other 3999 pictures of gaultier haute couture available upon request

This picture should simultaneously illustrate that I live in a city, that I like dramatic neon neo-noir stylings, and the below paragraph.

(A brief caveat—I am evidently awful at taking pictures.  When trying to pull pics for this post I had nothing of like my friends or family or actual scenic landmarks buuuuut I did have like a hundred blurry shots of various art exhibits and things I guess I found really funny/cool at some point but are utterly nonsensical to me now.  So bear with me.)

View from Twin Peaks, which is where I live.

So four months ago I moved to San Francisco with the help of my dad.  This is an update since then.

This is my awesome Dad; we are on Coit tower.

I love this city.  This city is perfect.  It’s a city of hills, of pitching and lurching your way from point to point.  The trees are enormous and twisted and dark green.  Every night the sea fog rolls in, roiling and dense like smoke.  

This is right when it starts--it literally rolls in, tumbling and tangible and enveloping everything.  Also, FREEZING.

It’s always the perfect amount of chilly, always, even in summer.  The architecture is narrow pastel stucco and wood and neo-Victorian.  People wear trenchcoats and tights.  There is non-traditional gender presentation.  Basically tripping over coffee shops and small bookstores walking everywhere.  The food.  McSweeney’s.  The weird store next to McSweeney's with the disconcertingly large back room full of carnivorous plants. 

McSweeney's small press offerings: basically like porn for me.

There is everything to do here all the time.  There’s German film festivals and readings and performance art and like 8 operas a year.  (I’m going to Moby Dick for my birthday; am reaaaaallly excited for the next Ring Cycle.)  Cindy Sherman downtown like it's no thing; across the city, Man Ray and Lee Miller.  Everything all the time everywhere. Whatever.

"We will not become what we mean to you."

Did not have time to find out what these ladies were doing, but they had dresses and popcorn and next to them a girl band was playing lesser-known tracks off of "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars," and if that isn't an afternoon well-spent then I don't know what is.

When I moved here, I lived next to a modernist cathedral outside Japantown.  Now, I live in Twin Peaks, so I can make David Lynch jokes to myself as well as live on a hill above the Castro with an amazing view, when not surrounded by mist like a Silent Hill game.  (Were there enough pop culture references in that sentence; I have more.)

Next door-neighbor for the summer

I love my job.  It is stressful as an extremely stressful thing but it is interesting and engaging and will remain so.  Consulting is a trippy, trippy industry.

Here's my business card balanced on my dresser though.  In case you need any consulting.  I'm in the SaaS practice, which is pronounced "sass" so I just tell everyone I'm a sass consultant.

I’ve traveled a bit since I’ve been here:

·      CHICAGO, PART 1: In a suburb in a corporate compound made out of a renovated Catholic girl’s school.  Everyone lived on top of each other in little cruiseship cabin rooms going through four weeks or training while the European management consultants breezed in and out for their four-day courses.  Weekly movie-night was always and seemingly without irony something like “Wall Street” or “Limitless”—I’m surprised they didn’t like play “Gattaca” with the last ten minutes cut out or something.

I have no pictures from Chicago part one except for like ten of this deer I found on a run and one hundred from the art museum--here's one of Chicago part 2.

·      SACRAMENTO: Shock when I got out of the car and realized it was actually summer.  Saw beloved long-lost cousin and fam—HELD A BABY.

·      CHICAGO, PART 2: More training, downtown this time.  Going out every night to museums and restaurants.  The architecture was amazing. Once I got lost in a horrible underground road complex walking home and I was terrified until I realized it was where they filmed the Dark Knight Joker-chasing-Harvey-Dent-in-his-truck scene, and then I was actually still terrified but also kind of jazzed.

Me on the Sears tower skywalk thing looking like I just had my wisdom teeth out.

·      PROVO, PART 1: Stopover from Chicago part 2.  Fun but brief; saw the girls at least.

My babies.

·      CARSON CITY: Amazing drive, did anyone actually know Lake Tahoe was that beautiful.  Best hike and conversation ever with Dana, also best casino food and popsicles.  OF COURSE NO PICTURES because I am the worst.

