Reclaiming Miss Havisham

The end of an era

Wonderful delightful bitches,

You probably haven't been wondering where I have been these past few days.  Allow me to answer that question with another question.  Where HAVEN'T I been?  The answer: anywhere.

My two new roommates moved in and we have to sever the former internet connection and set up a new one.  I'm back in action now, and have decided on a new name for myself. 

I know the winner of the poll was "A Sheep at the Wheel", but I have the ultimate veto power.  I'm moving my blog to the name SQUID PRO QUO!  I know this news may be devastating.  I know many of you have your opinions about the name change at all.  I just feel this new name is more chipper, wittier, and less pretentious. 

Now this is where I ask a favor from EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU READING THIS.  Please!  If you think of it change the links to me to http://www.squidproquosf.com.  You will also need to resubscribe to my feed using google reader or whatever the F else you may use. 

In a few weeks I am going to take RMH down completely and have the domain routed to Squid Pro Quo.  I have copied my archives over to SPQ so nothing will be lost.  Thanks to everyone who has made this blog so much fun for me this past year!  I want to especially thank Erika at Urban Grace Designs for being the very first stranger to read my blog and link to me when I was about to hit delete on the whole thing thinking it had no point.  From Erika I've communicated with dozens of interesting lunatics of all sorts from all over.  I just hope to see you all on the other side!

from Mobilohm

MISS HAVISHAM OUT!

Who here speaks spanish?

Please tell me what this bus stop advertisement from the Department of Homeland Security means.  Then I'll tell you what I THINK it means and then we'll decide where the two sentences intersect so I can figure out what the appropriate left wing nutcase outraged response should be. 

Help?  Sky? Not going to fall?  Something about the sky falling?  All I took out of college Spanish is never call a middle aged latina woman a "bruja". 

The mere fact that the Department of Homeland Security is enlisting help from the public transit riding population does not inspire much confidence in the higher-ups.  I ride the bus every day and those are the LAST people I would call on to assist in keeping this country free of terrorism.  Sometimes I believe the people on the bus ARE terrorists.  Terrorizing the very notion of civility and mutual respect.  Besides, when the zombie apocalypse comes, the 15 year old GW high school freshman next to me on the bus talking about anal sex is not the person I want to have my back.  Come on men in suits, at least pretend like you are keeping us safe!

Also, this sign is in the upper haight/panhandle neighborhood where I wouldn't imagine there are a ton of native Spanish speakers.  You can see one hippie in particular is confused also:

Shame on you, Homeland Security!  If you can't even research the demographics of the neighborhood in which you are advertising then how can we trust that you are accurately researching those responsible for threatening this country?  How can us out of work Haight-ers help protect the country if we can't even understand what is being asked of us!  Pressing issues of national security is no time to have to aprima numero dos or stay on the line. 

On an unrelated note, last night I went to a friend's new apartment right by Coit Tower.   Being up there gives you a completely different view of the city.  Here's my post-Oscar night drizzly iphone pictures:

post "Coit"-al

The bridge to Murder town

A New Start

Delightful bitches,

I've been toying with the idea of renaming this blog.  I know we all just recovered from the great move from wordpress to typepad, and I understand the pain and anguish this must have caused you all.  Hopefully you will alI agree that typepad is the SUPERIOR blogging tool. I still love Great Expectations and I still fully intend to become Miss Havisham in my twilight years, alone and crazy.  I originally started this blog to talk about decorating my fabulous apartment in a lower haight victorian with my live-in boyfriend at the time.  Miss Havisham is part of my crack-den hellhole thrift store bohemian dilapidated aesthetic devotees are very familiar with by this point.  I also enjoyed having an arty farty outlet in my overly scientific life.

Now this blog has nothing to do with apartments, decorating, or any aesthetic at all.  It's collapsed into an unstructured forum for me to regurgitate tales of my antics across the Bay Area.  You guys were there when my 'tard ex cheated on me and when I had to move out of my BELOVED apartment (that part still hurts the worst I think) and couldn't get out of bed for a while.  You were there when I went apartment hunting and met all the freaks of craigslist and you were my sounding board for the times I wanted to murder everyone I work with.  There's a little bit of opinion.  A little bit of rage.  A little bit of mental illness.  I do think a new name will perk the site up a bit and be more fluid with the tongue-in-cheek nature of my shenanigans.  A Dickens reference is a little pretentious, anyways. 

