It's traumatic. It's like throwing out pieces of your history. Each sheet set has a memory attached, and most of them are good ones. There's the threadbare and slimy flannel sheet set we first owned, and which I swear my daughter was concieved on. We haven't used that set for 10 years, but it still manages to put a smile on my face on my face everytime I see it.

There's the red satin set that my husband Joe brought home one, on the advice of one his buddies that red satin sheets were a big sexual turn on. Those were the days when Joe was at least still interested in us having a fun sex life. We only used the sheet set once, but it's a reminder to me that once long ago he was trying.

Then there's the pink flannel sheet set with hearts that Joe bought me one christmas, which I thought meant that he still really cared about our marriage. He confessed me to one night that he had seen it on sale, and that it was just too good a bargain to pass up. He told me that sleeping on flannel was great because our bed was often cold at night. Sometimes honesty in a marriage is a drag. I thought Joe had finally really gotten to know me after 11 years of marriage and could read my mind. I still haven't forgiven him for destroying my illusion.

Maybe it was that night I realized that Joe had become a total stranger to me, and that we needed flannel sheets instead of each other's body to keep warm at night.

It doesn't matter anymore. Joe is gone now. Don't you just hate when certain memories make you go all teary eyed? Honestly, you'd think that after two years I'd stopped crying over my broken marriage wouldn't you?

It's that damned bed that's driving me to think thoughts that no longer mean anything to me.

I wonder around the house at night when I can't sleep. Sometimes I go to into the den and watch TV. There never seems to be anything one except infomercials or B-grade love story movies. Like I really need to see that when I can't sleep because I miss my lousy exhusband at night.

Sometimes I try to read in bed, and that works. Joe always hated when I read in bed, and I gave up the habit in our second year of marraige. Reading in bed still feels like I'm doing something deliberately wrong, but I tell myself that it's just left over feelings from my Joe as Master of his Domain experience.

Sometimes, I sit in the dark in the living room and look of our picture window. I study each of my neighbor's houses with their perfectly groomed lawns and the color coordinated color schemes of their houses, and I wonder about their lives. From the outside, Joe and I were the perfect couple. All of our neighbors said so. What are they thinking now? That one day their happy facade, their fake pretense of a life will be rippped away and set down in precise legal terms in their divorce agreement. I wonder if they're contemplating it even now. If some other woman is awake like I was, or some man, wondering about that unknown person lying on the other side of the bed.

Sometimes I just stand at the door of daughter's bedroom and stare at her sleeping face. Some strange biological thing happened, and she looks like a cross between me and Joe, but prettier and more refined than either of us were at that age. Sometimes I am tempted to crawl into bed with her, but I've always stopped myself. I don't think Melissa would mind, but it just doesn't feel right. It never has felt right until tonight.

I make my way back to the living room so I can think in the dark. Joe called me today, to rearrange his weekend time with her. When I asked him why, he casually mentioned that he was going away for the weekend with some woman he met. I told myself I would be prepared for this moment, but how do you prepare yourself to hear that your ex-husband has moved on with his life. I tell myself that he has probably had other weekends away before and this isn't his first time, but then Joe blurts out that this is the first time he's missed his weekend with Melissa, and that he's really sorry. Guess I had him pegged wrong all along, maybe even from the day I first met him.

I don't remember the rest of our conversation, or what I said. I just hope I didn't blurt out anything stupid or sappy like "I just want you to be happy Joe". It's not that I don't want my exhusband to be happy, I just don't want to hear about it ever. I wish there was a way so I wouldn't have to talk to him, but there's Melissa to think about. Every condom or birth control device should come with a warning label that says, "Having a baby with this person means you will have to see that person for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not. Be smart. Use birth control" I bet this warning lower the birth rate in half if not more.

Don't get me wrong. I love my daughter. It's so corny, but it's true; Melissa is the apple of my eye. Not that I have the foggiest idea what the hell that saying means, but Melissa is the most important thing in my life.

Is the way my mother felt with me all those years ago, when it was just the two of us? My mother was luckier than me though. My dad just took off one day and never looked back. At least she didn't have to hear how my dad was starting a new life, and watch her husband transform himself into the man she always wanted him to be. At least my mother didn't have to wonder a dozen times a day, what is "she" doing that never did. Did he tell her? Why didn't he tell me how make him into the kind of husband every woman dreamed about? Was it some secret book they handed down to only certain women? And why the hell didn't I get the book?

I walk over again to Melissa's room. Like any young child she sleeps on her stomach. I can see her long brown hair all tangled up, and I tell myself I need to remind her to braid it before goes to sleep. She'll look at me through her father's blue eyes and whine "Mom, I'm not a little girl anymore. Only kids braid their hair before going to bed."

Not braiding her hair before she went to bed, was Melissa's first attempt at independence from me since she had gone to bed with braids for most of her life. I didn't say anything, even when she told me I needed to buy her a better brush or comb and conditioner so she could detangle her hair faster. I just smiled at her, and bought the items she needed. Oh sure I could have gloated, but why bother. This was only a small squirmish into what I remember as the long war called puberty.

The Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants are playing each other for the next six games.

I'm torn. I love the A's. They are a young good looking, Backstreet Boys team, with a genius of a general manager in Billy Beane and the best 3 starting pitchers in the game. They're young, scrappy, and they've got one of the smallest payrolls of any teams, yet they manage to be at the top of their league every year.

