so i got unzipped from netflix last night, oh my god. what an amazing movie. it's a documentary about isaac mizrahi putting together his 1994 fall/winter collection, so it's basically an hour of him, in all his fabulousness, and then about 15 minutes of runway action. both of these are incredible. isaac mizrahi is infinitely watchable, he's such a crazy genius it's ridiculous. plus, there's plenty of naomi campbell in all her 1994 glory - i'm not such a fan of people like her, cindy, linda, etc now - but in their heyday they were INCREDIBLE. there is a reason that she became a supermodel. i watched the runway part twice in a row, just to soak in naomi strutting it. she was in-fucking-credible.

and the whole time, all i could think was "jesus, i want to do that."

three day weekend down the drain. oh well, i got a lot done. hung out with people, got a lot of my shit moved, did a lot of stuff around the house. our apartment is starting to come together. we got a new catbox the other night because our old one was one-kitty size, and so if you left it for two days without cleaning it got scary. our new one is huge though, so it's all good. it has a door though to the consternation of frida, so it's funny to watch her try to get in. she does make it eventually.

yoga tonight was a bitch. it was hotter than usual, which meant i started sweating during the first breathing exercise, before i even started working out, and by the time the class was over i'd completely soaked two towels. it is unusual that it's this hot. but due to the heat, and the fact that i didn't eat much protein today, it was a really hard class. i had to lay down a few times and rest, i usually don't have to do that so it was sort of frustrating. oh well, i made it through alive. and the endorphins are great.

in other news, it's martin luther king day. bush gave an address honoring dr. king. yeah, you're really fucking carrying on his legend, you dumbfuck. all evidence taken from his behavior and remarks during his life suggest that he'd be fighting for gay marriage today, not against it like one of his daughters had the audacity to suggest. gah. fucking fundies.

also, vaguely related: watch harold and kumar go to white castle. beyond being a fucking funny stoner movie, it's also a very intelligent critique on our perceptions of race in america. i personally am on the edge of my seat waiting for the sequel, harold and kumar go to amsterdam.

fin.

snow in seattle! real snow! and it stuck!

too bad it's melting as fast as it can now, but it looks like we got about an inch. rooftops and grass and cars are still white. it's so pretty!

so it's my birthday. wheeeee.

we spent the day hitting the slopes. this season has been woefully lacking in snow, but crystal had 7" of powder overnight and then proceeded to dump another 3" or so on us while we were there, so the powder was amazing. just had to watch out for those places where rocks and trees come through the snow. plus i got to try out my new boots and bindings - man, they make such a difference over the old stuff. i'm hoping to have enough cash to buy a new deck at the end of the season (clearance time!) so then I'd have all new gear, and all gear i bought for myself instead of having it bought for me without my knowledge and thus not really fitting me right.

i just found out that jamie might be coming to visit in february. she got an interview with UW's neuro grad program, which is one of the best in the nation, so she's coming up for that. i really, really hope she gets in and decides to go there - having her close by again would be awesome.

all in all, not a bad birthday. i'm just old now.

what does jared mean by this:

"don't send it to whitey, man. whitey doesn't care."

discuss.

i got a new phone today. it's an lg flip phone. i like it waaaaay better than my little nokia candy bar - the keys on that phone always pissed me off. but this new one is far better, and best of all it was free. woohoo!

in other news, i'm a spoiled bitch who takes way too much for granted. i'm sitting here with a powerbook and a new phone, in a heated apartment with furniture and clean water and cable tv and wireless fucking internet, and yet on the other side of the planet, they are still finding dead bodies by the thousands and so many people have lost so much. i had this idea, where the peace corps should have a massive temporary membership drive, and organize volunteers to spend two weeks in asia helping out. i would go. i think a lot of people would.

Well, geez. It's the last day of 2004. So it's been almost a year since I moved here now - but it feels like I've lived here all along. I love it and wouldn't go back for the world.

