yeah, so thanksgiving weekend was about a wash. thursday was pretty cool. dinner was at jared's uncle's place... which is a converted elementary school, now inhabited by somewhere around 15 artists. plus there's studios that aren't live-in. it's a really cool atmosphere. but thanksgiving was a communal dinner, where everyone brought a few dishes and somehow there managed to be enough food to feed around 40 mouths. it was fun. i like hanging out with lance and traycee.

but then friday night kind of sucked. after i went to bed, my breathing just got worse and worse, and i kept sucking down my albuterol but nothing changed. so, being the panicky panic-stricken panic monster that is a person who can't breathe, i made jared drive me to the emergency room. where, upon checking in, i waited around an hour and a half (all the while my breathing getting better) to get called back, 45 minutes (much better now) to see a doctor, 15 minutes getting an EKG, 45 minutes waiting for the doctor to come back and give me a breathing treatment, you get the picture. i was almost fine by the time i got the fucking breathing treatment, it was kind of like, why the fuck am i here? but i was there, and what else could i have done when my albuterol wasn't working? man, i really hope my insurance company doesn't dick me over on that and charge me a $50 copay plus god knows how much for an ekg plus the cost of a chest x-ray plus the breathing treatment plus the "free" peak flow inhaler that i forgot at the hospital. that would really suck.

not having money blows. but (but!) i ordered satin opera-length gloves, so when they get here I can do my photo shoot with Lance! and then i can go get an interview with these people! and then i can do photo shoots and make hella bank and not worry about money any more. that would (will!) be nice.

ahh, hypocrisy. bush urges the ukraine to not certify election results. evidently the election seems to have been plagued with problems like lack of transparancy, no paper trail, possibly tampered-with voting machines...

hmm. sounds a bit familiar.

when i'm rich and famous, i am going to own a piece from this collection.

yeah, so i got stalked on the bus today. or sort of stalked. or more like discomfort-causingly-stared-at.

welcome to seattle.

so because jared's car is working again we drove to work this morning, which meant i got in an hour earlier than normal, which meant that i was able to slip out at 10 til 4 (i skipped 10 minutes of work, bad me). that, in turn, meant that i got to see daylight after work for the first time in several days, and probably the last time for quite a while. this whole darkness thing is taking some adjustment, trust me. it's not that it's affecting my mood - i'm actually getting steadily better despite the decrease in sunlight - it's just an odd sensation to step out of the building at 4:45 and have the streetlights be on and the sky a deep purple color. i have to say, though, that the evenings right now are gorgeous. today it cleared up after raining this morning, so the world was still wet but the sky was vibrantly pink and orange and blue. it's different than the winters i'm used to, but i think i'll do just fine.

anyway, that's just one of many reasons i love living in seattle. here is a quick list of some others.

- the fact that every single kerry-edwards sign and bumper sticker is still proudly displayed. george w. bush isn't our president here.
- live music. dj music. music in alcohol establishments every fucking night of the week. goodbye, boredom.
- public transit. sure, the people on it smell funny sometimes, but the bus has never failed to get me where i want to go.
- water. i love seeing the sound every day when i'm walking around downtown. i love smelling ocean some mornings. i love shilshole beach.
- the people. they're great for watching. though i suppose the same could be said for anywhere, seattlites have their oddities. playing spot-the-transplant (the ones from LA are the ones holding umbrellas when it's barely raining) is a favorite pasttime of mine.
- my neighborhood. it's the perfect mix of safe and exciting, most of the bums stay west of here, and the neighborhood to the south is somewhere i'd imagine raising kids, yet i'm within walking distance of several restaurants, more than enough bars (one of them is even gay) and the grocery store.

anyway, this city sufficiently rocks. i want it to be my home for ever and ever unless i decide to move to canada. but really, i don't like hockey, and i pronounce it "ah-BOWT" not "a-boot".

that's a marine shooting a wounded iraqi point blank. eerily reminiscent of the viet cong assassination photo... everyone knows that photo. except this is a still from a video, shown on cnn and nbc. (they blacked out the picture when he shot the guy, but those who have seen the unedited version say that there's plenty of gore). full story

