MARRIAGE

I CAN LEGALLY MARRY MY GIRLFRIEND!!!!!

(Or, well, I will be able to when she gets her domestic partnership dissolved.)

Mood: ecstatic
Music: Stardust eating

Pine Hill Photographs

Susan spent this past weekend at my apartment, instead of me going to her duplex like we do most weekends. This was because my apartment was closer both to Pine Hill Preserve, where we went for a wildflower walk on Saturday, and to my parents' house, where we went for Mother's Day.

Pine Hill Preserve is located on a small area of the Sierra Nevada foothills where gabbro rocks that formed deep below the ocean floor have been pushed up to the surface by the collision of plates that formed the Sierra Nevadas. Gabbro rocks contain high levels of iron, magnesium, and other heavy metals, so the soil in this area (created mostly from broken down, decomposed gabbro rocks) is also unusually high in these metals. Most plants are poisoned by the high levels of these heavy metals, so some unusual plant species have evolved to grow only in these soils and nowhere else. The California Bureau of Land Management established the Pine Hill Preserve to protect eight exceptionally rare species of plants, including three species that grow exclusively in the Pine Hill area and four species listed as endangered (plus one listed as threatened) under the Federal Endangered Species Act.

I wanted to see Pine Hill because of the rare native plants, and I thought a trip there would intersect reasonably well with Susan's interest in geology, too. So I signed us up for a guided tour, with a group of about 20 people. Here is the whole group near the start of the hike, with Susan standing nearest to the camera.



( More pictures! )

Mood: okay
Music: Susan turning the pages of her book

Pictures of Susan, Truck, and Fish

This is my sexy barefoot girlfriend standing on the running boards of her new redneck truck, with her hair braided by me.



( And these are her evil killer fish with their babies. )

Mood: cheerful
Music: M*A*S*H on Susan's TV

Happy Birthday, Dear Queerness!

My queerness turns sweet sixteen today! And unlike me, it managed to get kissed before turning sixteen (or eighteen, for that matter). Only about seven months before turning sixteen, but still. My queerness has a hot girlfriend now! And hey, how many women who've been queer for sixteen years are still in a relationship with the first woman they ever kissed, like I am? My guess is that most of the few such women turned queer later in life, when they had more ability to choose girlfriends wisely, rather than at fifteen like I did. But my way works too. Not that the advice "Wait almost sixteen years to kiss a woman, and then you'll be more likely to be able to keep her!" is ever likely to appeal to teenagers. Even my own teenage self would never have been weird enough to actually plan on waiting almost sixteen years.

Mood: happy

Susan's Truck, Rhekarid's Book, and My Pasta-Roni

Today Susan did buy that same truck that I mentioned having gone with her to test-drive. She offered $500 more than before, $1,000 less than the seller had asked for, and the seller accepted. Susan has a truck again! Or she will tomorrow, when the paperwork is all signed. Unless something goes horribly wrong, which it shouldn't. I'm going to have a girlfriend with a truck that has ugly modifications that raise it up in the air! My girlfriend is such a redneck. She thinks she only pretends to be a redneck, but she doesn't realize how much it's become a real part of her, even though it's an acquired part rather than one she was raised with. I fear that her dream car is this one.

Last weekend I finished reading the fantasy novel Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams, which I bought from rhekarid for 50 cents when he was having a garage sale and couldn't find any other customers. The book was about a young tomcat who goes on a long and terribly dangerous quest to rescue a feline damsel whom he imagines to be in distress - his girlfriend of sorts, who has inexplicably disappeared. The book ends when eventually he finds her living safely and happily with a family of humans; unfortunately, she's been neutered and therefore isn't attracted to him anymore. This definitely ranks among the weirdest books I've ever read.

Is it bad if being fed three nights per week by my amateur gourmet chef girlfriend hasn't at all diminished my love of Pasta-Roni? Susan does cook very impressive meals, and I do very much enjoy them; I just also still very much enjoy the Pasta-Roni I make during the other three nights per week when I'm eating alone. Like tonight. (The seventh night per week, I cook frozen pizza for Susan. She doesn't appreciate the greatness of Pasta-Roni, and it's not practical to wait for her to arrive at my place and cook dinner herself, because she arrives so late. Frozen pizza is within my abilities.)

Mood: hungry
Music: Stardust squeaking and purring simultaneously

Truck Shopping

Okay, okay, so I didn't really break up with Susan. April Fool! She was actually the one who suggested that I should claim to have broken up with her for April Fool's Day, and she also suggested the reason for the fictional breakup. It's true that she spends many hours in front of the TV, switching from one women's basketball game to another the whole day long, and periodically standing up to demonstrate basketball plays to me, and it's true that she buys season tickets to the Sacramento Monarchs every year. But it's not true that she looked for any basketball news while we were camping. I don't think she actually mentioned basketball at all until we were back home.

