At work we do much analysis in Water Years, which begin in October. With almost-spectacular timing, the gathering morning fog turned into a pathetic beady drizzle-fog today, too vigorous to ignore but too puny to exercise even the lowest setting on my windshield wipers. It is now the rainy season, and safe to plant spinach (or so I hope).

With "rain" drifting lazily in some direction near the road, it was prudent to knock at least 10 MPH off the average traffic speed on the freeway. Or so everyone seemed to think; I have now been driving in L.A. long enough to adjust to the speeds, and so found this rather irritating, rather than comforting and safe. I'll road your rain rage, yar, all the way to work.

They have come to fix the wall that the crazy drunk guy crashed into. They're jackhammering at 8 in the morning! It's so exciting, I hope it continues for several days.

Also, why the hell am I listed on buyshavers.com? This is deeply nonplussing.

Clothes made of polyester, or clothes without wrinkles. I clearly can't have both, so I must choose.

That was my one nice generic professional skirt too. I'm pissed. I hate ironing.

My emails tend to be direct, informal, and courteous. Every so often, someone responds with a more formal structure, and puts my favorite informal words in quotes.

Dear Yami,
Blah blah blah. If this is indeed their "goof" then blah blah blah.
Sincerely,
Person

This drives me absolutely bonkers. I start off feeling boorish and uncultured, then I realize why, take a hearty dislike to the person on the other side of the terminal, think about other situations in which I have felt similarly awkward, and soon I'm pissed off about code-switching and class stratification. It's not that I mind turning into a screaming Marxist, but really, the people who maintain Caltech's email database should not be my prime ideological influences.

Speaking of blogging about gardening... Mondays are landscape maintenance days in this little block of student housing, and today they brought out the leaf blower. A large he-boobied man had the blower backpack on, and every so often you could see him raise his black extendo-arm and rev the motor, blowing a quick riff into the sky. He blew bits of dust off the sidewalk and onto the lawn for a while; then he switched gears and blew bits of lawn onto the sidewalk. Tired after a couple hours of that, he blew some cigarette butts back into the lawn and left.

I am one step closer to becoming a crochety old lady who goes to city council meetings, to bang the podium with my umbrella and demand an insanely restrictive noise ordinance. Or else grabbing a handful of radioactive waste from the fridge and holding the whole block hostage until everyone agrees to let me use their lawns as my private organic spinach farm.

As I was walking home after handing in my sloppy-but-passable and oh-so-finished report on this particular patch of ground where we dragged around a few wires last week, some guy pulled over and called out that I had the nicest breasts he'd ever seen. He didn't call them breasts, of course, but I figured out pretty quickly what he meant. My response to that kind of thing is always to think up some snappy comeback a la Al Jafee, and then keep walking without a hint of response. Because I know damn well that any snappy comeback would inevitably devolve:

me: Oh, so how many breasts have you seen, then?
creepyguy: Fifteen.
me: Fifteen? What, you bite off yer ma's nipple trying to suck on it after she'd been in labor for thirty-six hours to get your fat head into the world?
creepyguy: ... hey, baby...
me: Dude, you need to get out more. Go find a strip club, you can see all the nice boobies you want there.
creepyguy: (here comes forth a soulful ode to the virtues of the honest, unaltered breast, wherein creepyguy paints himself as a sensitive, modern man in words of one syllable or less, all the while referring to me as "girl" or "baby" and staring at my chest for signs of nipple.)
me: ... (blank stare as I realize once again that pop culture feminism has somewhere gone terribly, terribly wrong) ... look, just fuck off, okay?

It's not so much the sexual objectification that disturbs me - after all, I can read a full issue of Cosmo without puking once. It's the fact that, unlike Cosmo, creepy guys give you no reasonable path to conversation.

Let me get this straight: they have airtime on ESPN to show the National Spelling Bee, but World Cup soccer (when they show it at all - I've been watching half the games in Spanish) is relegated to ESPN2?

Dancing death muffins.

In other news, I'm hodge-podgedly working on a new design which features more whitespace and, yes, a rotating tagline. "A spongiform advice column for the perpetually distracted," "the weblog equivalent of an out-of-body experience," "squishy brain slugs singing lullabies," and everyone's favorite, "juxtaposition as a form of self-actualizing bricolage" comprise the current list. So, what I need to know is, have you said something clever about this blog/blogs in general that I'm forgetting? Have I ever said anything clever?

I must remember to shut my eyes, plug my fingers in my ears and sing "la la la la la la" in a loud off key while I read my favorite international weblogs. At least, I must do that if I want to watch anything on English-language broadcast networks in the afternoon - there's always late-night KMEX.

And for those of you who thought Americans didn't watch soccer: we do. But we don't watch it in English, and we don't root for the US.

It's a background exhaustion you don't even notice, coupled with the throbbing stress headache of the soul that only comes from four-hour exams on which you do not do very well, that makes this time of year so special. So now, being done with all but one midterm, when I should be working on those two late homework sets I deprioritized this weekend, I'm listening to the crown jewels of Song Fight!, hoping for something mindboggling. The theory is that contestants get a song title, and have two weeks to write and record something grand. The results are mixed - I keep hoping I'll stumble upon some method for selecting only wacky, so-bad-they're-good entries rather than mundane, crap-garage-band entries, but thus far no luck.

The other great thing about exam weeks is remembering to appreciate showers - nothing feels quite so good as a shower when you're trying to procrastinate. But - and this is a huge but - the Salon Selectives sneak has struck again! I am left with neither shampoo nor conditioner and my hair is getting greasy and tangly. Those hair-care products were given to me by my mother, as a Christmas present, you cold-hearted fucknose!

So I'm really truly going to fill a decoy bottle with bleach this time. Has anyone else resorted to tricks like this? Has it worked? Do you have any advice?

[link via livingtech]

By tomorrow afternoon, nutritional supplement companies will be queued 'round the block to mine the vitamin C from my urine.

I just hate watching myself get sick. Plus my eyes are itchy. Bleah.