Lots happening, none fit for print.

Just got back from four days in El Paso.

Would you believe El Paso finally has a craigslist? Moving up in the world.

Went down for my mother's book release party. Since the warehouse was behind schedule there was no book until after the party, but oh well. I'm going down again next month for her first book signing.

Got a call back from a prospective employer -- can you believe it? There's a story there but it's utterly unfit for print. Need to request transcripts be sent to TVI so I can enroll in something other than their basic freshman courses. I've got the information that I need to do it but it's a major pain in the ass. UTEP is so bloody backwards. They have an online form you can use to request a transcript, but they won't actually send it 'til you print it out and send it in. What gives? Of course finding "transcripts" on their website is a joke -- a bad one. There's no search feature, you just have to find "transcripts" in the loooooong drop-down menu with everything the university does or has or offers listed alphabetically. I'm surprised they know how to spell "transcript".

I smell funny. Another story there, unfit for print. Seem to be having a lot of those these days. Think I'll go to a munch event tonight unless I get an email back saying don't bother. Anyhow enough rambling for now. Be well.

Good tired.

Tired from working. Yes, working. Seven hours at fifteen an hour. Got paid today for it too. Yay. Lovely estate in Corrales with a great view of the mountains. Got called back on a dumb job with lousy pay but will likely wind up putting off calling them back 'til Charles goes off to Argentina, drying up the well-paid work.

Looks like the bar raid story's becoming a nice little scandal.

Problem/Solution.

Problem: I've gotta save my money, but I've gottta go online, too.

Solution: park outside the Flying Star and use the wireless internet with the laptop on top of my lap.

Not bad. Not great, but not bad. Not thrilled at idling the engine like this but it's HOT.

Interviewed today at UNM Hospital for a barista position. Pays seven bucks an hour for thirty hours a week. Not great, but not bad. I think I'm gonna just hope that works out and do delivery or landscaping or something in the meantime to tie me over while the paperwork goes through HR -- it's the same application and process they use in hiring nurses and doctors. I like the hours. Regular schedule I can schedule my classes around. I like the benefits. I like the work. I like the people I'll be working with. That's all I need. Sign me up!

The bar scene's quieted down again so I am out of it. About time. No one's hardly tallking anymore about the Wednesday night raids. And litigation's pending. Voice is gonna do a story. No reason for me to stick around and spend money I do not have in the meantime. May have to do this laptop on top of the lap thing again tonight since I've made one more applicatioon through email on a job from craigslist. Battery's overheating so I'm gonna go.

I do not like the library.

Yes. I admit it. Albuquerque's library is the first I've ever used that I really don't like.

Getting into it is near impossible. The card catalog search interface sucks. You find the book you're looking for only to discover it's only at the branch clear across town. It smells funny. Of course some branches are much better than others, these bitchy complaints refer to the downtown main library. Maybe things'll get better with the construction and the splitting up of the catalogue in the works. I've been spending most of the last half hour waiting for pages to time out. Sucks.

Dog tired.

Spent all day in court today for the arraignments of two bartenders then wrote a long damn email about it to someone I think can help to spread the sense of outrage that's already felt among us.

'nuff said. There's litigation pending.

Stonewall on the mother road.

Yesternight extremely weird.

Even for Albuquerque.

Decided to go to Foxes for a drink or two, since I do after all have an application sorta languishing there. Last minute, on seeing the parking lot situation, decided to stop in at the Ranch first.

Service was freindly but slow. Only one bartender. No problem, I'll sit and read the alibi. About ten minutes later I get a beer and take two sips when I realise the one bartender they had on hand's no longer there at all. I guess he's in the back or something. Hm. Wonder who that is in a flack jacket with a sidearm coming up behind the bar and answering the telephone. Doesn't look like a security guard. Oh, APD. Vice Squad. Nice. What's that he's announcing? Oh, they're shutting the place down. Better go and spread the word. I guzzle down my beer and head right out to Foxes, two blocks West. They're trundling the bartender off in handcuffs out in front of everybody just as I leave. The lights cannot change fast enough; I'm on a mission.