A's management are geniuses at developing players and picking up great players that have been turned down by other teams. They are an underdog player's friends, always willing to value skills above anything else. What's not to love? They're the underdog team of underdog teams.

But I live in the city and county of San Francisco, so I also love the San Francisco Giants because they're the home team with the great stadium. They're the team I've gone to see at least once a year with friends, they're the team I feel honour bound to root for, because they're something so cool about rooting for the home team.

But I love my A's, I love my babies. But I have to also love the home team.

Mark Purdy from the Merc News has a great take on the series, A's vs. Giants means much to both teams.

I hope they split the series, A's winning one, the Giants winnning the other, then I'd be happy. I wouldn't feel bad that I love two great baseball teams for two totally different reasons.

Go A's! Go Giants!

So in honour of Harry Potter mania, and inspired by my friend J's essay on The Hogwarts Club at the Hooray for Anything blog, I figured out which Hogwarts house the sorting hat would put me in.

I would definitely be in Ravenclaw, because 1) I love crows and ravens, so it's a natural I'd be in the house with the word Raven in it and 2) "Ravenclaw are all the geeks and arty types" - from Hooray.

Yes, I consider myself the geeky and arty type. I'm a writer, and on the enneagram test I'm a 4 with a 5 wing, that's 4 - the artist with a 5 - intellectual bent. For the most part, I'm weird and introspective and sometimes very clever only because I seem to have a knack for memorizing trivia galore.

I wonder what colour would my uniform be? Because that's the really important question.

Wow, maybe there is something to the writing by hand thing. I printed out a bunch of stories I had started, but never finished and took them with me to the library.

I read through them and decided to work on one I titled "Spooning with My Mother". It's a story about a woman who is divorced from her husband and feeling lonely, and trying to decide if she should sleep in the same bed with her 13 year old daughter for comfort.

Anyway, I read through the 3 page freewrite and decided that before I could finish the story, I'd write an outline so I could see how it would end. I started outlining the story I had written and was just about to write the outline for the rest of it, when I realized I didn't know what the story was really about because it had been so long since I wrote it.

I started to write a Q&A session with myself, which soon turned into a Q&A session with the main character. I just ended up asking her how the story ends, and I wrote what I popped into my head. Once I knew how it ended, I knew I could finish the story.

So after a 3.5 page outline and a Q&A freewrite, I wrote 16 handwritten pages and finished the story. YEAH ME! My first completed short story in a really long time.

Of course it's only a very shitty first draft, but at least it's done, and I can start typing it up and deciding whether I want to work on it some more or just leave as is.

This is good. This is exciting. A completed short story.

I'll post the opening for "Spooning with My Mother" tomorrow.

YEAH! I'm writing again!

Love and Darkness and a Sidearm - a scary freewrite

The cursed say they are damned for all eternity. Me, I say, sometimes it’s just plain dumb luck that you get caught and then people go ahead and make up a big fuss about it, when secretly you know they are happy you did it. Delighted, is even a better word. They are delighted that you rid the place of a bad human being. Sometimes people don’t get what’s coming to them soon enough and you’ve got to give nature a helping hand.

I didn’t mean to shoot him, but he just kept coming at me. Paul was always a little crazy, you know, especially when he drank. Liquor is like a demon, a gold liquid demon. When you drink enough of the demon, it makes you do crazy and mean things. It’s like there’s this little voice talking inside of your head and telling you to do things, thing you would never normally think of doing. And the devil, he’s like an old cowboy who’s bent on breaking you. He rides and rides you and you can’t buck him off and he digs his heels into your sides, till pretty soon you get used to the pain and the hurt. He knows and you know that it’s just a matter of time, before you become his, his prize. And Paul was definitely one of his prize specimens.

Poor Paul, he couldn’t go more than a couple of days at least as far as I could tell without a drink. And when he didn’t drink, the devil would dig his spurs into old Paul and Paul would get all mean. But nasty mean, even meaner then when he did drink.

Whenever Paul got mean, I poured him a whiskey in one of those little glasses with the oranges on them, that mama gave me years ago. I’d hand it to Paul and he’d look at me, the hate coming out of his eyes like an icy heart stopping wind. You know, the kind that whips right through you in the dead of winter and chills you to the bone. But after a minute, he’d laugh, take the glass and down the content in one gulp without spilling a drop. Then he’d be okay, at least for awhile.

Maybe I need to start surfing republican and conservative websites so I can find exorcism ritutals to get rid of my inner hippie. Maybe I need to discover my inner conservative and republican side more, so I'm a little more balanced.

I'm still having a hard time writing in front of my computer. I haven't done it in so long, that it feels strange.

I watched the 60 Minutes interview with JK Rowling, and it looked like she still writes her first draft by hand. I'm getting desperate so I think I'll go back to writing by hand. Maybe if I get used to sitting at my computer and typing things up, I'll be able to one day sit down and just start typing, which I how I used to prefer to write.

Most writing books have at least one chapter devoted to ways to trick yourself into writing, so it must be a common writer's problem. One book said that every writer has "inner writing child" and that you have to pamper it, cajole it, so it wants to write.

