Cell phone users! Beware the wrath of Katie!!!

Do not. I repeat. Do NOT talk on a cell phone in a movie theater anywhere near this girl. She's armed with hair-grabbing fists and she's got some serious power behind those arms.

Katie and Katie went to see a movie at the Metreon that ended up with two trips to the emergency room. Katie asked a girl in the movie to get off her cell phone, on which she was talking loudly, and Katie ended up brawling with the girl and her boyfriend. I asked her what the other people in the movie theater did and she said they ignored it and watched the movie.

Katie did get a nice shiner out of the deal. Katie, you are the hero of all moviegoers everywhere who have had their $15 wasted when someone ruined it with their cell phone. From now on whenever I go to a movie I'm going to make sure you're there. Who knows, it could be more entertaining than the movie itself :D

Here's what Katie's beautiful eye looks like normally, with green shadow:



And here's what Katie's beautiful eye looks like with the "natural" look of coloring with bruises. Still pretty!



Thursday night was a rough night for everyone in our little Presidio house. A violent night, even. Was it a full moon? Do you believe in that? I do. People are fucked on full moons.

Last weekend we all went to the Beer and Oyster Fest at Fort Mason. It was a lot of Marina drinking transported to muddy grass.

See, Katie A. has beautiful eyes, too.




Because it was a rough week the roommates banded together. We went to the Painted Bird today in the Mission, a great vintage clothing store, and then to La Taqueria (best burritos in the city, and I won't debate it like some people like to. Hands down, the best carnitas ever) and then on to American Rag.

The Painted Bird:

Some Old Photos of San Francisco

How we wish San Francisco always looked. When San Francisco is like this, it's the best city in the world:



How it usually looks:



Nik at Land's End. This hike is in the city!



Bird in the nudie section of Baker Beach:



Temporary gallery in Hayes:



The San Francisco parrots, flying through the Presidio in the morning:



View of the bridge from Land's End:



Stormy view looking from Telegraph Hill in North Beach towards Russian Hill, the Golden Gate and Marin.



Little bird looking as ferocious as possible to big predatory bird on my street. She dived bombed the big bird several times, tugging at feathers, before the larger bird flew off. It was nesting season.



Sunset above Bolinas Lagoon in one of my favorite places in the world.

Ordering Prints through iPhoto

I decided to test out the order prints function through iPhoto and I am so disappointed! So far I've only received the 8x10s I ordered and the prints themselves are very good quality, but I didn't think that the photos would be cropped and they are significantly, so as to throw off the composition. Also, they are cropped on one side rather than being centered. It must be an automated process, but even the exposure in one of the photos is far off from both the proof sheet and the image I ordered. I'm going to try to return them--they weren't cheap!

I'm so disappointed because the idea of being able to order a bound linen book of photos through iPhoto (one of the options) seemed like such a great idea, but if the photos are treated this way then what's the point?

The Broadway Tunnel

Walking through the Broadway Tunnel is a hell that seems to never end. Driving through it takes less than 15 seconds, but you don't realize just how fast you can go in a car until you A. get pulled over by a police officer after speeding through, as i have, or B. walk through the dirty dirty tunnel, which takes about 5-10 minutes depending on how much time seems to drag on while you're in there.

It's warm, it's dirty, and you can write things in the scum on the walls. Don't touch anything. Don't try to run like I did--you just end up drawing the fumes deeper into the tiny capillaries of your lungs where smog instantly transfers into your bloodstream and makes you feel sluggish and drunk. Oh wait, I WAS drunk. Why else would I have walked through?

Walking through also makes you think of the asshole husband in Tales of the City, who met his demise in a fiery crash in his evil mercedes in the lovely, endless, scuzzy Broadway Tunnel.

Cataract Falls

I did the Cataract Trail alone yesterday. The best part was taking the windy drive from Fairfax as fast as I wanted to without fear of scaring a passenger or making him/her car sick. It was really fun to drive. The hike itself was harder than I would have expected going up (also because I thought I was losing light and practically ran), and easy on the downhill return. Every turn was covered with waterfalls. Little ones, big ones, ones everywhere. It's like what my Dutch uncle says when he goes to the beaches in Europe, haha, but he really says that.

The hike was like walking up the edge of a bowl that's being submersed under water--the waterfalls cascaded down the edges all around you.













I realized when I was starting the hike that the trailhead was right where I was on Christmas Day, though this would be a treacherous hike in pouring rain.



PS if you go on this hike a good place to stop after is in Fairfax, at the Fairfax Scoop, for ice cream. It's organic, too, but I don't really care.

#15, in which I repeatedly get smashed

I took advantage of a trip to LA, and the trip took advantage of me. It was a mutual thing between consenting adult and city. I love LA. Don't argue with me! You can't convince me to dislike a city I spent 4 lovely, fun years in. My profession takes me there occasionally and that may be one of the reasons I like my job.

I went down to work on some radio spots and stayed at the Avalon, where Marilyn Monroe lived briefly. I hung out with my friend, Andy, by the decorative pool.



The next day my coworker and I went to the recording studio in my rented Kia SUV, otherwise known as a supersized dink car. The recording studio was great, and very nice to look at, but you can still put your converse up on the table.



After our session we stopped by an edit house my coworker has worked with many times to say hi to his old friends. The space it occupies inspires architectural drool. I'm not a design/architecture person myself, but it's quite a space, in an old wooden warehouse. Each edit studio is positioned over a flat pool of water spotted with inverted fountains. One wall of each studio is constructed of two layers of glass, one full of glass beads (slowly sinking down and bending the glass outward until one day when it will break) and one full of ping pong balls.



