Drinks, Rain, Aliens, Dates vs. "Dates"

Things making me happy right now:

1. Kristin Hersh's Learn to Sing Like a Star CD, which has a kick-ass title and which has one song that includes both the lyric "If you lived here, you'd be home now and suicidal" and "You messing with my head makes a terrible noise."

2. Patty Griffin's Children Running Through CD (out Feb. 6). Love, love, love her.

3. My new hat, found on a rainy day in Burbank. It's damn cute, I must say. Self-portrait to come.

4. Art for Empty Walls: Nicole's awesome little website that I am helping promote (therefore: see www.artforemptywalls.com).

5. Hanging out with friends. A simple statement, but a necessary observation for me right now.

Last Friday I was exhausted, having had a long day at work and wanting to just ignore the world. But I knew Joe was getting people together for birthday drinks at the Figueroa Hotel downtown, so I called Lesley and we decided to go. And what a lovely evening--to see people I always enjoy and whom I do not see often enough, in my opinion. It being Lesley and myself, there were many pictures taken. A smattering of mine include a hot closeup of Ms. Maness, a blurry self-portrait, a handsome shot of Brett, a charming one of Stephen surrounded by beer bottles he did not empty, and bizarro abstract shots of the sky:







How did I not get any pictures of Jeff, Jeff, Juan, Bryan, and the birthday boy? Oh, right, I was busy taking pictures of CLOUDS. Well, I at least brought my camera, which is better than I have been doing...

Saturday it was rainy, cold, misty and Lesley ventured with me to Ikea to be profoundly disappointed by the bed frame selection (sigh for me), but she did make me buy the aforementioned hat (brava!), and thus ensued an insanely chaotic night of us in and out of her apartment trying to entertain ourselves, ending up at Hollywood video on hands and knees digging through the 10 for $10 VHS clearance tapes. Now you all know how we find the bad movies we find. It's hours of arguing over which tape looks worse; "I think that one knows exactly what it is, which means we'll hate it"; "Sci-fi is always tricky. It has to be serious yet stupid"; "God, do we really want to watch that, though?" and so on and so on.

Totally self-satisfied, we headed home to eagerly watch "Stranded," a 1988 alien movie the cover art of which looked like it could be a mix between "E.T." and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." No such luck.

Here's Lesley's synopsis:

"It's about a bunch of aliens with mullets who hole up in some old lady's house with her granddaughter. And rednecks try to kill them. Also trying to kill them is an alien disguised as Geraldine Ferraro. And Ione Skye's in it. And they all learn the meaning of friendship."

Now you know.
And have been warned.

But, really, I think what annoyed Lesley most was that I really got emotionally involved in it, even with the alien who looked like Martina Navratilova in the '80s and then turned out to be male and wanted to kiss Ione Skye at the end. EVEN with that, and the fact it was essentially a hostage movie with aliens, I was riveted.

The unusual weekend bled into today when I spontaneously went on a dinner date with a man I'd been chatting with online on and off over the last few weeks, but who was not clear as to whether he wanted to just have a platonic get together or if it was somehow romantic. He's cute, horribly intelligent, and a bit odd, so of course I am terribly intrigued, but it was clear once we were seated that he saw this as a friendly get together, at which point I wished I was a horrible enough person to just dab my lips with my napkin, stand up, and say, with no hesitation whatsoever: "Since it's clear this is going nowhere I want it to go, I think I should just leave." Or better yet: "I am not getting what I want, and therefore I am no longer interested."

I don't know. For me, the function of the Internet right now is not really to find new friends. So why, then, does it lob intelligent, attractive men at me who want to be? Stupid irony.