I'm like, I wish I could slap it and get it to work.

I mean, I know what kind of child I was. I was spoiled, moody, willful, stubborn and completely resistant to authority. I'm still that way, sort of, although I've learnt over the years to control myself so I can get things done and get along with people. This is what happens when you grow up basically as an only child of older parents, who are too old and tired to discipline you.

I think I was raised like any hippie child, except my parents weren't hippies, they were just too old and tired.

My friend Mellie Mel says I have an "inner hippie", which is just so gross, disgusting and embarrassing but probably totally true. Mel says it's because she and I grew up on the west coast (Hawaii and California and I think Oregon as well), and you can't help but be a hippie chick because it's all around you and it's in the culture.

You develop and "inner hippie, even though she and I totally detest the smell of patchouli. I know I could out hippie anyone at Rainbow Grocery in a serious second, even though I don't look like someone who would ever shop there, and I've been shopping there since I first moved to San Francisco

For example, I used to really be into eating clover sprouts and used them on everything from pizza, spaghetti and enchiladas. Worst yet, I actually thought clover sprouts added texture and taste to all my dishes.

I spent years eating basmati brown rice cooked in a pressure cooker, with steamed organic veggies and sprinkled with soy cheese. I've been an off and on vegetarian since I was 19 years old, and I've been cleansing my body of toxins since I was 22 years old.

I learned to meditate when I was 13 years old, and started doing yoga when I was 15, way before it was trendy to do and hardly anyone was teaching it. Now yoga studios are sprouting up all over like bad mushrooms after a rainstorm.

I participated in my first anti-government protest rally when I was 16 years old, and then spent my whole internship in Washington DC going to a different anti-government rally every weekend. Singing "We Shall Overcome" still brings tears to my eyes.

Plus the most hippie chick thing of all, whenever I start dating someone new or even just meet a guy who I potentially want to date, I immediately check to see if our horoscopes are compatible. I don't even think about it, it's so automatic, like of course you have to check if your stars are compatible and you have to read all about their sign so you know what you're dealing with.

And yes, I do keep a running tab in my head on what signs I've dated and which ones I haven't, which ones I'd love to date, and which signs are most compatible and the worst for me.

My "inner hippie", how gross is that. I'm an "inner hippie-ess". That's like telling me I drive a polluting gas guzzling SUV! It's so bad and evil!

I was having problems synching my palm pilot to my desktop, when I decided to check for a new upgrade. Sure enough, Palm had a new desktop software upgrade.

Once I downloaded the new upgrade and installed it, my palm started synching with my desktop again.

It makes me wonder if all around the world the palm software program started having problems all at the same time, and if that's why Palm had to issue an upgrade? Of course this scenario would only make sense if I could tell when the upgrade was released, but the Palm website doesn't give a date for the release.

The last time I upgraded my Palm software was in the fall when I bought a new computer, so the it's only been about 8 months since I've had the latest software download.

I saw "Bruce Almighty" on Friday, only because "2 Fast 2 Furious" was sold out. I'm glad I saw it on the big screen, because Bruce did have some nice special effects.

Jim Carrey is so funny, and the screenplay was so sweet. People in the theatre clapped at the end, which doesn't happen all the time.

"Bruce Almighty" is the kind of story, screenplay I wish I could write. It's sweet, it has a great message, and it was so funny without being schmaltzy.

Jim Carrey is a genius, but I think I sort of agree with a reviewer in the San Francisco Bay Guardian when he wrote, "Carrey has a dark edge". Carrey really skated the edge of something, I don't know what, when he was complaining about his life in this move.

I don't know. I detected maybe a little more bitterness than perhaps what was necessary for the character, maybe a little more ego than what the character should have had. I saw the extra bitterness and ego as more Jim Carrey being himself than being a character.

Carrey took the angry middle aged white male thing very close to the edge of sarcasm, but perhaps his genius is he didn't go over the edge, but just skirted it maybe a little too dangerously.

As a movie viewer, I did buy the ending of the movie, but the edginess of Carrey's portrayal of Bruce still stands out in my mind.

I received my car insurance renewal in the mail, and I called them and told them I wasn't commuting to work anymore. When they recalculated my policy, they told me I saved about $200 on my car insurance bill. YEAH!!!

Moving is so expensive. I just got my first phone for my new place, and it's like close to $300. My phone company charges you and arm and a leg for installing new jacks, and that new dsl modem wasn't cheap either.

Thankfully my boss said my company will pick up the charges for the dsl modem, the monthly dsl charge and all the set up charges. But still. Getting a $300 phone bill is shocking. My next two phone bills will be large as well, since the phone company said I could spread the charges out over three months.

I set my microsoft explorer security to high so I could receive links that people send me, and all of a sudden I couldn't do anything on blogger. That was so scary!

Once I set my security back to where it was before, all the blogger stuff started working again.

So I'm torturing myself and thinking of the cute guy (marina hottie boy) in my screenwriting class I had a crush on last year. It all started because I turned on the TV and started watching some Ken Burn's documentary on jazz. The cutie from screenwriting was a big time jazz freak. He said he only listened to jazz in his car and on the radio. I even surprised him when we were all at a party together, and I put on a Charlier Parker record. I only put it on because I hadn't seen a Charlie Parker record in ages, and it reminded me of college.