Yesterday I went with her to test-drive a truck. She loved the truck, but the seller (a private seller) wanted to charge quite a bit more than the Kelley Blue Book price. Susan made several offers, but the seller made no counter-offers, and when I pointed out to the seller that the asking price was significantly above Blue Book price, the seller just shrugged and said, "Well, but if I can get people to pay that much . . ." So I advised Susan not to buy it, and she didn't, and we went home. But she's unhappy about not getting the truck. Oh, and the seller had modified the truck by raising it about 9 inches higher above the wheels than it would normally have been. I thought this made the truck both uglier and unsafe, due to the higher center of gravity. Susan said she actually liked the modification. I have a girlfriend with bad taste in vehicle modification aesthetics!

Now I feel obliged to help her find a better truck right away, so that my advising her not to buy the one we looked at won't cause her to go truckless very long or to end up with a worse truck.

Mood: disappointed
Music: Susan playing mahjongg on iGoogle

Very Bad Day

I broke up with Susan today. Our relationship just hadn't been working anymore since the NCAA women's basketball playoffs started. She wouldn't stop talking about basketball! Ever! Whenever I went over to her place, she spent the whole time in front of the TV, switching from one women's basketball game to another the whole day long, periodically standing up to demonstrate basketball plays to me (as if I'd care!) and telling me how she used them as a high school basketball coach in the past or planned to use them in the future. And it made me realize that since she buys season tickets to the Sacramento Monarchs WNBA games every year, there's really no way of interacting with her at all between mid-winter and the end of summer that doesn't involve constant discussion of basketball. Even when we went camping together so she didn't have access to the games on TV anymore, she kept trying to find them on my car radio, and making us late to class because she had to stop at the nearest store to buy a newspaper and check the women's basketball scores. I just couldn't handle having that much basketball in my life for half of every year. If only we hadn't happened to meet right at the end of last year's WNBA season, I would have recognized our incompatibility much sooner, and we both probably could have been spared a lot of pain.

Another thing that helped me decide I needed to break up with her was her irresponsible behavior in keeping those dangerous fish around. This morning before work, I stuck my hand into the the fish tank to try to remove the dead body of the latest fish they murdered, and the largest of the convict fish (the father of all the tiny mean babies) bit me so deeply on my ring finger that the bone of the whole first joint was exposed. I called in sick to work and went to the hospital, but my doctor said the top two sections of my finger weren't salvageable. She amputated it at the first joint.

So that's how I lost Susan and most of my ring finger on the same day. In other news, I've decided to make use of one good thing I did get from my relationship with Susan - namely, the cooking skills she taught me - by quitting my job as an editor and becoming a professional chef. Oh, and I think I should go back to Kingdom Hall again sometime soon, too.

Mood: devastated and bloodied
Music: sobbing noises

Shocking Revelations: Barack Obama Talks to Black People Who Say Racism Exists!

I'm getting extremely sick of hearing people express shock and horror and outrage every time they come across any quote suggesting that anyone Barack Obama even associates with has ever openly acknowledged that racism exists. Like how Snopes.com feels a need to clarify his wife's statement in her senior thesis at Princeton:

Much scrutiny and discussion has been focused on a single phrase within the thesis, the statement that "blacks must join in solidarity to combat a white oppressor." This phrase has been repeatedly quoted out of context and presented as if it reflected Michelle Obama's own philosophy, but in its full context it is clearly her speculation about what she thought some of the respondents she surveyed for her thesis (i.e., students who had attended Princeton in earlier years) might have been feeling.

What the hell would be wrong with saying that, even if it were her own philosophy? Can it honestly be news to anyone whatsoever that black people are being (gasp!) oppressed by white people, or that they will have a better chance at ceasing to be oppressed if they (double gasp!) work together "in solidarity"? Isn't this just stating a rather blatantly obvious, objectively verifiable fact?

Why am I increasingly getting the impression that much of the United States, including much of the Democratic Party, is perfectly willing to vote for a black presidential candidate only on the condition that the candidate in question must frantically deny that black people are in any way oppressed by white people at all, and must also avoid ever associating with any other black people at all unless those black people also frantically deny that black people are in any way oppressed by white people at all?

