i have pretty bad vision. for awhile i was 'legally blind'. i'm nearsighted w/astigmatism. whee! and my prescription changes a lot, so i've never been eligible for lasik. when i was a kid i tried to get contacts 'cause i hated my coke bottle lenses, everyone made fun of me, my parents wouldn't let me play basketball 'cause i kept breaking my glasses, etc. a terrible woman at an opthamologist's office was supposed to teach me how to put soft contacts in and out. i'm not sure she really liked kids, and i wasn't an easy kid to like either. after about an hour of trying, we were both incredibly frustrated. the contacts kept rolling up into little sausage tubes and getting stuck behind my eyelid. it hurt. sometimes i managed to get them on, but never successfully got them off. she told me i'd have to come back another day. so i did. i failed again. after 4-5 times of this, she said that i couldn't get contacts because it was obvious that i'd never figure out how to do it properly and some people just aren't made for contacts. i cried for hours. i went back to school and everyone continued making fun of me. my mom wore gas permeable lenses, and with those you don't really have to touch your eye. you just hold them up near your eye and it goes swooop! and suctions them in. when you take them out you don't have to touch them either. you hold your eye open and blink and it loses the suction and falls out. after seeing her do this, when i was 17 i went to the eye doctor and demanded a pair. i bought them and took them home and taught myself how to take them in and out. i didn't do it the right way. i used the little toilet plunger thing to take them out for the entire 12 years i had them.

i went in to the eye doctor today and mentioned lasik longingly. he told me that i actually could be a candidate now. my prescription hasn't changed that much. however, if you want lasik, you can't wear gas permeable contacts for a long time beforehand. apparently their firmness gives an inaccurate impression of how badly your vision is deteriorating; they hold your eye in place sort of like a push-up bra and keep it from sagging and worsening. he said that if i seriously wanted lasik, i'd have to be out of gas permeable lenses for at least 6 months and preferably a year or longer to make sure that my eyes weren't going to worsen dramatically without them. going a year in glasses only would be tough. they're hard to wear goggles over at burning man. they're a pain in rainy seattle where they constantly get wet and fog up. now that they make awesome looking glasses i like them from a style perspective. but from a practical perspective they often drive me nuts. i like sunglasses in the summer and goggles in the snow. he said "okay, open your eye then" and stuck a soft contact on it. it felt bizarre and floppy and enormous. he came back a second later and said "time for your lesson!" and they took me out for my life's second attempt at soft contact training. i was terrified and expecting to fail miserably and have yet another person rolling their eyes and mumbling about how they'd never seen anyone have so much difficulty with this. but i guess they really aren't that different, 'cause i had not much trouble inserting them and removing them is only minorly awkward.

so now i wear the soft contacts which i always wanted to wear in the first place. this is very exciting because it means i can get all kinds of ridiculous fake eye colors and designs and silliness. it also means that the time has come for new glasses, and that you should vote on them.

( here are some pictures. which glasses should i get? )

i am really jealous of all the people going to the seattle urban golf thing on saturday. it looks hilarious. you better take lots of pictures. and someone should go to this new house night and tell me how it is. i'll be spending the time at the opthamologist, working, and doing boring laundry/grocery errands that i never find time to do during the week. (or any week, really.. i don't think i've done laundry in 3 weeks. good thing i have a lot of underwear and socks.) the only less-boring errand will be hitting the babeland sale.

sunday we're working on the dome we're building to camp in at burning man. i can't make it to the sustainable capitol hill event, but you should. i'm hoping to be able to make it to the seattle bike-in later that afternoon/evening if possible.

one of the people in our burning man camp is doing this thing called open flame dance which "combines contemporary dance and the beauty of fire". there's only like 50,000 fire dancing people in the northwest, but i never get tired of it. this incarnation looks pretty legitimately neat.

the shazam app for iphone is pretty awesome. you hold the phone up to a speaker and it will tell you the band/song/album. obviously this only works for more well known music, but it's still sweet. here's a video of it in action.

