My Blog

No More Blogs

margaret333 — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:17:48 GMT

Don’t hate me, but I nuked all your blogs From my homepage, that is. I’m overwhelmed by blogs. There are of lots of them, and, well, most of the time they make me uncomfortable. They’re so personal, and so NOT. I see blog entries every day about things that are really important to the writer – intensely personal intimate private revealing things, like Innermost secrets of the heart Confessions of mistakes made Recaps of conversation held in marriage counseling Pleas for financial help Analysis of the flaws of spouses and partners Insults Apologies Negotiations between lovers All spread wide in the most public way, open to anyone willing to read. It makes me squirm. It makes me wonder how important the subject really is, if anyone who comes across it is allowed to know and entitled/encouraged to throw in his or her two cents, possibly without knowing all that much about you or the context of your problem/challenge/whatever. That’s what makes a lot of these intensely personal blogs also seem paradoxically quite cold and impersonal. I do understand that thinking something through well enough to write about it can be the best way to get through it. That’s a good thing, writing it down, and perhaps sharing it with a few close friends – I’m just not sure we should all be publicizing our private journals this way. Argh! Blogs,,,,,,eeeeeeew. So I edited my homepage in Tribe, and now there aint no more blogs there. If you’re my friend and you want me to know about something important to you, I really do want to know! I do care – but I won’t find out about it through your blog. So please send me a note or call me, and I’ll be there for you. Unfortunately this also means I’ll miss some blogs that aren’t painful – I like blogs that are about something interesting that happened to you, or something you learned – but it’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make (or at least try!) So perhaps I have been influenced by bloggyness – here I am puttin’ out the truth even if it makes you squirm! Forgive me, please!

I like this time of year

margaret333 — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 21:24:44 GMT

Tis the season to wildly obsess over Burning Man! There are costume swaps and fund raisers and work days buzzing everywhere. I don't blog! but I found the email I wrote to a friend about this season a few years ago - it was the one year I took an RV to Burning Man, and it couldn't go naked, now could it?! This makes me nostalgic and very happy I'm not doing it again. Today I conquered the RV rental place. Did I tell you yet about the RV project?? I will spare you some of the hideous details since I like you (stories you are dodging: Why would anyone make a costume for an RV? What does a rain cloud have to do with the Vault of Heaven?? What are the physics governing the behavior of helium in a beach ball at 110 degrees? Whatever happened to the chicken?) and the bottom line is I am costuming an RV. I have to get it mostly assembled before Burning Man, and I needed measurements. I needed an actual RV. I was a little jumpy about this intelligence mission, because a lot of places are not charmed by burners (infernal playa dust gets everywhere). The lady at the desk accepted my request to measure without any curiosity, but unfortunately the only RV they had in the right size was in the process of being rented out that very minute. So I had to get the people renting it in on the story. At first they were wary (these people were quite bizarrely and comprehensively tattooed, by the way) but it wasn't too hard to get them to help. Turns out, measuring an RV is Fun! Wheeee! Their joyful shouts of "Well fuck me with a broom handle here's a little hook just what you need" (and that's a quote!) attracted the mechanic, a Mexican guy with very little English who at first seemed personally insulted by the idea, but suddenly got it. Excelente! Now we had a genuine ruckus happening. No longer a low-key, subdued, quietly-measure-the-RV-and-slink-away deal, now the service manager and the two salespeople needed to see what was up, and before I knew it I had a crowd. Had to start over again and make them hear the siren call of the properly dressed RV but when I got to the part about the ripped organza fringe they were totally invested in the vision. Like a revival meeting. Swarming the RV with tape measures, drawing things in my sketch pad (!!), explaining dimensions to me, and demanding a picture of the final masterpiece. When I finally escaped they were firing up the machine customarily used to make those single-entendre plastic license plate frames ("RVers do it on wheels") to make a frame for their drawing and promised picture. Of course, I also made the classic mistake of falling for my own publicity and I wasted a good chunk of today fantasizing about the splendid RV. Post script: we ended up batiking the RV's costume. Batik involves applying hot wax to the fabric and then dyeing it layers of color and then scraping off all the goddamn wax. And this was a big old costume - the wax took all night to apply, the dyeing needed two huge wading pools and the scraping it off required us to end up with bloody nubs instead of fingers. It was horrible - never, NEVER batik your RV's costume. And now I have to get back to gluing sequins on my bike.

But I don't blog! Sheeesh

margaret333 — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:10:39 GMT

Oh the wicked Shannon! She tagged me, so now I gotta do this. If you've been tagged, you must write a blog entry with 8 somewhat unknown factoids/interesting things/habits about yourself and STATE who tagged you! Then choose 6 new people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs. I have no toenails on my little toes. Well, hardly at all. I have a grandmother who has gone through 13 husbands that we KNOW about (one at a time, “just like Liz Taylor” is how she puts it), and she's still wowing them at the senior center. She could be queing up number 14 right this minute. She's charming. She can talk without taking a breath or receiving feedback of any kind indefinitely – you don't even have to say “uh huh”. When I lived in London I had an Egyptian boyfriend (briefly!) who proposed to me in the tea room at Marks and Spencer, and when I declined (appalled at the idea, actually) he howled and wept at tremendous volumes right there in the tea room and shrieked that I had plunged a dagger into his heart and was twisting it and letting the blood run down the gutter.....I should write that in all caps to give you a better idea of what it was like - people were looking, making their “O” faces and I got up and ran away and never saw him again. It was less fun than it sounds. I have an undergraduate degree in German Literature (yup, you read that right, German Lit, jeebus, sets a new standard for pointless, who would do that??) which required me to live in Berlin, and they had coed bathrooms in the dorms, and I was way too shy to pee with some guy in the room (of course, anyone reading this knows how shy I am), and so I lived like some ninja wraith vampire creature only venturing out to pish and shower at 3 am, skulking down the hallway, eyes darting frantically, for like, a year, until I moved. I know way way more about sumo than you would expect, and I ran a website about it (Stats! Games! Trivia! Photos! You name it) and there are pictures of me on the web hanging out with Akebono, and if you know who he is you're a bit quirky your own self. I used to have a nutty crush on Vaslav Nijinsky (the ballet dancer) and at one point had read every published word ever written about him (well, in the languages I speak anyway) - courtesy of the Los Angeles County public library system. I once took golf lessons!! ahahahahaha can you imagine. I wore the ghastly plaid pants and everything. Never Tell Anyone: In high school I was the California state Latin vocabulary champion....what a geek! I doubted that there were 8 interesting factoids about me and I was right. So I tag: (Ha!Ha!) Kevin Lee Janice L. Mike Loos Ophir Ana Marta