Alex, the doorman at Foxes, asks for my ID, even though he knows me. Good for him. I tell him they may get really busy quite soon, since Vice just shut down the Ranch. Them too, he says? Yes, them too -- wait, what do you mean, did they get AMC? Yeah they shut down AMC just about 45 minutes ago, arresting one of Albuquerque's best loved bartenders.

I settle in to Foxes and winds up long story short the cops raided every single gay bar on Central Avenue last night -- except for Foxes. Sid manages the bar with grace and skill under the pressure of an imminent set up which if allowed to occur would have sent him to jail, cost him five thousand bucks and his job, and the bar ten thousand. If you didn't know the cops were rounding up the queers, you wouldn't figure out from his demeanour. Alex keeps out the undercover, underage creep with his two fake IDs who went in before the uniformed officers at the other three bars. How he manages this is a minor miracle of fast detective work, but I'm not about to give away his secrets.

AMC got shut down.

Ranch got shut down.

Pulse got to stay open because they had more than one bartender, even though that's far and away the youngest and usually busiest (supposedly) gay bar in town. Utterly arbitrary -- in terms of stopping underage drinking, the one place besides Foxes they didn't shut down was the obnoxious twink bar. Of course, may have something to do with the fact that 90% of the people there aren't really gay. Do you think?

Nice to know these some three and a half decades after Stonewall we're still targets for selective police harassment. It's a sobering reminder of the depths of hatred for "the other" that man alone among the animals is capable of conceiving against his fellow man.

Foxes they didn't shut down because we wouldn't let 'em. We were ready and waiting, right up 'til last call.

What a memorable night! Just like an Irish pub. The energy was palpable. Waves of simultaneous, ecstatic laughter rolling through the whole establishment: once, twice, three times. We're all in this together. All these guys who so often don't look at or talk to eachother, who might not give eachother time of day in some cases, who stereotype eachother only slightly less severely than they stereotype themselves, everybody serves some purpose in this -- thing. This "situation". Feelings ran high the whole damn night. Intense awareness, panoramic. Total, complete respect for and from everyone who had a clue. Hell, even for the clueless out of towner who wandered in late and had no idea what went on -- his little slight, his self-absorbed manner amused us.

Midnight came in. He left. The much loved bartender from AMC might have to find a new job but he isn't gonna spend the night in jail.

Of course I'm spreading the word about this any way that I can. Haven't written a letter to the alibi yet, but likely will. I can't forget in the attendant euphoria of cameraderie that last night was a homophobic outrage on the part of *our* police department.

Thanks to Flem for the Felix cartoons. My god, they're all silent! Sorry I haven't said so sooner but between last night and the job search and goodness knows what else kind of coming out of nowhere I really haven't had the time. I do appreciate it.

I really don't want to go to the bars tonight, and really shouldn't, with my finances being what they are, but screw it, if I have to do day labour next week then I just have to and I've got to do my part in keeping abreast of this whole situation. I'm not about to let it be forgotten.

Main Library.

Connected today from the main library. It's free. There's construction going on and getting in is tricky. Parking is free but only for two hours. Not that I couldn't walk the twelve blocks from my house. But I'm lazy. Got a couple of leads off Craigslist and may follow up on either or both of them. Would need to bathe first since it's a go there in person type deal either way. I suppose it wouldn't kill me. The connection's kinda spotty. Hell. Either I stick around here and get frustrated or I go home take a bath and go out to find work. The latter option strikes me as eminently more reasonable at this time. Later.

Gah.

Knew this would happen. Didn't want that damn picture of me on this page, staring goofily out at all who come to look. Just in the profile. No one should have to look at me just to read stuff I write. Took out the link until I figure out a better way to get it to do what I actually want it to do -- show the picture in the profile only, and not on the page. It's not even a very good picture, just the only one I happen to have of myself in digital format.

What did I write about last? Don't remember. Oh yeah. Interviewed yesterday for the job doing website work for that solar energy company I won't give away 'til I know whether I'm hired or not. Job searches bring out my superstitious side, bigtime.

