Tuesday, June 27, 2006, 05:05 PM - Friends
doesn't feel like California outside. The air is wetter and more present than usual and full of vaguely unsettling potential. I am far too sensitive to barometric uncertainty, and I feel like a dreamy addict when I'm in it. Two small raindrops on the way back from lunch (with 'Peaches', for those of you who know your Lusty Lady history) and a series of NYC references are making me homesick for summer drenching thunderstorms and a time when we couldn't all keep tabs on each other electronically.Wednesday, June 21, 2006, 06:09 PM - Travels, Sex, Friends, Art
I talked with my former colleague Sybil yesterday - she runs the New Orleans sister site of the HIV prevention project I used to manage in SF (community-level HIV prevention for high-risk adolescents). They've been doing street intercept interviews with teenagers at nightclubs in Central City (where those 5 kids were killed over the weekend) - Sybil's had to suspend her project (again) until everything calms down. She told me that while some things haven't changed (there are still a lot of 15 year old girls in the supposedly 21-and-over clubs), most of the 'neighborhood' adolescents are driving in from Houston for the weekend to party. As far as I can tell, this implies that New Orleans is becoming a city of richer, whiter residents, and is now a short-hop tourist destination for its former underclass...which is a truly freaky demographic shift. Perhaps the national guard will start stopping carloads of black kids at the city limits?
And for something almost completely unrelated, my old friend Justin is very talented, if you didn't know. Check out Greetings From New Orleans - pre-Katrina, even more important now that found objects from New Orleans are likely mostly lost.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006, 01:09 AM - Friends
was my favorite surprise in NYC. And of course the lovely Miss B. is charming as always....
Friday, April 7, 2006, 09:58 PM - Politics, Friends, Technology, Art
This feels like it's been my first real week in LA - I've been working like a dog on the CA_50 special election that will happen Tuesday...setting up all kinds of hyper-geeky autodialiing/ web-based phone system tests to see if we can create a super-streamlined and foolproof phone bank infrastructure for the fall. Hopefully we'll help Busby win outright on Tuesday, but the evaluator in me wants another election in June to perfect the model...
I am getting used to the braces but feel horribly sibilant. You can catch my orthodontic voiceover debut on a MoveOn volunteer training call Monday, if you're lucky.
And yesterday I also had my first taste of what it will be like to have a community here - I went to an opening at Stephen Cohen gallery of photos from Democratic Republic of Congo with Jeannette- a fundraiser for Medecins Sans Frontieres - and ran into Noah Craft. Maybe someday I'll have a new network of friends to run into?? Maybe I already do?
I promise to post some braces photos this weekend, and will dish on what Ben Ball's party is like, too.
;)
Thursday, March 23, 2006, 02:30 PM - Travels, George, Friends, Food, Art
I've had not a minute to keep up with this little enterprise. Perhaps you'll be sympathetic if you hear that in the last 16 days I've been in Boston, New Haven, Bridgeport, Brooklyn, DC, San Francisco, LA, and Denver. Yikes! No wonder I slept in today. All have been good travels; really the optimal mix of work/family/art/fun/food that one can find on the East Coast. I made an excellent blanket fort with my goddaughter in Boston, went to the (kinda stinky) biennial with Andrew, ate homemade canneloni and cannoli with Leslie for the Sopranos premiere, and drank our signature cosmopolitans with my dear New Orleans friend in DC. I had a good visit with Dad - full of nice weather and walks by the water. I'm so lucky that he's still so independent. Denver had some swing dancing and a fun planning meeting for MoveOn's fall program, and back up in NorCal I took the Republican to Joan Blades' birthday party. He gets lots of points for a) venturing into the liberal lions' den and b) dancing with me even though he'd been on a million-mile bike ride that day. Now I have to finish unpacking my life and start seeing what things will be here....pretty much all I've done is see Claudia and Angel so far, but there's a whole city out there waiting. And an update on Griffith Park running: last night at dusk I saw a coyote and heard tons of frogs and crickets. I couldn't believe that I was in the middle of the great metropolis...Thursday, February 16, 2006, 12:14 PM - Dancing, Friends, Food, Technology
one new alternator belt
three boundlessly enthusiastic dream job emails
one long relationship rant
two dozen roses (four confused neighbors)
two chive dumplings
one hour of pure samba bliss
I can't complain, really.
Monday, February 6, 2006, 02:08 PM - Friends, Food
Yesterday was a high point in the annals of competitive eating. Delicious breakfast with Meredith at Slow Club to coach her on her job interview today at Larkin Street (they'd better hire her...her background of teaching GED in the SF County Jail will serve her well with the hustlers and gutter punks). Then Eitan's birthday party (7) with the new baby brigade- thankfully with minimal birthday cake consumption - I wanted to make sure the under-10s had enough material for a mammoth sugar rush. Things really got interesting once the game started - thankfully I went running during quarters 1 and 2, since Quarter 3 was spent at Binko's house of midwest ironworker 'file cabinet' chile, and Quarter 4 at the Paleokrassis palace of spanakopita. Sounds excessive, right? What if I tell you that then I went to Gary Danko with Lizbet and her charming father from North Carolina? I can't imagine wanting to see any more food for at least a week.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006, 05:41 PM - Friends, Books
My dear friend Eric Martin is reading Thursday, February 2nd at The Lab - he kicks things kick off at 7:00. He'll be reading from his book-in-progress Little Miss Zapata (or whatever he ends up calling it). I've heard him read from this one before, and it's delectable stuff. You may remember him from such wonderful novels as Luck (recently out in paperback) and Winners (for when you want to get your Foreign Cinema dot-com nostalgia on). He tells me: "I don't know what I'll read from yet but you might
get a glimpse at the lost tribes hiding out in 400-year old sewers, a teenage girl in drag chased through Mexico City's rock n' roll market, or a Texas cowboy fighting a peyote lord of the north."
Other folks reading include Juvenal Acosta (who just finished a book about the last Mexican vampire), Stephen Beachy (who broke the J.T. Leroy story), Marianna Cherry (whose name is never far from the word "erotica") and Charlie Girl Anders.
Monday, January 23, 2006, 06:13 PM - Politics, Friends
If you can stand it, take a look at the MSF list of some of the horrendous things going on in the world that are being ignored:list of the 10 most underreported humanitarian crises.. My friend Jane Coyne has been working with MSF for the last year or so, doing post-tsunami relief in Sri Lanka and working with malnourished children in a couple of places in Africa. I have huge respect for her work, and for this organization - they seem a little less strangled by bureaucracy than many aid groups, and their quick response to crises like the Pakistan/ Kashmir earthquake is impressive. Tuesday, January 17, 2006, 02:17 PM - Politics, Friends
My friend Josh -with whom I worked with last summer on Leave My Child Alone- just got featured in a NYT story on Pentagon monitoring of campus anti-war activism.. Nice to know I'm helping shape the next generation of activists... also Jen Low from Code Pink is part of the fun - aren't they cute?
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