And he can't really associate too closely with any white people at all, either; I'm sure that if he were married to a white woman, a sufficiently significant number of people would see that as a sign of him being "uppity" that he wouldn't be the Democratic Party frontrunner right now at all. He should probably just lock himself in an airtight biosphere all alone from now on, because if he associates with any other human being at all, the other human being will probably be classifiable as belonging to some race or other, and no matter which race(s) it is, the presence of anyone of any race(s) anywhere near him will always manage to remind people that the candidate himself is (despite actually being biracial) classifiable as belonging to a race too, and that the race he is classified as belonging to is not (triple gasp!) the white one. How very shocking and horrifying and outrageous.

Mood: aggravated
Music: silence

Point Reyes Photographs

Here are my photographs from the second day of our geology class camping trip, when we moved on from Bodega Bay to Point Reyes. This first one is of my beautiful girlfriend, posing on the San Andreas Fault next to the rebuilt section of a fence that had its two ends separated by 16 feet during the San Francisco earthquake in 1906.



( More Point Reyes photographs! )

Mood: happy
Music: Stardust purring

Bodega Bay Photographs

Susan and I are back from our geology class camping trip at Bodega Dunes Campground, on Bodega Bay. I'll divide my photographs into two posts, this one for the first day of class (traveling around Bodega Bay) and the next one for the second day of class (traveling south to Point Reyes).

After having been warned that we would probably have to share our campsite with dozens of other students, we were delighted to find that we actually ended up having campsite 42 (the answer to life, the universe, and everything!) all to ourselves. Our campsite featured its own shortcut path directly to the restroom (which included showers!). This meant that other people tended to want to walk through our campsite. But that was okay, because most of them politely asked permission, and we were happy to have such convenient access to the path ourselves. Here's Susan returning down the path to our campsite.



( More Bodega Bay photographs! )

Mood: happy
Music: Legally Blonde on Susan's TV

Camping!

Susan and I are leaving today and returning Saturday from a camping trip on the coast with the geology class we signed up for together. It should be fun. I'll take lots of pictures. We're taking my car, because she's not ready to buy a new pickup truck yet, and we're returning her rental car today.

The mean convict fish in her fish tank have now killed the smaller (previously mutilated) male and the smaller female of their own species. The only life forms left in the tank are the larger male, the larger female, a plecostomus, and a snail. I wonder whether, when we get back, the remaining convict fish will have killed each other off, had babies together, or both.

Mood: anticipatory
Music: a car engine outside

Dear Common Cold

Dear common cold,

We need to talk. Susan and I already paid our yearly dues to you in January. We don't owe you anything more so soon. And you're way overdoing this anyway. My nose isn't just dripping like a leaky faucet; it's gushing like a turned on faucet. I require it to function as a nose, not as a faucet. Granted, it never had much sense of smell in the first place, but it did do a satisfactory job of inhaling and exhaling until you came along and took it over. And if I may be so vain as to say so, I rather preferred the way it looked on my face when it wasn't bright red and irritated.

I've been sleeping 12 hours per night both of the last two nights, and I plan to do the same tonight, despite your interruptions. I've also been drinking lots of orange juice and eating chicken noodle soup. I even ate all the cooked carrots in the soup! I didn't eat the celery, but you know I'd have to be literally on my death bed to go so far as to eat green vegetables. I ate orange vegetables in mass quantities for you! These things are supposed to have an effect on you. So hurry up and go away already!

I'm supposed to attend an evening geology class with Susan after work tomorrow, and I've barely been able to drag myself through my normal workday for the past couple of days, even with the extreme good fortune of having coincidentally had a quite significantly lighter workload for the past two days than is normal for me. I need to be functional tomorrow. I need you to go away and leave me alone. PLEASE.

No love,
Gayle

Mood: sick
Music: silence

LiveJournal Users vs. SUP

SUP is currently publishing a false list of the Most Popular Interests on LiveJournal. Someone called "Stewardess" at InsaneJournal.com has determined that SUP censored at least twelve interests that should rightfully be included on the list of most popular interests: sex, boys, girls, fanfiction, yaoi, hardcore, porn, bondage, faeries, pain, depression, and bisexuality. belenen suggests that you click on the LiveJournal feedback link and send them feedback something like this:

I just discovered that SUP has removed the interests "Sex, Boys, Girls, Fanfiction, Yaoi, Hardcore, Porn, Bondage, Faeries, Pain, Depression, Bisexuality" from LJ's daily popular interests report, and I am outraged by this censorship. I want LJ to reflect its users, not the prejudices of its owners. I have seen a large number of my friends moving to another journaling site, with more threatening to do the same, and I think that LJ needs to pay attention to this before it loses a large chunk of its paying customers.

I am a _______ (plus, paid, permanent, basic, early adopter) account holder, and if I left, you would be losing the revenue I bring in by ________ (viewing ads, paying yearly, inviting new people to join LJ).

belenen adds: "If no one speaks up about this, they assume that no one cares, and the next time a censorship issue comes up, they are far more likely to act in favor of it because they don't see any negative consequences. If, instead, they face outrage at this, they are less likely to censor in the future."