I do think it went well, notwithstanding my getting the address wrong and calling up two minutes early to say "I'm at an empty building, yes, 517 Central, yes, it's gray, but what gives? The door's locked, and there's nobody here." Thank you Albuquerque for having NW, NE, SE, SW, appended to practically every single street name when there's absolutely no reason for it 90% of the time. Longest most confusing street addresses on earth. "Yeah just come up the stairway in the alley behind 1733 7/10 Central Ave SSE and ask the old lady in apartment 4 for the keys to 717A".

If someone else more qualified than me comes along and steals this job from under me (MY job!!! MINE!!!), there's another whole position opening up right now with that same company that I might apply for since at this point I think I would like to work for them in practically any capacity anyway. (If this one job weren't already pending while Kurt interviews those others who applied I'd go ahead and apply for this one as well, both are *that* good a fit. As it is I just have to sit back a few days and hope this one works out and be on the ball enough if it doesn't to apply for the other as soon as I possibly can.) That's what I took away when I attended the Solar Fiesta last year: "this sure is an industry I'd love to work in". Now it's up to me to make it happen!

Please god let the other two people interviewing for the same job smell of gin or get lost worse than I did and not call and show up hours late or better yet not at all. Or let them just happen to break up right before interviewing and walk in in tears. Or let them feel compelled to talk of nothing but how they hated their last boss so much they just wished that he'd die such a horrible death before their very eyes that they could stand over him and laugh in his face while refusing to help. Or let them think it would be "funny" to show up wearing a fish costume, or to "admit" that they work for Harkin Energy and are just trying to learn the competition's secrets. Or let them be 18 with no experience and even less talent.

I want to work for *this* company. I want *this* job, but would be willing and able to do the other just as well.

Of course I can't just come right out and say that, now can I?

Of course not.

I have to walk in with the damn it I'm fantastic and I know it attitude. The attitude I have to work at most days, but this day it just happens to be all over me, in me, and flowing through my every pore. Here's my work and it speaks for itself. The guy looked seriously interested in what I'd done. As it was what small handful of files I did manage to transfer wound up being the exact handful I needed -- a portfolio I could bookmark from Firefox and just go through, this is what I did first, then I did this, then that, then that, and so on. I didn't even finish the whole presentation -- the next thing to be shown was that website with the puppy pictures I didn't want to have to explain -- and he never asked to see the source code. No one but me gives a shit about structure, it seems.

Flem has emerged. Or rather, I have gone into his palace, which he *still* maintains and hosts once a week, can you believe it. He sent me (or someone sent me from the town he lives in) a package which I think's a felix DVD, though I don't really know, because I haven't opened it yet. My thanks go out to him.

It's finally cooled off enough I think I'll head home for the night. May watch that felix DVD, if that is what it is. Being broke sucks. I have to spend money to use the internet here and I'm sure they hate me now because I've gone from eating twelve dollar dinners and tipping two bucks to eating a muffin, drinking water, and tipping the change. Still they don't run me out. I do not understand.

Dead tired & miles to go before I sleep.

Slept 'til eleven.

Drove 268 miles down to El Paso.

Drove ten miles more to get an ethernet cable to transfer stuff from the G3 to the the G4.

Drove ten miles back to find out it won't work, for whatever reason. Apple Talk's not talking to eachother. No wonder network admins make the big money.

Spent six hours uploading examples of my work via FTP to a web server through a slow dialup modem.

Spent about half that time working around the server not wanting to deal with a mac, as a result of which I can't download most of my files.

Found out most of my work's nowhere to be found on the web, and too much of what I'd linked to in my old "what I've done" page is now nothing but dead links. Not a bad thing necessarily except I came down specifically to get it for a job interview I've got tomorrow, and most of it (except that one thing that I did for that one nonprofit group that got in bigtime trouble with the law, and some relatively early stuff I did for that cartoon studio that went out of business) may as well just not be anywhere. Finding it's a needle in the haystack job, and transferring it's about impossible on this short notice.

(Wish I could click my own ads. I want to see what that acupuncture model costs. They're like fifty bucks around here.)