I do have like FOUR THOUSAND pictures from the Gaultier exhibit though.

·      PROVO, PART 2: Recruiting.  Stressful but glorious.  Reflected on how much more fun it was to drive up the hill to the alumni center in my comped rental than biking up the hill in the rain, exhausted and miserable, which is what I had been doing exactly one year ago.  Saw more friends and fam and that was lovely.  Ended up in a cabin in the dark telling scary stories which always ends well, psychically. 

Sarah and Sarah, besties from home, visited and we did everything from Redwoods to surrealist photography exhibits to watching/giggling about “Sherlock” all night.  In two weeks I am going to Cleveland with my mum and some just crazy awesome ladies to Bouchercon, this mystery-writers conference.

Two years ago I went with my mom to Bouchercon in San Francisco.  It was the first time I had ever been, and I liked it well enough to ask to live here.

The heroine from one of my most formative reading experiences is after all from this city.

And I am still in the process of settling in, getting into a groove with my job, and getting to know the city.  And trying to write a book.  Oh my goodness that stupid book.

But anyways.

Last year was a very, very hard year in my life which has included some hard times.  Recruiting this time was especially trippy—this time last year I was miserable and frantic and tagging along with my brother to info sessions.  I had no idea my life could improve so much in such a short time.  I am really really happy right now although it kind of terrifies me to write that because I am superstitious and it seems to be inviting disaster but oh well.

I'll just end with a creepy picture of me at a concert--see how happy I am.

what.

this is me after this week.

(I know all that metal and leather is a pretty loose definition of business casual but I feel like I pulled it off.)

Okay so.

I don't even know where to start.

I moved to San Francisco.  This is a large dense sensory overload of a place with an ocean and flowers all over and all sorts of people.  I have a nice place with cool roommates and with an amazing view of all the sea fog rolling in in the evening.  I have HBO in my room.  (TRUE BLOOD why didn't anyone tell me.)

I have this awesome job where you're just expected to figure things out and work on your own which suits me just fine.  I have clever coworkers and my office is both right in the middle of the financial district and a ten-minute commute.  My first day they handed me a laptop and my corporate expense card came today.  I am the only humanities-type major in like a two-mile radius which we'll see how that goes.  With all they're spending on me, I know that they kind of own my soul but I realized a while ago my soul is not actually that expensive so this is a mutually advantageous relationship.

The seafood is amazing.

But then so also I'm shipping off for Chicago for a month in five days for some sort of consultant-camp.

I have a long weekend so I'll post more coherent/cogent things then but I'd just thought I'd do a brief update.

every prophet in her house

I went to Utah among other things, and it was more than lovely, but I'm still thinking about all that so I'll post about it later.

I did get this guy though.

But while I was there at a bachelorette party, Angie read my Tarot, which ultimately led to a creepy box arriving in the mail for me.

This is a lady who knows what's up.

(She did not mention this box in her reading, rather she suggested I chill the eff out, which, touché, Tarot.)

So this box.  Sometimes modern existence will offer up these little dark-mirror microcosm moments that let you see aspects of yourself a little too clearly.  These moments could be Netflix strongly insisting that prominents category of film in your life are like Dark Twisted Pervy Comedic Thrillers with Emotionally Unhealthy Relationships or Foreign Cartoons with Hilariously Weird Dubs.  Or like anytime you look at your Tumblr in its holistic form. 

My last moment like this came a couple days ago when I received a box from Amazon in the mail.  It included:

1. Leather Lotion for all my million leather things I don’t take care of properly.

2. A box set of all the Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski collaborations, because my thing for German things is getting out of control as of late.

3. Rider-Waite Tarot deck

4. A book about the Tarot based on the Rider-Waite Tarot deck so I can actually read said deck.

It all came at the same time which I was not expecting, but then was super happy about because you could really package and market that box as Activity Kit for a Creepy Evening.

Which is exactly what I used it for.

