Living in Seattle we were quite spoiled with the spring runs of coho salmon that would start around now and run into the summer. One or two days a season, the Native Americans are allowed to catch and sell as much as they want. I discovered this and headed to the spot underneath the freeway to find the guy with the cooler selling fish after fish, handing you the whole thing, head and all, in a Hefty bag while making change with fish scales all over it. This is how far I will go for good, fresh, never-frozen, line-caught, Pacific salmon.

Since moving away from Seattle, I have suffered this loss greatly. I was finally getting good at cooking salmon! It was healthy for us! I had a guy under the freeway dealing it out! And, then I had to go to Los Angeles for school, and Austin to get it together, and Washington, DC, for the job. Not one of them has access to good salmon.

Instant Fisherman Kit. I hoped I could get a fisherman that would catch us some King Salmon. I miss the fish.

My iPod and I were recently parted permanently. I was a dope and left it on a treadmill at the gym, not remembering until the next day I had forgotten it somewhere. Of course, it was not to be turned in. A 2-year old 15GB iPod that thinks every song is 2m 43s long, as though it were the 1950s and it was filled with the entire Buddy Holly catalog? That’s worth at least $12 on eBay. The iPod was a birthday present from my boy with engraving on the back that he thought of and told other people to put on there. Call me a sucker for the details, but losing the iPod was irrelevant. Losing the engraving, crushing.

In better news, we’ve spent enough on the credit card over the years to rack up these crazy ThankYou points that got me a brand new video iPod. It’s swank and shiny and makes these clicky noises I can’t figure out how to turn off. I’m afraid to take it places to listen to music, in case I lose it. This, of course, is ridiculous, because this is why one gets a mobile music-playing device. Better still, this one has video! To try out the video feature, I bought a couple of episodes of CSI, which visually has a combination of dramatic closeups, swooping aerial shots, and fast-moving action scenes. There are two problems with the combination of the video iPod and TV or movies: (1) We have the world’s lamest high-speed Internet connection. To call it high-speed would suggest that it is something other than a Granny driving the Plymouth in the far right lane at 35mph on the multimedia superhighway. (2) If video was meant to be that small, it would have been to start with. Am I rapidly moving into the older generation, where I don’t understand or need some of the features of the latest gizmo?
Other things I will add to my iPod: Jamie Lidell’s Multiply album. If you have not seen Jamie Lidell in concert, you should and in the meantime, you can watch him here on YouTube. Note that normally he’s a lot spazzier. Boy can’t keep his limbs in this stratosphere kind of spazzy. My assessment is that they told him it would be impossible to film if they didn’t nail his shoes to the floor. The new Shins album, Wincing the Night Away, is already on there, as is the Decemberists’ Crane Wife. Also, I have an obsession lately with “Telephone Line” from Electric Light Orchestra and I have no idea why.

It was my niece’s second birthday the other day and when I called to wish her a happy birthday, she wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. On the rare occasions that she does talk on the phone, she whispers. For her birthday, we gave her some acrobats. Every girl needs her own circus performers – even one who’s going to be a mime.

It has been icy and cold for days now. That sentence sounds a bit bleak, a bit Russian, perhaps to be followed by “I don’t think any of us are going to make it out alive.” Maybe there is a point where we huddle together for warmth, until we realize that some of us are not going to make it. How many days do the Donners snuggle up together, telling jokes at first and then eyeing who has the most meat to spare? (1) Our only hope is that Smoove B of Apartment 303 keeps bringing the R&B (and for variety, the pre-crack Whitney Houston) with the bass cranked way up to break down the rigid lattice structure of ice into the much less chilly plain water structure. I am complaining about the weather, which means that I must not have anything interesting to say. Or that I am your grandma ringing from Palm Beach. “Did you hear that, Herb? 18 degrees! We just got done playing shuffleboard with the Skillmans from next door and your grandpa is outside in his socks and sandals still.”

I don’t think any of us are going to make it out alive.

