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so i heard back from mary, and it looks like the assistant job went to someone else. while not a huge disappointment, i won't lie to you and say that i'm not affected whatsoever. on a disappointment scale of zero to ten, zero being totally unaffected and ten being my life is over, i'd say i'm about a 2, maybe a 1.5. 

anyway, the search continues. there's still a possibility of something with the script department out on long island, though it wouldn't start till later, beginning of september or so. to be honest, i'm kind of glad for the extra time in san francisco. there was a bit of too much too soon involved with the assistant job. 

best to all.

look at this... consecutive posts! pretty frickin' exciting if you ask me.

no call yet from new york... didn't really expect anything today after i didn't hear saturday evening... which of course means that tomorrow i get to pine. well, i'll try my best not to. anyways.

today i went rock climbing with sarah t at the mission cliffs climbing gym. it was fun, though my arms were killing me by the time i was done. i'm hoping to go again, though i imagine that will depend a little bit on what kind of hours i get... why do things have to cost money, i ask you, why?!

another reason i want to go back is that the place was rife with hot guys without shirts. whenever i see a straight guy staring at a girl's chest, i feel indignant for about three seconds, and then realize that usually any fit guy who's wearing a shirt tight enough to show of his chest usually grabs my attention in equal proportion. granted, i've never cat-called another guy in my life, but that has more to do with fucked up gender dynamics. anyway.

i'm exhausted, which is funny, because i wasn't expecting the jet lag to get me on this end. but, well, here it is. all right folks. until tomorrow.

whoa. i'm back. in san francisco. there's something about airplanes that makes me feel like whatever place i was coming from doesn't actually exist. it's so strange to, in less than a week, go from one familiar place to another familiar place thousands of miles a way... i think it kind of breaks the mind a little.

i guess what it comes down to (maybe) is that our minds still don't believe that we can travel as fast as we can. i mean, believe me, that flight felt interminable, but still... 600 mph? that's nuts. i see the pacific ocean as we're about to land, and all my mind is saying is "no fucking way... we were just in the atlantic two days ago!"

anyway, great travel distances aside... it's nice to be back. don't get me wrong, it was nice to be in new york, too, but it's hard to relax when it's humid; that's what i've decided. humidity has a kind of looming feeling about it... kind of like that guilt/dread mixture that usually accompanies presently due papers or chores. it's omnipresent, humidity... even with an air conditioner going, you can feel it just on the other side of the window or door. waiting. and, really, there's not a whole lot else going on in new york in the summer other than humidity. and i sweat like a squeezed sponge in heat. by the way, why isn't the past participle of "squeeze" "squozen?" like "freeze" is "frozen?" i just looked up "squeeze" in the dictionary, and besides feeling like it's not a real word, what with all the qs and zs, i saw that squeeze doesn't have a known origin. it comes from squise, which comes from the obselete queise, and nobody knows where that came from. weird!

whatever, you guys just want new york dirt. okay folks, here it comes:

i arrived tuesday evening, and chugged into the city. it really is a sunovabitch, how long it takes the subway to get out to the airport. 90 minutes for a trip that's no more than 20 miles. 17.9 miles, according to google maps. anyway, when i got in, julia, jess, brendan, and julia's bf justin were at hand, so we did some preliminary hanging out. my grandma was staying at the apartment as well, in from long island for some work. my parents and sister were out on long island, and, at the anus of dawn (coming before the ass-crack) wednesday morning, i made my way to penn station to grab the 7:39 train out there. of course, 7:39 is 4:39 california time, and the new lirr cars are specially designed to make sleep almost impossible, and that, as they say, is where my troubles began. i'm pretty sure the sleep deprivation was a leading cause in my impending sickness.

after a far too brief rest, we headed out to the ocean, which, though i was tired out of my gourd, was a lot of fun. one of the things that i've always known was true but had never verbalized (or... writalized?) was that having kids around allows adults to do kid things that otherwise they might feel stupid doing. case in point: playing in the waves. so much fun. yet, i'd never think of doing it on my own, i don't think. well, i guess one time in san diego i went in... perhaps with james? anyway.

so, after the beach, i went and got some interview-type clothes from the gap. see, i knew i had an appointment with this guy who's assistant i might be on friday, but on thursday, mary, the woman who's been kind of mentoring me and coaching me on this whole thing, sent me out to the television studio where they make the show to meet some people, and all the clothes i had brought to long island were t-shirts and bermuda shorts.

