sweetheart redux

There’s an old adage, probably at least 20 years old, that, roughly quoted (from a song by the Smiths), goes: “I was looking for a job and then I got a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now.” I bring this up because I’m used to complaining about having too much time on my hands, and I just started a perfectly fine (in the future, I foresee thinking it’s even great) job, so if you are unfortunate enough to be in earshot of me this week, you will probably hear me complain about being overwhelmed instead of the recent common complaint of unerwhelment. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, with some people (me!). Anyway, I was thinking about free time. Do only single people and Buddhists enjoy free time? Single people spend their free time doing all these great activities where they might just run into someone to fall in love with (dj’d pool parties on the roof of The Standard, artwalks in Chinatown, blah blah blah), and Buddhists know how to chill out: with their free time, they dr...

In case you've never been to the touristy part of Hollywood Blvd., which I live a couple blocks from, there's been a growing phenomenon the past few years: people who I can only assume are incredibly poor & in some cases homeless dress up like characters and stand in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Visiting yokels take pictures posed with these characters and then usually understand that they're expected to pay a little something to the person in the costume (like a dollar). Sometimes these characters are a bit of a nuisance, but I'm sure that dressing up like Elmo for dollars on a 90 degree day, as a creative way of panhandling, is probably sort of a nuisance to the costumed people. anyway, here's what recently happened, in this fair city of HOllywood: http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-hollywood-characters,0,2280392.story okay, i always expected there to be a big sweep that'd get rid of the characters in front of the theatre. that in itself...

Hmmm, so nobody's very interested in reading my novel in serialized form in the blog format, it seems. Duly noted, and that's okay. What've I been thinking about lately? The Lakers Riot that we had here in Los Angeles, the celebratory riot in downtown, got me thinking about human nature & class issues. I was unfairly attacked when I was a teenager, by a mob of people, so my gut reaction is to be upset by groups of people giving in to mob mentality. while I've increasingly come to appreciate the spirit of anarchy, I still have mixed feelings about the Rodney King Riots. It was just so unfair that Reginald Denny got beaten up so bad, it seemed like such a misdirection of anger. But then, his beating was no worse than the beating King'd received from cops who were allowed to get away with it. My husband is usually pro-riot, so I've thought about the good sides of that riot of the nineties, and I do think that it was the result of a bunch of disenfranchised...

I think I might be a textbook case of an only child born of interesting parents and raised in los angeles: i was lonely, did stuff for attention, and much of the stuff done for attention involved art projects featuring dolls (my best friends!). anyway, this particular photo must've fallen out of one of my oldest photo albums last night, when i was scanning some old photos of friends to put up on Facebook. i just found it on the desk this morning and it seemed a bit like magic. two of these dolls were ken dolls i turned into trannies, & the girl dolls were unique in their own right. i brought them to school often, when i was in 7th grade, & me & my "weird" clique of friends played with them at lunch. definitely a sweet bunch of kids who wanted it known that we weren't just anyone, that we were unique. the two tackle fish that the african-american barbie is holding were named alfred and zappa, as my scrupulous teenage documentation states: these were...

The ones who want kids will be sterile and the ones who don't care will be breedy and like Michael Moore recently theorized student loans keep employees acting needy and cancer's a little more cancerous at County Hospital than at Cedars Sinai and sometimes when the cookie jar's empty all you can do is just sigh.

admittedly, i've been too much of a couch potato this last century as a mostly unemployed young woman. that's a story for another day. but in any event, it's long been my goal to see as many films as possible -- isn't it weird how many movies there are? how many millions of dollars that get spent on straight to video b-movies, even? i'm not being critical here, i really do think the film industry is a marvel. in any event, i'll tell you right now, in this hardcore film watching year of mine, i've developed a problem: the Harry Potter films. i'm addicted to them. as i write this, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone plays in the background, and it's actually a calculated decision on my part: i keep our less popular dvd's in a drawer, & the more popular ones on shelves, and i'm currently letting myself watch each Harry Potter movie one last time before banishing it to the drawer. anyway, i just started renting movies from the ...