A letter to the editors of Budget Living, June/July 2003 issue:

"I read your magazine by chance and enjoyed it. Being a man, I was surprised that the contents were so entertaining. I was going to subscribe, but you'll have to bill me later, because I can't fill out money orders here in jail. Talk about budget living! Maybe I can share a couple of tips? I like to hang different-size woven baskets on kitchen walls. Also, a really cheap, cool way to decorate is to use a feather duster as a paintbrush and pile on different colors. I've thought up a lot of stuff. Being an editor and all, if you feel like writing, I need a pen pal. I bet you never thought you would be hit on buy a guy in jail that reads your magazine."

In unrelated news, this picture of Christina Ricci is really creeping me out.

I didn't take a whole lot of pictures over the weekend. I was more in hang out mode than look around mode, and the company was excellent. Below, however, are a few photos from my outing to the National Mall with Jim, daughters Mercedes and Reeve, and Scott. It was approximately one million degrees out, with 480% humidity. Never in my life have I had to eat a popsicle so fast. I couldn't help but wonder if the lunchtime joggers we saw weren't a little, you know, off. In the head. I also felt like the victim of a large-scale municipal prank when I read a sign on a water fountain that instructed me to "press button and wait." I pressed the button, and then I waited. And waited. And waited. But I had never been to DC before, and the sights were worth a bit of mugginess.

With Mercedes at the Lincoln Memorial.

Reeve somehow managed to make this look comfortable.

Kiteman. Not to be confused with Spoonman.

At the Washington Monument.

The Vietnam Memorial Wall.

The Lincoln Memorial.

It amazes me that so few people wash their hands after touching so many potentially nasty—or definitely nasty—objects. I'm not even particularly germ-phobic. I just think that after, say, getting sweaty and rolling around on an exercise mat—one that hundreds of other people have gotten sweaty and rolled all over—folks would want to take advantage of the fact that there's free soap in the locker room. Does the potential chain of events that can result from such sharing of funk not occur to people? Little Susie and her mom go to Toronto to visit Grandma and Grandpa. While they're there, little Susie meets little Johnny in the park. They indicate that they like each other by sticking the same toy in both of their mouths. BAM! Little Susie has the SARS. But no one knows that yet, and since everybody's so happy to be together as a family, they get nice and close. They're cozy like that. After they return home, Little Susie's mom stops in at Ballys for yoga at 9:30 on Friday, downward-facing-dogs all over the damn place, and politely hands you her mat as you show up for the 10:30 class. BAM! You've got the SARS! Remember breathing? Yeah, that used to be fun!

It's not just exercise mats, either. I read that Camus book. You think your antibacterial lotion will do the trick? You know, the kind you just pump onto your hands and rub in? The kind that doesn't require water? The kind that legions of future ebola virus carriers have decided is really cool, because using it means they never have to go near a sink again? No ho ho HO! Your antibacterial lotion is powerless in the face of the fact that a ship from Syria brought a bunch of rats to Marseilles, the Syrian rats got themselves some French fleas, and the French fleas stopped for a rest in your Californian coat, which you got at a fabulous vintage clothing store for $12. BAM! You've got the buboes! Wet Wipes can't help you now!

You'll probably set your coat down on top of the exercise mats at the gym, too. Just to make sure everyone dies.

Chapter 18 of "The Sinatraist" has been posted! I recommend you go take a look, both because it's good, and because spending your time over there will help distract you from the fact that I broke the script I was using for my photography pages when I updated my sitewide template, and that which is supposed to pop up no longer pops. Ah, well—I had been meaning to make some changes to that section, anyway. I should have it fixed in the next few days, and will post an update when everything works again.

The photo pages are now working properly. I changed the navigational scheme, and I made significant changes to the content of section 1 and section 2. Feel free to let me know what you think of the changes.