You know what's awesome? Warning lights on a dashboard that ACTUALLY PORTEND THE FUTURE. I have never encountered this before, ever, but it happened today. We were around Fife on our way back up to Seattle after spending my day off in Tacoma, and Jared's battery warning light comes on. He starts obsessing. What if my alternator dies? What if we break down? What if my car dies? I can't have that happen! Waaaah! and on and on. And I'm all, warning lights don't tell the truth, silly! Because mine don't. But then, 30 miles later, he's like, hey, my dashboard lights are getting dimmer. Fuck! And then, just as we crest the hill on the I-5 shipping channel bridge, like within sight of my exit, the car starts growling and making BAAAAD noises. And continues to do so all the way down the bridge, onto the exit and to the stoplite. And then we stop. And then the car stops. FUCK. And it won't turn back on. FUCK FUCK.

So we yell for a few minutes, attract the interest of a bum-lady (who proceeds to tell us what to do) and try to push it. No dice. All the while, people are pulling up behind us and wondering why we're not going. It's amazing how long someone will sit behind a car WITH ITS FUCKING BLINKERS ON and wait for it to go. And wait. And wait.

And then this car pulls up next to us and starts yelling. Hey! That's my roommate! Mike yells "I'll be back" at us and drives off. And then he pulls up in the grass by the bus stop on the other side, and comes over and we sit back and watch the distruction for awhile. Watching idiots be idiots is quite fun. One girl actually sat behind our car for almost a light cycle and a half before she realized that the car wasn't moving.

Then probably about 15 minutes after Mike shows up, the bum lady actually spouts somethhing useful - why don't you just jump it from his car? DUHHHH. So we pull Blue Steele up heading backwards on the off-ramp facing our car, and pull out the jumper cables. Then we stare at the jumper cables like morons because no one is ever REALLY sure how it goes. Red to the red terminal, black to the black, but don't you have to ground it? Fuck. No one knows. Then, the tow truck from AAA comes to save the day, puts the cables on the batteries (I SWEAR you had to connect it to the frame, not the battery, but I guess the tow truck guy would know) and we start the car. And make it almost all the way home only to have it die before Jared pulls it into a parking spot. So we pushed it. And it was craziness.

In other news, I think I might start a letter-writing campaign to Richard Branson to get him to start something like the X-Prize but for ridiculously efficient engines and alternative fuels instead of space travel. Because really, that dude has too much money and needs somewhere else to spend it

bad things i did this weekend.

- dropped $145 on clothing. in my defense, it was one leather jacket and one really great pair of heels, but still. i shouldn't have done that.
- that's all i can think of.

totally awesome things i did this weekend.

- dropped $145 on clothing. my new jacket is so fucking hot. and it's kenneth cole. and i only paid $120 for it. and it was somewhere in the $300 retail value range. rock. and the other 25 bucks went to a pair of strappy skinny little heels. because every girl needs a pair.

so i'm getting lots of practice wearing high heels now. i'm almost getting okay at it, too. so now when prada hires me for their 2005 campaign i won't fall on my face.

Which OS are You?

antiwar.com is the shit.

in other news, whatever my roommate put in the crock pot before he went to work smells really fucking good right now. if it's not there when you come home, mike, it's frida's fault. i promise.

a blogger in baghdad

"If watching these pretty girls weep into their Diet Cokes can make you despise the human beings responsible for setting up an idiotically small body type as the ideal, causing a whole nation of pretty girls to weep into their Diet Cokes just because they ate one too many curly fries for lunch, then Tyra is doing her job."

salon.com is funny. (Just watch the goddamn flash ad for the Free Day Pass. It's not that hard.)

because this is a great way to spend $887 million.

Our government is a bunch of fucktards. We don't need 887 million dollars spent on a fucking anthrax vaccine. Anthrax killed five people in 2001. FIVE. One, two, three, four, FIVE. That's five people. Five people do not warrant $887 million.

god fucking dammit.





what now??

So we've entered the final 24 hours. In the next day, we should know who will be the next President. We should be cracking open cheap champagne and getting victoriously drunk because ding dong, the asshole is gone. it should all be over in a matter of hours.

John Kerry will win. He just has to. I don't see any other choice.