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.