Category Archives: Stuff

Everything else

Fucking tired

5 Replies

I’m not sure if I can snap out of this great fatigue. Nope, instead I might perish on the spot with only a note to blow my ashes over Monterey.

My luggage finally fucking arrived at about 9 p.m. last night, while we were out dining with the family of Aunt #6. (I am determined to learn names this year, since I think I have the numerical order of the family down.)

It sucks wearing your boyfriend’s close (and mind you a wee tighter than I enjoy), whilst strolling the major shopping neighborhood in a major, fashionable, modern, consumerist city such as Singapore. We did buy an unlocked cell phone and SIM card to maintain radio contact with the relatives. But, I felt too disgusting, tired, frustrated and harassed by the equally jet lagged (but less like to admit it) boyo.

By the early evening, I just wanted to crawl my poorly clothed self into bed and sulk.

Although, dinner at an Indonesian restaurant was great with the Singaporean branch of the family, and they seemed to forgive my complete lack of fashion. I do so hate being the pseudo-wife dressed as a pseudo dyke.

It’s tomorrow, Monday, on this side of the world. Alas, the score for the Super Bowl didn’t time travel with us. Go Pats.

Jetlagged and short on the interwebs

Leave a reply

We’re in Singapore. I’m tired. Can’t find easy web access.

And so it goes.

Hopefully a better night’s sleep than our last night’s dragging in after 1 a.m. after cumulatively flying over 18 hours is on the agenda.

35,000 and whining

Leave a reply

Asia is very far away from the U.S.  About 9 hours in we still haven’t hit our layover in Japan.  Japan promises fun things like some kind of foot, toilets that are not in mid-air and electricity. From Tokyo, we’ll hit Singapore at about 12 midnight, there anyway.

It will be 19 or so hours from when we left the house, and one crossover the international dateline and yesterday is completely gone.  I’m sure I could come with some yearbook or poster worthy wise about minding the days as they slip through your hands. I hope I get to see monkeys.

More so, I hope I get to see monkeys in a wilderness kind of way.  Ones that don’t get peanuts from children, but instead live by their wits, as I’ll be doing. OK, that’s a lie.  I’ll be living more by my half-wits.  The wit that will need to go along with the crowd and smile profusely like the dim watt that I am unsure about language and all that.  Thank fucking god English is pretty prevalent among the M.’s folks.

If we get a SIM card to work in my old, unlocked cell phone I schlepped along, I’m going to have to beg M. to carry it.  His family from what I have seen seems addicted to the technology, using phones to text and talk like walkie talkies.  You don’t just meet somewhere, someone will call you. As what I like to call the “pseudo-wife,” seemingly there is a movement to put me pseudo in charge. So his aunt has my number on speed dial. It gives me sympathy to my sisters-in-law.  Seriously, what cosmic decree that apparently crosses cultures, puts the chicks in charge of telecommunications.  If I wanted that kind of role I would have tried to be a radioman in the army. 

Packing stress

Leave a reply

Pretty much I’m done. Clothes packed, car service arranged, iPods charged, bording passes printed, blah blah blah. I hate getting ready for a trip.

Now all that’s left is for me to stress out completely and worry if M.’s family likes me. And cross my fingers to see some kind of exotic rain forest action.

For the next two weeks, I’ll be living the minority lifestyle. A chubby white stranger trying not to sweat profusely (Singapore is like 80-90 miles from the equator) or catch a bad case of the skin cancer when pale, pale skin meets hot, near sun.

Check here for pictures and thoughts and general whining no doubt. (And, maybe a bit more once I sleep, make it through security and have nothing but sitting in the airport left to do.)

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Came, saw, hosted

Leave a reply

I dabbled in comedy tonight. It was fun, in that way that comedy isn’t really capital F fun for the folks doing it.

I really like some of the stuff from W. Kamau Bell, and I wished it was the kind of place you could have had an actual conversation with the other performers. Same with Nato Green.

It wasn’t, though. More of a come in, do your time get on the road kind of show. (With my road about 2-3 miles away, I could have stayed.)

When I got there, the bartender thought he might have met me before at the Rose and Crown nearby, which used to have a comedy show. I did it twice, moments after moving here. To say I sucked would be to grossly underestimate what amounted to the Orick challenge.

