And so… The birthday was fun, if expensive. My celebration at the Tonga Room was soiled by a preceding encounter with the DPT (dickheads, pricks and tramps, I think). My car had been towed on 24-hours’ notice in a city where I am supposedly allowed to park in any uncontrolled space for 72 hours at a time. I was, of course, ultimately expected to already know that this 72-hour rule only applies when the City chooses to apply it, so I paid the bail and got the car out of jail. Then off to try to enjoy what was left of the evening. But having such nifty friends made it all worth it…

The birthday gifts rolled in, including a Gameboy from David, some CDs from my sister and some more from Chuck, and other fun things to occupy me for the large amounts of free time I wish I had.

Went to meet the hubby for lunch today and we ran into the other Mark outside Rincon Center. We’ve communicated often, and he’s one of the original net-loggers along with David, but for some reason lives lived of late travel in every direction except the one allowing anything resembling regular visits. Pity we’ve thus far only met twice in person!

Went to Cambria for a weekend with the family, which was far more exhausting than I wanted it to be. I love my family, but being in a small house with 6 of them for two nights without a car can be trying. Combine that with the fact that my train was running 2.5 hours late and I didn’t make it home until 1am Tuesday morning and I am definitely waiting for a real weekend…

On the agenda for July: save money, whilst also visiting the North Bay to see LGB (stands for “Lesbian Gay Bisexual”) next week and then escape the horror of Dore Alley with a trip to Fresno to visit with Cattie. Fun.

It’s no secret that a logical argument carries more weight than any quantity of alogical moralizing. What’s strange is how rare logical arguments are in certain situations and for certain subjects. You see, I’ve been exposed over the years to a huge number of non-secular critcisms of drugs and alcohol; of parental prohibition (whilst they imbibed freely), of recoverers talking of how their reason-neutral 12-step programs helped them off the road to nowhere, and religious recruiters referencing the scriptures for lessons on temperance and discipline.

One thing I never was given much training on was the logic of discipline and the rational epistemological arguments against drugs and alcohol. Alcohol (and in many more liberal urban areas, drugs as well) is such an ingrained and accepted part of American culture that its root existence and effects are rarely studied other than in the usual inconclusive “temperance and tolerance” methodology.

In this sense, I feel like a total failure at logic and reason. I’m very angry at myself and the world around me that I could be so alarmingly misled for so much of my young adulthood, and that I can never get back the innocence and cleanliness of never having been drunk or high. All my reading and education and exposure to the virtue of logic and reason never prepared me for this particular quagmire.

Only when I started to seriously evaluate my own behavior (in stages for several years) did I realize that such arguments existed. I cannot as yet speak with any real authority, only having permanently spurned the bottle less than a month ago. However, I will say this: Read more »

The Economist, not your average liberal rag, has been coming out fairly scathingly critical of President Bush and perversely supportive of candidate Kerry these days… Which gives me some semblance of hope that the divisiveness of the past few years is turning from the usual religious- or wealth-based dichotomies to something more akin to stupidity versus non-stupidity (I hesitate to call Kerry ‘intelligent’).

In a case where one candidate is campaigning on fear and essentially convincing people that they’re too stupid to help themselves, and another campaigning on hope and the idea that people can solve their own problems, the one who is doing the least insulting will prevail. It would truly be refreshing if this election did not come down to lowest common denominators. But I’m not getting my hopes up. Kerry and his campaign may be better in the brains department, but the competition isn’t offering much of a fight…

Our third Dish DVR 510 receiver in two weeks failed on us sometime last night. The first receiver and the current one both died the same death, so this is a plea to anyone who might be able to help diagnose.

We awake and notice, before touching anything, that the receiver’s green power light is going off, then coming on, then going off again and again. We turn on the TV. It is in some state of the following repeated scenario:

1. Power comes on
2. Acquires signal from satellite (Progress 1-5 of 5)
3. Tunes successfully to it’s current channel
4. Displays perfect signal for 10-20 seconds
5. Spontaneously powers down

This is all before we touch anything. In all cases, we’ve tried all the usual trouble-shooting: different outlet, cycling the power button, removing and reinserting the SmartCard, different room, different TV, different satellite input, different wiring, different color pixie dust. In all cases, the symptoms remain the same.

The current receiver is still in its early stages, but by Day 3, the first receiver was degenerating and was no longer even transmitting a signal for the 10-20 seconds, but just randomly power cycling to no avail. I would be ready to call the BBB, the PUC, the FCC and the WTO right now had I not had a less than aggrivating tech support experience this morning by a very nice gal in North Carolina (as opposed to those (mostly) horrible excuses for native English speakers in India that I’m usually connected to). She gave us a 3-week service credit and promised more if the technician could not remedy the problem next week.

As it is now, us Po Waht Traysh can’t afford the real deal, so we had to sell our souls to DISH in order to get the service. Thus, we have to follow Their orders when it comes to remedies, lest we have to pay for our release from eternal servitude. The current one is that a technician from DumbFuck-MomAndPop-CableCompany-OnBehalfOf-DishNetwork will be visiting us a week from now to see if they know anything (which I doubt). Then begins the arduous task of making it up the acronymous chain of command for assistance.

Any tips, tricks or guesses should be sent to us.

Being one, I have nothing against homosexuals. But for an agglomeration of reasons, they piss me off a lot here in San Francisco. I previously ranted about the cheapening of sexuality which seems to have been brought on by “sexual liberation” and the culture of Pride. One thing I have also been pondering, however, is whether we’re just pandering to age-old caste systems by engrossing ourselves so frequently in our individual subcultures and ghettos.

I think about this every time I see one of the many parades and street fairs which imprison me in my home on various Sundays every few months. A peek down the street or a futile attempt to move my car exposes me to gaggles of gays in their preferred clone attire, attending an event which is advertized to portray the liberation and normalizing of their “preferred lifestyle” within their society.

I do not agree with that line of reasoning. San Francisco has very successfully marketed itself as the homo capital of the world. It is very safe to be queer here. You can peck your husband goodbye on the bus, casually pop by the bar waving the banded flag, enjoy multiple blowjobs for the cost of a movie with impunity, and once every month or so attend a fair showcasing just how undressed your peers can get in public.

Read more »

Another day, another vice to overcome; this time, overspending.

I’ve got this really bad habit of Ebaying myself into the poorhouse, and I gotta stop. I think, to tell the truth, I just have a really addiction-prone personality, and always get really into whatever I get started with. All the better that I’ve stopped drinking.

Sure, it’s cool having a bigger collection of Siouxsie music and memorabilia than most of the band even, but I’m sure I’m wearing my hubby’s patience thin with my constant acquisitions. He tries to show tolerance, but I think I need to get better. Besides, we really need to save up cash for him to get a new computer and for us to be able to escape this rathole of a city sooner than 2010.

It all started last month when I started looking for cheap iPods on Ebay, and regularly checking back for new auctions, then slowly I started doing more searches, then more, and before I knew it I had bought 500 bucks or so worth of Siouxsie junk.

My new goal: to avoid buying a single thing for myself for the next 60 days and see how much better we look financially after that.