Logistically this is going to hurt like 8 bitches on a bitch boat.  I will be asking all of you to change your links in the near future.  I understand if you do not get around to this. Hopefully I can work out a domain routing thing again.  You will also need to resubsribe to my new feed once it is set up.  I hope all of you make this cross-over journey with me!  It's so much fun to write for interweb strangers and even if my readership falls to 0 I'll still be writing it for me for fun.

Recently, my blog turned 1 year old.  A lot has changed.  I'm single, dating a little here and there and trying to find a new job, preferably remaining in laboratory animal welfare.  So much is different from when I started RMH as an f-you to not being accepted as a blogger at apartment therapy possibly for dropping an f-bomb in my writing sample. I believe a new name is in order! 

Let's get interactive with it.  I have pretty much decided on which one I am choosing but I want to run it by anyone who would care first to see what the opinion is.  Vote!

Attack from the back

Yesterday on muni this man took out a hairbrush several times to groom his brilliantly shiny man-mane.  If only he paid this much attention to the forest on his back...

New Roommates

A few weeks ago, two of my roommates knocked on my door to tell me they had found a new apartment and were moving out.  I was neither surprised nor upset by this news.  When they leave they’ll be taking those fucking cats with them.  Considering one of them PEED ON MY BED last night I will not be sorry to see them go.  I didn’t see this go down but my pillows were wetted with about the expected volume of animal pee and you know what?  I don’t know a lot of things.  I can’t speak Russian.  I don’t know anything about partial differentiation.  I can’t even be trusted to do my own taxes.  But I do know what ANIMAL URINE SMELLS LIKE.

So my roommate K, immortalized in the photograph below

immediately put an ad up on craigslist without running it by me.  I naturally had to re-write the thing to put my own stink on it.  His was far too vanilla.  The emails we received that sounded promising we invited over last week to meet us and see the two rooms.  I was anticipating this process to be as much of a nightmare as it was on the other side.  It wasn’t.  Being the decider is way easier.  It came down to four people we really adored equally.  It was a little eeenie-meenie-miney-moe at the end.

There was one unique character that I would like to tell you about.  Edward.  Oh, Edward.  I have a feeling I have not seen the last of you, you scoundrel. 

When I responded to emails, I left my cell phone number under my name in the event someone got lost trying to find the place.  I was surprised to get a voicemail from a potential roommate applicant the night before our big open house.  I screened the unknown number and immediately listened to the voice-mail.  I have tried to somehow record this so I could upload it to my blog, but I don’t have the skills or the patience so I’m going to transcribe.  It’s that important you that get the full scope of the crazy.  Keep in mind this is all from ONE SINGLE CONTINUOUS voice message to me, a total stranger from craigslist in his eyes.  I hate to see how much information he gives out to his friends. 

Voice-Mail Transcript:

“Hey Leslie, this is Edward I e-mailed you earlier today about the, um, rooms you’re showing.  I’m the guy who likes Sarah Vaughan and Brazilian jazz and um lived with a couple of cats before.  I just moved back to San Francisco after a few years away.  I would like to see the place tomorrow, unfortunately I am going to be busy for part of the time you guys are showing it and…um…um because of where I’m going to be it will be difficult for me to get back by foot, public transit or even if I had jetpacks to get where I’m going to be in San Francisco to this part of town.  I live right near you guys right now at 123 Anystreet [he gives me the actual address] this is my friends phone so I have no idea what she has set up on it whether it’s voicemail through Pacific Bell or if she has nothing at all so, um, please don’t call back because I have no idea where this message will go whether she will forward it to her cell phone, she’s out skiing right now.  So um, I will, uh give you, I mean respond to you by email and give you a call in the morning after I walk Misha’s dog, that’s who I’m uh, it’s a long story I’ll tell you in person.  I would like to come by and meet you guys and see the place if possible before the 12:30 window or afterwards or even on Monday or some other day but I am interested and would like to see the place and have you guys meet me and check me out.  Again this is Edward, I will send you an email from my Yahoo account and hopefully we can figure something out.  Bye.”

