I Am The Girl Of A Hundred Lists

[The List of 100:]

[1. I started reading online journals and blogs in 1998.
2. My first Diaryland obsession was (surprise, surprise) this one.
3. I've been kicking around the idea of starting a blog, rather than noting every little thing here.
4. Then again, why give myself another thing to procrastinate over?
5. Procrastination is my biggest flaw. It will be the end of me.
5. That, or a meteor slamming into my apartment building.
6. I love the building and neighborhood in which John and I live. The lobby looks like a run-down grand-hotel lobby, with a sweeping spiral staircase and a very old, rickety elevator. The corridors on each floor remind me of the end Madonna's "Justify My Love" video, suitable for careening post-coitally from wall to wall.
7. John and I have lived there together for four years. We've had eight different roommates in the other bedroom.
8. Our bedrooms are huge, long chambers with views of the Tenderloin and Potrero Hill.
8. Our current roommate calls our neighborhood "Tender Heights": not quite the 'Loin, not quite Nob Hill.
9. There are four Thai, two Indonesian, one Chinese, one Burmese and three Japanese restaurants within a two-block radius.
10. We're on very friendly terms with the Palestinian owners of the small grocery/liquor store across the street.
11. They know us as "well-done fries," "Marlboro Ultra Lights," and "exchange new five-dollar bill for old for the laundromat change machine."
12. We know them as the One With The Glasses, The Other One With The Glasses, the Crazy Old Guy At The Grill, Gramps, and the Younger, Cute One.
13. Their produce bins have gross bugs buzzing over them.
14. John and I live, work and go to school in city/county supervisoral District 6.
14. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my law degree, but I'm interested in local politics.
15. I chose my law school for its progressive tone, and because it admits people without bachelors degrees.
16. Sometimes I wonder which reason was more important.
17. Law school is hard, but quite doable if you keep a modicum of focus.
18. Law school is also fun, if you can lose yourself in arcana, and laugh at the bits in which you can't lose yourself.
19. Lots of people go to law school thinking Constitutional Law will be their favorite class.
20. Few lawyers become constitutional scholars or experts for a living.
21. I just found out my old friend Susanna is a first-year law student in Santa Rosa. Probably I should re-establish contact with her to see how she's doing.
22. My friend Violet, who convinced me to go to law school, is a lot like Susanna. I don't know if they can occupy similar spaces in my life at the same time.
22. It's a truism with me that I give friends too important a place. But I don't call people, I rarely write, and yet I wonder why I lose touch with them.
23. I hate chatting on the telephone.
24. I'd rather write, but I've never gotten into instant messaging.
25. John and I just got DSL; many things may change about the way I use the Internet.
26. Every time I think I can forget about George W. Bush, he does something else to chap my ass.
27. Ditto Al Gore. I waver between being a traditional liberal and really thinking radical solutions are our only hope. Bourgeois paranoia tells me that digging out the roots of an admittedly corrupt tree will kill lots of nevertheless worthy fruit.
28. I can't imagine a world without complicated French cheeses, fragrant books, and lovely old buildings.
29. The least worst part of working my hotel's front desk is dealing with the public. Just about eveyone, from the old French retired couples to the Swiss teenagers, from the Greyhound drivers to the harried southern families are perfectly pleasant.
30. The worst part is the same as any worst part of working anywhere: coworkers who don't give a shit about making the endeavor function smoothly.
31. The most surreal thing has been the C-list celebrities associated with the Friendly Neighborhood Cabaret attached to the hotel. I Know Things about a very famous former televangelist's famous former spouse, a former Dukes of Hazzard star, a former Star Search champion, a former Barbra Streisand understudy-cum-Divine sister-in-dust, and The Electric Company hollerer.
32. This bewildering array may explain why I had scant interest in American Idol. Do we really need another?
33. The list of John's and my magazine subscriptions looks like that of a suburban hair salon; let's get celebritied up!
34. For a period of years, like John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity, I thought it was so much more important what you liked, rather than what you were like.
35. Several 90s friendships disabused me of this notion (I knew in my bones it was a lie, but I thought I needed something to separate the wheat from the chaff), but I still find myself falling into old habits.
36. In a life that must be played as a set of probabilities, I have to say the notion of a Higher Power as it has been presented seems unlikely.
37. I'm not sure if that means that whatever moral code I've inherited and devised is simply a set of aesthetic choices; Oscar Wilde would probably say that there's nothing "simply" about it.
38. Isn't the notion that the 20th century invented the only effective ways to deal with human problems silly? As modern and postmodern folks, we don't draw enough on millennia of accumulated wisdom.
39. Then again, I'm open if you show me something new.
40. I'm a good simple cook. Not everything turns out perfectly, but more often than not, what I attempt gets that best of all compliments to the chef: silent chomp-chomp-chomp leading to a clean plate.