Yossarian the Kitty Guest is settling in nicely—thanks to those of you who provided advice on the transition! He's confined to my study right now, and he doesn't seem to mind so much. He has a good view of the front patio, and he likes to hang out underneath the big blue chair. That last part worries me a bit, because it's a reclining chair, and if anyone actually reclined it while he was under there, he would get rather squished. However, there are usually too many files/books/random items of clothing on the chair to make sitting possible, so that shouldn't be a problem.

When I spend time with other people's cats, I'm often struck by how nice they are. Yossi is a sweet little wisp of a thing. When I came in this morning, he squeezed out from under the blue chair and sat on my lap for a while. I let him stay, because he actually didn't seem to have been reading too much Bram Stoker lately. I had forgotten that cats come that way. Compared to Yossi, Leo is a brutish bruiser of a kitty. "What is good in life?" I asked him one day. He answered with an enthusiastic speech on the "lamentations of the sparrows."

Nicer isn't necessarily better when it comes to cats, and I often find the ways Leo can be a rat bastard quite funny. Still, if I had my druthers, I'd lower the probability that I'll stand at the sink and find myself suddenly choking on toothpaste, as there are cat teeth in my ankle.

I also love that Yossi, for obvious reasons, makes me think of Catch-22, because it's simply one of the best books ever. I taught it as part of an introductory humanities course in 1998 and 1999, and I do believe that book is almost as much fun to teach as it is to read. The first year I taught Catch-22, my classes were reading it while elections for freshman class officers were being held. Washington Irving got two write-in votes for President. He also showed up on the roll sheet from time to time, as did Irving Washington. A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army, also visited my class on occasion. I know this because I received notes from him informing me that he yearned for me tragically.

My mom bought a baby book for me when I was little. Its chapters were broken down by developmental stages and included numerous questions about things a child might be doing in each stage: Does she eat solid foods? Does she have an imaginary friend? What are her favorite games? That sort of thing. Mom was always quite diligent about pasting photos onto the book's pages, but as time passed, the questions fell by the wayside.

I loved looking through that book, and I did so regularly. Perhaps that's why one day, when I was 7, I decided something really needed to be done about all that blank space where mom's answers to questions about me would have gone. I therefore took out a pen and responded to all the questions in the "Age 7-8" chapter. However, I had this vague idea that the person answering the questions was supposed to be an objective source, and I was clearly not an objective source. My solution to this problem was to write everything in the third person. Apparently, it did not occur to me that my 7 year-old scrawl might give me away.

Does your child have a best friend or friends?
Yes. She likes Sally.

Does she watch television? What are her favorite shows?
The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, ect.

What are her least favorite shows?
Gunsmoke ect.

I liberally peppered my responses with "ect," quite enamored of the fact that it was such a convenient rhetorical device. I thought it stood for something, but I didn't know what—hence the transposition of 'c' and 't.' What I did know was that it was a really short way of saying, "Yeah, there's more, but I'm too lazy to write it out just now." I think I should take a lesson from my childhood self by turning in a dissertation with 40 pages of content and 200 pages that say "ect."

My favorite question-and-answer pairing was the following:

Your daughter has probably shown an interest in the telephone. Does she enjoy talking on the phone? Can she dial the numbers by herself?
Yes, she can. She does it good, too!

Ah, little Shasta liked cutting right to the chase. Screw the first part; what could she do? Unfortunately, she did not yet like differentiating between adjectives and adverbs. I don't know what they were teaching her down in Texas.

Three years and one day ago, Jeff and I went to a jewelry store to buy rings. My choice was not difficult, because I needed a simple gold band to go with my engagement ring, which is rather unusual and wouldn't look good next to anything elaborate. Jeff's choice was not difficult either, because he needed a ring—you know, just a ring—and out of the half dozen the woman behind the counter chose to show him, there was only one that both fit and was suitably, you know, just-a-ring-like.

"Do you want to get it engraved?" the woman asked, and yes, he did. He wanted the wedding date etched on the inside of the band. What date, she wanted to know.