Total Time: 1 min. 58 seconds

So when my roommate K got home from work I insisted we smoke a bowl and listen to this together.  I don’t know if it translates in text but we had tears running down our faces laughing.  Not necessarily at him but just at the absurdity of the message and even the human condition of having to go through these auditions for places to live.  I wrote that just to sound less bitchy.  We were totally laughing at him.

So this stranger we’ve never met at this point…we know the following intimate details:

-He has a friend named Misha
-Misha has a dog that Edward is currently walking
-We know Edwards address
-We know his eclectic taste in music
-Misha likes to go skiing
-Misha may or may not have Pacific Bell forward her calls to her cell phone
-Edward has been away from SF for several years
-Edward is hopeful about jetpacks becoming a mainstream mode of transportation, OR he made a little joke.

The next time I sign into my email, I have a message from Edward saying to ignore the entire message.  IMPOSSIBLE but I’ll try. 

The next day Edward shows up.  He’s about 45 years old of middle eastern descent (not that there is anything wrong with that) and balding. 

K and I show Edward through the apartment being as polite as possible although Edward’s fate as a potential roommate was decided long ago.  As Edward is going through a detailed verbal list of the massive amount of installation art he possesses I am trying to zone out, not listen, and stare at the wall.  I could feel inappropriate church giggles bubbling at the top of my stomach like alka seltzer.  Edward is still going on and on using flamboyant hand gestures to show K the approximate size of one of his more impressive pieces of visual art.  Kris is nodding his head respectfully punctuating the conversation.  I am not even pretending to be listening.  I am off to the side forcing myself to think about the time my cat Sparkie ran away in second grade so I don’t start laughing.   God bless Sparkie and his journey, but I couldn’t shake the giggles.

I swallow my immaturity down for a second to show Edward the kitchen and the back yard.  As long as I’m talking about the apartment specs I’m good to go.  Here’s the washer dryer….hot water heater….

“I really like the size of the shower.  Where I am right now the shower is only big enough for literally one person to get in”

“So, um, this is the kitchen.  We all share dishes and cookware, etc…”

K enters the kitchen and takes over.  I’m now thinking about the time I ordered Hotel Rwanda On Demand.  It’s not working and I hear,

“yeah the bathroom at my current place is really unacceptable.  The shower is not big enough to get in there with another person.”

The giggle bubbles are now in my throat.  If K so much as looks at me, it’s all over.  My head is repeating images of run-away cats, genocide, the first exam I failed in college…  but in the way that only a delightful gay boy can, K catches my eye and gives me a flirty wink and I have to take off running down the hallway.  I fall onto my bed and laugh hysterically with my face in my pillow.  I couldn’t take it anymore. 

After I collected myself K and Edward are in the hallway.  K is clearly trying to shuffle Edward towards the front door.  Edward begins to tell us about how he has 45 thousand dollars in his bank account and he saves that much money by being thrifty. 

“I haven’t bought a new pair of jeans in 15 years and no one can tell.  These came from the thrift store. “

I can see K’s judgmental eyes graze over the flanks of Edward’s high-waisted tapered denim and I can see there is a role reversal.  K is clearly getting tickled and asks to be excused to his room for a moment.   I finish the tour. 

Once we got the windbag out of the house, I knew it wasn’t over.  It’s never over. I’ve since seen Edward two more times.  Once walking down the street in Lower Haight and again when he showed up here looking for his lost umbrella.  Time can only tell what the next chapter is in this strange saga.

Oh by the way...

I can't stand being myself right now so I'm conducting all of my business as Little Edie.

where my do rag at?

So there are lots of reasons I haven’t been writing.  I go through violent waves of being too bored or too depressed or too excited or too enraged to write anything.  I feel like anything written during those times aren’t accurate representations of what’s going on with me.  How do you say, “Sometimes I just want to die” without it sounding like you actually may expire?

