Navigates genres as well as taboos

A week of deteriorating health, mental and physical.

One of my gayer personal habits is a partiality for flowers in the house and so it goes without saying that daffodil season at Safeway is one of my favorite times of the year. Two bunches for $2.25, yo! So on last Sunday's shopping trip I got some and set them up in the dining room. In a seemingly unrelated anecdote, my breathing was terrible this week and I woke up wheezing in the middle of several nights. It wasn't until Friday that I made the connection between the two and promptly donated the flowers to charity.

What makes that mental lapse even more foolish is that I dissect flowers every week at the museum. I even ask who's allergic to pollen "cuz now we get to look at it up close and personal on the microscope."

Boy did I feel shitty by the weekend though. And it doesn't help that I've been drinking three times as much, thanks mostly to college basketball. Well, college basketball and my lack of cable that has necessitated near-daily trips to sports bars. An unwelcome reality of this new lifestyle is the fact that the only sports bar around that bothers to pony up the $49 a month (predictably unthinkable at Nob Hill Tavern) for satellite games is Green's, the most unpleasant of the Russian Hill thirtysomething bar lineup.

That all would have been fine, if not for Pitt's meltdown against Bradley in the second round of the NCAA tournament. The second round--they don't even have a zany name for that one. And it came after a near-perfect game in the first round win against Kent State (who eliminated Pitt from the tournament 3 years ago). *Sigh* It was a pretty good year for Pitt basketball, though. They only lost one game at home, played a lot of young guys, and got a lot of exposure. One day they will find a way to score points at the end of the season. This was the only good thing about the final game:










This is Jill:













On Friday night I joined her and a few of her friends at a fancy French restaurant to help usher in her 28th year of life. When I was making her a card, I thought about how amazing it is that (a) I have known Jill for almost 10 years and (b) we live in the same city. Doesn't sound so amazing to you, but in my world there are not too many people who meets those qualifications. Although she knows of its existence, it is unknown whether Jill is a regular feather 2 pixel reader so all other remarks have been stricken from he record. Instead, we now bring you this useful piece of advice: eating two and a half rolls at a $40 meal is moronic.

------------

feather 2 pixel flesh pocket update: In which we track the progress of the lump growing on my upper thigh.

Well, I spent the whole week off my bike, more because of rain and appointments than anything else. With nothing to irritate it, the lump has since decreased in size. Instead, I developed a blister on each heel from a routine Sunday walk to the park. I asked Jesus to send me a sign if he thought I needed new shoes, but now I am just confused.

----------

Other items of note:

-traveled with coworkers to Santa Rosa to watch another coworker perform in "Urinetown" in the decade's most overplanned social event.

-Tutoring the worst kid ever.

-Taught another members' class at the Exploratorium (remember the snails?) I am now proud to say that I have invented a brand new way to confuse kids about the phases of the moon .

We Reserve the Right to Limit Quantities

If interviewing for jobs is like taking a shit then I just took a big old constipated dump all over Sunset Ave. I was at meeting with three principals about a full time job teaching physics at a school near the Pacific Ocean. It reminded me of all my previous meetings with principals (mostly in middle school, with Mr.Evans): it went on forever and the longer it did the madder they got.

I'm pretty sure that as far as indicators of success go, increasing hostility of one's interviewer is a bad sign. At the end she reminded me that they are talking to a few other people about the job. Is that a gentle preparation for rejection or a common courtsey? Only Jesus knows. For my part, I feel like I came across as pretty fucking inarticulate and I surely said some pretty stupid shit, though I did accomplish my goal of not bringing up Jesus once.

Ultimately, I should have just gone to work and earned my $50 for the day.

I thought there was a good chance that the Big One might hit San Francisco on Friday night. The mood was perfect: not just rain and lightning coming down in San Francisco City, but hail and snow! How about that?

Luckily, I was shielded from the inclement weather by the nine foot-thick concrete walls of Nowell's SoMa loft--we wouldn't have even felt a 9.0 (though the gas pipes that casually criss cross along his ceiling would have surely killed us within minutes). Carly and I came over to help him and Sadie usher in his 28th year of existence with nothing less than an oyster, Dungeness crab, and micro-martini feast followed by an impromptu rave on the aforementioned concrete slabs. Except instead of E, we took Claritin D. Either way, when in SoMa it's damn hard to avoid high class dining and dance parties.

