so-o, i went shoe shopping again yesterday. i had to go to urban outfitters, even though i was tired and shiny-faced. but anyway, the whole trip turned out ok, because i got two pairs of shoes:


i am still trying to perfect the whole tucking-pants-into-boots thing, as this picture shows.

and believe it or not, it is actually quite difficult to take pictures of shoes when you are wearing them:


i like boots, i think. i have never before owned a pair of non-snow boots. i feel like i want to wear boots constantly -- they're comfy! they're more water resistant than flats! they look awesome!

today and yesterday were both unsatisfying work days. yesterday was spent mostly moving and alphabetizing large stacks of books. today, my usual supervisor was in new york, and the other girl in editorial found almost NOTHING for me to do. i wasted a lot of time waiting for her to come up with something for me to do. then i conned sharon, who does marketing, into giving me something to do. but jeez it was all so frustrating. also i didn't eat lunch today or yesterday.

i have been trying a new bus route: taking the 1R (R = rapid!), which goes a different way but still gets to a bus stop where i can catch the 51. the 1R is a great bus -- so fast! so on time! so few stops! and the walk to the bus stop is nicer than the walk to the bus stop for the 18.

i just found out: there is a flea market every saturday at the ashby BART station! that's what i'm doing this saturday!

oh hai! it's been a while, hasn't it? well, to start, i have some pictures from saturday to show off.

saturday, i took BART for the first time. i even had to change trains! it all went ok, even though i had to ask a couple of people to make sure i was getting on the right trains. eventually, though, i found my way to the rockridge stattion in oakland. here is a picture of my Very First BART Ticket:



i like the way it glows, like some artifact sent from heaven.

next was breakfast, even though it was almost 1. i went to the rockridge cafe:
and had their corned beef hash. my waitress was really nice. she looked like julia stiles and steered me in the direction of the most delicious coffee cake i have ever shovelled into my mouth. i was sitting at the counter, so i got to watch the cooks work, and there was always someone passing through to refill my coffee.

i spent a few hours walking around on college avenue in oakland. it is a neat area; i would have liked to spend more time there, but i had to get home (via BART again! holla!) so that i could have dinner with uncle george and aunt mary jo. it hadn't rained all day, but it started almost pouring then they were driving me home.

me on saturday, pretty pleased with myself:


sunday: thrift stores on telegraph and shattuck. i found a jacket that at first looks to be some silly, useless windbreaker -- but lo! it is fleece-lined! i wore it today, and, man, was it cozy. i'm also trying to track down some shoes, and it is proving difficult. after thrift stores, i went to berkeley bowl. ugh, it was right when they were closing, and everyone was extremely stupid. at the bus stop, a woman asked my advice about her employer's habit of giving her a $20 cash bonus every week -- was this legal? should she accept it? i did not know. it rained off and on -- these fine drops that were sometimes just a mist and sometimes a thin shower.

as promised, here is the front door of my house. i have never used this door, but i have gone through a side door in our apartment that leads into the stairway, and someday i will have to get pictures of that for you, because this house is INCREDIBLE and was built by some maniac medievalist dentist.

today at work, i finished copying those gary snyder letters. at some point, i'll have to do ginsberg's, probably. then i had to use a very silly and complicated program to update production schedules for the books we're working on. the program is so silly and convoluted that i don't even want to try to explain it.

on the way home, i stopped at a diner and bought a meatloaf sandwich to take home for dinner. it was ok; it definitely suffered because of the half hour it took me to get home.

ack! the dinner i made was also crappy, and i managed to fill the whole house with smoke!

rain = the buses are slower and later than usual. i spent so much time standing outside in the cold and the rain (yes, i had an umbrella; no, it was not entirely effective) waiting for a bus (ESPECIALLY THE #18 BUS) to show up. jeez. when i got home, my feet and the bottom three inches of my pants were all wet. i need to get new shoes that are not flats, because puddles + flats ALWAYS = squeaky-wet feet.

but anyway, work was good. i got there late, but roxy is cool and completely understood about the buses. she told me i did a really great job on something i did yesterday (going through a newly-typeset manuscript to make sure that all of the changes from the previous draft had been incorporated -- dude, i caught like five errors that no one else had seen!).

i spent most of the afternoon xeroxing letters from gary snyder to allen ginsberg for this _selected letters of allen ginsberg and gary snyder_ book that counterpoint is doing. this is not a difficult task, but it is turning out to be very time-consuming. some of the letters (actually, they're already copies of the letters) are typed, and on 8.5x11 paper. these are the easiest, because i can just feed them into the copier. but it gets more complicated: different paper sizes, handwritten letters that require adjusting how light/dark the copy will be, and if the letters were written on colored paper, more adjustment of the color intensity to compensate for it. ohhhhh my god it is taking forever.

also i made myself a crappy lunch today. completely unsatisfying; i didn't even eat most of it.