A couple of people showed up from a job in the early 90s. A couple of other people showed up from my current employment. I shall see if they make eye contact come the morning, or advert their gaze in that awkward afterwards of a comedy show that’s rather like a bad morning after with an intimate stranger. Hopefully, all don’t hate me.

And, as I prepared to go on stage, I remembered Dot and I devising our hosting strategy. I tried to live it all, and I tried to do all of the things assigned to me — passing the tip bucket, eliciting tips, introducing and generally keeping the show moving. I believe I met expectations. (In a perfect world, people would have been howling for more of me. Alas.)

One last thing checked off my personal to-do list. I should try this comedy thing more often. Next on the list will be to go to Asia.

(Video to come, maybe I’ll ask people to vote on whether I should try this comedy thing more often.)

Asian prequel and burning out on Tuesday

Leave a reply

M.’s aunt, uncle and cousin from KL were back in the Bay Area. Whilst here, they stay with a high school friend of the uncle’s, in a typical suburban family house that is much like my big bro’s own playhouse. A drive from the big city, well-stocked, comfy and with all manner of entertainment.

They brought along another couple with whom they are partnering in a business, who hadn’t seen any of the sights.  So, we spent the weekend eating Asian food, talking about the business venture, sight-seeing and eating Asian food.

Here’s me, I believe looking like some kind of famous bridge docent:bridgetourists

M.’s taking the picture.  What this picture really needs is a bit of a visual intro, but I missed the shot while thinking about it rather than taking it.  You see, the Golden Gate bristles with tourists on any given weekend, and a large percentage of them are from areas east of Europe and west of the California cost.  However many countries there are in Asia, they be representing bridge-side.

And, there I was.

bikesunsetgoldengate

While driving up and down, up and down, up and down and over and across the San Francisco Bay quite a few times this weekend, I finally finished my ballot. 

We are heading out and away from the primaries on Friday to the other side of the globe, so we will be absentee voters in this race.  While the polls are reporting and the counting goes on, remember us as they talk about the millions of “absentee ballots,” now re-branded as vote-by-mail, not yet counted in Cali next Tuesday.

(Here, where people make programs and computers for a living, voting by mail is pretty dang popular.  Somewhere, somehow, tucking a piece of cardboard colored in with black or blue pen, licking it shut, stamping and tossing it into a blue box on the corner seems safer than using a newfangled machine that hackers have proved oh-so-compromise-able.)

M. has already been researching how we can tune into the crazy wacky fun of Super Tuesday.  (By the way, note to all TV talkers every-fucking-where, calling it “Super Duper Tuesday” just sounds so fucking indescribably lame. Please stop.)

We should be in Kuala Lumpur, but I’m not sure.  When the last polls close at 8 p.m. PST Tuesday, it should be 12 noon on Wednesday in Malaysia.  I’m confused, as I think we may already be hopping into his aunt and uncle’s minivan and driving from KL to Penang, because Super Tuesday will be Wednesday, the eve of the lunar new year, when the Chinese New Year-ing festivities shall commence.

Starting the new year and trying to monitor the primaries is likely to drive M. to distraction.  To say he’s wrapped up in the race would be an immense understatement.  He’s obsessed.

Somewhere in Malaysia, there will be at least one “Barack Obama ’08” t-shirt, and my man will be sporting it on his back.

Cumulatively, we’ve watched days of hours of minutes of eternities of coverage, swapped news links, youtube videos, blog postings, read most major news stories and finally did our ballots yesterday and mailed them off to the county.  I was undecided until minutes before envelope sealing.

In the end, I listened to the fire in the belly of our former president, William Jefferson Clinton.  His passion, his anger, his parsing of words, like “rolling the dice” and “fairy tale.”  And, I voted against his wife.

As much as I want to see a woman get ahead, I am fucking worn out and tired by all of the bullshit and lies and grandstanding.  We’ve been doing that for eight fucking destructive years.  It’s easy to believe that old Bill and Karl Rove are spiritual twins.

Oh, and, ah, feminist-wise, someone relying on both her husband’s old job and his current-day bullying, is, ah, not the kind of chick that does it for me. I mean, Phyllis Schlafly has a following and a career and ovaries, and I wouldn’t give her the time of day.