my coworker sent around a pdf file of all the starbucks that are closing in north america. he's a starbucks freak that used to spend ~$5+/day on a morning ginormous latte. the thing that's funny about this is that we have a high quality professional espresso machine at our office and they provide syrups, beans, milk and soy milk for employees. and at the time i was even bringing in my own beans. i tried to convince him to pay me $2/day and let me make the drinks instead. my beans are always tasty organic ones. i never worked as a barista, but after 7 years of working here i'm actually decent at making drinks. i can even do some halfassed designs in the foam.

after i got done making fun of him for caring about starbucks closures, i looked at the list and see that the capitol hill starbucks on 15th is one of them. that made me cruelly happy. how often do cool, locally owned, delicious coffeshops beat out a starbucks for business? oh hell yeah. go victrola & ladro!

photo was taken by nafun at a target awhile back. it makes me lol.

i tried to do the 365 days project on flickr for awhile. the idea is that you take a picture of yourself every day. it was interesting but i had a terrible time keeping up with it. i'm too vain and having a slew of mediocre pictures floating around just for the sake of photographing myself started to disturb me. also, i felt too much of a commitment to make them interesting, and if i wasn't feeling inspired or creative that day i couldn't motivate myself to take a picture i thought might be bland.

i really like the idea of documenting seemingly-trivial day to day life, though. (as evidenced by my use of livejournal, i s'pose.) so i've decided to try bustermcleod's 8:36 pm project. the idea is to document what you're doing at 8:36pm and send it to an 8:36 twitter tag or an 8:36 flickr tag (or both).

i'm debating whether i should make a second twitter account for this, though. i'm conscious of the limited number of text messages some people have. i only average maybe 1 post a day on my current twitter account (though it's usually more like one day with a bunch of posts, several with none.) the posts are a mixture of mundane "here's what i'm doing" with things that people might find useful/interesting/funny. but it seems likely that at least 50% of the 8:36pm posts will be mundane, and i don't want to annoy the crap out of my friendslist. on the other hand, they're already putting up with my often-mundane crap and they could always just switch me to web-only. hmm

headlining this year is carl craig. oh hell yes.

( preliminary lineup for decibel festival is sweeeeet )

although i have a few gripes about the new iphone (cut and paste?! :/ no landscape mode in sms/email?!) overall it's quite awesome and wonderful. i'm hoping that the whrrl app will get more of my friends to start using it now that dodgeball is going to go away :( i'm a big fan of reqall (which works outside the iphone, but i hadn't previously heard of it.) you speak a little to-do, something for a grocery shopping list, etc. the service transcribes the text and then adds it to a list that you can check off. graffitio is a neat concept - it finds your current geographic location via GPS and you can then scribble on a virtual 'wall' (ie linda's tavern - these bathrooms smell horrific). i'm also very fond of exposure which is a flickr viewer that incorporates geotagging. if you choose 'near me', it looks at your current location and pulls up photos which were taken near you. it was fun to do this at xamichee's house and pull up a bunch of pictures people had taken of parties at his house.

tonight's movie for movie night = idiocracy. 8pm.

i'm helping with an activity in our burningman camp this year called 'ravers anonymous' where we assist people in learning how not to rave. here is a silly description i wrote and submitted last night at 1am when i should've been sleeping.

i'm taking any and all suggestions for activities which we could incorporate into either the event or the 12-step program.

jamz is going to help out with some work on my car... but he needs some tools that zhouse doesn't have.

does anyone out there have a handheld impact wrench with either #2 or #3 philips socket that could be borrowed for a brief period this weekend? i'd feed you or find another way to repay you, and you could be physically present during the whole time of its use if you wanted =)

alternatively i'll have to research the cheapest place to rent it, so if anyone knows about that, that'd be helpful too.

another reason the lack of vision scenario is sad is that i'd planned to go pick up an iphone on my lunch break. but it's probably for the best, 'cause the at&t store in bellevue is apparently already sold out and the line at the apple store is 4 hours long.

i'm a masochist, so i'm still going to try to go over there after work even though in all likelihood they'll be sold out and/or close before i get through the line.

