Law school has eaten me alive. It's Night of the Living Holy Shit Too Much Homework all up in this piece, son. I hop on here occasionally to check new mail, but I rarely have the energy to write back. Sorry, peoples.

All of which is incredibly boring journal fodder. HEY GUESS WHAT YOU GUYS I HAD A CLIF BAR FOR BREAKFAST ISN'T THAT FASCINATING.

So instead, I'll leave you with a few rather amusing tidbits--and by "amusing tidbits," I mean "more excruciating minutiae that's made to be more exciting than it actually is because it's in numbered list format":

1. I had my name published in the NY Times before I turned 30. I didn't even have to embezzle millions of dollars from my employees or commit genocide or nothin' to get in. I blame the Internet for these lowered standards.

2. I was re-reading my journal and kind of amazed at all the friends I fell asleep on last year while watching movies. I'm grateful they put up with me, because I snore. Nowadays, I still fall asleep while looking at a screen, but it's typically my laptop, and more often than not it's on my best friend Ben's couch. It's all good. He bought me Breathe Right strips.

3. Talking about resilin and biomimicry with my friend Tristan, who's in England getting his Master's in Figuring Out How Incredibly Gross-Looking Invertebrates Work, made me realize how much I miss biology geekouts. Here's a question for you: molluscs have successfully transitioned to life on dry land, so why haven't crustaceans? Or are we being unfair, and we should count them as arthropods? In which case: NEVER MIND.

And is anybody else as freaked out as I am at how different some of the classes of Mollusca look from each other? Few can match molluscs in terms of dissimilar appearance. Snails, oysters and squid are all molluscs. Craziness. Most phyla are incredibly divese, but many of them have a unity of pattern in appearance that make sense. Arthropods = lots of feet and segmented bodies. Chordates...OK, we en-vertebra-ed species are incredibly diverse, too, since we encompass hagfish, frogs, koala bears and snakes. But I still get a kick out of realizing that octopodes and whelks are both molluscs.

4. A six-month-old picture of bedhead:


Note how I'm rockin' the Lesbian Plaid with my nightshirt. Hot.

I don't know why the terrible state of my hair first thing in the morning gives me so much glee, but it does.



Just about everything that can go wrong with hair exploded ALL OVER MY HEAD. It's great.

...all comin' your way, bitches. I haven't had much interweb time lately. I miss you, little tubes. So much. *sob*

So!

5/4: Had dinner with my friend Lili and The Sullen One, then we headed to the Crystal Ballroom to see Andrew Bird, where we confirm that he does, indeed, make my socks roll up and down--even when I'm not wearing any socks. Apostle of Hustle was pretty good, too; it occurred to me while watching them noodle around that they're a stoned out jam band catering to hipsters. A hipster jam band. Aiee.

5/11: Thryn and maigo were hosting Meatfest 2007 that weekend, so of course good ole XWRN and I had to be in attendance. Friday night was spent driving, and the rest of the weekend was mostly occupied with Insane Feats of Meat Cookery and Incredibly Awesome Baking.

5/18: A quiet night at home, filled with contemplation and the torture of little children and small animals.

5/25: Pirates of the Caribbean with several friends, then XWRN and I picked thryn up from the train station.

6/1: A friend of mine left town in a hurry and left his apartment in quite a state. Picture, if you will, an austere monk's cell. Now throw in 4 years of accumulated dirt, several pieces of hand-me-down college furniture, cupboards full of food that went bad back in December 2004, random tubes containing algae experiments (he's a bit of a mad scientist) and something like 200 boxes of tampons from former female roommates of his. I felt so bad, I ended up going there after work and, with some other friends, picked up over 10 bags of trash and boxed up a crapload of other stuff for Goodwill. Ah, to have an over-active guilt complex....

6/8: Bike Porn night at the Clinton Street Theater! Many of the films weren't especially pornographic in any sense of the word, and some didn't feature any bikes at all. But it was capped off by a 10-minute bike fuckfest submitted by some friends of mine, and let me tell you, seeing a friend be fucked up the ass by the narrow end of a bicycle seat is somethin' else.