BLAH NOW I AM SICK I HATE EVERYTHING.

for most of the morning and early afternoon, i put together mailings for a couple of the new titles. i put a book and a press release into a mailing envelope, put a label on the envelope, and then sealed the envelope, like 200x. eventually i developed a system. the labels came six to a sheet, so i would fold six press releases in half, shove each one inside a book, put each one in an envelope, label each envelope, and then seal them. then do six more. it was raining today, and i had to go over to the other suite in the office complex that counterpoint uses as a storage unit (to get more envelopes, yo) -- i took my umbrella, but i was still very cold and sort of wet.

i know i am sick because my eye sockets feel itchy.

o hai!
too bad about heath ledger; RIP, ennis.

today was not the best of all possible days. workmen were putting in new carpet back where i usually work, and i think the fumes messed with me. i was having a really hard time concentrating, and i felt all heavy and lethargic and exhausted. roxy (the managing editor) even noticed. i took a walk and got some coffee, and that helped, but i still got pathetically little accomplished today.

then i stopped on the way home and got some delicious ramen at a japanese noodle shop. i thought it was pretty authentic. it featured a hardboiled egg -- alas, fully hardboiled instead of still kind of gooey in the middle, but i guess concessions must be made to health codes here in the states. it also suffered a little bit because i got it to go and they put the soup in one container and the meat/noodles/egg/veggies in another carton, and then i combined the two myself when i finally got home. the noodles had congealed a little by the time i got home, but it was still tasty. dinner was a thumbs-up ending to a sub-par day.

i have been too tired at night to do anything but watch _arrested development_, eat, and sleep. hence, i'm going to sleep now; maybe tomorrow i'll actually have energy to go somewhere or do something after work, even if it's only writing a little.

today i tried to catch that same #18 bus, and the same thing happened: it lumbered past me as i was a block away from the stop. so i waited and read again, then the bus came, blah blah blah. there's not a bench at my bus stop, though, and i mourn this more every day. (mah hypothetical bench, ah mourns it.) i visited a thrift store that seemed a lot like buffalo exchange, except it had better stuff, it was cheaper, and the people who worked there weren't huge tools. so i guess it was nothing like buffalo exchange. anyway, i'm almost willing to go out of my way to visit other locations of this store. it was great, on an impersonal level -- i mean, they had a great variety and all that. but because i apparently have the most average-sized body in the world, it was hard to find stuff (ESPECIALLY SHOES) in my size. buuut i still got a sweater.

ugh then i was going to take another bus to go to another thrift store (called out of the closet, run by an AIDS charity), but i had waited 25 minutes and there was no sign of a bus, so i decided to just cross the street and catch the bus to go home instead of going to another store and then having to wait even longer for the buses to take me home.

it is raining today, and, because i am stupid, i wore the wrong shoes: my tweedy cloth flats. my feet were so cold and squeaky-wet. in my defense, it was not raining when i left the house... but, yeah, ok, it had been raining earlier so i probably should have known.


now i have tea! and a space heater! everything is a-ok.

this has happened to me at least three times:

just as i'm walking on to shattuck, a block away from the bus stop, the very bus i wanted to catch drives past me.

CURSE YOU, #18 BUS!

this happened today, so i stood at the bus stop and read. but it was chillier than i realized, and i didn't have a jacket. the occasional wind made the twenty-minute experience very unpleasant. it was balanced out by the pride i felt when i remembered which stop to get off at to go to berkeley bowl, and the smugness i felt when all of my groceries fit perfectly into one of my reusable bags. but then i had to wait twenty minutes for another bus, so i pretty much broke even.

here are pictures of where i live:

the awesome front of the house. the front door itself (hidden by trees in this shot) is pretty impressive, too. i'll try to take a picture of that soon.



this is the side of my house, and the door to our actual apartment.

today, i walked around on telegraph avenue. i visited a number of excellent bookstores (one of which had a GREAT selection of moleskine notebooks, which i think is a sign of a truly extraordinary establishment), and a thrift store where the people were really nice. i had dinner at some place that advertised its healthy fast food. veggie burgers instead of hamburgers, basically, but the fries were good, too. saw _persepolis_, AND IT WAS REALLY GOOD. i liked it a lot.

i took the bus home, and, walking from the bus stop to my house, i noticed that i had managed to break one of my shoes during the course of the day.
look at that! the right side of the shoe! the top is pulling away from the side at an ever-increasing rate! gah! i noticed this when i was walking past the bar at the corner of deakin and shattuck, and i said, "son of a bitch!" (sorry, aubree/scott, if you're reading this; i was mad.) the hipster kids standing outside, smoking, gave me a funny look.

i was going to go see _persepolis_ tonight, but my head hurts, and i am tired. so i'll go tomorrow night or something.