In addition, beckyzoole recommends (in protest not only against the censorship but also against the recent removal of the "Basic" account option for new journals created from now on) that everyone should avoid using LiveJournal in any way on Friday, March 21, from midnight GMT to midnight GMT. I don't know whether SUP will really pay any attention to a boycott with so little likely financial impact on them, but it can't hurt to try.

Also, if you are a member of Digg.com or would be willing to sign up, you can also help "digg" the news article "LiveJournal vs. Fandom: Again" to the top of the news headlines.

Mood: angry
Music: Angels/Cubs baseball game on Susan's TV

Yuba Goldfields: Photographs

The weekend before last, Susan and I went to the Yuba Goldfields so she could collect sand and gravel to make miniature glaciers with in her freezer for her students. The Yuba Goldfields are essentially the downstream equivalent of Malakoff Diggins, the last place I posted photographs of. During the gold rush, miners blasted apart the mountains at Malakoff Diggins with water cannons to look for gold, and all the debris from Malakoff Diggins washed down into the valley via the Yuba River. There was so much debris that it raised the entire riverbed drastically - so much that even all the way down in downtown Sacramento, which is several hours' driving distance from Malakoff Diggins, the I Street bridge over the Sacramento River had to be raised 20 feet because the riverbed was so full of debris from gold mining.

The Yuba River flows into the Sacramento River, which flows into the San Francisco Bay. A lot of the debris ended up in the San Francisco Bay, and a lot was left behind all along the way. The debris that washed ashore where the Yuba River first enters the Sacramento Valley formed what is now known as the Yuba Goldfields: 10,000 acres piles with loose gravel blasted out of the mountains upstream. The piles of gravel were re-mined for gold throughout much of the 20th century, and are now being marketed as aggregate to use in making cement.

Considering the massive environmental damage wreaked here, I was amazed at how many native plants I found thriving here. The very moment I stepped out of Susan's truck (R.I.P., Susan's truck), I was immediately greeted by the scene below. That's a native pine on the left, and native buckbrush directly to the right of it. I'm not sure what the other plants visible here are, but except for the grasses, they're all probably native. The whole area was also covered with lupine, which unfortunately wasn't in bloom yet, but it'll be gorgeous in another week or two (maybe it already is by now!) when the lupine bushes are all covered with purple flowers. For now, the buckbrush was already in bloom (there'll be better pictures of it later), and I also saw red maids, blue dicks, and purple vetch (all of which are native wildflowers).




( More photographs from the Yuba Goldfields )

Mood: sleepy
Music: silence

Computer Crashes and Car Crashes, Both of Which Could Have Been Far Worse

This week has contained rather more than its share of crises. Each of them could easily have been far worse than it was, but each of them was still stressful even with the more limited degree of badness that actually happened.

Last weekend was lovely, but I haven't had a moment to write about it because of the crises ever since. Susan needed to collect sand and pebbles to have her students build volcanoes, so I went to the store for her and bought the baking soda and vinegar that will be used to create the lava, and then we both went to the Yuba River so she could collect the sand and pebbles. I wandered around the Yuba Goldfields identifying native plants and taking photographs (which I'll post later, whenever I have time). We stayed away from each other almost the whole time we were there, because I was trying to avoid a sunburn (which I succeeded at), while she was trying to get a tan (which she failed at). I would have liked to have her within conversational range more of the time, but the only shade available was nowhere near the good supply of sand and pebbles she needed, so we just went our separate ways. Susan spent a lot of the time there thinking about how this was the same place where, when she took her dogs there a year ago, her dog Taco was bitten by a rattlesnake and swelled to twice is normal size and was declared clinically dead, but was revived a moment later and miraculously survived with the help of a blood transfusion from her other dog, who then got hit by a car a week later and killed. I just spent the time there thinking about how nice it was to be there and to have a wonderful girlfriend who took me there.

But on Monday the first crisis happened, when my computer displayed the dreaded Blue Screen of Death and then, upon reboot, displayed a message informing me that its hard drive had failed to pass the S.M.A.R.T. test and that I should back up my data immediately because the hard drive was likely to die at any moment. It was nice of the computer to give me advance warning, at least. I'd never heard of the S.M.A.R.T. test before, but apparently my computer had been silently performing this test on itself during bootup for all the time I've owned it, and just never announced this to me until the hard drive failed the test. I now highly recommend that all of you should have something like this installed on your computers, because it enabled me to perform a final backup of my data that was more recent and more thorough than I would otherwise have had.