we ate dinner wednesday night at a place on shelter island called "bob's," a lobster/seafood joint. i had a hamburger. eating lobster still kind of grosses me out. watching people eating it, that is.

the next day i shipped over to sag harbor, had a quick visit with gram, then was whisked off the studio. it was pretty cool; they're not in production so there were only four people there, but they were all really nice, and the whole thing got me pretty excited for the potential job. i met the person who i would be replacing, and she reassured me about the lack of correlation between this job and the devil wears prada. quick note: if i haven't said it before, anyone who thought that the devil wears prada was good needs to see a kevin spacey movie called swimming with sharks. it's pretty much the same basic story (thought sharks is considerably older, so gets the cred), but much, much darker and way more satisfying and sinister. and it's got kevin spacey in it, so, awesome. and i believe benicio del toro is in it as well. crazy.

back into the city that evening, straight to jess and brendan's for their "we're leaving the nyc metropolitain area" dinner, which was sad and fun and humid (they don't have a/c, but i love them anyway). there was a great few minutes where everyone was choosing their favorite elliott smith song. it's a hard choice, but i think all-time fav for me would have to be "bottle up and explode" off of xo.

i woke up the next morning for my interview, showered, dressed, and went. we met at the cornelia street café, which meant a twenty second trip. the interview was... fine. it's hard to tell if my lack of enthusiasm is self-doubt or something more substantial. i had been told that this guy was a bit of an egomaniac (lets hope he doesn't read this as part of any background research he might be doing...), and that the more i could get him to talk about him, the better. i did my best, but he actually did ask me quite a few things about me, so i one worry was i was talking too much about moi-même... it was a little hard to read him for most of the time, though towards hte end he started describing all of the grungier aspects of the job in a tone that i've described to every single person i've seen since as the same tone a parent uses with a kid who really wants a puppy. "you'll have to walk him every day and feed him every day..." his was more along the lines of "i need five or six reminders sometimes" and "this job takes a lot of attention to detail." it was vaguely cautionary with an air of being dissuasive. but who knows. anyway, he said he's trying to figure everything out by this evening, so, it's possible the phone could ring at any moment with a verdict.

after the interview, i zipped up to the bronx for a quick lunch with amalea, then back down to the village to give my dad a high-five as he headed out the door again to go back to long island. i hung out with julia, brendan and jessica a bit more, before jules headed back to the dirty jerz and jess and bren went to brooklyn to pack. i lazed around, which felt extremely nice, until 9-ish, when i met up with kristine, and we went to dinner with dan, son of the family who put me up in dublin. all in all it was an awkward dinner. dan was sick, and by now i was feeling pretty raw myself, and we never were able to hit any solid universal conversation topics. ah well. we ended up meeting up with kathie (kamili bailed/failed us all) and we went to good old standby lederhosen, a german beer garden on grove street off of hudson. it was fun.

then, getting home around 12:15, i called jetblue to invoke the $25 same-day flight change, and, by 12:30, they hadn't picked up, and, slightly drunk, i decided just to take my 7:00 am flight, and suffer. i got a solid 3 hours of sleep, and then headed out to fly here. and here i am.

i feel like there were more observations i wanted to make, but seeing as how this is slightly shorter than the odyssey i'll leave them for another time.

anyway, watch this space for information about my next life chapter.

things keep moving along at a pretty good clip. i bought a ticket for my trip to austin today, which will happen in two or so weeks. i'd be more stressed out about missing work if i actually knew if i'd be missing any, but, well, so it goes, i guess.

tomorrow i'm off to new york. it's going to be a crazy few days, which makes me feel more tired than i should... a lot of back and forth most likely to long island. 

anyway, waiting around right now, technically for a call from park and rec, though i think it's probably not going to happen today. no biggie. i'm going to go to the gym and clean my room and see some peeps tonight, and that'll make the day full.

laters. 

quick addendum: just watched the fourth episode of the first season of the wonder years, which mostly consists of kevin witnessing his hippie sister argue with her parents, but, playing the hippie sister's boyfriend is none other than john corbett, perhaps best known as aidan in sex in the city. crazy. okay, that's all. later, folks.

hey folks. i'm back from my trip up north... i'd've posted from up there, but as you all well know, the internet, along with electricity and the wheel, haven't made it up there just yet, so i was unable.

