Kim's car?
A friend emailed me about a personalized plate that she spotted at JFK airport in NYC.
TRU-DIVA
On a white Cadillac Escalade. (No doubt with shiny, swirling rims.) She wondered if Lil Kim was already out of jail.
Saying something in Spanish
One day last month I was driving to work behind an aqua-colored Jaguar with the plate
SICPUED
Sic
something? Sí, I've been CPUed? Ok, so I took French in high school,
and only a little bit of Spanish later on in life. Maybe that's why it
took me a minute to get ¡Sí, Se Puede! (Yes We Can, or Yes, It Can Be
Done) out of that. I think I've heard it used as a labor rallying cry,
and as a phrase used by politicans.
We were driving
in a direction away from downtown where the immigration rallies would
take place later on that day (May 1), so I doubt this Jaguar driver with the can-do
attitude was headed to those events, but it still seemed à propos (or
should I say apropriado?), especially as I followed the day's news
coverage of the immigration-related boycott/protests/rallies.
Sometime later week, two other car license plates caught my attention on the same day, and almost in the same lane.
WLDBLL - on a white truck with a back window sticker that said "Frontier ..." something or other.
GOD
GENE - on a blue Toyota hybrid. Did not know what to make of this one.
At the time, I wondered if it was a plaintive sort of appeal to Gene
Roddenberry. After googling the phrase, I now wonder if the driver was
geneticist Dean Hamer, who "postulated the existence of a God gene for
religious experience." (Wikipedia)
Places in the park
I read somewhere that Griffith Park is the largest municipal park in
the country. I tried to go to Griffith Park last Sunday but it was so
packed that I couldn't get through a park entrance road. It was blocked
off due to traffic and crowds.
The first time I visited it was
probably in elementary school on a field trip to the zoo. In late 2005,
I went there for a few evenings to view some spaghetti westerns by
Sergio Leone (Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Once
Upon a Time in the West) screened outside on the lawn of the Autry
Museum. The year before that, I went to the Griffith Observatory's
Satellite - it's the temporary home of the Observatory until
renovations are completed.
The Satellite looks quite
unimpressive from the outside, but I liked the planetarium show inside.
The fisheye projection of the sky onto a domed ceiling, with views of
the morning and evening skies and the astronomer who took our requests
(I asked him to show us a meteor shower) made it a pretty cool
experience. Even if my neck ached a bit from looking up for the length
of the presentation.
But I haven't visited much of the park’s
natural landscape. I would like to check out Amir's Garden. Other
spots in the park that seem like they would make for interesting visits
are Fern Dell and the Bronson (aka Batman) Caves.
Thwap, thwap.
Thoughts unspoken but present, last night after dinner at this fine institution.
"It's like being mauled by sandpaper."
"I didn't know kisses sounded like, 'Thwap, thwap.' "
"Oh, I guess they don't really. That's the sound of his open mouth hitting against the side of my face and my closed mouth."
"How ominous that the last thing to air on tv before he clicked the remote off was video clips from Abu Ghraib."
"I am so glad that he's not actually fingering that part of my breast that he seems to think he is, judging by those pinching motions he's making right beneath my chest."
"What is wrong with me? Why did I let him walk with me into my apartment? I should've asked to be dropped off in front of my building."
"Hmm. Those occasional bittersweet moments of feeling lonely when I see other couples out doing things are so much better than what I'm feeling right now."
"I suppose there's nothing technically wrong about telling me that I have a nice tan, even if it is February and I haven't really been tanning. It simply feels wrong."
"I can't believe I just asked him if those repetetive finger motions he was making on my shoulders and at the edge of my armpits were the type that caused carpal tunnel syndrome."
"It is raining pretty hard outside, but I really don't feel like letting him back in to get his jacket. I'll just open the door a crack and stick his jacket out through it."
Bee beard.
Muntoyib, an Indonesian bee-sting therapist, covers himself with
hundreds of live honeybees in Jakarta January 28, 2006. Although the
therapy is scientifically unproven and needs more studying, the
popularity of bee-sting therapy, the use of bee venom from live
stinging bees to treat chronic pain, is on the rise. REUTERS/Beawiharta
Ring a ding ding.
I bought myself a ring. I don't know if I'll wear it much, but I like the look of it. It's a little stretchy green band of threaded beads topped with a bright orange glass poppy. It fits best on the aptly named ring finger of my left hand, where it gives me an aura of being married to a wood sprite. I kind of like the idea of being married to someone small and playful who flits around the forest. Maybe we would live in a treehouse. I suppose if it really was someone's wedding ring, it wouldn't do much in the way of keeping away unwanted attention. "C'mon man, take a look at her ring. What's her guy gonna do? Beat us up with his pan flute?" In this universe I've imagined where the look of a woman's wedding ring has some significant bearing on whether or not certain unsavory characters decide to mess with her...this ring keeps most of them away:
Her and her haven't homes.
It's not uncommon to see people standing to the sides of freeway offramps with signs, signs that ask for help or money or food or work. It is, however, the first time I saw people with signs at this particular offramp into an upscale residential area. They were two women, both blonde, one in a Fair Isle style sweater, the other wearing plaid. Both could have passed for soccer moms on a walk, except their faces looked like they'd been outdoors too long for too many days, without sunscreen. Maybe soccer moms walking home from the bar after a late-late night binge? As if they knew what I was thinking, their cardboard signs made it clear that they were not.
HOMELESS
NEED HELP
and
HOMELESS LADY
plus a bunch of text too small for me to read.
Par(an)alysis.
We met once over a month ago. I thanked him for a pleasant evening the next day. He never wrote back, and I was getting better at moving on at any hint of non-interest, so I did. Then last week he got back to me and said he'd been busy, wanted to take me to dinner, and didn't want to meet somewhere like last time. He wanted to pick me up at my place. My first (over?)reaction was that it seemed kind of pushy. For me, anyway. I remember him as a nice guy from a month ago, but it's not like he's been vetted by my matchmaking posse or the police. Being picked up at work would be a nice solution, except that it's too far given where we are going.
The rate at which he returns email, even not counting that one month gap, seems glacial. Especially when I consider that his work is something web related. I've thought about matching my email response times to his, but at that rate we might not meet again until next December. I've also considered, among other possibilities, whether he is following advice from a guidebook written for men that instructs him to wait a certain number of days before getting back to me (it always seems to be about three days). My own internal guidebook is telling me to take lots of cash. I've heard that cabs in LA are quite the rip-off.
In which Guava is graceless, grating.
First and foremost,
he said he had low expectations.
That it was something he learned in business.
Therefore, he said, it took a lot
to get him excited.
And that he was romantic.
I wondered how romantic it
could feel to be asked out by a guy
with low expectations?
By romantic maybe he meant
his preferences in dining room ambience.
He chuckled at my suggestions -
Tacos Machos, Fatburgers and
Palermo's pizza - all visibly within walking distance
of the cafe where we met, and said,
"We can do better than that."
So in this case romantic meant getting into
the red, two-door stick shift of someone
I met twenty minutes ago.
For a brief ride down the street to
ritzy Thai with glitzy karaoke, a big tip,
and not going back for validation
after finding the parking
stub in the car.
It meant a smiling no to my suggestion
that we split the bill.
"You're saying no, but you're smiling.
So does that mean it is ok if we split this?"
Another smile, another no.
"Um, why not?"
"Because I'm supposed to be the..."
He looked down at the table, but didn't
finish the sentence.
the...what?
the Dude?
the Big Lebowski?
the one with money?
the one who drives stick?
I'll allow for that last one.
It seems unwise to drive stick in LA.