Marina hottie boy was so shocked I even knew who Charlie Parker was. I guess I must not look like the type who listens to jazz. I think he thought I only liked bands lik Guns n Roses, a band that I of course totally love, because the song made me smile and he saw me smiling when we were all walking to a bar one night. Whatever.

I'm going to check out the North Beach festival on Saturday, and I'm like wondering if I'll run into him because he lives in the area. Like I really want to run into him, because the last time I saw him at a screenwriting reading he was holding hands with some woman with like Anna Nicole Smith type boobs. How embarrassing, that I was actually interested in a guy who would hold hands with a woman with huge cow udders. I'm so mean, huh!

I love that cow udder phrase. My first love in college used to call girls with massive chests - chicks with cow udders, and I still really love that phrase. I don't know. Cow udders is so perfect, although I like my own made up phrase, plastique rack. You know, because like plastique is an explosive, and a woman with a huge rack probably have fake ones, an fake ones can explode and give you cancer, so they're like "plastique".

plastique n: an explosive material that is easily molded around the object it is intended to destroy [syn: plastic explosive]; French: plastic [adjective-adverb]

Anyway, I'd love to run into him because the man is absolutely drop dead beautiful, but at the same time, it's like I don't know why I even want to torture myself that way.

The man is like so out of my league, and even if I could date him, I wouldn't because he's a baby and so immature. I mean, the guy played college football and he's got that whole jock thing going which means he's fun to hang with but not fun to be with in any kind of dating situation.

But, boy is he pretty, and I'm a sucker for a man with pretty blue eyes. But he's like an aetheist, he's a krishna boy and not a JC boy, which means he can never anything but a very short term experience for me. Who wants to listen to a rant against god and organized religion for the rest of your life? Life is stressful enough without having that kind of religious stress at home.

But I'm bad, because if I do run into him and he's not with the giant cow udder woman, and I get my chance to have him, I would definitely take it. I'm so bad!

In honor of Gregory Peck's death, I'm going to reread "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.

I was going to write about how I can be a christian and post modernist at the same time, and how post modernism brings God back into the equation of our lives. At least I think it does. But I don't feel like being philosophical and who the hell cares what I think anyway.

I'm just glad I figured it all for myself, and maybe that's all that matters.

Post modernism theory, at least my understanding of it, has every viewpoint be valid. If this is true, then people who think they talk to angels, people who think they have visitations from God, people who speak in tongues or have those biblical ecstatic experiences all have valid experiences.

I'm sure it's all much more complicated than that, and most of the time when people tell me I'm a post modernist, I have absolutely no idea what they're talkinga about. But if being a post modernist allows for miracles, angels, healers and other mystical phenomena to be true, then yes I'm a post modernist.

I have no scientific fact, no numbers as they say in finance, to back up the theory that things like angels and miracles can't be true. But I don't care. I think it's totally cool that things like angels and miracles might be true. I don't know. It's not like I talk to angels or have had like a biblical type miracle happen to me, but if someone tells me that they talk to angels or have had biblical type miracles happen to them, I'm like "GREAT". Wow, wish I could have stuff like that happen to me.

To me the problem with rationalism and enlightenment is it took God out of life. It said we can't prove God exists because scientifically it can't be done. Rationalism and the enlightenment relied on science to make everything true in our lives. It painted the world in black and white, in absolutes, and life just isn't like that. Life is full of contradictions, and stuff that just doesn't make any sense.

I mean, sure you can scientifically prove things, but then things happen, shit happens, people do things that make absolutely no sense at all for absolutely no reason. Life just not that rational sometimes, life can't be put in a box and added up.

I think post modernism frees us from the strait jacket of rationalism and enlightenment, and says that faith is valid. Faith in god, which can't be scientifically proven, which can't be explained, which in some ways is the most irrational thing in the whole wide world, faith is valid and if faith is valid, then so is God, from my point of view.

It's six degrees of Star Wars. You know, when Obiwon Kanobi tells Luke that Darth Vader is his father, and Luke accuses Obiwon of lying. Obiwon says he was telling the truth, from a certain point of view. And then Obiwon ways something like "you will find that truth depends on your perspective." How post modernist is that?

But like everything else, post modernist has it weaknesses and bad points too. I mean, everything does. It's so ying yang. What's so great about post modernism is also what's really bad, because then truth is not absolute and if truth is not absolute, then some people will say that God is not absolute. But I disagree.

Post modernist thinking opens the door for God, for people believing in angels, for people who fervently believe that prayer works and works absolutely. Post modernist thinking puts God back into the equation of life.

At least that's how l look at , But I am a christian, and God is the filter through which I view life, so of course, like duh!!! Like I'm going to say that post modern thinking negates God. I don't think so.

I bought tickets to go see the play "Wicked" with a friend. Another friend went to see it on opening night and loved it, but the SF Chron gave it a bad review. My friend who saw it on opening night, flies to NYC every year to see 5 or 6 broadway shows. She's very, very critical of theatre productions, and I almost hate going to theatre with her because if the show is bad she'll walk out or just complain and moan all night long. If my friend liked it, then I'll trust her opinion more than I would a newspaper review.

Now if I could just convince someone else to see "The Damnation of Faust" with me. Nobody I know likes french opera. Damnation got a great review, and the friends whom I've called said they will think about it.