Today was not The Usual Saturday, which means early morning pancakes and bacon at The Diner, followed by 6 hours of studying and then a trip to the gym and 15 minutes in the hot tub. I am a creature of habit. (2) However, last night, an old friend called at 9pm and said, “I can be on the next train from Wilmington.” to which I said, “North Carolina?” While my knowedge of geography is pretty good, it never occurs to me that Delaware is a nearby state. Also, I was secretly hoping that he could grab Pacey Witter from the bar and bring him on up for some good dish on the Kat(i)e Holmes Cruise debacle. At any rate, he turned up and then we waited forever for Al’s Pizza to bring pizza and wings. By then it was 1:30am, and because I am the hostess with the mostest, I busted out the air mattress, realizing too late that the air pump to inflate the thing required significant charging time to be useful. There is nothing so embarrassing as reazling how ghetto and first-place-out-of-college your 12-years-out-of-college life has become when you have exactly one spare drinking glass to offer your guest in the studio apartment where you will make them sleep on an air mattress that you can’t inflate. We were up well past 2:30am, a rare feat for me even in non-ghetto circumstances, and we overslept, missing prime breakfast hour at The Diner and settling for doughy pancakes at the neighborhood joint instead.
All this is my way of saying that I am not Living The Life I Imagined. There has been more whingeing than usual which is a sign of A) discontent more befitting a Dostoevsky character; B) the hyper-insecure sentiment of “My life is an utter failure and I am so much less (insert adjective) than my peers!”; and C) not Being Here in the Now. (3) Hi, I’d like to get over being 20 and oh-so-tortured. Did this once already, thanks! I am looking forward to finding the door out of this and hoping it opens onto a nice green field of warm sunshine and opportunity. Or to some place that has cupcakes. I love me some cupcakes.

(1) Squid cannibals!
(2) A Google search for “creature of habit” leads me to an article titled “What is your Goddess sign?” Apparently my Goddess sign is Persephone and I should practice honesty and saying “yes”. I should steer clear of Goddess energy articles written by Australians trying to hawk their workshops. Yes.
(3) I have lately been reading several semi-woowoo Law of Attraction-esque blogs just to keep some sort of California vibe going. I should stop reading these things because they are warping my brain. Yes.

(Fake)Steve Jobs explains his management style.

You don’t have to hire the best people. You can hire anyone, as long as you scare the bejesus out of them. That’s the key, the fear.  

They scary part? There are managers who totally ascribe to this philosophy of management. And I’ve worked for some of them.

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2006/12/regarding-my-management-style.html

I find Westerns to be cheesey in their fake earnestness and highly stylized plainspokenness. This is not true of all Westerns, but more than most. More importantly, I have a hard time, typically, accepting the premise of the film and this dooms it.

Giant. 30 minutes. There is no way that the handsome but rich Rock Hudson would still be single and there’s no way that Elizabeth Taylor would have given up life as a potential ambassador’s wife to go be a rancher’s wife. Why is this film on the AFI list?

Once Upon a Time in the West. Stunning plotted death of the traditional Western. I bought into the crazy vision of a lonely single father, trying to hit it big and provide for his family. I bought into the idea that this guy would go to New Orleans and pick up a whore to be the mother of his kids, after one too many lonely nights in the middle of nowhere without another adult to talk to. I bought into that woman, stuck now in the middle of nowhere and not wanting to go back to her old life without something to show for it, exacting revenge. I bought into Charles Bronson spending his whole life preparing for revenge and Jason Robards getting too old to keep running any more. Every character and their arc in the film was completely plausible and the film itself moves through those arcs with the awareness that it’s nailing the coffin of the traditional overwrought, good guys in white hats, staged barfight, John Wayne ride off into the sunset Westerns. Why isn’t this film on the AFI list?

I took only a handful of photos in London. I’m not sure why I was so uninspired. They are off to the right there, the little block of pictures. Click and go to Flickr.

I am proud now to have contributed to Flickr’s The Hoff group, a collection of photos of the inimitable David Hasselhoff. The Hoff lives on.

I’m in London for the next week and would really love to find a modern little Internet cafe with full tea service and comfy chairs. Alas, today I spent walking (and getting totally soaked in a sudden downpour) through Holland Park, leaving my umbrella at All Bar One where I had the world’s most inept waitress, and shopping on Oxford Street. I stopped for tea and a berry meringue (delicious) at Liberty of London, a store where–if I had the budget–I would spend, spend, spend on the lovely Issa dresses, fabulous Vivienne Westwood blouses, and soft as a feather Johnston’s cashmere scarves. Instead, I left, headed off to Waterstone’s Books to buy The Complete Short Stories Vols. 1 & 2 by JG Ballard for a friend, wandered back down Oxford Street to Selfridges, and had a chicken pot pie, mashed potatoes, and peas at Square Pie, before braving the packed underground back to the hotel to consume:

• Bjorn Against – Jumbled little piece on the origins of “grups” (courtesy of Electrolicious)
  
• Up with Grups – The original article “grups” from
• Green & Black’s Organic Dark Chocolate with Crystallized Ginger
• Conan the Barbarian

Long day, and left with the wish that I were a little smarter or braver or less entitled-feeling while more willing to stand up for myself or a little something else. And desperate for a place to wear that Topshop turquoise sequined mini-dress I didn’t buy and the legs to go with it.