I’ve always wanted to learn Tarot.  It’s a fun trick.  It’s pretend magic.  It’s all archetypal and Kabbalistic and arcane in the original sense of arcane.   It’s probably the only card trick I will ever be able to do because I am clumsy to the point of really not even being able to shuffle, where when I shuffle I still do that thing you did when you were four and had to shuffle cards where you kind of spread them all out like you’re fingerpainting for a while until they look mixed up and then you gather them back up again.  (UPDATE: After some practice, while I am not quite up to maybe sexy Vegas dealer yet I have gotten past four-year-old-with-nerve-damage.  It’s a process.)  

I never learned Tarot as a kid because every time I bought a deck my mother would find it on one of her sweeps of my room and throw it away.  A tack that certainly did its job in quelling my interest, let me tell you.

Also, Tarot in Carnivale.  TAROT IN CARNIVALE.

Why don't they sell these.  WHY.

(Also: Carnivaaaaaaaaaale.  This post took all night to write because I took some time off to watch Carnivale.)

WATCH THIS.  WATCH THIS AND TRY NOT TO BE ENCHANTED, I DARE YOU.

I’m only in like the fifth chapter of my book, which is sadly not enough to tell the future but is enough to feel really pretentious ALREADY and to offer readings to family members, were it not for Tarottes.

I should mention first that my family is to a member neurotic enough that nicknaming compulsions is not even a thing any more.  For instance, the TV Volume Game is the fun game to juggle the various volume controls and consanguineous neuroses so that all possible volume settings are an even number that is also a multiple of five and does not shatter eardrums.

This is not a thing I am making up.

My family has two cats, Clochette and Tiger Lily.  Clochette is a neurotic little half-Siamese sausage of a cat that I don’t have much use for.  Tiger Lily and I, though, are sister spirits.  We both for example suffer from a specific form of Tourettes subnamed Clorettes, because it involves an insatiable urge to mess with Clochette whenever possible. I remember something similar growing up with my placid little brothers—I would poke, tease, whatever just to mess up their equilibrium.  But so another form of Tourettes is sweeping my family that could be subnamed Tarottes.

Practicing readings with my family has been really fun, but some of them are not as interested in readings as “accidentally” touching my cards.

One of the (admittedly loose) rules of Tarot is that you do not let anyone touch your cards because the energy gets all polluted.

Once I mentioned this, everyone seemed to develop a new purpose in life, with that good old Tuckfield single-mindedness you may know so well. 

I fended them off pretty well.  Shockingly, it was ultimately Tiger Lily that betrayed me.

Traitor.  And your namesake was so honorable.

Now my cards are all polluted with kitten energy.

This was going to be the whole blogpost because it's late and while I was going to post about, oh, all the things that have happened in the past month (which important things I never talk about, ugh) I got distracted by Tarot and spent most of the now-early-morning looking up Carnivale clips and teaching myself the Celtic Cross.

But since my cards were already tinged with Kitten Energy, I decided to break another loose rule of Tarot and decided to do a reading for myself.

Here is the one with all the cards:

And here’s the one with the Major Arcana which is more fun because the pictures are more fun and the whole thing is more dramatic:

The first two cards are the sun and the moon.

Like these guys but less intense, because, Rider-Waite.

Like the general trend for all my readings which means the general trends of my thoughts/subconscious is that this is going to be a dramatic clean break.  I am going to have to let go of a lot of the authoritative and often damaging figures/experiences/institutions in my life and let go what they do/will think about me.  I need to calm down and stop trying to control every aspect of my existence and just let things happen.  Most of all I need to trust the validity of my own feelings and experiences, and that will help me get to some sort of integration and complete un-fragmented non-cognitive-dissonant self.

Basically and in short, chill the eff out.

(Thanks, Angie.  You lovely psychic lady, you.)

Fun fact: I have loved this time in Austin. 

Like concerts with cute guys.

It has given me time to regroup and reconnect and redefine, etc.

Like go to friends' weddings where we all rocked out to Pulp and Blur like we did when we were 15.

Or end up at surprise jazz concerts in art museums.

Or collaborate on comics about Norse gods for indie publications.  (Hint: I did not do the drawing part.)

 But I am more than feeling that this time is over.  I’m swirling into old patterns and getting sucked down by drowning people who don’t want to be saved.

And at some point you have to admit that you can’t save them against their will, and the most you can do is keep yourself from getting pulled under.