I'll probably just end up going myself just because I don't want to miss it. I'm still bummed I missed the opera on St. Francis of Assisi, which was I heard spectacular.

So I couldn't help myself. I was in Walgreen's buying some stuff, and I saw the Iraq Most Wanted deck of playing cards for $5.99. I had to buy them. They are such a riot. I hope it's an official deck. It says it is, but you can never tell. Sadam Huseein is the Ace of Spades. How funny is that? I should display my Iraq bad boys deck with the soldier girl doll I bought in a junk store in West Virginia.

I also saw the cds for Clay and Ruben from American Idol. I was tempted to buy the Clay Aiken cd too, but I stopped myself. I couldn't just buy the Clay cd and not buy Ruben's cd as well.

I just love popular american culture artifacts!

This is the art exhibit I want to see in LA.

I think this is the catalogue for the exhibit above.

Having fun hijacking images from websites. Check out my book collection on the side bar.

I saw the movie "The Road to Perdition" over the weekend. In the screenwriting seminar I took last fall, the visiting UCLA professor told the class that the screenplay was written by someone who he knew and who had taken classes at the screenwriting school where he was lecturing and had worked on the screenplay there.

The local San Francisco screenwriter received $125K from the studio for the rights to the screenplay, which is the standard Writer's Guild fee, and then when the script was made into a movie, the screenwriter received $350K, which is again the standard fee. The local screenwriter had since supposedly moved down to LA, and was hired a movie studio and was working on another screenplay.

It was quite a good movie, and I'm surprised it didn't get nominated for an oscar. It did however, lack a certain amount of emotional punch that I think you need to have be a really great movie and get nominated. The whole tone of the movie was very understated, but still quite dramatic.

I love that some schlub in a screenwriting seminar somehwere in downtown San Francisco was working on this script, and it became a movie that was well received. That's pretty cool.

I went to the local library tonight to write. It's amazing how time just zips buy when I'm writing. I arrived at the library at around 7 pm, and the next thing I knew it was close to 9 pm and the workers were dimming the lights.

I brought my crazy eddie story with me and edited what I had already written. Then I decided I needed to outline the story again, since I'm doing another second draft totally new rewrite. I thought by doing the second rewrite, the structure of the story would change, but it's essentially stayed intact. The second rewrite basically just cuts away all the backstory and dead wood from the story.

Since doing character interviews really helped with my screenplay, I decided to do them for my crazy eddie story. I interviewed my main character, her mother and crazy eddie's friend Charlie, who tries to strangle her near the end.

My Crazy Eddie story is just so strange that at this point, I just want to finish it, and then have my writing group read it, and then be done with it. It's a story that came from a freewrite, which just needed to be written down as a complete story.

My character Jessie, during the interview, told me she hoped I would finish her story. She said she'd been waiting a very long time for me to finish it. Jessie said she just wants her story told and on paper, and then she could rest and be happy.

It's very odd when your characters address you directly and say, "please finish my story". It's like they have more of a vested interest in seeing it finished than I do.

I'm not sure I'll be able to bring my laptop to the library and write. I may have to go to a coffeeshop to do that. I'm almost tempted to take my work laptop with me, but I probably shouldn't do that. I could take my baby laptop, but I really like staring at a big screen when I write.

The library is open late from Monday through Wednesday. The library is a great place to edit, write outlines, write out character interviews, and do freewrites by hand. I'm not sure it's the best place to actually write a story, unless I'm writing it by hand.

I don't mind writing by hand, except then I have to read my own horrid handwriting and type it all up. It's much more efficient for me to write directly to a computer, but it's been so hard for to just sit down and write, that I'm almost tempted to write out everything by hand until I get in the mood to sit at my computer and write.

The thing about writing by hand is you can do another rewrite and edit as you type, which is kind of nice sometimes. I know I tend to edit more if I write by computer, than when I write by hand, but not by much.

At this point I'm willing to do anything to get to write again, even doing writing by hand and making very, very structured outlines, so I can just concentrate on writing sections of the outline instead of trying to write the whole story in one session. Many writers write this way, other try to spit it all out.

The Crazy Eddie story is all written, so maybe all I have to do is a combination of both techniques to get to a complete second and hopefully final draft. I have fantasies of submitting it somewhere, but I don't know. I don't think I'm ready for that yet. I might just submit it just to see what's involved in submitting something for publication, but I would be submitting just to go through the process and would have absolutely no expectations about crazy eddie ever seeing the publishing light of day.

I think to write well takes practice, tons and tons of it, and who knows how many stories I'd have to write just to get one good one. Writing a story is probably like take the right photo for a fashion magazine. A photographer takes hundreds and hundreds of shots before choosing one photo for the cover. Writing a damned good story is probably akin to getting the absolutely perfect photo for Vogue or the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated.

The photo or story has to be the one that makes the buyer or editor want to purchase the magazine or in a story's case, buy the story for publication. And Crazy Eddie is definitely not cover material. I like the story well enough, and I know I'm only finishing it because I've had comments from people that it's my best work.

It's a story where the character is so unlike me and goes through something I've never gone through before. It's a totally fictional, yet on a certain level, a very personal story. I've taken experiences that have happened to me, and molded them to fit this story. I suppose it's the personal stuff from my own life, although vastly diferent in the fictional story, that makes the story so close to me, yet not. It's hard to explain.