anyway. portland... i don't know exactly what i was expecting, but i think the town came in slightly below my expectations. I feel like the northwest is a little bit like a lost chunk of the southeast, in that there are a lot of rural accents, and not a small amount of white trash. i know, that sounds harsh. but, on the train into the city from the airport, i heard no more than three people talking about court dates, appointments with parole officers, and other police troubles. maybe i'm old fashioned. or just sheltered. but damn.

the city itself is nice enough, though walking around the downtown area feels kind of like walking through one of those old buildings renovated into an armani store. in fact, that's exactly what it was: most of the old buildings, which were pretty enough, had been renovated to house department stores, corporate chains, and other depressing yet pervasive institutions. it may have been just me, and it may have been the heat, or the lack of time, or who knows what, but i felt like i couldn't zero in on portland's character. there was a slight sensation of earthiness, but only slight. of course, that city is a lot younger than san francisco or new york; one historical plaque informed my dad and i that the city was named by a coin toss between two guys, one from portland, maine and one from boston. go figure.

so, enough of my complaining already. i had a really good time. first of all, hanging out with my dad is always fun. i'm not going to wax nostalgic about how great my dad is, so let's just agree on that point. dad: you're great. there was lots of joking, most stupid, but all fun. the first whole day there, we drove up to mount hood, where there was still snow (although apparently significantly less snow than there had been historically) and people were still going up to snowboard... in july. what? after that we drove down into the columbia river valley gorge (or some combination of those words) which was absolutely stunning. looking over into southern washington, you can almost pretend to see what it must have looked like when lewis and clark sailed down it for the first time, which i think is pretty sweet. my dad and i stopped at a few wineries, had some lovely oregonian wines. saw multanomah falls, very cool. made it back to portland in time for him to go give a talk on mozart and shostakovitch, which was why he was there in the first place.

the next day, the forecasters were predicting record heat (105°f) so we decided to flee town and head for the coast. we took a scenic route through the mountains, with some absolutely stunning views. it reminded me somewhat of the cross-country trip i took with alexis and mo before our sophomore years... we'd gone to pick up alexis, who was just finishing a week with her family at a cabin in the sierra, and we took california route 4 all the way through the mountains to nevada. it was this crazy windy road, and for the first half hour or so we were constantly surrounded by trees on both sides, but then, and one point, we turn a corner, and we're on the side of a mountian; one side of trees just falls away, and we're looking out at wall of trees on the mountain next to us... it was amazing. of course, there was no guard rail, so it was simultaneously terrifying, but anyway.

the oregon coast was a little strange... not entirely unlike the chunk of oregon coast i saw on my last visit to the state, as a part of spring break '05 with julia. we met the coast near tillamook, oregon, home of the famous cheese. apparently, there are postcards for purchase in tillamook which have a picture of a cow's ass, and say "come smell the dairy-air." that about sums it up; the place stinks of cow and its flooded with rednecks... very high mullet percentages.

then we continued on towards manzanita, a little beach town friends of my dad's had said was sweet and would be a nice place to eat. along the way, my dad stopped at antique shops, and i decided that it was as good a time as any to follow up on my letters asking for a writer's traineeship. talk about a bust: one show after another simply told me that they don't participate in the writer's training program, which begs the question: why does the wga have it? anyway, i tried not to get too down; we had a good lunch and a pleasant enough drive home, replete with a pit-stop at a pit stop at a dairy queen, because no road trip is complete without a stop at a fast food chain.

anyway, i've gone on long enough. suffice to say, the rest of the trip was just as good as this... i'll have to fill the rest in later. i'm going to new york this week, though, so we all know it's never going to happen. 

best to all.

today was a bit of a blah day. no work, no real activity. i got up at 10, ate breakfast, watched half an episode of star trek ds9, went to the gym, showered, took a sandwich with me to a movie (i took muni, which was free, because it was a 'spare the air' day), strangers with candy. it was good, but not great. i came back home, wrote an extra long e-mail to a girl who's going to be an assistant this coming year at my old lycée, ate dinner with the family, then puttered around the internet. i've just watched two episodes of csi, which i've started tivoing because it's on daily. 

i feel vaguely as if i'm in some sort of rut.

the real crime of the day is that, outside of my novella-length e-mail, i didn't do any writing. and i feel like i've got plenty of ideas... it's hard to tell if it's a discipline thing or a unfocused thing. anyway, here's hoping tomorrow has a little more to offer.