Let's hope the guy I'm interviewing with is vegetarian. Or at least more interested in the source code for certain sites than in their content. Heh! It's gonna be a real smoke and mirrors show, folks! I can hear myself now: "Yeah yeah cute little puppy behind bars whatever nah man you really don't wanna scroll down any further I didn't put him there of course here's what the source looks like man look that HTML structure! See how cleanly the CSS is integrated, from a time when browsers didn't implement CSS at all! Behold the hidden subtlety of typographic design in delivering a message effectively!"

If the guy's the least bit superstitious, or even just a little bit hostile to animals (or activists!) I'm sunk. Either I'm a bad luck black cat and something terrible will happen to his business if I touch his website or I'm a nutcase who should be locked up in Gitmo.

Screw it. I've got to be back up in Albuquerque by noon and will be lucky to sleep three or four hours before the four hour drive back up and then the bath and then the running to the Flying Star to check my email and then the harried phone call and then the interview. It's going to be a very hectic day. I'm down to very little cash. And I mean very, very little. Flying by the seat of my pants. Did find a picture of me I can put in the profile for this journal since I seem to be living rather shamelessly these days.

So much stuff on that old computer. Years of my life, encapsulated. Like archæology. The things that people keep and throw away. Like thrift store and antique store hunting. Too much to hold on too. Too much to throw away. Can't take it all with me. Can't take much of anything from it, in fact. Just have to settle for the moment for the barest of the bare bones in terms of what might get me a job -- with luck, and if the universe is on my side. But it has been before. So what I haven't slept. I've gone without before. Such is existence. Love it.

Must delete one site from public view right now and then transfer that dumb picture of me for this. Then off to get a little sleep. Be well.

Finally off dead center!

A miserably sleepless night last night. Must not drink that much coffee that late in the day even if I am just trying to save my money. Just plain dumb. An excellent reminder, though, why I must not work graveyard: since even just one sleepless night leaves me a bit deranged.

Being up (and deranged) I finally went to TVI and enrolled. (Nineteen months is long enough to use the "I don't know where to park" excuse.) TVI's the community college here. It was a snap. They saw that I was breathing on my own and openly displayed the competency of a crack-addicted snail and boldly let me in. Open enrollment rules. Does wonders for the self-esteem, now anytime anyone asks what I do I can say I am a student. (Beats the long story of why I'm not working right now.) Registration's in about a month. The catalogue -- print version -- comes out this coming Friday.

I've called Southwest Acupuncture College and they say it's not too early to start the application process for Spring if that is what I want to do and that they'll keep my things on file as I get them in one bit at a time. Prospects for admission there look damn good. Prospects of graduationg and passing the state certification exams is the much bigger, longer-term challenge, but I've got three years to get there, which gives me three days to memorise each point on the body. 365 of them, plus a handful of others. Channels and collaterals. Names of each in Chinese and English with alternate names and their numbers in terms of the Channels and their various relationships to eachother. Source points, connecting points, extra points, all that. Internal and external organ relations. States of change -- not "elements" -- though everybody calls 'em that, I guess for shorthand. Tongue diagnosis: easy. Pulse diagnosis: hard. Herbs, maybe two hundred of 'em: in Chinese, Latin, and English. The classic formulations. Needling technique: hold like a tiger.

Can you tell that I'm already into this?

Assuming that I'm fairly competent, patients will not be in too short supply.

More immediately I've got to get a ton of transcripts sent from a bunch of places to a bunch of other places and fill out a FAFSA. Not sure if I qualify for Pell grants this time 'round (I made a killing and lived like a king on restaurant wages all last year) but why not spend an hour and at least possibly save the five hundred bucks tuition for the part I'm just getting out of the way? Goodness knows I'll have plenty to worry about paying for once I get the forty grand in student loans for Acupuncture college all lined up. Not to be tacky but I do hope there's at least a small handful of relatively well-to-do HIV patients out here in the Land of Entrapment so I can focus quite entirely on the work I really want to do. The work I must do. If all I do is clinic work I might be paying this off for many, many years to come. Oh well. If I'm gonna be in debt I'm gonna be in debt but at least I'll have something I can take with me.