I’m not working at all right now, which leaves me very little to do with the massive amount of mental energy I have.  My attempt to worm my way back into employment at the hospital where I worked until recently have been thwarted by a man who doesn’t care for me much.  You know how they tell you to never burn any bridges in business?  Well I had to learn this lesson the hard way.  The man who is replacing my former boss and who would be my new boss just happens to be the same man I’ve spent the last two years terrorizing.  I never thought there would be a situation in which he would have hiring and firing power over me.  DO NOT BE THIS STUPID.  People change jobs; get promoted, etc and you never know whom you’ll need a favor from.

When my loyal snitch told me about my name getting shot off the table I admit I curled up in my bed and felt sorry for myself for a while.  My first reaction was, “oh my god how can anyone think I would be bad at any job ever?!  I’m adorable and smart and I’ve done so much good work at XYZ Hospital!”  While I was in the disturbing clutches of plotting my revenge on this man I remembered the time I lost Dr. H’s protocol and when called out on it, slammed the phone down on him in a fit of rage.  It wasn’t that one-sided; he was being a dick.  He did call me back immediately and screamed at me for about 15 minutes.  Then there was the time I called him a “fake dermatologist” (he’s a pharmD specializing in dermatology but not an MD) when he offered to look at my eczema.  Oh and then there was the time I said, “nice nut huggers!” when he rolled in one morning in a full body lycra bicycle nerdsuit. The memories kept pouring in.  And for the first time in a long time I realized that I am not as likeable as I think I am sometimes.  And I don’t even think I’m very likeable.  I think they call this, “self-awareness”.  And it may have cost me this job. 

So I curled back up in the bed expecting to redirect my rage from Dr. H to myself but instead I began cackling wildly.  If I had to do it all over again I’d slam the phone down on him even harder.  No one can take that away from me.  That man really is the king of all donkeys.

There are many more things that we need to go over, dear readers, but I’ve decided to break them up into a few posts so you don’t have to read huge blocks of my ramblings.

On the agenda: The ridiculous hunt for two new roommates (remember fun with craigslist from last year?), my obsession with the news and how its eating away at my sanity like a tumor, and completely changing the name of this blog.

Dear drunk men everywhere:

I have brown hair.  I wear prominent glasses. I'm a little snarky. It may take all of your RAM, but try try try to sort out that I am NOT:

Tina Fey

or Sarah Palin:

or Jeanne Garofalo:

And to answer your question, yes.  Yes I've been told I look like her before.  Which one?  Take your pic.

Don't shoot me, bro

So you may or may not have heard depending on where you are about the BART police officer that shot and killed a 22 year old black guy on the Fruitvale Platform on New Years Eve.  If you don't know about this I suggest searching "BART shooting" on SFGate and you'll have more information than you ever wanted.  You can even watch all of the video recordings of it!  I've seen like all 20 angles.  It's fucked up each time.

Anywho, now there is a t-shirt featuring an updated version of the BART logo. 

Original Logo:

Upgrade?:

from Matthew Williams Design

So what say you San Franciscans and others?

I'll snatch it down

I sure am learning things the hard way lately.  It’s just been life lessons out the ying yang.  Realization station. 

First, my employment at the rat death camp has ended.  Devotees will remember I resigned back in early December.  One crisis after another had pushed my departure back, but I finally made a run for it on Friday.  This of course opens me up to the question, “OH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WTF RECESSION!!!”

I’ll tell you my plan.  It’s not a good one, but it’s the only one I have.  By the middle of February the animal facility director, animal facility junior supervisor, animal welfare committee chair, and myself will have all stepped down from their positions.  I’m going to let them get a little more fucked before I swoop in and offer to help out FOR A NOMINAL FEE.  No one tells AAALAC to shut the fuck up quite like I do.