In short, although I love my family, my friends, and Austin, I really am excited there are only two more weeks.

Even those these hills are two minutes behind my house.

Also, but so now we're getting down to the wire I am a little panicked. 

Because holy crap.  Do they know my major was only 30 credits and is kind of made up anyway?  That my last book I read was a comic book?  That the only things on my Kindle are Nabokov and Grant Morrison and the Mighty Boosh?

Like, I got that letter from the Dean that all humanities graduates get, and it went on and on about my increased sensitivity and sophistication and understanding I should have now for the world, and when I read it I was literally eating chocolate chips for lunch and watching cartoons in my Sherlock Holmes pajamas.  

The sophisticated face of BYU liberal arts graduates.  Totally not wearing Nightmare Before Christmas pants or anything. There is not an old film noir on right now either.  I'm not making a weirdly twee face because I have this thing about smiling in pictures.

(And to think that lady from BYU's gender-based complaints department thought I couldn't understand sarcasm!!)

 I might like pin The World card up, or something, to remember to calm down.

halftime show

Above me and to the left is a Norwegian poster for Deathly Hallows asking HVEM DØR? but obviously me and my currently tragic haircut are more interesting.

OK SO.

This is a blogpost in list form, the third-best form for a blogpost.

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN MY LIFE:

--Running a lot.

--Working at Dillards to save up money to move to San Francisco.

--Working on a book, because who isn’t.

--Oh man, it’s so much fun doing that, though.  But not as much fun as this next one.

--Working on a comic with a friend.

--Found a place in SF.

--Living in limbo, I guess.

--At least SXSW is next week.

--Reading a lot of blogs of people whose writing ability I am just experiencing a jealousy manifesting as physical pain over.

WHAT I DID YESTERDAY:

--Dismembered like one hundred mannequins.

--Almost beat a mannequin to death with her own arms because I could not get the stupid arm magnets to connect who even designed those mannequins I looked like the Dillards Juniors Department Serial Killer.

Bits strewn about like I was getting a made-for-tv movie based on me.

--More importantly: Saw Love Never Dies, the sequel to Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

 Which featured the sexy Phantom/Christine thumb war.
(That's about how high stakes it was, honestly.)
(God I loved it.)

THOUGHTS/QUESTIONS THAT WERE BROUGHT UP WHILE WATCHING LOVE NEVER DIES, MORE OR LESS IN ORDER:

--Did my eleven-year old self write this.  No seriously.

--Are they singing a walk of shame song. 

--Are Phantom and Christine the worst parents ever?

--It sure is nice Phantom has integrated into society so well that he I guess stopped being a psychotic serial killer (albeit a very sexy one) and is I guess the only viable romantic option?

--The many failings of this play raise some interesting questions about the strengths and weakness of a proper Gothic romance and Kantean aesthetics concerning the sublime (REDACTED BECAUSE SPOILER THEY ARE NOT INTERESTING QUESTIONS TO ANYONE BUT ME.)

--Holy crap I love freaky dark carnivals.  I LOVE THEM THE MOST.

THE MOST.

--Seriously worst parents ever.

--DID THIS PLAY JUST TURN INTO LAW AND ORDER: PHANTOM OF THE OPERA INTENT.

--How much of my life would I dedicate into getting Law and Order: POTOI to happen?  All of it, probably.  Obviously.

If I were more dedicated I would have posted Goren with a photoshopped phantom mask, but instead there's this.

This picture is the whole play summed up.

THINGS PHANTOM HAD IN HIS PERSONAL LIFE THAT I WAS QUITE ENVIOUS OF OTHER THAN THE ABILITY TO LOOK GOOD IN A SUIT AND A COOL MASK:

--A creepy little goth son he did not even have to deal with till the kid was old enough to watch himself

--A freaky cabaret carnival that he was the owner and artistic director of.

--A dramatic room to swoop around in and write stuff, and cry, I guess.

--Just like every member of the gender he was attracted to violently attracted to him

--An awesome wardrobe.

DOES THIS SILLY POST HAVE A POINT:

Kind of.

WHAT IS IT THEN.