At first, though, it didn't look like the warning was going to do me much good. My CD-ROM drive refused to function anymore, so I couldn't use it to back up my data. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't had a wonderful girlfriend who, even despite being busy taking a night class that evening, readily invited me to come over Tuesday night and spend the whole evening using her flash drive to copy files from my dying computer to her desktop computer. Then for good measure, she served me a delicious dinner and loaned me her desktop computer to take home for the rest of the month. I'll need it that long, because the new computer I bought isn't going to be delivered until near the end of March.

I did order a new computer though. Thank you, everyone who advised me about what to buy. I ended up adding a DVD writer (thanks, hansel25, for that advice) and a longer-lasting battery (thanks, safiiru, for advising me to read the reviews that convinced me I needed a better battery) and skipping the messenger case (thanks, wonderful girlfriend susanlizr, for offering to give me your unused one). I think I'll be very happy with it once it arrives. I just have to wait quite a while for it. But that's hardly any inconvenience at all, now that I have Susan's old computer to use in the interim.

The latest crisis happened last night: Susan was in a car accident. A driver going at least 65 miles per hour in a 35 mile per hour zone crashed into her truck, pushing it way down the street and flipping it completely upside down, flattening the roof so that some windows were squashed to half their former height. She heard a witness outside remark, "They're certainly not going to be able to walk out of that one," referring to her and the teenager she had been driving home at the time. But she and the teenager are both actually pretty much okay, surprisingly. They both have a bunch of tiny cuts all over their hands and knees from squeezing out the windows to get out of the truck, and Susan has some bruises, a bump on her knee, a sore neck, and a sore spot on the top of her head where her head bumped into the ceiling light switch and turned the light on inside the truck. Her much beloved truck is ruined, and the much beloved pants she was wearing are ruined, but she herself is not very badly damaged. And the insurance will pay for a new truck. Hopefully the other driver's insurance, since it certainly seems to have been the other driver's fault; but on the off-chance that the authorities are idiots and fail to figure that out, she'd still only have to pay a $500 deductible and then her own insurance would cover the rest of the truck's value.

She called me on the phone last night to tell me about the accident, and I decided to drive over to see her. She kept telling me I didn't have to, because it's almost a 60-mile drive from my place to hers and I'd already driven there the night before to back up my computer with her flash drive. But I know something about how stressful car accidents are; I practically never dislike being alone, but if I'd just been in a car accident, even I would prefer not to be alone. So I drove to see her and stayed the night again. It turned out that she had only $3 cash and about four cigarettes when I arrived, and no transportation to obtain more, so I loaned her $20 cash and bought her a pack of cigarettes. I got carded while buying the cigarettes, which I thought was weird since I really don't look under 18. Susan said I must have just looked so uncomfortable with the idea of buying cigarettes that the guy behind the counter concluded that I must surely be doing something illegal despite appearing to be of legal age.

Anyway, now I'm back home with my loaned computer, and Susan is at her home with her rented car. My data is intact, and my girlfriend is intact, too. So all has turned out reasonably well, despite the crashes. I'd just like things to stop crashing in the first place now, please.

Mood: relieved
Music: silence

Emergency Computer Replacement

My computer has taken to shutting itself down at random moments and displaying warning messages telling me that its hard drive is on the brink of death. So it looks like I need to buy a new computer. I think I'm going to buy a laptop instead of a desktop. Specifically, I'm thinking of buying a Dell Inspiron laptop with these specifications:

• 120GB Hard Drive (5400RPM)
• RAM: 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 667MHz
• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo T5450 (1.66GHz/667Mhz FSB/2MB
  cache)
• Glossy, widescreen 15.4 inch display (1280x800)
• CD writer / DVD player (Combo Drive)
• Dell Wireless 1395 802.11g Mini Card
• 56Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell)
• Belkin 15.4" Messenger Case
• Included 3 GB DataSafe Online Backup for 1Yr
• Windows XP(TM) Home Edition (which I will upgrade to Windows XP Professional Edition with my existing disk, because I need XP Professional to telecommute)

Is there anything else you think I would be likely to need or want that isn't listed? And does $780 seem like a good price for it?

Mood: stressed
Music: radio commercials

Malakoff Diggins: Photographs

Malakoff Diggins is a state historic park where gold miners used huge water cannons to carve away massive sections of the cliffs in hopes of extracting deeply buried gold. The bare dirt you can see on the sides of the cliffs in my photographs is where the land was carved away. The plants still haven't grown back, because all the topsoil that plants grow best in was removed.

I wasn't expecting snow here, and Susan wasn't particularly expecting it either, but we were very pleasantly surprised to find snow as we started driving toward it. (We Californians rarely see any snow unless we go driving somewhere to find it. Unless you count seeing it from a vast distance, on the mountaintops far off along the horizon.)