Anyway, it feel good to be writing again. When I don't write, I totally and truly forget how interesting the whole experience is, how lost I get in it, and how I get so caught up so totally in what I'm doing. Writing is like watching a really good movie or tv show. I am spellbound for however long I do it. I am so transported into this other world, and I guess that makes sense because I'm in the mind of the character speaking or in the mind of the storyteller recounting the story.

Writing is really like an escape for me, and it feels like a good and necessary escape as well.

I was feeling a little down this morning, because when it's that time of the month as it now, I sometimes get a little depressed. I don't know. I was feeling really, really lonely, even though I spent a lovely day at my church picnic on Sunday afternoon.

Then an hour ago, my froggie french friend Francois sent me a message inviting me to chat with him on MSN messenger, and now we're chatting ahd having lunch on Friday. Thank god for friends, especially when they're french and read, speak and write fluent hebrew, greek, japanese as well as their native froggie tongue.

This is fun. I took an art history 103 class, the origins and developments of Modern Art in Europe and America from the French Revolution through World War II. from a painter/professor a few years ago, and in that class he always talked about wanting to teach a class on contemporary art from 1945 to the present. When I check the fall schedule for the community college where he teaches, I saw his new class. I'm so happy he was able to fulfill his wish.

I like modern art, even though I don't always understand it. Sometimes I think I just love the expressiveness of the the colours that are used. It will be interesting to see what he says about the really, really modern stuff.

I was going to take Art History 101, which is early art, but I decided I should take the Contemporary art class because it might not be offered again. The local community college always offers the standard Art History 101 and 102. You don't even have to take them in order, since I took 103 first because it was the only art history class that fit into my schedule at the time.

I know I should to take art history 101 and 102 sometime, just so I have the historical perspective on art, but I guess they'll have to wait.

It's really cool to take an art history class from an artist. The guy who teaches the class is a painter, who teaches painting classes as well as art history. He even takes a group to France every summer to paint outdoors, like the french impressionists did. One night he brought into some of his painting, and they were really really interesting. Maybe he'll do the same thing in this class.

I love studying art. I keep thinking that if I'd taken an art history class as a freshman in college, I probably would have majored in art history. I think I like studying art because I get to use my analytical skills in a way I don't normally use them. Analyzing art isn't as cut and dried as analyzing numbers; you have to be so much more creative. Plus the whole time you're analyzing a piece of art, you're studying an incredibly beautiful creation, which is so much more satisfying than staring at an excel worksheet full of numbers.

Not sure how serious this analyst is, but if he's right, I don't want to even think of the consequences to the US economy, The Big Three automakers could be headed for Chapter 11, a UBS Warburg analyst argued in a research note Thursday.

So like I know this is going to sound very silly, but I was searching the Net for how to use an electric oven. I've always had gas ovens, and now I have an electric oven and I have no idea how to use it.

There are like all these knobs. There's one know that says off, preheat, bake and timed bake, and another know that has the temperature. I tried to just put the oven on bake and then set it to the temperature I wanted, but the oven didn't heat up. Then I just put it on broil just like a gas oven, and waited till the oven got very hot and then turned the guage back to temperature I wanted.

Is it supposed to work this way? What about the preheat setting? What's that for? I miss my gas stove and oven very much.

I feel really out of sorts today, so I thought I'd cheer myself up and plan my next vacation.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, there's going to be what looks like to be this fantastic art exhibit.

Old Masters, Impressionists and Moderns: French Masterworks from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow. The exhibit was in Houston, and is now in Atlanta. Featured artists include Cezanne, Picasso, van Gogh, and Matisse.

So I check out the Los Angeles County Museum website, and I don't know, I guess was expecting a more visitor friendly site. The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, where I saw the Andy Warhol exhibit last year, had a whole section for visitors to the museum. They had a section for places to stay near the museum, and even nearby restaurants.

I was expecting the same sort of thing from LACMA, but there was nothing! I did some research on Google, and I think I found a couple of hotels, Le Meridien on La Cienega and The Beverly Plaza on West 3rd St. Some website I found says that these hotels are only a mile away from LACMA. But a mile in LA is like a long way.

Just in case, I emailed LACMA and asked them for hotel recommendations. I wonder if I'll even get a response.

Art museums totally whine about they don't make any money and stuff, and that's all fine and good, but if they're not going to create websites which make is easy for visitors, in town and out of town alike, to visit them, then they have nobody to blame but themselves for their budgetary shortfalls.

Sometimes like tonight, I feel like I should just shut up and write. Sometimes when I speak stupid things come out of my mouth and it bugs me. It's like my mouth and my brain don't work and either I say the wrong thing or I have absolutely nothing to say.

But when I write stories, it's not like that. The words just come, they pour out if I let them, and I can't move my hand or type fast enought to get it all down.

I am so looking forward to my writing class next week. I really need a big kick in the pants to get me started writing stories again. Maybe God is making my mouth and brain not work so I would realize that I can only say what I need and have to say through my writing. It's cruel, very cruel of God to do this, although I know he is probably just trying to do something, anything to get me to write.

