12:30 AM 3/20/2010
Emailed best friend to let him know that 4/5 of our old college gang are now on Facebook together, he being the 5th. This is, however, unlikely to net him into the Facebook thing, he not being a fan. (You may deliver any peanuts, trout, or other compensations for that last statement to my journaling service inbox, on your preferred iteration of journaling service that I actually use.)

8:29 AM 3/20/2010
La la la it is morning. Have commenced reading the epic photo-story http://community.livejournal.com/twilightplastic/706.html (not sure if it's captioned), wherein Potter, Twilight, the X-Files, and apparently drugs collide in as portrayed by a bunch of Barbies, and apparently some Beanie Babies too, but they have yet to show up in the first episode.

9:13 AM 3/20/2010
I have "The King of Disco" in my head. I was blasting it, um. Thursday? when I was driving to the BART station (because it randomly came up on Fruitz and it is awesome) and now it is in my head. The cure for this? Retrieving Fruitz from where I set it when pulled it out of my pocket very early Friday morning and playing it again. (Let's dance all night 'cause this is San Francisco)

5:09 PM 3/20/2010
Life in #lj_userdoc is sometimes ... surreal ... when it's not an active doccing party.
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10:17 AM 3/21/2010
Perhaps it's easy to spend a large chunk of your morning documenting your earworms of the moment. Mine at earwormhole: James Bondage and Bad Romance.

7:04 PM 3/15/2010
Darkside to me: *tale of mistaken assumptions at a concert*
Me to Darkside: *howling with hilarity*
Darkside: *scowling*
Me to Dawn: *howling with hilarity*
Dawn to Darkside (via me): "YOU WILD MAN YOU, I NEVER KNEW"
Dawn to me: "Poor, poor baby." (About Darkside.)

7:33 PM 3/15/2010
Oh right, it was that conversation about the HAIL that got me thinking in the direction I was thinking.

In unrelated news, apparently "present her with the head" is insufficiently romantic/vengeful, and only the golf club will do.

4:33 AM 3/16/2010
So very madly in love and the tale of mistaken assumptions is still making me howl with hilarity in the morning.

7:55 AM 3/16/2010
Yep, still laughing.

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10:30 AM 3/5/2010
Back home. Engaged in deep thought. Discovered that desktop had, in my absence, gone to sleep (as is the norm), but responded sluggishly to pokes of the mouse and keyboard, without HDD indicator flashing: the same symptoms reported last time. Rebooted; did not get the Windows Is Loading screen fully on the monitor (it was fading in) before it rebooted. Last Known Good got the same treatment. Woe. Woe *ass*.

Will let him sit for a while. At least I now have a UPS between him and the wall.

10:39 AM 3/5/2010
This makes me massively unhappy.

On the other hand, the staying-in-and-drinking-with-JD last -- er, this morning -- that was very good. Did not manage to make it to TV night. Managed, well afer midnight, to head over to JD's with ground coffee, a bottle of cock-cola, the last of the Irish Cream, and the amaretto. We chatted about this and that.

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2:56 PM 3/7/2010
Not participating in the "Six Weeks for Dreamwidth" thing; I am too invested and connected in LiveJournal to consider withdrawing lightly. (And I'm aware it's not "lightly" for those who have left long ago, who have just left, who are considering leaving, who are participating or considering; withdrawing from LJ would be nearly as significant to me as leaving a job rather than giving up Facebook for Lent.)

3:27 PM 3/7/2010
Still looking at hair. Hmm.

4:25 PM 3/7/2010
Off phone with best friend. Renfair was rained out. Dear boy, looking up at the sky and yelling "BRING IT ON" is in fact a very good way to get hailed on. Dorkface. <3

Shared the top two woes on my list. He was, as usual, very wise. His favorite bartender's last night at the usual karaoke bar was Friday, so they did "Take This Job and Shove It" in her honor. He got paged away for chores.

5:03 PM 3/7/2010
Snipped a good inch or two off the bottom of my hair, as this will make it far less Impossible.

5:05 PM 3/7/2010
Hope Steph gets back to me soonish.

( Stuff from the morning: sleep, volunteer works, walking, groceries. )

Now let me tell you about the SFO-fail.

