I spent last night uploading photos to flickr and the past couple hours adding stupid labels. Do take a look. I will probably add some Greece photos and more from San Fran in the next couple days.

I'm in one of those states where emotion is fogged so thick around me that I can't see past it. So please just indulge me for now.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

Sort of an approximation of a conversation, on the train yesterday:

Burcu: Danielle, when you put effort into it you can really look nice sometimes. Just promise me one thing: don't buy any more fleece.
Danielle: ..............
Burcu: Danielle. Don't. Buy. Any. More. Fleece.
Danielle: ..........................................okay.
Burcu: Okay, good.
Danielle: But-
Burcu: DANIELLE.
Danielle: okay.

Why do I find Stephen Rea so hot?!





I think it's the undereye bags. He looks deep. Like he's stayed up nights pondering profound things.. Like he could use a good nap. And a good woman.

Oh Stephen Rea, the things I want to do to you...like take you home, bundle you up in an electric blanket, feed you chicken soup, and have lots of long conversations about, you know, life.



Is that his bitch?! Blonde??? Tan??? I'll kill her.

Stephen Rea, call me. I'll take care of you.

Sooooooooo......

Things that have happened and observations thereof:

• On Tuesday, we walked through the first five hundred yards of Golden Gate Park, which happens to be an all-out marijuana bazaar. We were offered pot about five times in as many minutes. The only one I wasn't sure about was a scrubby-looking girl sitting with her boyfriend who called out, "Nuggets!" as we passed by. Was she offering us the opportunity to buy nuggets, or was she calling us nuggets? According to my more experienced sources, it was the former.
  Also, there's a large grassy knoll in GGP where all the burnouts twirl around and babble with each other, just like in Clueless! They're all brownish-colored and dressed in military fatigues, and they have dogs who are probably having the time of their lives. I guess I have no place to judge, but on the other hand, we walked by a realllly rough-looking girl pushing a stroller with a baby in it. I can't stop thinking about that poor baby. Such a thorny issue.
  
  
• We went to Chinatown and my associates made me buy a hat. A hat! Me! With a hat!
  
  
• Through a series of strange and unsettling circumstances I ended up wandering around the city by myself on Wednesday evening with some flickering buzzing lightbulb of an idea of going to the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately I disembarked the 43 bus in a dark and deserted park only to discover the the bus I intended to transfer to didn't run after 6:30. Oh no! After shivering and glaring at the few passersby and driversby for half an hour I caught the bus again and decided to try and get to the Fisherman's Wharf for some In-N-Out. After scrutinizing the map at another bus stop I transferred to another bus and the driver (picture scrawny middle-aged Asian man) said to me, "You know where you going?"
  Me: ....Yes.
  Driver: Oh (chuckling) you know, these tourists, they don't know... (throws up hands like "such an amusing hassle, those tourists")
  Me: Heh heh.
  bus drives two blocks, stops
  Me: ...Is this the last stop?
  Driver: I SAW YOU LOOKING AT THE MAP!
  So I ended up walking down Beach Street, by the Marina, to Safeway, to...I don't even know, but the point is, I got to the subway ten minutes after it stopped running, and thus had to get on a bus that dropped me off eight blocks from home and I had to walk through the panhandle and then I got home and went to sleep.
  
  
• Nothing much else other than Cranium, movies, and cleaning. My sister left yesterday, and it's been raining all day and I hate going out in the rain so instead I stayed in and listened to music. I know, I'm in San Francisco and should be exploring, but sometimes a girl just needs seven hours to do her makeup. Tonight after Burcu'n'Carlos get home we're going to see V for Vendetta, I think, and then...it better fucking stop raining, or I put on all this makeup for nothing.

I've never been able to keep to a schedule.

Sunday: We went to the Mission District for Mexican food. I got a super taco and it was delicious. Then we wandered around and finally ended up at the Civic Center MUNI stop to pick up my twin, who had flown in from San Diego expressly to play Cranium with me. We ate Thai food for dinner, aaaand...then went home.

Monday: Kirsten and I went downtown to Powell Street, and gazed wonderingly at the seven stories of the San Francisco Shopping Center and the clothes and shoes and accessories and lip glosses we can't afford. I bought hoop earrings at H&M. Hoop earrings! I've felt so naked without them. We rode the bus to Trader Joe's and Kirsten bought raspberry beer for our hosts. Our bus driver was so bizarre. Actually, the bus-riding experience in general has been completely bizarre. The aforementioned bus driver would make abrupt and random announcements in a Moviefone guy tone. He scolded, "Please DO NOT EAT ON THE BUS," and everyone craned their necks around to see who the guilty party was. Everytime the bus would start he'd say, "HANG ON NOW!" Then he asked, "So does anyone else have a sense of humor? Or is it just me?" and the other people on the bus half-giggled and shifted around uncomfortably. I suppose he took that to mean it was just him who had a sense of humor.