i ran into james' younger brother at the movie theater... he was hanging out with a friend of my brother (who i guess also is friends with james' bro as well). it was awkward. i felt like some sort of... parent. i know i've harped on this before, but i still have no frame of reference for what it's like to run into your older sibling's friend, but why should it be awkward? after the movie, i saw andrew (that's james' bro) on the train, and i kept waiting for him to look over so i could say hello, but it was almost as if he was avoiding looking at me.

i'm probably making all this up, but, well. there's always a chance i'm not.

all right. a depressing post. i apologize in advance. hasta pronto.

i walked in the aids walk today... yay!
i'm really tired, but i like the idea of posting something today, to keep up with the momentum.
the guy i've been chatting to on myspace never wrote back. sad.
still no work... ugh. also, very little money... i'll be scraping from here to payday. but that's all right; i like the idea of scraping. it builds character.
tomorrow is the first full business day that i can be more or less sure that my letters have reached la... i have no idea how long it will take people to get to them, and, once that happens, if they will even contact me to say "hell no" so... let the waiting game begin.
i go to new york a week from tuesday. crazy! i swear the country is shrinking. or something. here's what was on the front page of the onion this week, though apparently it's from 1997. way to stay current, guys. oh well. still funny.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29877
all right folks. that's all i've got. better luck tomorrow.

today was just one of those days where i couldn't find anyone.

please chalk all typos up to the amount of alcohol in my system.

i called a bunch of people and got a lot of answering machines. this included my parents. they called later, but when they called i couldn't think of the things i wanted to ask them. you know what's weird? thinking about how you're made out of your parents. i'm a little too intoxicated to actually sift through all this, but here: the relationship between myself and michael beckerman is 50% genetic. no, wait, 50% of my genetic makeup comes from michael beckerman. i mean, that's a fucking lot. but i haven't seen him in weeks and weeks, and he feels very foreign to me at the moment, and i mentally associate him with the other 40s-and-up men i know. and i know that a lot of that has to do with the fact that he's not around, but still... strange.

anyway. tonight i went to this place canvas cafe with janine. it's a coffee shop slash bar slash nightclub slash art gallery, and tonight it was a lesbian dance place. at the beginning there was this supercute guy there. he was vaguely nerdy (had glasses) but was totally cute, and then he and his friends just BAILED. lame. and my heart went out of it. it made me feel lame, that once this guy was gone, i was sort of setting myself up not to have a good time... what is that all about? good god... we are creatures of nature... there is something indescribable about the pursuit of a potential companion... the smell of blood in your nose.

wow... i'm really much more far gone than i'd thought. why'd none of you stop me? well... here's me stopping myself.

oooh! plus, tomorrow, i'm going on the aids walk. oops, i meant, today.

until next time.

so i think the word i was looking for is "rapport." that's got a french "t" in it, so i wasn't completely off the mark. anyway, don't worry, i'm not counting this as an actual post; stop feeling so robbed. god.

look at that! i thought i was going to be posting on the 15th, two days after the last post, but hey! i've got 54 minutes to go! sweet!

no work again today; that rounds out the pay week at 10 hours, though five of those hours are premium, so i get a bit more money for those. which is pretty sweet. what did i do? well, a whole lot of nothing... i figure yesterday was sooo productive that today could be a little un-productive. i took a two hour bus journey to get my nalgene back from the rec center i worked at last night, so that was... well, a waste of time. then i went to the gym, that was good.

for dinner, i went with bernie to eat with old friends of ours from when we lived in noe valley, which i believe was 1992-94... so, old friends. they're the landmans: jim, debbie, katie and max. when we lived across the street from them, both jim and debbie ran their coffee business, selling landmark coffee beans, though since debbie has become a sixth grade teacher. anyway, they're all great. back in the day, me and bernie spent copious amounts of time over there, mostly playing on max's sega genesis (our parents denied us video games); but as the years have gone on and we've all grown up, it's just been a lot of great conversation. debbie is a stitch, and me and her kind of have this weird comedic... there's this word that i'm looking for that i can't find; it's somewhere between synergy and cooperation and collaboration... i feel like there may be some funny sound in it, like a "sh" or "f" or something french maybe. anyway, if yout hink of the word, tell me. i was saying that we just have this patter we kind of get into, and it's a lot of fun.

so yeah. afterwards, i drove bernie and max, and then picked up three more of bernie's friends, and deposited them at a third party's house so they could have a lost party... it seemed strange, because most of the people in the car were doing a whole "i'm above lost thing," which i found pretty stupid, but whatev. it was weird, though, thinking about who i represented, and i had to come around to the fact once again that i have no idea what it's like to have an older sibling. strange, strange. also, all those college kids hanging out together reminding me strongly of what i had previously believed were high school kid characteristics made me feel ancient. lame.

all right, well that covers it. until next time?

another week, another post... maybe it's time to rename the blog?

