every day, around 1:30, sharon and abbye and roxy start talking about how they want chocolate. since i was going for lunch around that time today, i got chocolate chocolate chip cookies for them, too. it was a happy day at counterpoint!

the guy who sold me those cookies (and the lasagna i ate for lunch) at the deli was flirting with me really obviously. i found myself wanting to encourage it so that it would make a better story to tell later. and that, kids, is when i thought i might be a bad person. anyway, now i'm not sure i can go back to that deli, which sucks, because it's either that or the diner take-out place across the street, which is always uber-busy.

ah, what i would not give for a BART station in west berkeley! the buses have been messing with me lately, being either shamefully late or suspiciously convenient. conspiracy? yes, i think so. but BART is much more reliable... ah, BART, how i love thee.

today at work, abbye (pronounced as if the 'e' was not there) said that she replied to a craigslist posting about forming a softball league. she wrote, "i played varsity in high school, and i have a mean arm." neither of those things are true, and she's not really sure why she wrote them.

lately, tedious proofreading projects have been eating my time at work. actually, tedious isn't the right word, because they're not boring or anything like that -- they're just really long and involved.

taylor the terrier loves to come in my room, partly because there are always crumbs in my bed, and partly because she loves attention.

i didn't get home til 8 today because i had to take the 18 -- the stupid, worthless 18 -- to walgreen's to pick up prescriptions. i had to wait SO LONG for the bus to get to where i was. sooooo long. so then, after walgreens, i just walked home instead of waiting for the bus, and, i have to say, it was a much shorter walk than i thought it would be. kind of nice.

last night, i saw _eraserhead_, and, boy, am i glad i did! i've been thinking to myself lately, there aren't enough creepy things in my life. i sure could use more! thanks, david lynch!

what is _eraserhead_ about? i'm not sure. did i like it? i'm not sure. i mean, i'm definitely not sorry i saw it, but i'm still trying to digest it, which is kind of like trying to digest tree bark.

the only bad part of the whole experience was the other people who were there -- they were suuuuch stereotypical liberal arts morons who thought they were very smart. behind me, one guy was talking about how dave chapelle is an anthropologist; in front of me, two guys were talking about books. one of the guys mentioned _swann's way_, probably just as a show-off thing, since i'm almost 100% sure that no real conversation can involve _swann's way_. (also, he just dropped the title instead of displaying any actual knowledge of the book.) then the other guy started talking about _absolom, absolom!_ by william faulkner. he described it simply as "a beautiful text." i don't know why, but that just sounds like such utter nonsense, to me. using the word "beautiful" along with the clinical word "text"... bleh.

ok, so then, _eraserhead_. afterwards, walking out of the auditorium, the first thing i heard was someone saying, "so what's your interpretation of that?" gah!

before all of that, i was walking on telegraph, and a homeless man asked if i had any change. i gave him a dollar (DON'T JUDGE ME). he was super nice, and he had a boombox that was playing "this is how we do it." as i was walking away from him, another guy said to me, "that was really nice of you." it confused me, and i think i weirded people out because i was singing along with "this is how we do it" (DON'T JUDGE ME).

then there was another altercation with a homeless man at the coffee shop i went to. he locked himself in the bathroom for 15 minutes, and they had to ask him to leave. he got super angry, but they finally got him out the door. he stood outside the window for a while, gesturing and yelling obscenities, until someone called the cops.

heeeeey yoooooou guuuuuuys.

i had to buy a new bus pass the other day, which means that i have officially lived here more than 31 days. counterpoint has hired a new editorial assistant named adam; he used to work at _mcsweeney's_, but i won't hold that against him. he's going to start on 3 march, so i'll have to move out of eryn's desk, back to my table in the very back of the office, quite far away from all windows. i liked having a desk, and i really think that eventually i would even have organized it instead of just putting things places and forgetting where they were

an incredible thing: right now we're proofing the cover of this leonard woolf biography (it gets passed around the whole office, and everyone looks at it and tries to find typos and other awful looking things), and I WROTE THE BLURB ON THE BACK COVER. the summary/teaser of the book. ok, so i only massaged an already existing paragraph, but it was actually more of a dismantling than a massage. anyway, that copy can sort of be attributed to me. the book is by victoria glendinning. BUY IT, but only in paperback. i had nothing to do with the hardcover.

i didn't really do anything last weekend except sleep longer than i meant to. this weekend i am going to go exploring somewhere.

man, running to catch the bus when you're carrying a laptop suuuuucks.

today i took the 1 home instead of the 1R because i didn't feel like waiting any longer, and it was uncomfortably warm on the 1, and i got kind of dizzy. bleh.

well, i just realized that my laundry probably stopped drying about 20 minutes ago and is now just getting crushed. i guess i better go fix that. i bought dryer sheets this week, and i'm hoping they'll cut down on the issues i'm having with cat hair coating me like a marinade.

oh, and my dad was right all along. it really does help with wrinkles if you shake your clothes out a bit before putting them in the dryer. i never thought i'd say that.

