I've been cooped up doing QA for a couple of days straight, and needed to unwind a bit, so I did the only thing that really destresses me -- a photoshoot. Unfortunately, I was the only model available at 10pm, resulting in another set of seemingly narcissistic images.

Since my hair has grown to a rather mod length, I decided to slap on some mascara and dark eyeshadow for a 60s/20s look. I played with lighting, exposure, styling and posing. As always I learned a lot in the process, and I'm quite pleased with the results.

It's finally up! I feel pretty good about it. Here is a cap of the old site design, just for posterity:

I went to Wal-Mart to price out bikes yesterday (yeah, I shop from Wal-Mart and I am going to hell for it). I found a bike at the perfect price-point: $91 for a beach cruiser. It's the type of bike that would make my bike expert ex=boyfriend Jesse a little queasy. It's the type of bike that I won't go catatonic over if it gets stolen, the type of bike I won't have any qualms leaving behind if and when I leave Hawaii (which seems to be getting increasingly iffier the longer I'm here. Hawaii is like a black hole).

I didn't pick up the bike just then; after dropping $139 at the Mac store a few days ago to pick up a much needed external hard drive, I'm trying not to go willy-nilly with expenditures just before dreaded tax time. I did find a pair of sneakers. Flip-flops, my primary footwear, is awful for doing anything athletic, and my trusty hiking sandals from Arizona got shredded on lava rocks and Hawaii mud, so I needed something new. I hate sneakers in general, especially white ones, which remind me of the eighties, but I found a pair of brown ones with green stripes. Even better, they were lightweight and comfortable. Best of all, they were only $20. Ah globalism. Sneakers are cheaper now than 30 years ago and some kid in China gets to feed his family back home on the farm. Everybody wins (yes that was a sarcastic attempt at justifying my trip to Wal-Mart).

I've been extremely listless, lonely, and depressed the past couple of days. A few days ago I was asked to do a project for work under a big time constraint. I didn't know it was coming and was ill prepared to handle it. I should have said no or asked for a more reasonable time frame. Anyway, I finished, but the end result was pretty crappy and my boss redid it anyway. It's rather embarrassing.

It did make me realize how much of my self-worth is wrapped up in what I achieve (not job title, money, possessions, or social status). What's worse, is that even when I do accomplish something, the elation is very temporary. When my first book was published, I felt good about it for only a few hours. When I don't achieve anything for awhile (i.e. when I try to relax or take a day off) I end up feeling guilty for not doing enough. I've pretty much been this way my entire life. Not a good way to live.

Even if I become a published fiction writer with a legion of adoring fans, I'll probably still feel like I'll never be good enough.

I finally joined the 21st century, I'm redoing my blog design completely table free. Here is a little preview, but there is still plenty of polish to apply, not to mention having to integrate it with goopy Blogger code directives.

At the Ala Moana mall near where I live, there was this failing Chinese restaurant in the food court. They shut down for awhile, and just reopened as "Little Chinatown" (not sure if I have the name entirely correct). I was craving Chinese food yesterday so I though I would check them out.

They had roast duck. I'm a huge fan of duck, it's my favorite meat, so I got some of that. When I got it home I realized there was something odd about it. It was all chopped up in pieces, with the bones still in. This was not like fried chicken, with ribs and thigh bones. No, this was whole vertebrae. Not particularly appetizing (another reason to become a vegetarian).

Worse, there was organ meat. Still attached to the rest of the bones and duck meat. While I realize this is uber-authentic, it was still pretty gross getting an anatomy lesson in my meal.

Okay, before I freak out my co-workers, it's an additional job :-) In my ongoing quest to diversify income sources, I came across ChaCha, a new SMS search engine, where people with cell phones in the US can text a question and get an answer from a human being. I tried it on my cell phone ("Who owns IKEA?" -- it was the first thing to come to mind), and got an accurate, concise answer in about a minute. Until I get an iPhone at least, the next time I need to search on the go, I'm not going to bother with Virgin Mobile's crappy web browser, I'm using ChaCha (there is a small chance I've been turned into a shill for the company).

I signed up and was accepted as a guide (basically you have to go through a trivia test). Now I have to go through some training, which is fine. But the cool part of the job is just being able to look up stuff for people. I actually thought about this very thing a few years ago -- I love trivia and looking stuff up, and many people I've known are pretty inept searchers -- I always seem to find stuff others can't. To me, this is entertainment.

Anyway, the pay structure is way better than most paid writing/blogging gigs. It's by the search (paid for by SMS fees). I dropped my column last summer for a couple of reasons, but the awful $15/month (which worked out to pennies an hour, freaking slave labor) was a big reason to do so. The hours are pretty fantastic too -- whenever I want, for as long as I want.

Apparently a construction crane collapsed on a nearby building in NYC in a 'freak accident'.