Utah was a bit of a warzone for me.  Recently, on the same day, I found out about two things:  The Randy Bott being a racist (and by logical extension of his imbecilic argument, misogynist) thing going public—although I guess if I’m understanding correctly, that sort of thing had been going on in his classes for years.  That fact--and the fact that he went public--are being swept under the rug, as far as I can tell.  (I'm not talking about the church here, they released a statement which was great.  I'm talking about the public response of the religion faculty.)


This doesn’t surprise me, because that day I got the results back on my complaint about my sexist expletive of a religion professor—the investigator had talked to a bunch of his other students, and they found his “unconventional personality” and “sarcasm” charming, so, they were closing the complaint.  (Because, as you know, if there are two things that I just cannot wrap my mind around, it's sarcasm and anything unconventional.)  This is, I would argue, the tip of the cliché iceberg for all sorts of institutionalized crap in a few different institutions those guys were representing.

Seriously I was incandescent for an hour, there.  (With rage, obv., which is my go-to emotion.  My little black dress of emotion.)  Like white-hot-destructive-anger-of-the-Erinyes upset, which happens every so often. This is due to some good reasons, but that doesn’t make it any more reasonable or easy.

But then I realized it doesn’t (more or less) matter for me any more.  I never have to deal with those people or institutions ever again.  And it’s not giving up—it’s making a life for myself where those things and people have no power.

Choose your battles, and all that.

UGH that’s getting cheesy.  So but IN SHORT:

The new plan is to move to San Francisco and just love it and somehow in the course of my life acquire and head up a freaky-cabaret-burlesque and have a real live lair to write in and a bunch of handsome genius gentlemen friends, and we can all swoon over each other.  In costume.

Spiky spindly costume.

Anyway, that’s how I will be measuring personal deep-inner-self-instantiating success from now on.  

Why did I come to this conclusion while watching the worst/best musical ever?  Because that's the kind of sophisticate I am.

keep on your mean side

 AAAHHH.

Saw the Kills on Wednesday—Alison Mosshart is a goddess that I either want to become or marry or both, jury’s out.  It was my first show back home, and come to think of it my first real show since like Arcade Fire which is a little depressing. 

There was 100% more Mostly if Not All Black and Leather outfits (which percentage I was contributing to) than the Arcade Fire show, and 67% more Cigarettes Being Smoked that Did Not Just Contain Tobacco, which I was secondhand partaking of because what use is a concert if you are not going to be in front, in the crush of people and the haze of smoke.

From which vantage point you can take one thousand terrible phone pictures because you are the one person without a proper camera.

Alison was of course an amazing if weirdly shy performer.  Like she would make eye contact and kind of interact with the audience—but mostly she would just dance and convulse and headbang in her own feverish little sphere.  She hardly spoke at all.  Jamie Hince, however, would play his guitar with this stance and this weird thousand-mile wide-eyed glassy stare like Javier Bardem in No Country and then after I thought that I couldn’t even take him seriously.

Jamie is on the left TELL ME I AM WRONG.

It was fun being back downtown—fun seeing Red River and Seventh, all the fauxglam hipster divebars.  Also I saw people I haven’t seen in EVER which was the best.

In other news I am having tremendous difficulty getting any sort of motivation back.  The last couple of years' crazy workload has been fueled by this really nihilistic self-loathing slash self-destructive streak that I wasn't happy about at the time, but at least I got stuff done.  Now that I’m happy about life I just eat ice cream and watch Law and Order: Criminal Intent with my mom and NOTHING GETS DONE.

Nothing.  Here's a half-hearted running picture.  I walked this.  That's how lazy I am now.

This obviously has got to stop if I’m not to move to San Francisco with nothing to show for the last few months but an enormous butt and a really good Detective Goren impression.  

The key is to turn sideways.

Which impression the enormous butt helps, actually, if I’m imitating post-fifth-season Goren, BUT IT’S NOT WORTH IT.

YES GOREN YOU SHOULD LOOK HURT I AM CALLING BOTH OF US FAT.

OH speaking of being inappropriately happy (which I was, right?) I’ve started the complaint process for that one creepy misogynist professor. Which I have all sorts of feelings about but I’m gonna wait till it’s all done before I talk about it more.

