2001-10-08 - 8:41 p.m.
Had my first brush with heightened post-9/11 security last Monday--at the Union-Tribune, of all places. Arriving for my monthly journalist�s meeting, I had to pass through a most festive-looking makeshift guard checkpoint to get into the parking lot and then follow this 11th-grade-Driver�s-Ed-type maze of Day-Glo orange traffic cones to get to the handicapped spaces, which (being close to the front of the building and thus inside some kind of defense perimeter or other) were cordoned off with bright yellow crime-scene tape. Then, on the way inside, the security guard--who�s seen me a couple of hundred times and seemed more embarrassed than anything else by the whole thing--made me leave my backpack in the car and peered inside my wheelchair�s side-pouch to make sure I wasn�t hiding a wad of plastique in there, or something.
Did this make me feel safe? Not especially. The loudest thought in my head at the time ran more along the lines of, "Does this ridiculously right-wing dishrag have an ultra-inflated sense of its own importance, or what?"
There�s nothing in San Diego worth blowing up. Certainly not the U-T.
***
All right. Enough about terrorism for now. Life has been good to me lately and I�d rather share it with my minions than sit watching CNN.
First, the good. If you watched Buffy last Tuesday you got to witness the national television debut of the one and only LESBIAN PANCAKE MEME! I suspect it got there via Badsnake, rather than from me directly, but since the meme was my creation to start with I�m going to grab credit for its appearance in one of today�s pop-culture institutions. Mig shoots, Mig SCORES!
Can Bacon Day be far behind?
***
In other news, I�M MOVING! Cue the Jeffersons theme.
It�s a two-bedroom on the third floor of the same building I�m in now. The rent�s slightly higher than I�d like, but well below the going rate for what I�m getting: a separate office, a separate living room, acres of closet space, a kitchen that would give ComfortFood the mother of all orgasms and a balcony with a view that just begs me to lounge out there with a martini and indulge those power-drunk, master-of-all-I-survey manic states I�m prone to. A dee-luxe apartment in the sky, indeed.
Unfortunately, this also means I�m going to have to buy furniture. I can feel my personality starting to fragment already under the pressure of conflicting tastes. My inner design fag, Todd, is practically spooging his shorts at the prospect of getting me to spend way too much money on a bunch of twee crap that�s going to look dated in six months. Bleh.
One thing�s for certain, however: I--we--won�t be going to IKEA again. At least not for anything expensive, or anything that takes longer than five minutes to put together, which pretty much limits me to lamps and towels. But that�s ok with me. I went to IKEA again a few days ago, just to test my resolve, and you know what struck me? Everything at IKEA wobbles. Fuck that. I�ll be 40 years old in just a few years--I�m too old for furniture that wobbles.
***
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