( Us in the snow! Also, a bonus photograph of me at Malakoff Diggins when I was a toddler! )

Mood: happy
Music: Susan playing mahjongg on her laptop

Yuba River Recreation Area: Photographs

When Susan and I went to Malakoff Diggins last Sunday, we first stopped along the way at Yuba River Recreation Area. I've decided to put the Yuba River Recreation Area photographs in a separate post from the Malakoff Diggins photographs, so this post is just for the former. There was snow at Malakoff Diggins, but not here, because this was at a lower elevation.

We drove across this bridge and Susan parked her truck on the edge of the road directly at the left end of the bridge. From there we climbed down to the river with her dogs and wandered around on the very impressive rocks you can see along the left shoreline.




( Photographs of us and the dogs there! )

Mood: happy
Music: Susan typing on her laptop

Dear Scientologists: Subtlety Is Not One of Your Talents

I just checked my snail mail and found a recruitment questionnaire from the Church of Scientology. It's very funny to see the things they want to know about their recruits. I especially like how they keep rephrasing the questions that really matter to them over and over, interspersing them with more innocuous ones to try to disguise their primary interests. These are some of their actual questions, quoted verbatim:

7. Would you prefer to be in a position where you did not have the responsibilities of making decisions?
23. Do you resent the efforts of others to tell you what to do?
29. Would you rather give orders than take them?
31. Could you agree to "strict discipline"?
32. Would the idea of making a complete new start cause you much concern?
55. When hearing a lecturer, do you sometimes experience the idea that the speaker is referring entirely to you?
68. Do you enjoy activities of your own choosing?
69. Does emotional music have quite an effect on you?
80. Do you accept criticism easily and without resentment?
84. Do you prefer to abide by the wishes of others rather than seek to have your own way?
90. Do you have few interests and activities that are your own choice?
99. Do you prefer to take a passive role in any club or organization to which you belong?
103. Would you give up easily on a given course if it were causing you a considerable amount of inconvenience?
107. Do you turn down responsibility because you doubt your fitness to cope?
120. When met with direct opposition would you still seek to have your own way rather than give in?
125. Are you suspicious of people who ask to borrow money from you?
126. Are your decisions swayed by personal interests?
128. Do you frequently take action even though you know your own good judgment would indicate otherwise?
142. Do you get very ill at ease in disordered surroundings?
179. Do others push you around?
181. Do you often ponder over your own inferiority?
184. Do you frequently not do something you want to do because of other people's desires?
200. Do you consider you have many warm friends?

As it happens, I do resent the efforts of others to tell me what to do, and I would not prefer to be in a position where I did not have the responsibilities of making my own decisions - much less a position of "strict discipline." I do happen to enjoy choosing my own activities, thanks very much, and I certainly do not wish to put up with any cult leaders causing me "a considerable amount of inconvenience." Somehow I get the feeling that Scientology and I would not get along.

Mood: amused
Music: The Who: "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere"

Why I Feel Optimistic About This Year's Presidential Election

I can't remember any other presidential election in my lifetime that made me feel as optimistic as this one does, so far, about American politics. I couldn't vote for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton myself, since I'm a registered Peace & Freedom Party member rather than a registered Democrat - and I'm not particularly sad about not being allowed to vote for either of them, since they both do still disappoint me in significant ways. But they disappoint me far less than Democratic presidential candidates have always disappointed me in the past. I would prefer Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton (as would apparently the vast majority of you on my LiveJournal friends list: I've counted three Hillary Clinton voters among you and one Ron Paul voter, but uncountable dozens of Barack Obama voters), but even if Hillary Clinton wins, I'll still be happier with her than I've ever been with any other Democratic presidential nominee in my lifetime. I think I may even vote for either one of them in the November election; if so, it will be the first time in my life that I've ever voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in the November election.

A big part of my optimism is due to the obvious fact of them being the first ever black and female presidential candidates on a major party ticket. The media has made a big deal over this, but I feel it's so significant that it's worthy of an even bigger deal than anyone has fully realized yet. Presidents have more powers than the ones officially granted to them; they have a huge amount of symbolic culture-shifting power as figureheads, too. Especially if Clinton wins, the whole sexist language of presidency would have to be rewritten in ways that I don't think the country has really begun to grapple with seriously yet. If either one of them wins, I think their mere existences in the bodies they were born into will make the country a significantly more pleasant place, even if I do end up hating a large number of their actual political stances.