I like taking photos in all the hotel rooms I stay in. Usually the weirdest self-portraits possible, but you are what you eat, so here you go. By the way, this breakfast cost THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS. There were actually diamonds mixed in with my oats.



When I got back X brought me beautiful flowers and took me to Frascati on Hyde which was delicious. Try the duck rillettes, yum.





On St. Patty's Day I went to a party at the Jo-tel which at some points was so packed there were literally people standing in the showers to get out of the way.



The next day the members of the Jo-tel had their traditional giant breakfast and we walked to Golden Gate Park.





I went on the same dirtiest dirty hike with one of my roommates but this time I was prepared.









this plant



looks like me in LA. yay, fun with alcohol and hair!



I also spent 6 straight hours sitting and drinking with coworkers and one friend's dad and brother but as you can imagine no good photos came out of it. (read: no publishable photos). :)

A song

My narcissism has officially taken over. I have listened too many times to this song written by my friend Nik, which he says is inspired by my adventures. It's a good song to listen to while looking at the hiking photos :) . Thanks, Nik. Soon enough you'll be scoring Meatland yourself.

The House that Was Built on TV

Sigh. I hate TV. I HATE TV. I hate it. I do kind of work in it, which is fun. I enjoy watching it every once in a while. But overall, really, I think it just takes away from life. Yes, there are moments when it is nice to not think about anything and relax your mind and watch a movie or just veg out. But beware, it can truly ruin the potential fun of something, like a weekend away. And it just takes one person to turn it on. And no one can turn it off. Because that would be rude. To walk away or read a book would be anti-social. There is no escaping it. It IS TV.

You go away for a weekend with people who you don't know very well and one of them turns on the TV. All of a sudden, you are no longer talking. You are no longer moving. You are...watching. You are...bored. You are not dancing, you are not talking, you are not playing games, you are not drinking, you are not smoking, you are not getting to know people better, you are not having stimulating conversations, you are not being silly, you are not making an ass of yourself and neither are the people around you, you are not building inside jokes that will make you snicker years later, you are not making memories, you are not living. You are watching TV. You are zoned out. And if you're me, that is your cue to fall asleep.

TV all evening, bleh. TV during breakfast and dinner, yuck. Sitting down to a meal and watching someone try to see around and over your head to the basketball game as you are facing them, terrible. TV.

To those out there who might fear the vacuum of a world without TV, please trust me. When you turn off the TV you will still be entertained. You will not miss it. You will have conversations with people and you will live your life. There will be things to fill that vacuum, and they will be a lot more memorable than 99.5% of everything you can see on TV. Because it will be you and it will be real.

That said, everyone's different. Not everyone feels the same way I do. And the people who don't made fun of the person who made the very cool Superman-esque icicle arrangement above. I think I know which side of the fence I belong on.

The Drunken Dog Race

This is one of the things I love about living in the presidio. On my way to or from home I sometimes see this bird standing stoically in a small field. It just stands there, huge and peaceful. It's a great blue heron.

I'm not a big music purchaser (read, I "borrow" a lot of music) but there's no place quite like Amoeba, with the masses and masses of albums, trendy music-oriented hipsters browsing away a weekend afternoon, and Fillmore posters lining the walls.



I went with a bunch of people from my work (a great group) to bowl. As if you needed another reason to go bowling at the best alley in the City, Presidio Bowl, their beer comes in glass bottles the shape of bowling pins.



To explain this series of photos may require that you be drinking yourself to understand just exactly what the fuck is going on. I myself was drunken and winded and still couldn't quite make heads or tails of it for the nutty hour that it lasted. The Urban Iditarod is a race through SF where each person is on a team based on a shopping cart and ropes attached to the shopping cart. Basically, you are the "dogs" and the shopping cart is the "sled" which is full of "beer" and "other alcohol". Each team seemed to be themed, mostly in a doggy fashion. There were the "dogtors", the "fire dogs", the "red rockets" (also fondly known as the dog's lipstick), the "salty dog" pirates, and us, the "brown hornets" otherwise known, according to our drunken teammate, Rich, as the "Bee-yotches". Much smaller and less official than Bay to Breakers, and slightly illegal, much of the race is based on running like mad and stopping in alleys.

This photo is of the start of the race:



This one is of the first stop on the race (there were 4). Everyone sprinted like fucking crazy at the start of the race, with their shopping carts, uphill. Then you stop all of a sudden like a crazed school of drunken fish and drink in an alley for 10 minutes. Then at some invisible word everyone sprints off again, to the next stop.



After the first stop we took off through the entrance to Chinatown, uphill as you can see. Everyone is screaming around you, and half the people are screaming "I didn't know we'd actually run!!!!" (well, that was just a few of us, actually).



By the time we made it close to the water (and the end of the race), it was near chaos. I think the crowd grew as the race went on.



The race that was supposed to take 4 hours only took 1. At the end everyone stood around, sweaty, in disheveled costumes, drinking more and more, so I took off.

Later that night I went for my friend Katie's birthday to Ti Couz in the Mission. It's a crepe restaurant, and it was pretty damn good. The cocktails were great, too. After, we went to the Elbo Room for an upstairs 50's soul party, which was not your average Saturday night fare. It was fun to dance to.