i wanted to bike to the u-district for my doctor's appointment tomorrow too and i can't now unless i find my glasses 'cause i'd be death on wheels :(

i washed a contact down the sink this morning. i was tired and not thinking straight, so i stared like a deer in headlights while the water rushed it through the pipes before my mind clicked into gear and i shut it off. too late. gone. this is a trouble because i wear gas permeable contacts, so it'll take a few weeks at least to get a new pair. that wouldn't be so bad except that i'm so nearsighted that i'm legally blind. i can't safely drive to work. i can barely even see the ground when i'm walking. that wouldn't be much of an issue either except that i've lost my glasses. i wear them now and then 'cause i like glasses, but they disappeared sometime this month or last. i spent a few hours this morning with stereo99 and ripped my room apart trying to find them. i'm a total slob, so it's often difficult to even find the floor in my room let alone a small object. i'm normally pretty good about putting valuable things which might get broken on high shelves or safe places, but none of the normal glasses locales produced glasses.

i get terrible headaches without contacts/glasses 'cause my vision is so bad. today i'm wearing platform sandals, and i almost fell as i was leaving the house because i can't see the ground well enough to avoid obstacles. (don't ask me why i thought it was a good idea to wear them in the first place.) i had to call my mom and beg her to drive me to work. as i write this i'm sitting a few inches from the monitor squinting and my eyes are all sandpapery and hot and my forehead aching.

it's interesting, i rarely think about how nonfunctional i am without technology. if i lived many years ago i probably would've been eaten by a boar or otherwise killed in the wilderness. i don't have a spare pair of contacts because my insurance only allows you to get either glasses or contacts once every other year, and 4 years back i chose to get glasses instead. my glasses/contacts are very expensive because my vision's so bad that they have to use some kind of crazymagic to get the glasses to be thin enough to not look like coke bottle lenses, and my eyes are two different prescriptions. i never learned how to put in soft contacts and got kicked out of the eye doctor when i was a kid because they tried to teach me so many times and i failed so many times that they told me i couldn't have them. i guess i should probably try again. it would be awfully nice to be able to easily replace a lost contact, or to have cool fake colored eyes with little designs, etc. although i like to avoid disposable products in general in favor of ones that last if possible.

did any of you guys rush out and buy an iphone when they were first released? if so, how long did you have to wait in line? i ask this because i am one of the losers who is going to rush over to the apple store in bellevue tomorrow and torment myself trying to get the new iphone, but i only have an hour lunch break from work. so if you had to wait longer than that, i may have to try to hire my mom to wait in line for me. how sad is that? :)

to be fair, i do need to go there anyway 'cause stupid, stupid laptop has a defective battery and no longer functions unless it's plugged into the wall and also has a nonfunctional trackpad. i'm hoping that the nonfunctional trackpad will also turn out to be a known apple defect so i don't have to pay to get it serviced. i feel like i haven't done anything to cause the trackpad to cough and die.

also, what apps am i going to want from the appstore? i haven't been paying attention to the tech blog salivation frenzy.

have i mentioned that facebook is 50,000,000 times better now that they allow you to block obnoxious invitations to be a zombiemonkeywerewolforegontrailflowergiver? i can't remember. i totally like it now. except i still don't know who these people who want to add me as friends are. you would think that if you asked somebody to be your friend that you didn't know very well with no explanation of who you were and they didn't add you after a few weeks that would indicate that they have no idea who you are and you ought to explain yourself. i can't be arsed to message all these people with 'who are you?' it seems really weird and rude. if i ever added somebody who i didn't know well i would totally explain who i was and why i wanted to add them. i have 20 confusing friend requests and seeing them irks me. i s'pose i should just click ignore on all of them 'cause if they really cared that much they would've explained themselves by now.

curious about the experiences of my friendslist with craigslist personals, the stranger personals, etc. this was partially sparked by a friend who's doing a social experiment which involves putting a personal ad on craigslist and going out with anybody who asks her out, partially by me thinking about making out with more ladies ;) it seems to me like the stranger personals has a higher percentage of hot & smart people due to forcing them to pay, but maybe that's an unfair bias.

anonymous replies are allowed if you'd rather not be outed ;)

are any of you guys members of 24 hour fitness? i'm going to start attending a bunch of their classes but it'd be cooler to have a friend join me :)

last night i had a rough day at work and skipped the picnic and went to cafe presse with my roommates instead. i try never to forget how lucky i am to live with such awesome people in such an awesome house. i feel like i haven't been giving back enough lately, though, and am determined to set aside a few hours this weekend to clean. it's been ages since i could walk freely through my room and ages since i cleaned any of the shared parts of the house either.