I'm still astounded by the friendliness of complete strangers. Two stories:
1. On Sunday, two blocks from Burcu'n'Carlos's apartment,we encountered a lovely green futon with chartreuse "FREE! TAKE ME! ENJOY ME!" signs. We tried to pick it up but oh no! It was far too heavy for even three ladies and a Carlos to drag home. But before we even realized what was happening an unknown burly middle-aged man grabbed one end and motioned to Carlos to grabbed the other, and they began to carry the frame. Burcu and I attempted to pick up the mattress, and upon seeing us struggle with its cumbersomeness another strange man, who was sitting in a nearby cafe having drinks, jumped up and grabbed one end. The aforementioned burly man's girlfriend grabbed a corner, and Burcu and I each grabbed another corner, and before we knew it, we had been set up with a new futon. Amazing!
2. While sitting on the bus coming home from Trader Joe's, the handle on one of my paper bags broke. Seeing Kirsten and I fiddling with it, a guy who was sitting across from us, who'd also come from Trader Joe's, abruptly said, "Here," and handed me one of his own bags to stick my stuff in.
I keep comparing this to a horrid and discouraging day three years ago when Burcu and I were moving our stuff into our new apartments, and there was a guy in the building who saw us coming and scampered into his own apartment and closed the door, presumably so he wouldn't feel awkward about not asking to help us move our enormous shelves, dressers, and mattresses. Or when I was a first-year returning from winter break and moving into a new dorm, and I accidentally had the taxi driver drop me off a couple of blocks from the entrance, and stood there struggling with my enormous bags as throngs of students walked right by without offering any help at all. I'm sure San Francisco has its fair share of assholes (according to Burcu and Carlos, a majority come in the form of dreadlocked drug-addicted runaways who sit in corners on Haight Street and call you names if you don't give them money) but I've not encountered nearly as many as I encounter on an average trip on the El in Chicago.

Final thoughts: Howl's Moving Castle was somewhat disappointing. Howl was kind of a tool.

This is where my memories begin turning to mush. Let's see if I can hush the incessant questions of the twin who's sitting next to me on the couch in order to get through

Saturday: Woke up, showered, was ushered out of the apartment. Damn, Saturday is kind of a blur. I think we went to Powell Street and wandered around the clothing stores until Carlos said kindly, "I'm really bored by this. Can we please leave?" Then we took the bus to Fisherman's Wharf and ambled down one of the piers. I wanted to buy a $5 admission ticket to explore the old ships docked at the harbor but Burcu talked me out of it. Instead, we went to In-N-Out, where Carlos had never been. He pronounced his animal-style cheeseburger "hauntingly good."

Then we went to the actual Fisherman's Wharf (I think) with the shops and the street performers and there was a magician and I got to choose the card and then he put the deck of cards in his mouth and managed not only to pull my card out but somehow fold it up with his tongue! It was so awesome!

FW is totally touristy and overpriced but utterly charming to me. Lots of families with dogs, happy children, and sea lions. Sea lions! Burcu and I rode the carousel and went to the Pearl Factory, where I bought a freshwater-pearl bracelet and Burcu bought an oyster, like out of a tub of oysters, which the cashier opened up to great ceremony (ringing a bell and shouting "Alohhhha!") to reveal her very own pink-yellow-white pearl!

On the way home we stopped at The Spy Shop, where we skimmed books such as the vanity-press-published paperback How Not to Get Scammed, priced at the completely unscammish price of $35.95.

Oh yeah, then we went to Castro, the gay neighborhood. Lots of interesting BDSM shops that we didn't go into (something I'll have to do with my less-embarrassed sister instead). Burcu and Carlos bought cookies. Then we went home and watched Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which was, as you might expect, absolutely adorable.

Sunday, you're next...after Cranium and a movie.

My sleep schedule is slowly getting back into whack. It's 9:30 and I'm awake not because I haven't been able to get to sleep yet, but because I fell asleep at a reasonable hour and was woken up by Burcu and Carlos getting ready for work. I tried to go back to sleep, especially when I stumbled into the bathroom, glanced in the mirror, and saw that my eyes were comically apuff. But I couldn't and instead read some of A Walk in the Woods (funny!), ate some string cheese, and decided that now would be an excellent time to regale you with my first San Francisco weekend.

Friday:: I made my way to Burcu'n'Carlos's apartment from the Oakland airport by way of AIRbart shuttle, BART train, MUNI streetcar, and my own two feet. I was thankfully assisted by the extravagantly detailed instructions Burcu had sent me the day before with helpful repetitions, capitalizations, and bolded phrases (she knows my ditziness well). It is true both that San Francisco is filled with very friendly people and very crazy people, and sometimes/often the two overlap. I had three people en route to the apartment try to make small talk with me. In Chicago I might have replied by way of death glare (usually because the "small talk" proffered on the El is along the lines of "Damn girl, yo name J.Lo?") but everyone was so nice and my frozen heart melted AND grew maybe half a size larger. When the old guy on the bike rode by and yelled, "You got some JUNK IN YOUR TRUNK!" he was referring to my BACKPACK (at least, I hope that's what he was referring to).