"July 14, 2000," Jeff answered, and the woman's eyes popped a little.

"That's tomorrow!" she exclaimed.

"Right," he agreed. Both of us laughed, and we explained that we were going to be married in a civil ceremony, and we were planning to go to the courthouse the next afternoon. Early, because the website said Fridays were big marrying days at the courthouse, and if you got to the courthouse too late on a big marrying day, it would still be a big marrying day—just not yours.

"Well, you have to get there early, now," the woman behind the counter said as she handed back the newly engraved ring a few minutes later. "Can't have the ring be wrong!"

The manifest trueness of this remark could lead to nothing but paranoia. I checked the Orange County website at least three times that night. I knew I had read the page that said the state of California didn't require blood tests anymore, but I couldn't seem to find the other part of the site, the one that would inform me that blood tests would be mandatory just for five foot-tall blondes, or for men with red hair, or for anyone who lived in Huntington Beach but once had chickenpox in Texas. Ultimately, I decided that I couldn't find the page with those caveats because it didn't exist, though I remained uneasy. After all, this is the OC government we were talking about.

---

The morning after we bought our rings, I was awoken by helicopters. The sound of helicopters wasn't out of place in that neighborhood, but it was awfully early for the police to be flying around just to advertise the fact that they existed, and the Fuzz didn't normally buzz so low or for so long. After trying to ignore the noise for nearly a half hour, I gave up and pulled on a pair of jeans. I then wandered outside to investigate. The helicopters held news crews, not officers of the law, and people with cameras were filming some sort of hullabaloo down the street. I wasn't the only one who had come to see what was happening, and as I stood a few feet back from the rest of my curious neighbors, a barefoot woman with mussed hair and a spandex shirt caught my eye.

"It was so LOUD!" she complained, not unloudly. "It woke me up! I was disoriented at first, and I thought, 'Oh no, they're coming for my husband again!'"

I tried not to choke, and I put on my best poker face. My best poker face is not particularly good, but I suspected she wouldn't notice.

"Me too," I returned, just for the hell of it. For effect, I threw in a we're-all-in-this-together-kid nod. The chatty stranger in the spandex shirt, encouraged, continued to talk.

"... so, I heard all the racket, and I went to shake my husband and tell him, 'Hey, baby, get up! You've got to jump out the window!' But then, I remembered, 'Oh yeah! My husband's already in jail!'"

I actually did choke at this one, but I pretended I was just coughing, and pointed by way of explanation at the cigarette I was holding.

"Mine is at home," I told her once I could manage speech. "But we're going to the courthouse later."

---

And so we did. We bought flowers and then drove to the courthouse, where it was a big marrying day, just like the website said it would be. After confirming that we had arrived early enough to ensure that the ring wouldn't be wrong, we filled out some paperwork and sat down to look at the other people who had gathered in the waiting room. Some were there just for marriage licenses. Others, like us, were there to get a license and marry right away. Some people wore jeans. Some looked like they were on their way to (or from) work. One woman wore a formal wedding gown with lacy sleeves; she kept grinning at her fiancé as she tried to squeeze the endless layers of her skirt into a chair that wasn't meant to accommodate such sartorial complexity. Me, I wore a sundress and sandals, and I carried my flowers, and it wasn't long before we exited the building and made our way down the sidewalk towards the parking garage.

As we walked, we heard someone on the street call to someone else. Turning our heads to find the owner of the voice, we realized the "someone else" was us. A woman had slowed down her car and rolled down her window so she could speak to us.

"Hey! Did you just get married?" she asked excitedly.

"Yeah!" we told her, holding up our hands to display rings she no doubt couldn't see.

"Congratulations!!!" she shouted. We thanked her as she honked a few times and drove away, waving at us in her rearview mirror. We couldn't stop smiling at her, even after she was gone.