Anyway, being New Year's Eve, I had the day off. Jared didn't. This means it was a KAT DAY. I love this kind of day. the kind where I wake up at 10 and crawl out of bed at 10:30, then make myself look hot and catch a bus downtown to spend waaaaay too much money on new clothes at Nordstrom. I shopped in that department where the sales people call you by your first name, and the dressing rooms are like small lounges rather than bathroom stalls. And I bought a new pair of jeans and a really awesome shirt. I'm not talking about how much I spent though. ;)

So after I left Nordstrom I was walking past Westlake Center when I remembered, "Hey, the monorail is open again!" So I went up to the top floor of the mall... just to see how much it cost to ride to Seattle Center - and when it was only a buck fifty i jumped on that silly little relic from the 1962 World's Fair and rode north in nostalgia. And then I saw the Space Needle.

Some background here: I haven't been up the space needle in more than a decade, so it was time. But, my boyfriend is afraid of heights, so it's one of those things he doesn't really want to do together. So I decided, to hell with the fact that it's 13 bucks, i'm going to see the view from 520 feet up. So I did. You really can see so much from up there - the view over the sound is absolutely amazing. And there's a fucking Starbucks at top. (Duh.)

Anyway, that was pretty cool. I felt like a tourist, but oh well. It was me day, so I did what I wanted. :D

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

I just touched a man's stereo equipment. And unplugged stuff and plugged new stuff in.

AND IT WORKS.

I am breaking new ground for women here.

yargh, another week down. another week closer to the end of the year, and the end of the world. Not that I'm saying these two events will be concurrent or anything, I'm just saying is all.

Finally got around to closing that credit union account I've been meaning to drain for the last, oh, five years or so, so I should have a check for almost $500 coming my way soon. Big money. Oh well, it'll go to some of my debts and other such crap. Fucking money. Also, that raise that my boss has been promising me since August will finally be in effect as of the 20th. Thanks. That really helps for all these 5 months I've been paying rent on a place that's just too damn expensive when you're making less than $10 an hour in take-home pay. So, assuming all goes well, and Mike's friend decides to move into my room, I'm all set to move in with Jared in January. this will mean a drop from $468 to $337 in rent - count all $131 of those new dollars I'll have now - coupled with my buck-oh-eight raise, should mean things will be slightly easier than they have been. Not to mention all the hours and gallons of petroleum saved in commuting to and from Tacoma to spend time with my boyfriend. And that fucking apartment down there, with its fucking mold that fucking gave me asthma, will finally be out of my life by the end of the year, once Brian leaves. And the new place doesn't have carpet, which I'm glad about because carpet is bad for asthma and it's easier to keep dander and dust down with hardwood, but it is so fucking noisy when his cats decide to race down the length of the apartment at breakneck speed at all fucking hours of the night. obnoxious kitties.

Hardly got anything done at work this afternoon, I had friday-brain so bad. this is a common but untreatable condition in which your brain is already off for the weekend, but your body isn't. I cope with repetetive tasks and music, but it often degrades into shameless free-cell playing and much spacing-out. Blah. I have such a mind-numbing job. But hey, big-bossman dropped in unexpectedly this week (he is based in southern california, so my desk isn't on his daily tour). I accidentally let leak a few key remarks on my salary and he, not previously knowing my monetary situation, was much dismayed. Perhaps this will result in the pulling of a few strings and the raising of my pay, once more. I would be stoked about that.

Tonight: dinner, maybe Tacoma, nothing exciting. Jared has a box waiting for him at his old place from Kenneth Cole - and he didn't order anything. I am just dying to know what's inside. That boy has ALL THE FUCKING LUCK with entering contests and forgetting about them. I should keep him around - maybe we'll get a few vacations or a car or something. He idly wondered at one point whether it was about Kenneth Cole's model contest they had a few months back - but he never submitted a picture or anything for that, and no one picks a model without seeng a fucking picture, so I'm sure that's not it. If that boy got a major ad campaign for a totally respectable label I would be very jealous for awhile, and then I'd deal with it.

Wow, I'm rambling.

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