6/15: Minor Foodening session with various friends at the Long House, where we consumed the Best Tomato and Cheese Sandwiches EVER, consisting of, from bottom to top: crusty French batard bread from New Seasons Market, butter, sauteed mushrooms, huge slab of heirloom tomato, two types of cheese. After the food, we played with the We Wii, a Wii console collectively owned by about 10 different people.

The next day: PLUNDERATHON, motherfuckers. Holy crapdamn, so much fun.

6/22: Drove to Seattle to help Thryn and maigo move house. That's right: if I like you enough, I will drive 170 miles just to help you haul crap from one apartment to another.

6/29: Attended a James Bond-themed martini party with a bunch of friends, where I got to wear a slinky nightgown and a red feather boa. I even had a long-haired cat that I held and petted eeeeevilly while saying "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."

7/6: Dancing at the Good Foot with several friends, where the DJ was incredibly disappointing, and the breakdancers nowhere in sight. It just figures that the one night I manage to drag a bunch of friends with me that one of the most reliably fun dance joints in Portland would suck unwashed monkey ass. Grr. My friends Melissa and Dave got sick of it before I did, however, and decided to abduct me from the dance floor, which was awesome fun--Melissa grabbed me from behind and Dave had my feet, and they hauled me out like a big sack o' rice. Then Dave decided to promenade up and down Stark St. while holding me in a fireman's carry before taking me over to my car.

Am I ever glad I decided to wear underwear that night.

Whoa, hey, I haven't done one of my Typical Friday Night summaries in a while. Sorry for the silence, sports fans! (And by "sports fans," I mean "all six people who occasionally stop by and read this journal." Woo!)

So, when I left off, I expressed the keen desire to shake my life up and Do Something Different. Stir up some shit. Etc. Boy oh boy have I. The past few Fridays have been quite entertaining.

4/6: A posse for Hedwig! CrabCaution, Jain133, linettasky, quiped and I went to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch, complete with a shadow cast à la Rocky Horror Picture Show, performed at the Clinton St. Theater. Almost all of us went in glam drag in one form or another. I wore a stupid-short denim skirt, a ripped-up T-shirt, an obnoxious white belt, knee-high boots and enough bad eye-makeup and glitter to stun an elephant at 50 paces. (Which is a phrase that makes absolutely NO SENSE when you think about it, but I sure do like the way it sounds.) During the course of that night, I:

1. Went to see John Vanderslice in concert before Hedwig--alone, and in full glam drag. If you've heard any Vanderslice, you'd realize how hilarious that is. The only way I would've looked more out-of-place would've been if I'd gone in Goth drag. At any rate, Vanderslice was fucking RAD, but then he always is, and I felt only minimally awkward in my get-up.
2. Almost won the glam costume contest. (CrabCaution won, and rightly so, for his Ziggy Stardust costume).
3. Claimed to be sixteen years old, largely because it was such a ridiculous assertion that nobody in their right minds could possibly believe me, except the Clinton St. Theater was apparently FULL of people Not Even Remotely in Their Right Minds that night.
4. Flirted with a hot boy who looked to be in his 20s but turned out to be SEVENTEEN. Apparently, I'd inhaled enough glitter to impair my ability to accurately gauge other people's ages, too. Backed up so fast that I probably left black tire marks, because seriously: SEVENTEEN. Sweet jelly-covered Christ in a wheelchair.
5. Except that the seventeen-year-old boy, astounded at my revealed age (most people are shocked to find out I'm 29, and I'm not sure whether I should feel flattered that I look so youthful, or concerned at the possibility that I'm becoming one of those awful aging party girls) decided to follow me back, cheerfully leaped (and I'm not exaggerating here--he literally vaulted) into the empty chair next to me, reached over and gave my right breast a cheerful squeeze.

What actually happened after that was really boring because I'm not a peeederphile, so I'll just leave it to your lurid imaginations to make up something incredibly exciting here, eh?

4/13: Had dinner with my friend Lili and the teenage boy she's fostering, known fondly as The Sullen One. (This seventeen-year-old showed absolutely zero tendency to reach over and honk the Wonder Twins, thank Christ.) We started out at Colosso, where we demolished a terrifying quantity of tapas over the course of three hours, then headed to Pix Pâtisserie for desserts, and then finished the night being utter music geeks at Music Millennium, where I shoved Andrew Bird's two newest releases into Lili's hands and The Black Keys' Rubber Factory and Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights into The Sullen One's.