Burcu and Carlos were still at work when I arrived at the apartment. I entered to find that Burcu had gone to Trader Joe's the day before and stocked the refrigerator with all my favorite foods: Spelt bread! White cheddar soy crisps! Grape tomatoes! Peanut butter! More! I almost sobbed with gratitude, sobbed like a little bitch. I'm not kidding. Do you know how amazing it is to have a friend who not only accepts your strange eating habits, but indulges them? I called my mom and cried, "BURCU BOUGHT ME FOOD" and my mom said, "That sounds like Burcu." I have the best best friend in the world.

So I slept until about eight pm. Burcu and Carlos finally came home and much squealing and hugging ensued. I took a shower and washed my poor scraggly hair. We then went out to an Italian restaurant called Panta Rei, through streets clogged with drunken frat boys and sorority girls with green beads around their necks. Lots of sweatshirts with "KISS ME I'M IRISH" on them. That's a clever one, don't think I've ever seen it before. I probably would have worn green had I remembered the holiday, but instead I wore lots of pink.

We sat in the restaurant and conversed about life, love, and alcohol. Burcu and Carlos are perfect conversational partners for me - we definitely don't agree on everything but we're always at least on the same wavelength. Our disagreements expand and enhance instead of exasperating. For me, anyway.

I'm going to go have a peanut-butter spelt-bread sandwich and then I'll continue.

Dobrii dyen'! I am typing from the computer in Burcu and Carlos's room. For some reason I befriend people unlike me, people who make plans to go to the zoo and then actually get up and go to the zoo instead of sitting around thinking about going to the zoo until it gets dark outside. Thus, I've not had time to update yet, but I will tonight. At the moment, I'm being swept out of the apartment with a broom, and the broom's name is Burcu, and the purpose is to go to the Mission district for Mexican food and then to pick up my sister. "Let's GOOOO!" Burcu says.

You know what you're doing. Even when you don't know what you're doing, you know what you're doing.

I'm in San Francisco, lying on my back on a futon mattress, with a laptop angled against my knees. It's 4:41 AM and I'm groggy and gummy yet sleep eludes me. I don't believe that my sleep schedule has ever in my life been so completely fucked up. I slept for one hour last night (by which I mean Thursday night) before I had to tumble out of bed and get ready to leave for the airport, which I accomplished by sort of pingponging myself against the furniture, my eyes mostly seared shut. While waiting to board the plane, I developed a couple-crush on two hipsters around my age who were just so perfect together. To my chagrin, I found that I had followed them starry-eyed to the very last row of the plane, the one with the seats that don't recline. I sheepishly sat next to them, only to discover that they were mean, because I overheard the girl say, "We should have bought a third seat." Howwwwww embarrassing. I'm sure it didn't help that whenever I go to the airport I look extra homeless, sweatshirt hood over my messy ponytail, stress spots all over my face, glazed-eyed expression, vaguely jaundiced. I am always bewildered by those who get dressed up to go to the airport. Sure, you encounter more people of different kinds than really anywhere else, and may want to present yourself as attractive, or at least not crazy squirrel lady. But plane-riding is possibly the most inconvenient and uncomfortable way to travel (my sister is going to pipe up and say: "Noooo, riding in a bus for thirteen hours over unpaved rocks in Cambodia is the most uncomfortable way to travel and I will have to defer to her superior experience) and thus I try to make it as pleasant as possible, and pleasant for me in this case is not having to wake up half an hour earlier to apply eyeliner and flat-iron my hair. Or somehow hop onto the moving sidewalk in two-inch kitten heels.

Anyway, so I tried to sleep on the plane, and I guess I did, somehow. But like I said, the seats didn't recline, and I was straining away from the hipster couple so as to not touch them and freak them out with my crazy lady cooties, and within those constraints managed to attempt more positions than Jenna Jameson in Please Cum Inside Me (I swear I didn't know the name of that offhand, I just looked her up on IMDB and chose the movie with the funniest name). The most successful was leaning over the open tray-table with my head pressed against my crossed arms. I suppose I must have slept because after about the twelfth time I opened my eyes, we were beginning our descent, and I had the vague sense of having traveled to a destination I had no memory of. At least I never did that thing where you almost fall asleep and then suddenly jerk out of it, because the hipsters would probably have attributed that to tardive dyskinesia from my schizophrenia medication.

But so I'm here, and I'll describe what here is tomorrow.

I just e-mailed this to my friend Carlos, with whom I got into an argument awhile back about the relative merits of the Smiths & Tatu versions of "How Soon Is Now," but I liked it so much I've decided to post it for the benefit of mankind. From an interview with Morrissey in Word magazine a couple years back:

Interviewer: Did you hear Tatu's version of "How Soon Is Now"?
Morrissey: Yes, it was magnificent. Absolutely. Again, I don't know much about them.
Interviewer: They're the teenage Russian lesbians.
Morrissey: Well, aren't we all.

I ♥ Morrissey.

You know, I've decided to hold a moratorium on talking about or even bringing up Russia (or Greece for that matter), on here or in my actual spoken-word life. I sort of feel like I'm becoming Catherine Keener in Lovely & Amazing when she blathers on to complete strangers about giving birth to her daughter without an epidural, except I'm blathering about dust and swollen brain tissue.

It's not like I have more to do than anyone else at this school for finals, but I really feel like my mind has been shattered into splinters and I have no idea how I'm going to get everything done. I feel a little sick.