As a Geography major and a bit of an obsessive about all things urban, I’m bothered by sloppy social science. Tonight’s example involved my participation in a research study where one of the questions was “how many cities of over one million population have you lived in?”. She just didn’t understand that I needed a concrete explanation of whether she was referring to central city or metropolitan population, and she couldn’t see why it mattered…
While I’ve never lived in a CITY of a million people (San Francisco is just shy of 800,000), I’ve lived in METROPOLITAN AREAS of over a million people for all but the three (sucky, miserable) months of my life spent in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 1986…
Am I just being anal?
Mark‘s back from Fresno in a few minutes with presents and clean laundry, and I’ll be able to sleep better tonight. Funny how he should mention in his new “100 Things” essay (currently on the front page with no perma-link) that he sleeps better when I’m in bed with him. I was just about to do a journal entry on the same subject. It’s amazing; I’ve never been able to sleep with anyone in the same room with me before, much less the same bed…
This from the one who used to pick up boys in bars, bring them home, have sex, and then force them to leave, baffled, by telling them “it’s too bad you have to go now”, even when they’d previously expressed no such need…
Hmmm. An unexplained and unplanned 12-day absence. This is to confirm that I am in fact alive and relatively healthy. And that’s about it. Not, mind you, that anything’s wrong. I just haven’t had much to say lately. I’m once again thinking of my computer more as a workplace than an entertainment zone…
But, by way of quick updates:
- Road trip last weekend. Pictures soon.
- Planet SOMA — and this whole personal web-publishing thing to which I’m paying almost no attention lately — celebrated its seventh anniversary on Monday, and I had to be reminded of that fact by reading Becky’s site.
- Liking Safari. A lot. I’ll like it even more when it starts having actual preferences settings.
- I now have friends in Albany, which is a whole new experience for me.
Funniest read of the week (from The NYC Anti-Hipster Forum, via Chromewaves)…
Pictures from the Sierra, should you find yourself interested…
So everyone’s buying houses lately. I want to buy a house. Of course, it will never happen in San Francisco for two big reasons, the first being that we’ll never be able to afford one here, and the second being that doing so would require much more of a commitment to San Francisco than I’m willing to make at this point…
But the apartment’s comfy, if small, and it’s time for an updated tour, I think:
This is the house where I live. It’s a different color now, but I don’t have a new picture handy. Inside is our mailbox…
This is the hall. It is long and narrow and has lots of Apple posters in it. It was rebuilt in 2001 to accommodate a new heating unit. Afterward, the hall has always been toasty warm, no matter how cold the rest of the apartment might be…
The front room is the office. This was where Otherstream and Murdering Mouth and all the other assorted websites live and breed…
We have a lot of books…
Next you come to the bedroom. It is very small, but quite adequate for purposes of sleeping, watching “Streets of San Francisco” re-runs in bed, and, ummm, other things…
There is also a bathroom. This is the room where we shower, release waste, and brush our teeth. It is also the room where Mark and I said that we loved each other for the very first time, but that’s a different story entirely (and it doesn’t involve watersports or scat, thanks)…
Now you’ve arrived in the living room. When the building was first built in 1912, this would have been the dining room. You can’t see the dish shelf, which is stocked with hundreds of videotapes. You can, however, see the porn, the DVDs, and the shelf of good juju…
We use the chairs for sitting, and the entertainment center for entertainment. And sometimes vice versa…
The back room (pardon the terminology) is the kitchen. It is the largest room in the place, and I like it. Probably because that’s where all the food is…
From the back door, you stepp onto the deck. This is where I smoke cigarettes and wish that the grill were being put to more use…
And that is my house. Thanks for visiting…
So yeah, being fully informed as to its location, we went and drove by Jimmy Stewart’s apartment from Vertigo last night after dinner…
Before dinner, of course, we’d relived our respective childhoods, me in the living room with a Banana Splits marathon on Boomerang, and Mark in the office with his new Robotech DVDs. I must admit I’d forgotten how good Jan-Michael Vincent’s ass looked when he was parading around Danger Island in those 1969 pants which gave him the perpetual wedgie. And how stupid those Arabian Nights cartoons were…
Dinner seemed a bit of an afterthought in the midst of all that, but it was pretty good too…
I was having a conversation with a friend and co-worker the other day and mentioned in context that I would never marry a pot-smoker. My friend was horrified and demanded an explanation. This has happened to me before, on several occasions. The funny thing is that if I’d announced that I’d never marry a cigarette-smoker (you know, a LEGAL vice), no one would have batted an eye and the chorus of “I understand completely” would have been near-unanimous…
Note that I didn’t say that I thought marijuana should be illegal (I don’t), but that I didn’t particularly care for the idea of a user sharing MY OWN HOME with me. But I guess that, as a San Franciscan, I should be more tolerant when choosing which vices I want to be surrounded by, rating them by way of some pre-approved social acceptability scale rather than by how personally offensive or annoying I find them…
Sorry. That conversation has been bugging me since Thursday and I had to get it off my chest…
How could I not love a boy who would willingly spend a Saturday afternoon driving me around so I could take pictures of old supermarkets in Sacramento? It was a good weekend; we ransacked a dying Kmart, hit thrift stores, and ate well on Saturday and then spent Sunday together in the front room playing with our databases (with the shades open so the neighbors could see)…
The only down side was when I tried to introduce Mark to the joys of jerk pork Saturday afternoon. We strolled into a place on Broadway in Sacramento which turned out to be from hell. Anyone know a really kick-ass Jamaican place in San Francisco so I can try again?
All feelings about potential military action aside, you gotta love the simple truth of this letter in yesterday’s Chronicle:
I have to laugh every time I hear some peace demonstrator around here crow about how “courageous” it is to demonstrate against war. Courageous? It takes about as much courage to be anti-war in the Bay Area as it does to be anti-abortion in Vatican City.
And while I’m on the subject of newspapers, here’s one of the creepiest paragraphs I’ve read in quite a while, from Saturday’s LA Times. Note that the creepiness of what it says pales in comparison to the matter-of-fact manner in which it’s said:
The lack of a head and hands has stymied efforts to identify the woman, and police can only speculate as to why the knees were missing. Perhaps the knees carried identifying marks, Seyler said, or perhaps they simply didn’t fit inside whatever was use to transport the body parts.
Pictures from last weekend’s trip to LA (which will include no kneecap shots whatsoever, thanks) coming this weekend…
You know what I like? I like not having a headache like the really nasty, vaguely debilitating one I had last night. Not having a headache makes me happy…
Only one person today noticed that I snuck in a new cover photo yesterday featuring yer humble host standing smack dab in front of the real live Brady Bunch house. Maybe I didn’t include enough of it. Or maybe no one cared. Anyway, more photos from LA coming soon, I promise…