Most Awesome Discovery of the Night: Steven Seagal has a band. It's called Thunderbox. And one of their albums, Mojo Priest, has a song called "Talk to My Ass."

I'm not sure I'll ever, ever recover from learning this.

4/20: XWRN's birthday, yayyyyy! In celebration, we went to see Grindhouse. Verdict:

Planet Terror was one of the awesomest, grossest, over-the-toppest zombie movies I've ever seen. Good, dirty, splattery fun. I'm not sure I can view pizza (or any other food involving melted mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce) in quite the same way again after that bit in which Quentin Tarantino, playing Rapey McRapist Zombie Soldier dude, attempts to get it on with Rose McGowan's character.

Death Proof: as my friend Zeo put it: any part without a moving car in it = snore. I'm serious: The pacing in the first half of the movie slowed down to a veritable crawl--and I'm normally a fan of Tarantino's conversational wankiness. If you have to go to the bathroom or get more snacks, the first 25 minutes of Death Proof would be an excellent time to do that. That said, once the cars started moving, HOLY SHIT. HOLY HOLY HOLY CRAPPING DAMNING SHIT. Best car chase scene ever in the history of ever. EV. AR.

Also, Zoe Bell is quite mind-meltingly awesome and full of teh hotttt.

4/27: veracious_jess, niryv, thryn and konomaigo all descended upon Portland for Reed College's Renn Fayre--which, in case you didn't know, has absolutely nothing to do with actual Renaissance Faires. It's really an excuse to have a three-day debauch after a year of insane academic workloads. On Friday night, I picked up thryn and konomaigo from the bus station, then headed over to Reed, where together with many other friends, we danced, slid down huge, rickety wooden slides, crawled through a cardboard maze that led to a room filled with balloons, engaged in a fairly epic balloon battle, played and boogied in foam, and did our best to prevent our dear friend Tristan from being molested by Rainbow Brite. This covers only a fraction of a fraction of my adventures this weekend. I'll just say that my whole body hurts, and I'm still feeling sleep-deprived, even after getting in a solid 10 hours last night.

3/16: Yet another foodening at XWRN's, with Jain133, gorthx, vivamus and other people in attendance. (Man, a lot of my friends sure do have OKCupid profiles.) Zeo made lentil lasagne, and we watched disc 5 of Samurai Champloo until I fell asleep. I actually managed to hold out until 10 minutes into the second episode.

There's a distinct pattern here: I'm either going balls-out, or I am le tired. (Well, have a nap. THEN YOU FIRE ZE MISSILES.) A good way to keep me awake is to keep me moving. Luring me with the promise of doughnuts, or adventures that may or may not involve wheeled conveyances (and their inappropriate use thereof) and/or trees and/or music and/or silly dancing and/or conversations involving topics like what would happen if Catullus were reincarnated as an evil robot monkey, work quite well. I've successfully stayed up longer than 24 hours that way. Cattle prods aren't recommended since they'd just knock me on my ass, and as we can see from the observations recorded within this here fine bit of journalry, getting me horizontal and prone once I'm tired is a bad idea. Or at least it's a bad idea if your aim is to have me vertical and dancing like a monkey for your amusement.

3/30: Redsouffle was visiting from Seattle, with her mother and best friend in tow. On Friday night, we went to Khun Pic's Bahn Thai for dinner with GarfGarfGarf and knittinggoddess. By the end of the night, we almost apologized to the people sitting across from us for having to put up with the stream of disgusting paramedic stories (courtesy of Garth) and filthy jokes (courtesy everyone at the table except Katie's mom).

My weekends in general have been a lot more varied and exciting than my Fridays, I've noticed. F'rinstance: Saturday evening involved the consumption of inhuman amounts of sushi, a large quantity of alcohol (none of which I drank, because of my allergies) and eating steak while naked women jiggled and stroked their breasteses in front of me.