Like a whole lot of people I want to believe that maybe there is something else.  I want to think change could happen as Barry Crimmins, who hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid yet like me, wrote here. Caroline K. helped push me over the edge.  And today her uncle closed it.

I mean holy shit.  Ted Kennedy is speechifying all positive-like and forward thinking and inspirational.  There is something in the air.  Could be political shit, of course, but at the moment it’s smelling sweeter. Check this endorsement from the SF paper.

(Sorry to Dennis Kucinich.  I know you and I are kindred spirits, united on such things as policy and progressive ideals.  We were meant to be together, you and I.  Like a poor girl in a Dickensian drama, I went not with love but with strategy.  Barack has a chance of making history, Dennis, and selfishly I want to be a part.  Maybe we could each send him a pocket Constitution.)

Overdue and fun-ish in list form

Leave a reply

There’s a whole lot of shit I haven’t written out and tried to make all funny haha.  But rest assured there are teeny little glimmers of ideas bouncing in the vast, empty expanse I call my skull.

The best I can do:

 – M. has taken to getting T-shirts altered to his particular likes. 
 – M. makes me laugh.  Very, very much, in fact too much, like myself he struggles with his individuality.  We both think we blend in a very low-key one of the crowd way.  We don’t.
 – It looks like folks from a few jobs ago, and number 2 entry in my spectacularly fired from workplaces trilogy, might show up at the show I’m hosting.
 – Oh yeah, did I mention I’m hosting a show.  Comedy.  Funny.  Come on by.
 – Next week we head to Singapore and Malaysia.  I’m beginning the obsessive compulsive phase of traveling.  It begins with list making in my head.  I also am quite concerned that my underwear is ready for the international challenge.
 – Apropos the item above, my guilt is sinking in.  I mentioned a desire to see the rain forest.  I believe this wish will be met, but that accompanying us will be a subset of M.’s clan.  I had no intention that my whimsy would result in forcing his mother to a long march in the jungle.
 – Since Chinese is way above my intellectual capacity to learn, I thought I’d try Malay.  I have one week to actually take the book off our book shelf and learn a language.  Good planning.
 – Our guide book to Singapore says the slang for white person is “Ang Moh” around that neighborhood.  I think it’s Hokkien.  I asked M. for the word for “fat,” and it sounds something like bu-yo.  I’m going to be listening up for “bu-yo ang moh,” because this visit I’m chubbier and whiter than before.
 – If I hear a universal “Holy Shit” when I get off the plane, I know the prior item is correct.
 – Finally, there’s a whole slew of shit about work I could bitch about.  Suffice it to say — People is C-R-A-Z-Y (and generally, they annoy me.  People, all of them, that is.)

Sweet jesus I'm a geek

Leave a reply

For a few days now, I’ve been swapping around three laptops each running a separate OS.  Why?  ‘Cuz apparently I’m devoid of life’s fine sweet nectar.  By which I would mean sex or food.

The aim has been tweaking the teeny tiny Asus eeepc, digging into the command line (which is only a meaningful sentence for the unwashed and unfriended.  That would be me.)  I’m damned if I can’t figure out how to install the kernel headers that would make the Cisco VPN client to install.

(Not that I want to be able to tunnel into work’s VPN, but, like a some sort of puny, sad Everest, I want to be able to say I can.)

The old, shitty, slow-booting, sad, clunky, Windows XP Winbook laptop was helpful in making some tools and, with the help of these guys, made my legal collection of iTunes songs playable anywhere.  More than anything, it helped for when I crashed my new toy’s drive with too much crap and too much stupidity.  In some kind of meta-dork-techno moment, I used an old Apple shuffle as the USB flash drive to create a bootable restore drive on the Windows brick and fixed up the Linux machine.

Good fucking god.  I just read the above.  I am freaking dull.

 Here’s something vaguely amusing.  On Sunday, I had it in my head to buy some new prescription shades to wear when we wander down to a few clicks from the equator in a week and a half.  Not exactly a tough errand.  Only, I’m retarded.

(By the way, I’m writing this little episode down, because a certain maile friend with whom I live and sleep suggested I wouldn’t.  Something about my making myself godlike and infallible on this little web domain for which I pay the bills.  Oh, how he doesn’t know me and my awesomely humble, self-deprecating ways.)