But hopefully it will all turn out great because revenge is justified if it's for the greater good, right?

Here's one last picture to head out on because I have a thousand of these.

meanwhile at stately wayne manor

This is just part of my usual jog.  Whatever.  

Austin.  Austin Austin Austin.  Have I mentioned it's the best?  It's the best.  Bands tour here.  The Drafthouses are here.  Town Lake is here.  Non-traditional gender and identity presentations are here.  There is more than one coffee shop per capita here.  Everything is here!

Seriously though at the risk of sounding really overdramatic I feel like I can like breathe freely here in a way that was not an option in Provo.

Did I mention our art deco power plant?  I should use another image where you can like actually see it but I took this one so deal with it.

So that last week of school was pretty insane for reasons that I will probably talk more about when it's all resolved slash I get my diploma in the mail so I know absolutely nothing can go wrong.  It involves a super-misogynistic professor and some weird power trips where he tried to, in his words, "teach me a lesson."  What a non-creepy charmer!!!!  Luckily, one of my superpowers is writing cutting correspondence.  Hopefully some formal complaints will make a dent.

This was at the bus stop.  SHORTS THAT DON'T COME TO YOUR KNEE??  YOU DIRTY SLUT.  Have some respect for yourself, as modeled by your invasive and judgmental friends.

That was the weird thing about BYU.  Like the vast majority of my experience was really positive and I had opportunities that I wouldn't have had anywhere else (wonderful wonderful friends and mentors and that stupid thesis and all sorts of things like that) but there were some decidedly weird undercurrents going on.

Stuff like this, of course, supersedes all that other crap.

But anyways.  What I have mostly done since I was home was chill the eff out.  This last year was one of the hardest ones of my life and I didn't quite realize the toll that it had taken.  Since I have been home I have done absolutely zero constructive things.

Except pose four of my siblings as the ice skating princesses they are.

What I have done, is I have gone ice skating.

Bradford is freaked out, since I have obviously unwittingly skated into a version of The Grudge starring Sophie.

I have been driven to a tiny Texas town by a closet barbecue connoisseur where we went to what was essentially a smokehouse and were served pounds of meat pulled from firepits in crumpled paper bags and I was convinced that some meat does not in fact need sauce and I ate one hundred pounds of pickles.

Everything was smoky and charred.  See those wooden crates?  That's where they'd pull your meat from.

Because that's where the fire was.

This was our wadded bag of crumpled meat and sausage and white bread.  Also, the most delicious thing ever.

There is a Hook showing and accompanying "feast"at the Drafthouse to which I am bringing everyone and I will be sorely disappointed if they don't give us empty pots at first so I can say PETER YOU'RE PLAYING WITH US in a creepy little-boy voice when they finally give us the food, which is from the movie if you didn't know, I'm not just being creepy.

"Don't try to stop me, Smee" is another family quote.

I have started jogging in earnest, because that's what happens when all you do when you get home is eat Nutella and Christmas candy and watch emotionally exploitative TLC reality dramas and police procedurals.  You gain ten pounds in three weeks.  That is a true thing.  So you run all the time because all the clothes you got for Christmas that fit you two weeks ago do not fit now.

This is literally a three-and-a-half-foot-tall vulture watching me run.  He obviously has zero faith in me.  Joke's on him, though, I didn't collapse till I got home!

I have also gotten a dinky job as a hostess at a restaurant, which is one step closer to my weird fantasy of working as a hostess at a Japanese superhero theme bar.

I have outlined a YA novel that I should be able to have a solid draft of written by the time I leave for SF in April.

And that is pretty much all, other than like the holidays.

I do miss Provo a million times more than I thought--or rather, the people in Provo.  I keep seeing fun things to do, and keep thinking "OH I HAVE TO TELL (Insert Provo person's name here)!" and then I realize they're a thousand miles away and I can't see them, and I get sad.  I also just miss seeing everyone and doing fun things.

I mean velociraptors do not glitter themselves.

But, I'll see everyone again soon, in April! I hope.  Nobody go anywhere.