41. I'm still leery of baking, although I did recently produce some kick-ass oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies from scratch.
42. It used to be true that I hated every vegetable that starts with "A." My newfound appreciation for asparagus ruined that pattern.
43. This may sound shallow, but my friend Leah and I agree that food and sex are a lot alike.
44. I used to really enjoy being a sexual outlaw, but at some point, I realized that the highness of the highs and the lowness of the lows really didn't fit with my personality.
45. I'm slowly trying to apply that rule to other aspects of my life; the road of excess may lead to the palace of wisdom, but I seem headed instead for the tract house of common sense
46. Somehow, I managed to seroconvert after I'd been in a long-term relationship for about two years. Like the Dogpoet, I don't know the exact occasion, either.
47. No virus or cancer carries any innate moral component; how we deal with it presents some interesting questions, but no one is a moral failure for having a biological condition, whether it's a cancer, an addiction, or this little monster.
48. Despite that brave declaration, I still let my body's nonstandard fat percentage and hairiness get me down.
49. John asked me yesterday if I was losing weight.
50. I'm wearing a pair of wool Old Navy pants which John bought before we met. They're still one of the best-looking garments we own.
51. One of the best things about being in a same-sex relationship is your wardrobe may double.
52. We still have way too many clothes in our closet waiting to be mended, drycleaned, or to fit us after one of us loses some weight.
53. John has much better fashion sense than I do.
54. I'm sorry I missed this summer's road trip season. There are several nearby highways I still haven't gotten around to driving.
54. I know a lot about California history. After having lived in San Diego, Sonoma, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco, can it have been any other way?
55. I had an interest in genealogy drilled into me as a kid; I'm sure my ongoing unhealthy interest in British royal history has something to do with this.
56. I don't actually still read alt.talk.royalty.
57. If I believed in a grand design, I'd have to wonder about falling in love with an adoptee who knows next to nothing about his biological family tree, not much about his adopted one, but who stays in closer contact with his family than I do.
58. My next project may be helping John obtain official tribal membership.
59. He's not a morning person. I am. This is not what he signed up for.
60. I know I've written this before, but it's buried deep in the archives, so it bears repeating: John and I met thru the personals. He was "an 80s music freak looking for someone who's not a dork." I'd just gone by myself to an 80s dance night at the now-defunct Club Trocadero, and had just determined that I wasn't going to date outside my musical taste (last whiffs of that John-Cusack-in-High-Fidelity stuff mentioned above.) We first laid eyes on each other on a four-way blind date at Just Desserts on Church Street. Every time we were drawn from our own conversation into broader tablewide talk, we couldn't wait to talk to each other again. As we parted that first night, I kissed him on the cheek. He tells me he told his friend, "That's my next boyfriend."
61. (I'm typing this at the front desk of the Cute Victorian Hotel Around the Corner, and a very attractive German couple, who are apparently the tour guides of a large group staying here, just came down carrying the most extraordinary box of candy, and cleaned me out of local maps. They stood here, tracing the cable car routes auf Deutsch, and munching Gummi Baren and Cadbury chocolate. Strange.)
62. I'm not particularly fond of gummi bears.
63. My grandmother, however, has a manic sweet tooth, especially for chocolate. I think that if it were an effective delivery system, and if she could stand needles, she'd mainline Hershey's syrup
64. I do like chocolate, but I think I fall more into the salty-crunchy category.
65. And cheese. Sean, Jessica and I used to have "There's no such thing as too much cheese" as our mantra. It got to the point where we'd be making a lasagna together, and Jess would be sprinkling the mozzarella, look up quizzically to see if we thought she'd overdone it, and we'd just look at each other and laugh.
65. Unlike Bevin, I'm left-handed, love all seafood except for tuna, salmon, and the more exotic sushis, and own no body glitter. One of these will need to be changed very soon.
66. I have a weird aversion to the South, even though I've never been there in this life except to change planes in Atlanta and Dallas, and one long weekend spent in Knoxville, Tennessee. Rereading The Witching Hour last week did reignite an interest in New Orleans, I guess. I have an odd idea that NOLA isn't the South in the same way that San Francisco isn't California.
67. Also, in W.I., I'd forgotten how much Anne Rice used that book to rid San Francisco from her soul. I've never heard anyone refer so often to sunny California as "cold."
68. John's contention regarding Californians vs. East Coasters is that the former are warm on the outside, but cold on the inside, while the latter are the reverse. I'm not convinced, but then, I wouldn't admit to something like that, now would I?
69. Huhhuhhuh, I just typed "69."
70. Besides, Rochester is closer to Cleveland than it is to New York City, so how would he know? (I just pissed him off by writing that.)