I currently live beneath such a crane, one on the Waikiki Trump Tower Hotel and Condominium. I think about the crane coming down practically every day. I always tell myself, "nah, that'll never happen." Gee, guess it does.

My site was down for a few hours yesterday. Blogger has a conflict with PHP on occasion. I've wanted to blow away my crusty site design for awhile, but being ill, I just opted to forgo the design effort in favor of simply changing my blog from PHP to plain old HTML. Ah well. A task for another day.

Right now I am fighting off a raging ear infection. I used to get them every time I went swimming in a public pool, until I got wise to the fact that hydrogen peroxide in the ear will prevent infections. Swimming in the ocean is a different ball of yarn, and this is my first infection from the ocean, and I'm pretty sure it's because of all the people at Waikiki dirtying up the water. Yuck!

I haven't been able to blog the last day or so because my web hosting space has been completely eaten up by spam messages to my catchall address (dating back only to November 2007 mind you), 42,000+ of them. I deleted the mail file back in November to clear up space, but this time I decided to add that address to gmail. Gmail couldn't handle it (timed out while accessing the file), so I set up Mail on my mac to download them. I could manually download one message at a time from both for awhile, but Gmail limits manual checking to once a minute. After a few hours, Mail was able to unclog the spam block (nice visual image there), and now I can blog again. I guess I could have just delete the mail file, but this was more interesting :-)

After several months, I performed a new piece at the HawaiiSlam. I wasn't great, I didn't totally suck, just not great among some really fantastic competition. Frankly the last few slams have kind of sucked. In comparison, this slam is what slam is all about (you kind of have to be there).

I think I caught the bug again. This was such a lark this time, but I really, really love being up on stage. I was ill-prepared, but not nervous, and I knew I could do better with both writing and performance (and rehearsing would definitely help along with not waiting until the day-of to write).

Here is the piece:

TSA

I'd like to tell a joke.

When I fly, I feel like
A cow, going to slaughter

The plane itself isn't so bad
No. It's the security line

The narrow Switchback corded
Snakeline cattle chute of doom

Through which one must shuffle slowly
In close proximity to other tired
Frightened sweating cowpeople
Each saddled with 30 or 40 pounds
Of muscle cramp inducing travel crap

Once you've slunked to the front of the line

There's an officious security person
Unhappy in his or her uncomfortable
Uniform of unnatural fabric, itching, sweating
Peering at each approaching vassilant
With beady, hateful, suspicious eyes
This is the ID checker

It's at this point, having been raised Catholic
That I suppress a powerful urge
To genuflect, as I hand over my boarding pass
And belatedly attempting to strike the same pose
Captured on my ID

But it's not finished there
The X-Ray machine still looms ahead

And it's worse because you are urged
Into expediancy

Take your shoes off!
(and hope your feet don't smell after sweating
through the first line)

Grab a bin! Dump out half your luggage
So that an inattentive operator
can theoretically scan your stuff more effectively

And while you wait for the nimrod
With the belt buckle ahead get wanded
Your bins pass through the other end, digested
And you are helpless as your shoes, luggage
And expensive laptop careen
Off the end of the conveyor belt

I understand why this system was put in place
And while I don't particularly  want to die
At the hands of an ideologically deficient asshole
All the security measures in the world
Won't stop violence

Security lines aren't the solution
Because hijacked planes are not the problem

Until we get it through our heads
That everyone everywhere
Is entitled to a basic, decent life
That a kid in Sudan deserves at least a meal a day
That a kid in Saudi Arabia deserves to learn math
That a kid in Bangladesh deserves clean water

And that we don't own the copyright on freedom!

Until we act, everyday with that knowledge,

Security is a joke.

I was just at my neighborhood Denny's for dinner, and the manager asked me out on a date -- he wanted to "lay out with me at the North Shore". To be fair, he's an interesting individual, but he's my father's age (ick, ick, ick! That's so "To Catch a Predator"), and a restaurant manager! He was quite insistent and wrote his phone number on my receipt. I can't go back there.

The last guy who showed any interest in me was pretty old too, unemployed, and very creepy. And need I mention the homeless guy who hit on me last spring?

I'm not looking for a relationship or even a fuck -- I could care less frankly. Good friendships are worth more, especially so since I have a lot of things I want to accomplish in a short space of time. So what is it about me that attracts these people? Ugh. I'm going to have to start wearing turtlenecks and sunglasses everywhere I go. And letting my hair go greasy or something.

Obama seems to have a Flickr account, and it looks pretty genuine. Of course, I immediately made Barack Obama one of my contacts :-)

I searched to see if Hillary Clinton had an account, and the only two results were not valid. Searching for John McCain yielded absolutely nothing. Not surprisingly, under-under-underdog candidate Ron Paul does have a Flickr account, though his photos are far less polished than Obama's. Interestingly, Obama's photos are released under a Creative Commons license, while Paul's are copyrighted.