 

naah, too lazy.

 

so, i was productive today: i mailed off the first round of letters for this writers training program i'm trying to do in la. it's a bit of a long shot, but that's cool. the freakiest thing of all about the whole thing is that, theoretically (though probably not) I could get a call next week from someone saying "come down to la" and then i'm gone. what?! i mean, it's probably not going to go down like that, but it could. i said in my letters that i would be able to be down in la the next day for an interview, and after that i'd need only a couple more days to get my shit in order and start working. it sounds strange, and impossible... but its not. i mean, all i'd have to do here would be to quit my job and throw all of my belongings in a suitcase. okay. this is making me kind of freak out a little bit. let's move on.

 

last night i went to see a play with bernie, and one of his friends' family. it was very san francisco, at this place called "the marsh." lots of ex-hippy types. the play was interesting... it was a one-man show, starring this white guy from sf who had gotten a fulbright scholarship to go to nigeria. the entire show is presented as people who are talking to him: a lot of accents/impressions. a lot of oil companies ruining the world, and the united states condoning it. the only thing that didn't sit right was that it was a white guy doing impressions of black nigerians for an audience of white people who all more or less have a concept of what is going on in oil-rich countries at the moment. there was something vaguely... conspiratorial about it, especially when i walked outside and passed a chevron, a shell, a 76.

 

i've been getting an okay amount of work this week. i had three hours on monday, three yesterday, and i have four hours tonight. the one on monday was very strange: it was a latchkey program that's been turned into an all-day thing for the summer. it was in the sunnyside district, which is possibly the foggiest neighborhood in sf. i walked into this rec center and the only other director there (the head director) was handing out a snack of microwave popcorn and yelling at the kids pretty harshly. then, to top it all off, she sticks a video on, and tells the kids to be quiet. it was an impossible situation; i couldn't contradict anything she was doing, because i was just a sub. finally, one of the kids (in the most adorable voice you've ever heard) asked me if they could play outside... i asked the head teacher if they could and she said "well, they just came in from outside, but if they want to go back out, that's fine." later, around 5, i was playing kickball with the kids and she comes out of the building and says "i'm going to pick up my kids, so you can close up." so all of a sudden it was me and 25 kids alone at this place. i mean, that's not outside the parameters of my job, but still. whoa.

 

okay, that'll have to do for now. later, gators.

i'll tell you what it is. what it is is that i when i don't work, the weekend is my busy time, because all my friends are off from work. so i had a busy weekend, and then the july 4th bbq, and then i had three days of work at silvertree. so what it is is that by the time i found time to sit down and post, there was so much to write about that i felt overwhelmed.

"poor baby."

yes, i know, i was the one who named my blog, not y'all, so, i'm sorry.

tonight i'll have to keep it short and sweet, because i'm waking up early for the world cup final tomorrow.

i was at this bar in that weird intersection of the mission, noe valley and bernal heights at the corner of mission and army; jessica's in town, looking for apartments, and a friend of hers from texas who lives here now was out at a bar for a friend of her's birthday; anyway, we dropped by. it was fun, though i drove, so i wasn't drinking (which was not a problem... i didn't really have any drinking stamina tonight, plus i'm not 100% sure what nighttime muni is like, so i wasn't keen to get wasted). we hung out on the patio, which was cold but nice... i'm much happier in this weather than in humid new york. anyway, we were there for a little over an hour, and as we get up to leave, i see this guy out of the corner of my eye who seems kind of cute, with light-ish colored hair. then, as i get a closer look, i see that his hair is actually grey (whoa!) and then, that he's a social studies teacher from my high school (double whoa!). it was an intense moment... an "it's a small world" crossed with a "shit i'm old" moment. strange.

of course, tomorrow i'm world-cupping it with a former journ teacher, but that, naturally, is different. it's unclear as to whether our particular institution will be serving booze... part of me feels that a european sporting event stone-cold sober might be a bit difficult, but we'll see.

also, i have lots to tell about the three days of work at silvertree (day camp) i had. but another day. tomorrow perhaps.

hasta proxima.

ps. apologies to all my die-hard fans. jessica, sarah, brendan: i'll try to stay more on top of it.