But the other reason I feel so much more optimistic about this election than about any other presidential elections I've ever been eligible to vote in is something much less noticed by the media: Quite simply, whenever I hear anyone this year urging me to vote for either of the Democratic presidential candidates, the urging is consistently phrased as, "You should vote for X because X did something good." This stands in very sharp contrast to what I heard during the past several elections (most noticeably with John Kerry, but also quite a bit with Al Gore and even to a significant extent with Bill Clinton, at least during his second term, which was the first one I was eligible to vote about), when instead I kept hearing, "You should vote for X because even though I know X is horribly disappointingly conservative and totally uninspiring, the alternative is the absolutely terrifying prospect of Y being elected instead!" The fact that this year I hear Democratic voters actually enthused about the prospect of voting for the Democratic candidates, rather than just terrified into resigning themselves to having to vote against the Republican candidates, makes me feel for the first time in ages that the Democrats are actually going to win the November elections this time around. And yes, I know the Barack Obama voters tend to be significantly more enthusiastic than the Hillary Clinton voters. But even most of the Hillary Clinton voters seem to be phrasing their support of her in terms of things they actually like about her. I really think they're both far more decent candidates than the Democrats have ever previously given me the opportunity to vote for.

My opportunity won't come until November, though, since I'm not a registered Democrat. In the meantime, I voted yesterday for Cynthia McKinney, on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket.

Mood: optimistic
Music: silence

Sutter Buttes Photographs

Way back in November, Susan and I went on an organized geology hike in the Sutter Buttes, "the smallest mountain range in the world." The hike was supposedly six miles round trip, although it didn't feel that long to either of us. I took photographs, and now I'm finally going to get around to posting them. Here is Susan near the start of the hike.




( More pictures from the Sutter Buttes! )

Mood: accomplished
Music: cars outside

Elephant Seals

My photographs from Cayucos itself are in the previous post, but in this one I'll share my photographs from the place we drove to on our last afternoon, slightly up the coast from Cayucos. We drove there to see elephant seals, and we sure did see a lot of them. We also took most of our photographs of each other here, rather than in Cayucos itself. Here are Susan and me, as photographed by Susan's sister Wendy. The reason I'm standing that way is that I'm trying to avoid being pulled off the edge of a cliff by Susan's dog Taco. Both her dogs took one look at the elephant seals and were determined to hurl themselves off the cliff to go play with the elephant seals. It took a lot of effort to restrain them.




( Lots of elephant seal photographs! And us photographs, too! )

Mood: content
Music: rain on Susan's patio roof

Cayucos Photographs

I really should get around to posting photographs from back in November, when Susan and I went hiking in the Sutter Buttes. But instead I have pictures from our more recent vacation this month in Cayucos, near San Luis Obispo. Our hotel room had a balcony that directly overlooked the ocean. This was the view from our balcony.




( Lots more pictures from our trip to Cayucos! )

Mood: content
Music: rain on Susan's patio roof

Sutter Buttes Hike

I spent all day Saturday worrying that I would never be able to keep up with everyone else on the Sutter Buttes hike that I signed up to go on with Susan, because the organizers didn't tell us until after we'd already signed up that the hike was going to be about six miles long, which is a lot more than I'm used to walking even on flat ground, let alone up and down mountains. They did tell us before we signed up that the hike we were going on was considered appropriate for anyone who's over 12 years old and exercises regularly, which I certainly don't do, but I decided I had to try to manage it anyway because all the easier hikes sounded so much less interesting.

Anyway, the hike actually turned out to be shockingly easy! My legs aren't even sore at all today. I was exclaiming to Susan during the hike that it didn't seem like it could possibly be anywhere near as long as six miles, and she was agreeing that it didn't seem that long to her either, but the hike leader kept repeating that it was. I was also exclaiming to Susan how glad I was that the hike leader didn't walk anywhere near as fast as the geology professor who led our hikes in Yosemite. Except then our two carpool passengers on the way back from the Buttes to the high school that we had originally gathered at started complaining that he walked way too fast because he was too tall. One of our passengers had been on other organized hikes in the Sutter Buttes before, and she said the other hike leaders had walked much more slowly. She was older than us, but she was in the habit of taking 50-mile bike rides through the Buttes regularly, so I thought she would be a lot more in shape than me. But I guess she wasn't.

We even went on an optional extra climb up some peaks at the end that raised the difficulty rating of the hike from "3 - Challenging" to "4- Difficult." I told Susan that the hike convinced me that I must be young still, because "3 - Challenging" was supposed to be too hard for people who don't exercise regularly, yet I didn't have any problem with it or even with "4 - Difficult" even though I don't exercise regularly.