Wrote down Tif's flight info on one of the last pages in my little pocket notebook, stuck it in my pocket, and headed out to pick up JD. Spotted a passing airship. Picked up JD. Dove in my jacket pocket in search of the notebook. No notebook to be found. Cursed. Drove to the airport (SFO). Located the cellphone lot. Located a jackass in an SUV who pulls in to turn around right behind the cranky bitch who's pulled in to turn around herself. Located the lack of large screens giving flight information to the cellphone lot. Located the sign giving information on the website to visit with your cellphone to find flight info. Located the information booth. Located JD's cellphone. (JD) Navigated to the page. Discovered how absolutely shittly the page rendered on his cellphone. Attempted to find and load the arrivals page (lol, no). Headed to the information booth. Discovered that the information booth had info on Friday's flights and a few v. early Saturday morning (today is fucking Sunday). (Azz) Half remembered the vital info for the flight (I had the time and 3 out of 4 digits, and knew I didn't know the 4th). (JD) Got flight info from airline's page. Waited. Headed back over. Dropped off JD, circled airport. Picked up JD, Tif, and baggage.

( Social and home and support )

(bottled spider) is he Spiderman?
Psychedelic poodle -- harder to lose at a rave. (Wave a blacklight-reactive poodle instead of cellphones or glowsticks.)

Trained skunk. Dye it. Bring it to the rave. (If the show stinks...)

Best friend. Karaoke. (Friend stopping in the middle of out of sync Saga Begins to rant about Gungans...)

Pizza delivery, and its woes.


I miiiisss him.

Weird-ass dreams.

I dreamed we (for certain old-family-type values of 'we'; the Virtual Aunt and so forth) were living on the side of a particular hill (the one that Dad's obnoxious friend and Mama's old best friend lived on) but the valley was a bay instead of a valley. And my best friend was trying out for some jobs, and was taking a bath, and I had been taking a different bath or something when his mother showed up? And I was talking to his mother, and talking to him, and it was interesting and no little weird. And bath salts or bath bubbles and big bath towels. We were trying to avoid the seeing-each-other-naked part.

And part of the place on the lower end of the hill was a gas station with a bunch of pumps and a concrete pad, but it was mostly or entirely used for family purposes, though others could buy -- it was just so out of the way that no one came there.

Then there was an earthquake or something, a small localized one, and some of the power poles had catastrophic failure, and they fell down and there was some fire. However, we still had some light for some reason; clearly they were not directly affecting us (or there were solar panels) but the road out was very definitely blocked.

In the bay, there were whales, and the whales were talking and there were hippos and the whales were playing with the baby hippos and you could watch what was going on through the clear clear water, and I was trying to remember so I could write it down because it was important observations, and there were loud and slightly drunken guys commenting and they were distracting.

There were also earlier parts of the dream involving my elementary school, its gym (which was being used as its secondary purpose, just a big room, at that time) and people who seemed at the time as if they should be important.

Best of all possible worlds: best friend.

Somehow I let it go too long without talking to my best friend (though I did try the other day but miss him), but he was in this afternoon when I called. We chattered about many things of little consequence, including my sunburn, and music and other pieces of hilarity. The Snowflake incident came up; I described in some amount of succinct detail, and this resulted in him cracking up and making Helpful Suggestions. He was shocked that I'd never seen Dark Crystal; we discussed David Bowie's pants in Labyrinth, also.

He mentioned, in passing, a certain 90s song with a fascinating title:

( Hurt Me, Hurt Me, But The Pants Stay On )

That song's title cracked me up enough that I moved away from the magic spot in which my phone gets reception. I dropped the call a few times, all told. I told him about earwormhole. He was almost tempted to join in the fun, and started plotting what he might like to share with it. I pointed out that plotting isn't really the thing. He plotted anyway. Then I mentioned that an invite code was necessary (but I could get him one if he wanted) and he deflated a bit. (Alas.)

Eventually, I told him about Gordy, and the tribute, and the comment from Gordy's mommy came floating in while we were on about that. And I shared what she had to say, and that made us laugh, and we wound up talking music again. He would want a celebration of his life and the good times, not seriousness and mourning. We're of a like mind on this. He suggested Voltaire's Brains, or Graveyard Picnic. But, he warned me, his taste in such things was Weird and Strange; after all, I was talking to the man who thought that the Imperial March was appropriate music for a wedding. "Ha, guess what I was planning to walk down the aisle to, when I was planning to get married," I reminded him.

We talked my phone out of battery. It was over an hour, all told. I miss him.

I got confirmation about the internet problems. With a judicious use of ipconfig /all, I noted the wireless appliance's IP address, popped that into my browser, and met the appliance's status/login page. The status helpfully gives the air quality and SSID of the connected network; it was one bar, connected to PacificaNet4. Moving the appliance around did not help much. Ugh. 1 bar. That about fit my mood, too.