71. Cleveland is further east than Atlanta, though...
72. When I was a kid, I knew all the world capitals. I'm still pretty good, but the republics of the former Soviet Union, and such newfangles places like Eritrea, still mess me up.
73. I think it's interesting that one of the oldest Italian restaurants in San Francisco recently closed, and the space now holds an Ethiopian, or Eritrean, eatery. Mussolini must be rolling over in his grave.
74. There are lots of Eritreans in San Francisco, including one sharp middle-aged woman in my year at law school.
75. There are at least three Iranians in my class as well. They get shit all the time from the more established communities of color for being "white." Oh, really? If the coalition of the black and Latino student groups on campus has named itself the Third World Caucus (a name I didn't understand until I realized the Third World isn't a place; it's a state of mind), then precisely where DO people from the Arab and Muslim worlds belong? What if my boyfriend, half-Native American, attended?
76. Let's not even discuss the campus Queer Caucus (no one else does), or why International Woman's Day (gee, a whole day!) was totally ignored last term.
77. Sheesh, some of that sounded bitter. I get a little crazy when paintbrushes paint too broadly.
78. Especially when I'm doing the painting.
79. Great discussion last night in in my Critical Legal Studies class, about a little thing called human nature. Readings from James Madison, Sigmund Freud and Martin Luther King informed the discussion. From a grid the instructor put on the board, it turns out I fall right in the middle of the Plastic/Fixed-Hawk/Dove axis. In other words, people are somewhat aggressive, and somewhat loving, and somewhat malleable, and somewhat unchangeable.
80. (I was feeling very hawkish this morning as I stumbled into work at 7 ayem, and was plunged into a very busy front desk. Did I say I was a morning person? Lies, all lies.)
81. The Critical Legal theorist Duncan Kennedy writes that the conflict in human nature between hawkishness and dovishness is the essential conflict. In a fairly well-known Crit piece, he and my Contracts professor from last year debate whether this conflict is real or illusory. While I think I agree with Kennedy, I'm proud to have had one of CLS's progenitors as a professor.
82. I had one of anthropology's leading lights as a prof at UCSB, a man who later was condemned for basically breaking the Star Trek Prime Directive.
83. I'm a stealth Trekkie; I know an awful lot of Trek arcana, but you'd never catch me at a convention. Some pleasures I prefer to keep solitary.
84. I don't have particularly exotic taste in television: current faves right now include "The West Wing," "Six Feet Under," "Sex and the City," and "Buffy." Further afield, John and I spend a lot of time on the Food Network, BBC America, the music channels, and I could watch C-SPAN for hours if John didn't start squirming in his chair.
85. We had digital cable installed last week. The installer was this young, straight, black guy from Vallejo with whom I had a long and edifying conversation about Kylie Minogue. Strange.
86. The city of Vallejo is a mostly blue-collar community north of San Francisco. My grandmother is a frequent visitor to the Kaiser Permanente hospital there. It was named for General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, who, among other things, founded my hometown, which is not called Vallejo.
87. Sonoma has streets named Mariano and Guadalupe, but none named Vallejo.
88. The town next to Vallejo was named Benicia for Gen. Vallejo's wife's middle name; her first name, Francisca, was already taken (or close enough) by a burgeoning burg to the south of which you may have heard.
89. Are you sick of this line of facts yet?
90. In a double ceremony sometime in the 1860s, Vallejo's daughters, Natalia and Jovita, married Attila and Arpad Haraszthy, sons of the founder of California's commercial wine industry. This wedding is reenacted annually at Mission San Francisco Solano during Sonoma's Vintage Festival. In this pageant, I've played a ring-bearer, a guest, and, once, one of the grooms. (My friend John and I could never decide which of us got to be Attila.)
91. My understanding of the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. takeovers of California wasn't informed by notions of genocide until I was an adult. I just thought the stories were COOL.
92. "Confidence taken in by a suntan and a grin" (Part 1): I just found out I'd been considered for Employee of the Quarter during my previous period of employment here at the hotel, but I hadn't worked here long enough. Gosh, another ambition foiled.
93. "Confidence..." (Part 2): One of my fellow law students, one I don't know well, greeted me the other day and said I was the kindest student at the school.
94. I don't know whether to be flattered or to wonder what's being put in San Francisco's water.
95. I just engaged in a frustrating and amusing mangled-Spanish dialogue with a non-English-speaking guest. I think we communicated. (But how do you say "telephone call" en espanol?! Something "...de telefono.") I managed to avoid the old mistake of raising my voice to make myself understood, and so did he.
96. Two years of college Spanish not quite down the drain.
97. Almost anything tastes better with a dash of cilantro.
98. Bottles of beer on the wall.
99. It has taken me over a week to finish this list.
100. Procrastination, or nothing left to say? Either way, here it is, ending with a thud.]

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