I was at the library today looking for a book, and the woman next me at the library computer catalog was looking for books on celtic literature. She made me think of my half elf human novel that I started last November and never finished.

I realized another thing today as well. You know how doubting Thomas is one of the characters in the bible that I most relate to. Well, doubting Thomas' problem was lack of faith and I know that my biggest spiritual problem is lack of faith.

So ... if I have constant lack of faith in God, wouldn't it make sense that I have constant lack of faith in everything I do or attempt to do? I realized I don't write because I have such a depth of lack of faith in my ability to write and tell a story. Like it doesn't matter that from grade school on, teachers have been telling me that I write good stories and good plots and would make a good writer one day.

Writing is an act of faith, faith that someone wants to read what you have to say, what stories you have to tell. It takes faith to think that someone will pay some of their totally hard won money to buy something that you wrote. It takes faith to think that you will find a connection into a publisher, who will push your work so it gets published. It takes faith to think that what stories you have to tell will be relevant, entertaining, amusing and fun to read.

And I'm thinking in the car as I have these thoughts, I don't know if I that kind of faith. I mean, I'm the living female reincarnation of doubting Thomas after all, she of little faith, who had to see the holes in Jesus' hands and sides to know that Christ had risen.

I don't know. This is a hard realization to face, this lack of faith thing. I struggle with with the faith question constantly just on the spiritual/religious side. Now I have to deal with it so I can write as well. OY!!!

I am in such a mood to buy a summer bag. I don't know what put me into this mood, but I was surfing on ebay this morning looking for dirt cheap Coach or Bottega Venetta bags.

Why I even need a summer bag is a mystery to me, since we don't get proper summers in San Francisco. Our summertime comes in the fall when we get an indian summer, and it's a beautiful 80 degrees from September through October and sometimes even into early November.

I need to start saving to buy myself a place someday, not buying an expensive summer bag for a climate that doesn't have a summer. Most summer bags are way too small anyway for me, and I only buy bags with long straps so that I can wear the bag around my body.

Summer bags have always been way too fragile for me, since I am very hard on my purses. The only purses that I don't wear out in three months are strong leather purses.

I think I got in the mood to buy a summer bag because I saw this woman I know at church with one of those "The Sak" bags. I bought a knock-off The Sak bag at Target for my cruise vacation. I could start using that I bag I guess, but it is so small. Or I guess I could just go and buy a real "The Sak" bag from Macy's or better yet, buy one off of Ebay.

I saw a bunch of those "The Sak" bags at both Marshalls and Ross, but I couldn't find one I liked. Those bags are for women who don't carry very much in their purses, and I'm definitely not one of those types.

I added a link on the left side to my new tibetan buddhism book called "Kindly Bent to Ease Us, Part 3: Wonderment by Longchenpa or Longchen Rabjam. Longchen was recommended in that seminar I took last year taught by Russell Targ, who is a physicist and parapsychology researcher.

This book is mind blowing. I get so many insights just by reading a few pages, it's like the equivalent of taking one of those $3,000 growth and development seminars, only I only paid $7.50 for the book and I'm not even done with it yet.

A new word I discovered from First Matter, under Lexicon. Their reading list is also very interesting.

Devox
We’ve created a word to capture the spirit of both the deviant and deviance -- devox -- which we’ll use to describe the voice of deviant ideas, products and even individuals as it moves down the path of acceptance. As the devox evolves it gains in marketability and therefore in commercial value. At each point of its journey from the outer Fringe of society to what we call the heart of Social Convention the devox becomes exponentially more commercially viable. Its market increases in both absolute numbers and breadth, building and building until it gains maximum attention and acceptance. And then, just as predictably as it arrived, the devox recedes from the collective consciousness beginning, an even more interesting journey to either functional cultural immortality or oblivion.

I put a link up to amazon.com for the two books I'm reading on the left, and a list of movies I've seen in 2003. I've seen 22 movies so far in 2003, not counting mindless movie watching on TV.

I've been trying to account for how I spend my time these last five months, and the stress of worrying about my job and then having to move really put a stop to me reading. This is not good.

I read 7 books in 5 months, which is I daresay not very promising for someone who wants to be a writer.

Books I've read so far in 2003:
God Talk: Travels in Spiritual America by Brad Gooch
Phantoms by Dean Koontz
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan
LOTR - The Two Towers
The Courage to be Rich by Suze Orman
The Energy of Money by Mara Nemeth.

I definitely need to start reading more. I go through periods where I read mostly books, and then I go through periods where I read everything else but books.

I know I spent most of April going through my old papers and magazines, and reading through them to decide whether to trash or keep them, so maybe I was burnt out on reading. Who knows?

Plays I've Seen so far in 2003
American Buffalo by David Mamet
The Dazzle by Richard Greenberg
The Constant Wifev by W. Somerset Maugham
The Three Sister by Anton Chekhov
The Ramayana

Other Events I've attended so far in 2003
Art exhibit - American Flag: Two Centuries of Concord and Conflict
Art Exhibit - The opening of the Asian Art Museum
Art Exhibit - Leonardo Da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland
Exhibition - The Orchid Show
Fair - Whole Earth Expo
Exhibition - Arts of Pacific Asia
Concert - Opera in the Gardens
Concert - Free Blues Concert in Golden Gate Park

Seminars/classes I've taken so far in 2003
Sean David Morton - Trends for 2003
The Path of the Adept by Dr. Paul A Clark
Kerygma Bible class - every Wednesday from January through June 2003
The Moral Education of Children by Steve Johnson

I mean when I list all of things I remember doing and going to, I think I lead a fairly busy life, but my reading list truly sucks! I'll have to put myself on a serious reading schedule to make sure I get my reading in. It's the only way I can guarantee myself that I'll read and actually finish a book.