I'm feeling very restless. I need to shake things up a bit more. There needs to be more wackiness in my life. STAY TUNED.

Last Friday started off fantastically, because I saw THIS when I got up and looked in the mirror:



Best. Bedhead. EVAR.

The hair calmed down somewhat as the day went on, but the Wings of Doom tendency still remained strong.

So Friday night was another small-scale Foodening at XWRN's, a vegetarian one that featured pasta tossed in olive oil, tomatoes and mozzarella; cabbage cooked with butter and apples (it sounds revolting, but it's really tasty--I had never, ever said the words "May I have more cabbage?" before that night); and a delicious garlic spinach thing garnished liberally with home-made croutons. For dessert: whole cored apples baked with honey and a streusel topping, served warm, with obscene amounts of ice cream heaped on the side. For entertainment: Monty Python's Flying Circus. For pillows: my friends Tristan and jain133.

To celebrate my acceptance into Lewis and Clark Law School (on one hand: YAY LAW SCHOOL; and on the other: CRUSHING DEBT AHOY), my friends Jeff and linettasky decided to take me out for a sushi dinner. Along the way, XWRN and gorthx joined us, as well as our friend Tristan. After inhaling copious amounts of raw fish and rice, XWRN, gorthx, Tristan and I headed over to the Laurelhurst theater to watch The Omega Man, which is a so-bad-it's-good perversion of Richard Matheson's absolutely brilliant I Am Legend. And really, how can I not love a post-apocalyptic movie in which Chuck Heston makes out with a beautiful black woman with a 'fro the size of the sun? It's impossible, I tell you.

Last Friday was a small-scale Foodening for four people: XWRN, Zeo, Tristan and me. I braised a pork shoulder roast in brown ale, apple cider vinegar, carrots, garlic and onion, while Schwern and Zeo made a salad from asparagus spears, green beans and orange slices. I also roasted some baby red potatoes, but they were somewhat bland because I didn't add enough salt or seasoning. For dessert: vanilla ice-cream with home-made chocolate sauce. I won't attempt to describe how tasty everything was (everything except the spuds, anyway), because I'd end up sounding like one of those actress judges on Iron Chef.

(Side note: If any of youse ever see me talking to a bowl of asparagus, telling them they must be so honored that they were turned into delicious, delicious food, feel free to give me a good crack upside the head with a blunt object.)

We settled down on Schwern's futon to watch Ravenous, because how else should we celebrate good food and even better company than a movie about cannibalism and wendigos? Not that I'd know what the movie was about, because I was so sleepy that I fell asleep on Tristan about 15 minutes into the movie. When the movie was over, Schwern threw a blanket over me, I rolled onto my side to make room for Tristan and fell right back asleep.

(Another note: I'm so short that I fit comfortably on the short axis of a full-size futon. Poor Tristan did not attempt to cudgel my completely prone body into a more reasonable position, so he slept all bunched up by my side throughout the night. Poor dear.)

Saturday (yes yes, I'm going beyond the bounds of my title, but I'm a maverick) was marked by Breakfast of Awesomeness (scrambled eggs with two different kinds of cheese, leftover potatoes fried with copious amounts of garlic and cumin) and an absolutely epic 4-hour shopping trip at a Chinese grocery store. Schwern breaks all records for Most Unplanned Things Bought During A Shopping Trip. He meant to buy rice and a spider basket, and ended up with over $100 in assorted groceries, a footstool, a tea mug with a built-in filter and a long-handled fine-mesh sieve-thing.

Me? I was there to buy some edible rape, and by golly by god, I got me my edible rape.

2/9: Crapping damn. I can't remember what I did that night. It was nice, I remember that much. And I remember what I did on Saturday night, because I went to the Lightbar party (throw together a week-long party in a huge white tent, a bunch of geeks, a party band, a rotating theme and a bunch of bright lights, and voila! Lightbar!). But Friday...Hmm. I know I did something with somebody, but mostly, I remember getting a whole bunch of sleep that night and feeling grateful for it.

2/16: Drove to Seattle for a five-day visit, during which I spent Chinese New Year with assorted friends, attended a bondage class at Toys in Babeland, watched Pan's Labyrinth at The Egyptian and saw The Shins play at the Paramount on Tuesday night. So Friday in and of itself was pretty unremarkable, but the trip as a whole was full of awesome bits.