I also spent all day Saturday worrying that it would rain on us during the hike, because it was pouring rain all day Saturday, and all night until Sunday morning. It even rained on us a little as we were driving to the hike. But once we actually arrives, it cleared right up and we had blue sky all day long. Then I realized I'd forgotten to bring any extra camera batteries, so I worried about that, but my single pair of camera batteries already in my camera turned out to be enough. I don't usually worry much without having my worries turn out to be justified! Eventually I'll post pictures from the hike.

I took today off work to spend it with Susan, who has it off work automatically because it's Veteran's Day. She's still in bed. Other than the hike, our weekend has consisted mostly of fantastic amounts of reading together on the couch. I read two of Susan's books, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (which was absolutely amazing!) and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller (which was not so amazing; it was mediocre punctuated by occasional riveting moments and a lot of general horror at how unbearably racist the author's family was). Now I'm reading a book of my own that I brought with me, Love and Vertigo by Tsu-Ming Teo. I'm not very far into it yet, and it hasn't really hooked me yet. Susan is reading Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray by Linda Simon. I love having a girlfriend this geeky.

Also she somehow managed to write me another email love letter on her laptop right while I was sitting next to her on the couch, without my ever guessing it was me she was writing to. I also love having a girlfriend who understands that writing can sometimes be more fun than talking.

Mood: accomplished
Music: cars outside

An Inventory of My Girlfriend's Influence on My Apartment

My girlfriend has brought lots of happiness and excitement into my life. She's also brought lots of other stuff into my apartment. I feel compelled to make a list. Some of these things are hers and some of them are mine, but all of them have entered my apartment because of her:

• Babyji by Abha Dawesar


• 1 bar of soap


• black full-length winter coat


• black pepper


• 1 bottle Guinness draught beer


• 2 bottles white wine


• 3 business cards of hers, each with a different design


• California state fair ticket and associated photography stub


• Daedalus Books Fall 2007 catalog


• 19 cans Dr. Pepper


• 10 chopsticks


• classwork from a community college "Geology of Yosemite" class


• 1/2 clove garlic


• coffee beans


• coffee grinder


• coffeepot


• colander


• Collected Poems by Jane Kenyon


• corkscrew


• 1 cube real butter


• Dijon mustard


• hairbrush


• hiking boots


• hoisin sauce


• Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle by Lois W. Banner


• 3 matchboxes filled with tiny rocks


• Native Treasures: Gardening with the Plants of California by M. Nevin Smith


• navy blue button-down shirt


• olive oil


• pickled ginger


• photographs of her


• 2 potatoes


• purple blazer with blue and gold lapel pin


• 2 razors


• 5 medium-sized rocks


• Russian fruit drink that I don't know the details of because the entire label is in Russian


• 2 Sacramento Monarchs programs from August 23rd and associated photography stub


• self-inflating camping mattress


• sesame oil


• 4 sharp knives


• sourdough bread


• Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World by Sarah Vowell


• tan pants with pinstripes


• tea kettle


• The Atlantic 150th anniversary issue


• The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop


• The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Homes


• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion


• Time and Materials by Robert Hass


• toothbrush


• toothpaste


• U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service booklet "Discover Wildlife California"


• wasabi


• whipping cream


• whisk


• Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not by Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert


• 1 wooden chair


• 2 wooden spoons


• Worcestershire sauce

It only took her two months to bring all this into my life. What will she manage to bring in another two months?

For comparison, the only things I can think of that I have caused to enter her apartment are: The Enormous Room by e. e. cummings, Identity by Milan Kundera, two sleeping bags, two sonnets, two cat-shaped pins, a toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, some extra-dark chocolate that's probably gone by now, and one rock. You'd think we spend more time at my place, which we don't. We spend more time at her place. But she is more of a stuff-owning person than me, so she finds my place lacking in stuff and she fills in the gaps. Most of the gaps she finds are in my kitchen.

She was here this morning, and she took away some of her stuff. She took away a black button-down shirt that I sewed new buttons onto for her, a Tupperware container that used to contain the remains of the dinner she cooked for me last Saturday, and a travel mug that said, "If you can read this, thank a teacher!" on the side of it. I don't think she brought any new stuff this time. But then, I never think she has brought any new stuff until I stumble across it unexpectedly after she's gone. I never know what new and unfamiliar objects may turn up in my apartment these days.

My girlfriend reads faster than I do. I was reading parts of The Atlantic over her shoulder in bed last night, and she kept finishing the pages before I did. Nobody ever reads faster than I do! It's unheard of. Now I am intimidated. Wait, I was intimidated already anyway because she is beautiful and knows practically everything, including what she's doing at almost any given moment and how to do it competently. But now I have one more reason to be intimidated. It is very convenient that she is so in love with me, because otherwise I might be too intimidated to ask her out!

Mood: amused
Music: the bell on Stardust's collar