i'm really excited 'cause i discovered this crew called easy riders that does group bike rides for wusses (ie people like me who are total n00bs, people who are out of shape, people who have medical problems that prevent them from being superfast etc.) so next month i'm going to go on one of those and take an introduction to bike commuting class.

via cuddlenoise i learned about a ( rubber duck regata tonight in cal anderson park ). i can't go, but you guys should go and take pictures for me ;)

what is burger king thinking?! was too good not to pass on.

as is this photo of spitfirehussy's sidewalk chalk equation.

i was very proud and excited by my biking while in portland. we were in bike lanes for part of the time, but other times we rode in the street with heavy traffic and used the hand signals, wove in and out of cars, etc. i was truly terrified for parts of it because amindadrift and stereo99 are experienced bikers and i've fallen/crashed just going around a tiny corner on a bike path. they kept taking off and going really fast, swerving between cars, etc. and i thought i was going to die. but i made it and am very happy about it. we biked to the saturday market where i got a pretty black tiered dress, then ground kontrol to play dance dance revolution and other wonderful games, then to the hedgehouse for a delicous beer sampler and pix for tasty dessert. from now on i'm going to try to ride as much as possible on the weekends and just walk the bike if i find a hill is too scary.

i was hoping to go to salon of shame tonight but it got slogged so it'll probably be crazypacked.

so instead i'm going to brave the streets once again and try to bike down to the arboretum and have a picnic in the lovely near-80 degree weather. if any of you are interested in joining me (via bike or just via meeting me there) you are encouraged to do so :) it'll likely be around 7-7:30pm.

photo's of dangerous_bunny, spitfirehussy, me & alison after blowing up cakes on 4th of july.

on the 4th of july i helped spitfirehussy crash a party and explode some cake bombs. she baked the cakes with tertyl and they were shaped like tnt and bombs. we dressed up in red, white, and blue and then rolled up in a white convertible. then we ran in, lit the cakes, and hid.

here is a video of the cakes exploding.

lele's husband's poor band got their drum set covered in cake. it was quite awesome.

movie night is thursday this week 'cause tonight = matmos show. woooo!

i was grumpy in this picture 'cause i was really dehydrated. i'm probably grumpy now for the same reason. last night was quite fun, though... went to the redwood for the first time and was a fan. hoegaarden on tap, tasty vegan options. hush puppies = mmmm. getting waxed by amphitrite8 in her capitol hill apartment was way more fun than going to a salon. salons don't play boards of canada and offer you sangria. it was also very significantly less painful than when i do it myself, so there's definitely much to be said for knowing what you're doing. i recommend that anyone in need of waxing services give hers a try :)

i am super excited for portland this weekend. we decided that we liked the couchsurfers from new brunswick who stayed at our house last week. their goal is to do a tour of the west coast. so they're coming over tonight and staying the night and then carpooling with us down there tomorrow. and now it looks like dangerous_bunny will be joining us too! so it'll be a packed car, but it should be awesome. we're heading down tomorrow night around 7-8pm. so far it looks like thursday night there's dj p, friday night r.a.w. & magneto, saturday night luke solomon and/or an awesome chickenhed party!

i've heard there's a bar in portland like zeitgeist in sf where there's bike 'parking' inside the bar so i must research this :)

i carpooled with my roommate kyle to work today. he isn't going to be able to pick me up 'til 8pm, and ideally he'd rather stay later. but i have a thrilling wax appointment and can't leave much later. so i posted an ad on craigslist asking if anyone was going from downtown bellevue > capitol hill between 6-8pm who might give a ride in exchange for some gas money. (yeah, i know i could take the bus ;) but it takes 3 buses and a few hours, so i'd rather spend that time at work where i could be working/doing something productive)

i got a response. it's quite classy.

> Just on my lunch break and saw your ad. I'm leaving Kirkland around 5pm
> to run errands for a short time in Bellevue before coming home. If you
> are still looking for a ride and open to flashing your breasts to me
> occassionally on the ride home, I'd do if for free.
>
> Adam

i replied with:

since i'm a transsexual, you'd love my perky D implants. unfortunately i'm not off work 'til 6. breast of luck!