Woohoo. I'm getting ready and set just to go into debt on a scale I never imagined possible. The only way I could possibly go deeper would be to buy a house or really, really, really fancy car. The good part is that in theory I'll be making something approaching real money on my own terms when I (good god, that woman uses lots of mustard) set up my practice.

Screaming baby at the next table, damn it. Well at least the mustard-loving grandmother seems to have it under control, more or less. Breeders.

So what am I thinking? Damned if I know. TVI is gonna be a snap. Getting the student loans might be just a bit harder. (Paying them off? Uhm. OK.) Acupuncture college is gonna be the real challenge. And of course I have to get a job of some sort before the next couple of weeks are out.

I sat in this back hallway to be away from the crowd in the big room. But the acoustics in here are far more intense. The music is louder in comparison and then there's that damn stoopid baby. Gawd.

Staff is clearly stressed. Tons of huge trays going out. Busy busy busy. Never seen it like this -- not that I haven't seen it busy, but it's very rare to see signs of a meltdown, here. I guess they're human too. Oh well. Usually everything's perfect. I should have known something was "off" when the fried rice noodles in my salad included one, about a half inch long, which wasn't cooked.

AGH! IMPERFECTION! UNACCEPTABLE!

Finally they left. Glad I'm not them. Having to drag that screaming thing around everywhere and being aware of disturbing everyone else so that you can't even enjoy your meal when you finally contrive to get out of the house with the stinking bundle of diaper with the awkward chubby chunk of you-flesh that can't stand on its own wrapped in it. Tried not to be discourteous to them but between sleep deprivation and all else I'm a bit edgy and I'm sure that it showed. Sorry ladies. Nothing personal, and you actually handled it pretty well, all things considered. Next time you might consider using rubbers.

If this were starbucks studio city, and this were my shift, and it had gone this way with this music, i'd pull the tape now playing and destroy it with a steaming portafilter, burying its remains in the grounds under the bar. the music alone's enough to make the day go wrong for everybody here. it's not a superstition either. it makes the mood. the work rhythms, the dining rhythms have to work together, complement eachother. too much of anything throws something off and everything cascades as the whole restaurant slides down into utter chaos.

my punctuation and capitalization have gone straight down the toilet. i'm loopy.

I much prefer this place at night. Nicer crowd. Lunch people suck. Obnoxious yuppies shouting into cellphones. Does this prick in front of me think I'm impressed that he's using Yahoo mail from Windows?

Great. the crowning touch. That idiotic reggae music.

Now he's looking at some regrow your hair website. Or maybe it's a popup and he's clueless. Or maybe he's selling that product to the overweight pleasant mannered woman he's with for her husband for whom she can no longer feel affection because he's fat and bald and impotent but who she can't leave 'cause he's rich enough to buy one miracle hair restorer cure after another whereas she being a good christian would never think to do anything but be a wife and mother. Or maybe she's in business with him. Looks like some sort of Ponzi scheme to me. I think it's the Amway woman from that Michael Moore film. I don't remember the title. It wasn't looking for big brother grim but it was something like that i believe. Maybe jim where are you. the general motors flint michigan one. you know.

The young woman I ordered my beef salad from was vegetarian. Awkward. Wear it on yer sleeve why dontcha. I used to be as bad with honey.

Ooh. This is fun. Sure am glad I don't have those flashing banners in my email anymore like he does. I bet he thinks I'm jealous, that he's some sort of big shot out impressing everyone. Just white trash with a computer to me. Not like me. I'm a student. Nyaah.

I'm leavin'. This place is buggin' me today and I could use some sleep.

Heaven help me.

I've gone and done it.

The utterly unthinkable.

I've put commercial advertisements on this webpage.

If advertising was good enough for the Harper's Weekly for which Thomas Nast penned his famous Tammany Hall cartoons, they might just be good enough for me, too.