2/23: Driving to Seattle AGAIN, but this time I has a linettasky to keep me company. On the agenda this weekend: a birthday party, tagging along with thryn as she and her mother go condo shopping, possibly a play about wacky Japanese sexual practices with vivamus, and a trip to the Pacific Science Center and the science fiction museum with maigo.

Next Friday: Sleep. Lots of it. Please.

I used to record the last three or four or five Fridays on my profile, erasing old hijinks to make space for new as that section became too big and unwieldy--I mean, have y'all looked at my profile? That sumbitch is wordy. But as I deleted the oldest entries, I realized I wanted to keep a more permanent record of what I did on past Fridays; they're bare-bones outlines as far as they go, but they hold the seeds to some truly spectacular memories. So now I'm documenting my Incredibly Exciting Friday Night Adventures That May or May Not Involve Shaved Gerbils (and If I'm Feeling Especially Sassy Perhaps Even Others in the Muridae Family But I'm Still Not Telling and The Bald Little Buggers Are Certainly Keeping Mum If They Know What's Best for Them) in this here OKCupid journal instead.

So, on to what I did last Friday:

maigo and thryn were in town for my birthday. We had tapas at Colosso, then headed to the Siam Society to have dinner and to meet up with some author/bookseller friends of mine. Mel, the bookstore owner, gave me a book on pathoparasitology that she'd saved especially for me. (Glossy pages full of cross-sections of Trichinella and Leishmania! Right at the dinner table! GLEE.) A pretty excellent night all around.

And for posterity, here are all the things I did in the previous Fridays to this, going back to 12/29:

1/26: Ate dinner at the Siam Society with a couple of friends while listening to Adam Hurst (an utterly, utterly hot local cellist) play. We had cardamom ice-cream for dessert, which is possibly one of the best things you can put in your mouth, ever. Afterwards, we walked to another friend's house and clambered into his hot tub. My Friday nights have been pretty damn awesome for the last several months, but this particular one was especially satisfying to all my senses.

1/19: On Wednesday night, I turned to XWRN and said, "Hey, what you doing on Friday night?"

And he said, "I'm not sure, but I think you're about to tell me."

So I said, "I want to cook a lot of food for a whole lot of people. Like my lamb shanks in red wine. And there's this zucchini-basil gratin recipe I've been wanting to try. Also, I want to try and recreate the mushrooms in red wine that Colosso makes, and make some garlic toast to go with that. And for dessert, I want to bake my Godiva with crumbs cake." [pause] "So, uh, can I use your apartment?"

And he said, without so much as batting an eyelid, "No problem! We'll put out the Foodening signal."

(It's a hand holding a chicken drumstick. Or maybe a roast chicken with two carrots crossed under it, Jolly Roger-stylee.)

Anyway, I made a fuckton of food, almost everyone we invited showed up, and after eating too much and laughing too loudly and doing everything in a thoroughly immoderate fashion, all fourteen of us piled up in front of the TV and watched The Goonies.

1/12: Had sushi with my friend Tristan, then watched a couple of episodes of Trigun before I fell asleep on his shoulder--the trip to California to see The Price is Right involved lots and lots of driving and sleep deprivation (two great tastes that taste great together!), and I'm astonished I managed to stay awake as long as I did.

1/5: Flew to Sacramento as part of the Grand Plan to watch a taping of The Price is Right with several friends before Bob Barker retires (or before the secret to his animatronic corpse is discovered).

12/29: maigo was in town for the New Year. He had brought his Special Pants, which are black and bedecked with Wacky Hardware. Alas, he failed to bring an exciting shirt to go with the exciting pants, but since he's not much bigger than I am, I decided to lend him one of mine. After some comical trial and error (the stretchy fairy shirt made him look gayer than nine guys fucking ten guys), we settled on a sleeveless black shirt, and I took him to the Good Foot, where we watched the breakdancers (who weren't all that good that particular night, to be honest) and made utter fools of ourselves dancing. It was tremendous fun and an excellent way to kick off his visit.