you know, work is not like school. at school, everyone does the same things wrong at the same time, because you're all learning the same things at the same time. at work, you show up and try to blend in with people who already know what they're doing, and you try to do what they do and keep up, but you do all of these little things wrong (like using staples instead of paperclips; who knew?) and PLUS they all work on macs and you've got a PC, jeez. plus it's hard to concentrate who you still can't quite talk yourself into eating breakfast and it's 3 PM and you've been too busy to take a lunch break.

anyway, i find the work world both terrifying and exciting. everyone at the office is nice and helpful, and a lot of the women wear boots (cowboy and otherwise). i am trying to work up the courage to speak german with bernhard, the german account/something-or-other.

i am going to have an outing this weekend! i am not sure what it will be, but it will be fun!

today did not start off well. i woke up a little late, and i am not good at hurrying in the morning, and, anyway, i missed the bus that was supposed to take me north on shattuck (the closest main north/south street to me; it's like a quarter of a mile from the house), so i thought, hmm, i bet if i walk it i can still get there in time to catch my next bus. HOWEVER i underestimated how long the walk was (IT WAS ALMOST A MILE), so by the time i got there i had missed not only the bus i had originally planned to take, but also the next one. so i was starting to freak out. but then the bus came at 9:2o, and i thought, ok, even if i'm a little late to work, everyone will understand. (the trip planner website said the ride would take 15 minutes, plus a little walking.)

the bus got to my stop at like 9:30! i got to the office at like 9:34! and i didn't even have to rush!

the bus driver did get a little snippy with me when i didn't know what to do with my bus pass, and i almost told him i hadn't done this before, but i didn't want to talk to him. he had a mean face.

the rest of the day picked up. i wrote some copy for the fall catalog in the morning. i was so hungry (i have been too nervous to eat breakfast, although today i was able to choke down some tea), but going to lunch was easy and guilt-free because i reached a good stopping place in my work and everyone else in the editorial department was in a meeting, so there was no one to trip me up by asking me to xerox things. which i am more than happy to do.

after lunch, i got to work on publicity stuff! for the first time! i was going through author questionnaires, trying to pull out some stuff that we could use as hooks for advertising or that would help promotion, and i came across the following:

15. Please list any awards or prizes you think your book may be eligible for, and we'll look into nominating it if appropriate.

Well, Hitchens was nominated for the National Book Award, and my book is much better than his.

bahahaha. then my pregnant editor told me she had a milkshake for lunch. there was much yelling at the office today; people were knocking things over and having aggravating phone conversations right and left.

this is my mom, in my room. everyone is jealous of her hair color -- as they should be
this is my bed, a queen-sized air mattress with five pillows. i dumped all my stuff on it when i came home. sorry, ma; i'm picking it up right after i finish this entry. you can perhaps also see my small ikea lamp and my awesome space heater.

here is the other wall of my room: two closets and a nook. it's a sweet deal.



this was me, this morning. my hair is very big in this picture. the bottom only got bigger as the day went on, but it was ok, because today was THE FIRST DAY OF MY INTERNSHIP. it was pretty cool. everyone is really nice at the office, and there are only like ten people (who are all pretty distinctly different), so it is easy to learn names. today i intimidated a xerox machine (its name is gary, because one of the press's biggest authors is gary snyder) into working, and i wrote copy for the fall 08 catalog. i worked 9:30-6, with a half-hour lunch break. i am very tired. but not too tired to post more pictures.



this is my roommate's cat. this picture makes him look like a psycho demon, but he is very nice and affectionate.

you may have to squint a little on this one, but hopefully you can see the hinge on my closet door. it's triangular. LIKE IN A CASTLE. there are sconces on the wall in the living room, too.

mom and i had dinner tonight with her friend carmen at a place called eccolo in berkeley. i ate butternut squash lasagna and bread pudding with currants. already, i have eaten so much delicious food here!

today we visited berkeley bowl, a grocery store that is awesome in general, but especially awesome because of its produce section. there were like ten kinds of mushrooms, lots of heirloom tomatoes, SO MANY SWEET POTATOES, and carrots with their green leafy tops still attached, like in cartoons! most importantly, they sell meyer lemons, which are a cross between a regular lemon and a mandarin orange, so it's this sweet, thin-skinned lemon. in short, the meyer lemon is my favorite thing ever.

i think i will post pictures tomorrow, or maybe the next day. tomorrow will be my first day of the internship. i'll let you know how that turns out.

i am in berkeley now, and i am scared. there is no reason to lie about that. actually, i'm with my mom at my aunt and uncle's in albany, north of berkeley. the drive up was ok. we smelled skunk a few times, which was kind of like the way an eraser smells when you use it a lot. we just got back from this really nice italian restaurant owned by my parents' friends. IT WAS SO DELICIOUS.

anyway, i'll write more later, but, for now, i am good, but also really scared of having a job and living without my family for what seems right now to be a very long time.

for my family, the universe is shaped exactly like the earth. we have gone straight long enough, and now we've ended up where we were.