Forgive me. But I'm frankly hurting for money and actually found the whole process of trying the Google adsense thing to be a lot of fun. Much more fun than actually getting out and looking for a job. Not that I expect ever to accrue enough to actually get a check in the mail, but I've gotten so into the whole google thing lately it's freakish. Free webmail I can actually USE! God, I'm grrateful (yes, grrateful) enough for that alone to be willing to whore out 120 x 600 measly pixels worth of my blog, just not to have my emails spontaneously dissapear into the æther every few weeks.

Truth be told, as the author of this site, I actually like it so far. Still have editorial control, including a high degree of control over advertisement content. I chose to do text ads only. No shameless, flashing images of god-only-knows-what for me, thanks. Went in and tweaked the template just a bit to make it fit in better.

Comments and recommendations from whatever reader(s) I have are of course more than welcome.

Am I hopeless? Is this the end of an era? Do the colours work out OK? Does it detract from the site's content? (Be honest.) Are you deeply enough offended by the fact that I would ever even seriously entertain the possibility of doing such a terrible thing that not only will you never read this website again, but, if you ever see me in the street, make a point of spitting in my face before throwing feces from the passing horses at me as I run away in shame and ignominy in order to avoid the jeers, hisses, and impending violence of the madding crowd? Or am I just making too much of this really-not-too-terribly momentous occasion in my personal history of grandiose little websites filled to overflowing with pompous verbosity for teensy-weensy little audiences?

Whoa. Just refreshed -- which according to the Terms of Service I'm really not supposed to (sorry, but at this stage I consider a refresh or two to be legitimate testing) -- in order to check out one of the other colour palettes which I've selected to have rotate. Mind you, I just set this up about twenty minutes ago, and expected to have the PSAs running for several weeks -- but no! Already on the page where I've written about visiting Southwest Acupuncture College (finally figured out how to put links in here too, duh), four of the five links in the sidebar are acupuncture-related, and the fifth has something or other to do with prescription drugs. Damn! Four out of five ain't half bad! And aparently if I'm sufficiently disturbed by a drug company advertising on what I consider to be a page dedicated to Traditional Chinese Medicine, I can go in and filter it out. Google, you've earned my admiration. Unbelievable.

Back to the outside world. I'm at Flying Star downtown again tonight. Only bought a cup of coffee and tipped a dollar -- I must have had 700 refills in the couple of hours I've already been here, and am shocked and dismayed that they haven't yet thrown me out. You'd think someone would make a point of sending the bigggest, burliest person working here over to my table to loom over me and snarl something like "eat or get the f--- out", or at least "whaddaya want", but no, apparently they do things differently here than at the place where I worked graveyard for over a year.

I went down to El Paso for a few days to do laundry, clear my head, and get some needles stuck in me. I'm becoming much more sensitive to the movements of qi as time goes on and as I get more treatments. (Tony did an amazing thing with two corresponding points in my arm, needling straight through one to the other -- a good 3/4 of an inch or more worth of steel straight through musculature! And it felt good!) Also got a fresh supply of Kudzu since some part of me seems determined to never quit smoking and I've got to run that part of me down in cold blood before it kills me first. Came back to Albuquerque with a ton of my mother's cooking and have hardly spent a penny on food these past couple of days which helps out tremendously. Long holiday weekend wroke havoc on what should be job searching days. But today I had no good excuse and so went out to Page One Bookstore -- locally owned, thank you very much -- way out in the Northeast Heights to drop off a flyer for my mother's book, which is coming out later this month, and in her words, "make the connection".

Time for an ad of my own. Buy her book, damn it. It's fantastic.

With any luck I'll get up before noon tomorrow and come here, have a good breakfast, and finally start calling people back with whom I have left applications -- including talking with the manager right here, where I seem to have applied for a line cook's position. Assuming I can get up the requisite courage. Bunch of coffee and a full stomach should definitely help.

Enough for now. It's almost nine and I really have nothing else to say right now. Oh yeah -- there is one thing: I'm not living like a monk anymore. That's nice. Not that I'm living like a decadent libertine, either, but you know. Let's just say it is a welcome change.

Later!