EDIT (11:30 PM): i take it back about the shaking and the wrinkles. it probably would help if you weren't using an awful dryer that still couldn't get everything dry after more than an hour and somehow managed to twist pant legs and shirt sleeves into ropes.

there is one flaw with my internship.

see, in order to get ASU credit for all the time i spend at counterpoint, i have to put together a semi-detailed log of what i do there every day. like: 1.5 hrs: creating database entries. 1hr: checking manuscript for errors. ETC. the thing is that, because i'm there all the time, i do a lot of little things that i forget about. like, roxy will come over to my desk/table and say, yo, xerox this manuscript for me -- or, yo, file these five things for me. ETC. so putting together this log has become a huge hassle because there is always at least an hour that i can't account for (it also doesn't help that i forgot to do it for the first three weeks, so i'm having to haphazardly make stuff up for that). i feel bad, but i'm fudging so many things for this log. no, wait, i take it back. i DON'T feel bad, i just realized. the fact that i am getting an opportunity to do everything at counterpoint instead of having pre-packaged two-hour tasks assigned to me every day does not bother me. suck it, ASU.

last night there was a rat in the kitchen. shayna told me this when i got home (at 8! because i stayed late at work and the bus was so shamefully behind schedule!), and she said that the cat was back there probably taking care of it. i had stopped by whole foods and picked up something for dinner, and she went out and did the same, and we ate dinner and watched _the wizard_ in the living room, which is coincidentally the farthest room from the kitchen. the dogs were hanging out with us. then it was like 10 PM, and we figured, ok, better go back and see what's going on with the cat-rat standoff. avi (the cat) had clearly managed to injure the rat, because there was blood on the floor. he had backed the rat into a corner under something, and this was clearly his preferred arrangement because he was content to just lie there and stare at the rat. but shayna and i did not feel the same way. so she had to flush the rat out, and she was thinking that she would then have to catch and drown it. but once the rat was running around, taylor the terrier suddenly tapped into her instincts and chased it into the hall (all doors were closed, thank god). she caught it within like thirty seconds, then shook it and broke its neck. and the rat fiasco was over.

the great part was, though, that taylor was sooooo proud of herself, and she spent the next 20 minutes retracing and smelling the path that she and the rat had taken, wagging her tail like a goof. avi was also pretty pleased with himself, although not for nearly as good a reason.

i just ate a portabella mushroom sandwich + a yam + a tomato + 1/4 onion + 1/2 rice krispy treat. all that delicious food has made me sleepy.

today was much better than monday and yesterday. as i said to several people, i felt like a person.

so anyway, nothing much, and i am really tired, but i just wanted to say hi. taylor the little terrier just scratched on my door til i opened it, then came in and ran around, like she likes me or something.

there's no way to sugarcoat this: today was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day -- although, to be fair, it did not start out that way. i had time to eat breakfast, make coffee, and still catch the bus on time. then it was only a five minute wait for my second bus. everything was coming up greta.

however, this delightful trend came to an abrupt end when i started to get a headache in the early afternoon. as the headache became more intense and persistent, i began to hate today. THEN i started feeling all slow and thick-headed,too -- i couldn't concentrate, and i kept reading and rereading the instructions for what i was supposed to be doing, yet never really understanding how to implement those instructions. even xeroxing was too much for me. at about four, i told roxy that i had to go home. the bus ride did not help my headache, but a three hour nap did.

i just ate what strikes me as a very midwestern meal: mac and cheese, carrot sticks, and sliced tomato with salt and pepper. now i am going to eat a rice krispy treat.

final thought for the day: on my way home, i took the 18 bus instead of the 1R because the 18 showed up first, and i was worried that the 1R would let me down and make me wait much longer. but as the 18 was making another of its tediously numerous stops on shattuck, the 1R zoomed past. i need to learn to trust the 1R. it will not disappoint or abandon me. (perhaps i am anthropomorphizing these buses too much. also, i instinctively view it as a personal affront when the bus i am waiting for -- but going the opposite way on its route, a way that is of no use to me just then -- goes past, like this bus is rubbing my wait time in my face.)