So, there we are in the mall in the LensCrafters, and some chick wants to help me.  Her English wasn’t great, and her salesmanship blew outright, as she tried to upsell me to the notion I could get progressive lenses in sunglasses. (Well, yeah, honey, I get that I could have hip old-lady shades for my peepers that were also bifocals.  But, I didn’t see myself reading or computering while driving or sunbathing or do any number of things I tend to do in bright sunlight.)

Anyway, as she’s annoying me and we chat, I unfold and place under her nose the paper I took from my nightstand expressly for this moment.  The folded up sheet of standard white was meant to be my copy of my spectacle perscription. Only, again, I’m retarded.

She, in confused, stalling English, said she didn’t know what to do with what I gave her.  Impatiently, I looked over her shoulder and saw the printout of the online ticket to Kooza, the Cirque du Soleil show we went to the night before.

What lady?  You can’t make me some glasses based on a barcode and directions to the Canadian circus?  What kind of glasses place is this?

I apologized, we left and I got glasses the next day at another Lenscrafters in a whole ‘nother town.

Testing in Linux land

1 Reply
Clearly, I want Apple’s latest toy.  And no doubt, I can rationalize and afford ownership.

I mean, I’m about a week and a half away from traveling to the edge of the universe, also known as Southeast Asia.  I don’t want to be lugging my 5-pound, dusty old (by like a whole year or something) MacBook into the rain forest.  It’s heavy.

Nah, truth is it is really, heavy schlepping a laptop onto a plane any way you stretch it.  I almost wish I didn’t carry it the six-hour flight to Boston.  Almost.

Cutting a couple pounds means more books and magazines to amuse me for the endless stretch of sitting in coach-class seats and hating humanity.  What’s a girl to do, but lust after a shiny new thing that’s rich and thin?

On the other hand, the other long, long trip for which I am probably destined to jet is not Asia but a whole other swinging, exotic (to me) continent, Africa.  For Africa, it will actually be work, and so a computer would be likely more than a luxury but a necessity.

But, then again, the whole point will be indeed to see some of the spots off the tourist miles and into the real folks and all.  Infrastructure and wireless at every turn is not really a hallmark of the neighborhoods in which I will likely find myself.

El Jobso, as the CEO might be called, wasn’t, I think, designing for places where electricity is iffy, let alone freaking wifi. 

Then, there’s the cold, harsh reality.  If you walk around with bleeding edge technology in a corner where folks aren’t getting the basics of food, clothing and shelter, might it be expected that a ne’er-do-well might get all Jean Valjean on your ass and swipe your shiny, new thing?

After much research, and no doubt annoying the snot out of my partner, the occasionally long suffering M., I settled on the not-quite ready for prime time world of Linux, and the latest out of Taiwan.  The Asus EEE PC.  The e’s are all for words like easy.

At $400, I might just leave it in Africa, if anyone there wants it.  At two-pounds, I won’t do nearly a speck of whining.  Well, I still might, but this thang is book-sized, so it won’t be over that.

This entry is fully open-sourced.  Written on a Linux machine, using FireFox and the plug-in Deepest Sender.  And, every single word I’ve used is code that’s been used and passed along by others for centuries.

On the plus sides, when the IT guys at work get all chauvinistic and anti-Mac, and can honestly, really and truly say, “Pshaw, I gots me three laptops, each with a different OS.  Windows, Mac, Xandros Linux, I’m covered.  I’m nothing if not petty and macho.

Bit of bitter before bed

4 Replies

Hillary and a lot of the second wave feminist kind of dialogue going on has me depressed. The reminder that sexism is alive and well and living here in the USA Today should have been the opposite.

I happily noticed Patti Smith as an “iTunes exclusive” artist on my magic internet connected computer thingie. A chunk of the reviews, who were clearly from people you gotta wonder how they stumbled there in the first place, took pointless, misogynistic swipes at her voice and her appearance and even her marriage. Yeah. That’s what it all comes down to, right?

A chick lives over 60 years on the planet, brings on passion and literacy and becomes iconic in rock and roll. And, on what is she judged? Raw emotion? The fact that once she ignited women like myself to pump their fists in the air and think FUCK YA ROCK AND FUCKING ROLL? Whether she still continues to produce art?

Nope. She should be prettier and her voice should be higher.

Technorati Tags: , , ,