Not finishing a book is a problem too. I'll pick up a book and start reading it, and if it doesn't grab my attention right away, I'll just stop reading it. I have many partially read books in my apartment. I think it's a good idea to finish reading a book once you start it, even if it sucks, just to see as a writer why the book failed. Easier said than done however. Some books are just so darn boring.

I brought the book "London" by Edward Rutherford with me on my vacation, intending to finish reading the book and I just couldn't do it. It just so happens that the person I was on vacation with was the one who gave me the book to read, and when I asked her if she finished it, she said no, it was too boring. I'm determined to finish "London" sometime this year I swear, just to get it out of my apartment.

I never have the same problems forcing myself to see movies though. Movies don't require the same level of commitment that a book does. You can go to a movie and in 2-3 hours and it's done. Most books, depending on the length can take me a week to read or even longer, and if it's a good book I'll end up reading parts over 2 or 3 times because the writing is so good and I want to savor every part.

I wish I could go back to the bookworm self of my youth when I lived for reading, and was one of those types with their nose always in a book. But maybe back when I was a teenager living in my parents' house, I had to read because there was nothing else to do.

As an adult, there are so many choices of how to spend my time, whatever time I have left that is when I'm not working, eating, exercising, sleeping or maintaining my relationships. Sometimes I think if I didn't go to so many exhibits, plays and seminars/classes I would have more time to read. But I love plays and I love looking at art and attending events. Then there's all the websites to read, the newspapers online to read (SF Chron, NY Times, LA Times and Merc News), the magazines to read that I subscribe to (Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Shape, and Martha Stewart Living) It's a total conundrum.

Maybe if I'd gotten into the habit of reading before I go to bed I think I would read more books, but most people read to relax themselves and then go to sleep. When I read, I either get stirred up or I totally fall asleep. If a book really interests me, I'll have to keep reading it till I finish it.

I prefer to block out a period of several hours so I can read a book from start to finish. It's very hard for me to read a book in sections at a time, although I'm trying to teach myself to read this way. It's really the only way in my fairly busy life, that I'll ever get a book read.

Maybe reading needs to be like losing weight or doing anything else in my life at this point. I'll have to set up a schedule, a routine and try to follow it.

Some "The Matrix Reloaded" tidbits. I was going through a pile of old newspapers when I ran across a SF Chron interview with Keanu Reeves for the movie. Here's what Keanu said about his reading list for both movies.

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When he prepared for the original "Matrix", the Wachowski brothers asked Reeves to read Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" and Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control" so he'd gain an understanding of issues surround artificial intelligence. For the sequels, Reeve says, "the brothers told me if I wanted to look at what they were doing, I should read some Schopenhauer, some Hume and their old pal Nietzsche. I got a little bit into Schopenhauer, but you have to keep going backward -- you start at "Will and Representation", then you have to read "The Four Fold Path", and then, Schopenhauer hates Hegel, and he's opposed to Kant, so you start reading Kant, and then you go, OK -- I've go to do some stretching and some kicking".
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I'm starting back on counting my calories again to lose those last 10 stubborn pounds. Wow, I have been way more than I thought. I haven't been gaining any weight though, and I guess that's a good thing.

I decided to start off easy and try to eat only 1400 calories this week. I thought I could start with 1300 calories, but after 1200 calories I was still hungry. YIKES!!!

It's the snacks that are killing me. A cookie here, a piece of candy there, and pretty soon I've eaten the equivalent of two meals. I've been lax about religiously counting my calories since I went on the cruise, so that's two months of an eating free for all.

I would gain a 2-5 pounds, but then if I just cut back a little on my food intake my weight would come down to where it was before I stopped being vigilant. If this is maintenance eating, it's not that bad.

But now for these last 10 pounds. If I can do it on my own, I think I may join weight watchers. I've resisted it so far, and managed to lose weight without joining but I would so dearly love to get rid of these last incredibly donkey stubborn 10 pounds.

I know my body is fighting me. It likes this weight because I weighed this weight for a really long time. Maybe it's my set weight, so who knows. I know I used to weigh less so I know it can be done. I still have a few things in my closet that don't fit, and they bug me.

Maybe I need to give up juice. I don't even drink 100% juice anymore anyway. I always dilute my juice with mineral water. It tastes better and it's kind of like drinking soda, plus I drink a quarter of the juice I would normally drink. Maybe it's back to mineral water with a lemon twist.

Definitely no more trips to junk food palaces like Burger King and Taco Bell. I know I need to start exercising again regularly as well. I really slacked off on that big time in the last two months.

I took a four mile walk this evening, and I worked out on Saturdday and Sunday. If I exercise every day even if it's just walking 4-5 miles a day, I know this will help me in the battle of the last 10 immovable pounds that are fighting for dear life to hold on to my body.