So, there was one kind of anniversary yesterday, and a different kind today. I celebrated being a non-smoker by spending an hour on hold with Countrywide Financial. Why, you might ask? I'll show you.

What you should know to follow this sequence of events properly: our homeowners' insurance payment is paid through our escrow account with our mortgage company. It is due once a year, in the spring, and the cost of the policy is $463.

04/01/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins pmt	-$463.00
05/08/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins pmt	-$463.00
Shasta makes phone call #1. She learns that our mortgage company has paid both our homeowners' insurance company and some other random homeowners' insurance company. She requests that the payment that was made to the wrong company be refunded. The phone people say okay.

05/14/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins credit	+$463.00
05/14/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins pmt	-$463.00
Shasta makes phone call #2. She learns that our mortgage company requested a refund not from the random company we've never heard of, but from the company that actually holds our policy. When the refund arrived, somebody noticed that the company's return of the funds meant we were no longer covered under a homeowner's insurance policy. They fixed that error. Shasta is glad that she still has insurance, but she again requests that the payment that was made to the wrong company be refunded. The phone people say okay.

05/16/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins credit	+$463.00
All seems well. Until...

06/25/2003 12:00:00 - misc posting

-$463.00

Whee! For anyone who would like a summary, this means that we have paid our homeowner's insurance premium four times and had it refunded twice. Shasta makes phone call #3. She learns that Betty in the Lancaster office is confused as all hell by this series of transactions, that Betty has at least three coworkers who are also confused, and that because the 6/25 payment is labeled as a "miscellaneous posting," she cannot say she will have the payment refunded, for it must have been authorized by "one of our account executives." Translation: she knows I'm being fucked, but she can't fix it. She has to write a note to somebody in a suit, and that person will probably fix it. Or might fix it, anyway. Betty is a nice lady with a headache.

The bad part? I'm pretty sure this will never, ever end. The good part? Not once while I was alternately talking to Betty and listening to Muzak did it occur to me that two years ago, that would have been a five-cigarette phone call.

I made archives! Real ones! I say a little bit about why on my archives page, so there is no need to duplicate it here, but I am excited about requiring a half hour if I want to find a post I made "some time in 2001." And about having most of the stuff I'd be upset about losing stored somewhere other than LiveJournal's servers. Plus, I thought there was some chance that having navigable archives might actually be of some use to others. If you missed The Chardonnay Diet or A Visit to the Oracle the first time around, you know where to find them.

I'll be updating the archives once a month or so. If you'd like to receive email notification when I update the site, you can sign up on my main page. I'm the only one who sees that list, and I promise not to sell your name to the people who send out enormous volumes of Wallace Stevens spam. I'm sure they exist. I get Cubism spam all the time; the modernists are onto this Internet thing.

I made a number of other changes, as well: First, I would like to bid a fond farewell to my guestbook, which has served me well for some time now. However, since there are now approximately 7 million different spots on my site where people can comment if they want to, the guestbook seemed unnecessary.

Second, I moved many of the links that appear in the "others" section of my pages to a "more links" page. The bar was just getting too friggin long. Most of the people still in the "others" link box are people who don't have livejournals, or people who do have livejournals, but who update their sites regularly with content they don't include in their journals. It's not about how much I like you, okay? You're still linked. I just needed my navigation system to start being useful again. If you're not still linked, it's because I screwed up. Please let me know if that's the case. If you were never linked, it's because I'm too lazy to click around enough to get the necessary details. If you have a site you'd like me to link, please leave a comment and point me to it.

Finally, I added a search feature to the site. It seems to work well so far, but you should know that it does not index the photography pages or anything hosted on livejournal's servers. This is because the search engine only indexes movable type content. I do think the idea of setting up the necessary templates to update the photo pages through movable type is a nice idea, but it will take a fair amount of time to set them up, and I just don't feel like it at the moment. Besides, those pages are easy enough to navigate visually. I'll switch them over eventually, but not now.

And I do believe that's it! Whew.