The last day of work was surreal.  Although I plan to totally worm my way back into their system to help fix a mess I was instrumental in causing for an inflated hourly rate, I was pretty emotional.  I was hoping that my boss, D, would come around and finally speak to me.  He didn’t, of course, and by the time my exit interview was over, he had left for the day.  I still don’t know what he’s mad about this time.  I’m not saying I didn’t do or say anything unprofessional; of course I did.  I just can’t think of anything that would justify the sting of being shunned by a man I’ve followed around with adoring puppy love for the past two years.  One of the surgeons told me not to worry about, “he’s a fucking lunatic”.  It’s almost like I won the mental illness lottery.  I found the one man more ridiculous, stubborn, and grudge-holding than I am so everyone is distracted from my own bad behavior.  That was a freebie.

The chair of the Committee, Dr. B has been amazingly gracious and flattering these past few weeks.  It took my resignation for him to stop taking me for granted.  He wanted me to come to his lab to say good-bye before I left on Friday, and when I got down there I had a really touching moment with a man I had mocked endlessly and resented for so long. I was down there trying to not start bawling as this joyless little british troll was telling me how high my skill level was, how precocious and smart I am, how I could be the IACUC chair, and how he couldn’t have done anything without me.  All I could think about is how D and I would sit in my office and cackle making fun of Dr. B’s stature (“He could fit in a teacup!”)  his cold British nature (“Dr. Foggyknickers needs a crrrrrrrrumpet!”) and blaming him for all animal fecundity issues (“They’d mate if that man weren’t such a drag”) 

And then at the end of it all the 65 year-old frat boy boss I wanted to fit in with totally dropped me like a child and the man I thought had tortured me was my biggest fan all along.  I felt wrong.  Not in the guilty sense, but in the incorrect sense.  I don’t often tell myself, “Leslie, you were incorrect” especially when its something like judging character.  Two years of feeding myself wrong information and congratulating myself on unsound judgments about my bosses all caught up to me as soon as I saw Dr. B’s eyes begin to water.  Was he going to cry?  Was he capable of crying?  All I could think about is how earlier I explained to my replacement that Dr. B sold his soul to Satan for a blueberry scone and some earl grey tea and couldn’t feel feelings.   I hate being wrong.

So I’m unemployed.  I’ve been trying to write a proposal for my former employer for when I make my swoop.  I think I have a pretty solid plan and some great ideas for the program, many of which the ACOS is already excited about.

 I like to go to the bottom of the hill to the deli to pick up diet soda and bagels.  Yesterday as I was readying myself to run down there I noticed that I slid my diamond ring off.  Do I always do that?  Yes.  I’ve done that for as long as I’ve lived here, it just took me that long to catch myself doing it.  I always think to myself, “If I’m mugged, at least they won’t get my ring”

I recalled over the holidays talking to my friend Alice who lives in a Puerto Rican section of Brooklyn.  Being in Nashville was such a world away from my life in San Francisco, and I can only imagine it was the same for her.  The Nashville that I know is better referred to as MANSIONLAND.  My childhood friends come from exceedingly wealthy families and the holidays were an excellent time to discuss over-tipping, superfluous graduate degrees as a means of avoiding work, lamenting about how you can’t train the iPhone to say the N-word, and uniforms on baby nurses.  By the end of it my SFgBFF (San Francisco gay bff who grew up with me in Nashville ) and I would pout and whine when there was no one around to invite us into their mansion to smoke pot.  WHYYYYY DON’T WE HAVE A MANSSSION TO GO TO TONIGHT?!!?! 

I digress.  In the middle of mansion hopping Alice leaned over to me at the bar and a painful gutteral moan came from within “FUCCKKKK I LIVE IN THE GHETTTOOOOO”  And in that instant she said the one thing I’ve been too proud to admit.  I, too, live in the ghetto.  Not only do I live in the ghetto, but you would SLAP YOUR MOTHER if you knew how much I pay to live where when I leave my house I have a gang of teenagers yell “BITCH I’M GONNA COME ON YOUR FACE!  I KNOW YOU AINT NEVER BEEN WITH A BLACK MAN BEFORE”  (true story)

So you’re catching me at a bad time.  I’m unemployed, angry, and living in the ghetto.   However, 2009 is already WAY better than 2008.  That’s got to be worth something.