I woke up groggy, and things did not really improve much over the morning. My brain was out of tune, what with the lack of internet, and I may not have eaten a proper breakfast. Moving hurt. Thinking about moving hurt. The closer we got to time to leave and go do things, the more I was aware that all was not right in the department of my brain. I could barely focus, and needed to do things very strictly one thing at a time, very strictly monofocus. I was also somewhat cranky from lack of sleep. That is really a bad combination. ( Despite all this and more, we made it to dinner. ) It seems that "It's Complicated" has attained an enviable status, as the linguistic semi-equivalent of "Um ... friends!" of the new generation of internet children. (It differs in that "um-friends" are often acknowledged relationships that one can explain without recourse to a whiteboard and a whole playbook full of characters, but just that this status should not really be conveyed to the present audience (or can be shared with the *present* present audience, but not your mom. (Not mine. Yours.) "It's Complicated" implies that while you might be happy to explain the scenario to present company, it would require a Long Story (or two), and perhaps the sort of diagrams that have to include yarn in various color-codes to model the full dynamics of the whole situation.)

sithjawa. My trusty GPS delivered us to the correct hotel housing Consonance '09 (not without commentary at the GPS), and I spied willskyfall and sithjawa in the parking lot. Introductions were made all around, involving usernames.

We had not actually decided on a specific venue for supper, but JD had done some Googling and had found that there were many possibilities in the area. He put forth the idea of "drive until we find something that looks good"; sithjawa and willskyfall suggested that the closest four-star-reviewed thing they'd heard of in the area was right across the way.

My dietary requirements were merely that they have something available without any shrimp, bananas, and walnuts. This seemed entirely like it could happen. (I am thinking that the banana problem may have upgraded itself to an allergy, if one sip of smoothie containing bananas will make every part of my mouth that touches it start to sting even after it is hastily spat out.) So we were off! willskyfall had shotgun on account of leg length, and sithjawa was in the back with the giggling boys. (In the parking lot headed in, they declared that no, actually, it was not possible for them to let go of each other at this point in time.)

Hot Pot City was great fun. We did not have the spicy hot pot. I can take certain amounts of spice; Steph is not a spice person.

Upon learning that it was our first time, the fellow who seated us demonstrated what we were to do. There was a burner in the center of the table, which had an arrangement of a foil-covered platter and a pot in the center of it. He poured water in the pot and spread butter on the foiled tray. At his direction, we headed to the buffet to choose our ingredients, then put vegetables in the pot and spread meats on the tray.

We were a little unnerved at first, that all the vegetables were going in together, but that passed quickly in the debate about whether this was too many cooks for the soup, and then the resulting discussion of how many cooks are too many, anyway, and the concept of a successful multi-cook gestalt. There were mushrooms, assorted greens, bean sprouts, more mushrooms, a tomato, some zucchini, and goodness knows what else. The meats were delicious. I had picked a skewer with chicken gizzards, and sithjawa and the Boy had some (after I explained to Steph what part of the chicken it was). There were ribs. There was some sausage. There were potstickers. There was crab in the soup, and there was IRC-related giggling on the Support side of the table. It's very good to be Out with fellow internet people. Things got alarmingly meta when "Live Your Life" came on as background music, as that samples O-Zone. Oh, internet. (Also, your mom.) Steph needs to write a filk of "500 Miles" involving a sex change rather further away than one would like to be driving. There was more general silliness than can be easily remembered.

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I have the best friend in the universe. I know this because I called him today while I was waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in. My uterus is not happy with me today, and it was not wasting any time in letting me know this. I didn't even feel like I could read. My vocabulary was drastically limited because I couldn't string two coherent thoughts together. I couldn't actually laugh because doing so would disturb my uterus.

My best friend kept me company as the ibuprofen kicked in, and managed to distract me enough so that the half-hour was not the utter agony it could have been.

Most of the actual conversation was somewhat bizarre and probably didn't make much sense. That was OK. He was concerned about my lack of coherent, but once I explained he settled down, although he did recommend a nice warm bath. (That would still be nice.) When I mentioned Dawn's hosed phone, he got me good by pulling a hurt-and-angry on the "If that's what it takes to get her to call me...!", then laughed at me when I apologized. Moment of panic, thinking I'd hurt the dearest man to me in the world.

Once I finally started to feel better, he complained about TMI. "You mean it's TMI when I tell you my uterus doesn't hurt, but it's not TMI when I tell you it does? ... Or it was TMI then too, and you just weren't complaining because I was in so much pain."

He gets cranky when I tell him he's sweet. But he is. ♥

For the usual reasons, the best friend and I were discussing him being a cantankerous bastard (which he is) on Friday evening. He had intended to say that he was going to get "the Grinch song", to continue the discussion. Unfortunately, he lisped.

It is very likely that there will be either an actual pair of red-with-white-fur-trimming butt floss in his future, or at least a lot of jokes about this particular item.

I didn't even hear it. I knew what he'd meant to say, but then he started backpedaling. I was confused. He asked me what I'd heard. He explained what he said. I proceeded to tease him. It's so very nice that he allows me these opportunities.