Feather 2 Pixel Lump Update: In which we track the progress of the lump growing on my upper thigh.

I felt like my lump was really doing well before yesterday. Not necessarily getting smaller, but aching less. But godammit if I didn't bike 6 miles across the city on Monday to see the best picture of the year as deemed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And I'm not saying "Crash" was bad per se, but not worth distressing any growth within two inches of your genitals over.

[Cow Eyeball dissection at the museum]

Enchanted Pillows Help Comfort Your Sore Nose Issue

Ok blog readers, you don't like me, I don't like you, and I can't tell you how much I don't feel like writing a blog entry. But you know what? I am going to do it anyways, purely for the sake of principle. And that's pretty much the difference between you and I: principles.

For some reason, it's hard to say what I have been up to in the last few weeks. Definitely not anything useful. I did injure my ankle pretty bad around the time of my last post. I was playing frisbee at work and landed on it awkwardly, suffering a moderate sprain that hurts but which is healing. I'm still not 100%. In fact, right now I am what Rich Kim from high school would surely have called a "hurt piece:"

-I have been very awkwardly hunching over obsessive, overcontrolled drawings for hours on end, resulting in unbelievably old-manish chronic back pain. It's even spread to my chest. It hurts to swallow, move my head, and lift my right arm.

-I've developed a hard little lump where my thigh meets my torso, right between two important private parts. It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't in just the right spot to be irritated by pedalling my bike. The more I pedal, the worse it gets. Did the pedalling cause the lump or did the lump cause the pedalling? These are questions only science can answer, but fuck going to see a biomedical professional. The last time I did that I was told the that lump on my balls was just an enlarged sweat gland. Total waste of an afternoon.

I have been watching lots of Pitt basketball. Too much one could say. The team fought through the majority of the year with a top ten ranking, but lost 3 of their last 4 regular season games. Despite the fact that there is no logical reason why it should affect my life in any way, I didn't take it well. The last game was particularly devastating (they ruined a perfect season at home as well as a bye in the first round of the Big East Tournament in a ridiculous loss to a very mediocre Seton Hall team) and I was unbelievably upset. To the point, really, where I temporarily lost all perspective on life had to sit myself down to disconnect from Pitt basketball.

It really makes no sense. My fandom exists in a complete vacuum, even more so than the other parts of my life. I don't associate with other Pitt fans. I don't go to Pitt games. I experience all of it through a virtual reality of newspaper articles, chatrooms, and television broadcasts. For all I know, the game of basketball doesn't even exist. And yet there I am, at Green's Sports Bar in San Francisco, ready to rip apart the bulletin board in the bathroom in response to a simple series of photons that interacted with my retina moments before.

I continue to interview for jobs that I either don't want or won't be offered, mostly for sport I suppose. The latest is a series of teaching positions at independent (aka private) schools. I don't know what I would do if I was actually offered a full time teaching job at a Catholic school, but I guess a part of me is perversely interested. The exhibit developer job at the Exploratorium didn't work out because they decided to hire nobody. That's really the best outcome I could have hoped for. Hooray for deficits.

Slowly, slowly, slowly I build my online presence. Get ready for feather2pixels.com, world.

And somewhere in between all those distractions, I am getting ready for an art show. Remember the back pain? Well, it will all pay off when I get to showcase all my new work for the three people who make it to the back wall of the Art Explosion studios during our spring show on April 28th. Now that's exciting.

For all my spinning wheels, Carly has been one busy little bee with 19 credits worth of all nighters and last minute papers. I'm glad she is busy though (although not too busy to miss the pretty model show). She has even been waking up before me 3 days a week, something which of course isn't a contest, but for those who are counting, starts to close the 80,000-15 lead I hold. She tires to make up for it by cheating me at Scrabble with 47 point "words" such as "ZAS." Hasbro might let that shit fly, but Gloria Fischer didn't raise no fools.