feather2pixels

The streets are damp, the air is cold, and a handyman is busy snaking unimaginably large clumps of girl hair from our various drains. I am trapped here. I can no longer avoid this journal. And, probably, some of the hair was mine.

Here is some art stuff that happened, for the record:

I got a fat check from The Lab gallery, which represents my earnings from their post-postcard show (post a 50% gallery commission). At $12 a set, they were a steal and I’m curious who bought them. Are they sending them? Where are my gushing emails of adulation? The ruling: The money should cover paper.

Postcard 28 got selected to screen at the SF Independent Film Festival’s opening party. I’m not really sure what that means beyond what they told us:

“Your film is an official selection in the program but, since it won’t be showing in the theater, will be listed just on our website and not in our program guide. Our parties are one of the things SF IndieFest is known for, and people love being able to watch more films while enjoying the party vibe.”

The party vibe: truly the way this film was made to be seen. Eh. I’m actually totally excited. The ruling: We will take what we can get.

As part of a series of large art pieces, I test printed the first of several panoramas I have been planning. This is what it looked like:

That’s highway 280 in the background. The final pieces are slated to be five foot long, mixed media works on wood. The ruling: I will believe in it when I see it.

Oh, and some other crap.

The temperature keeps dropping and the family visits keep coming. On a cold Friday night, I hopped on a BART train to SFO and found Mom at the U.S. Air terminal. She was wearing wooden shoes with a trim blazer and it would be the nicest she looked all weekend. The next day she put on a borrowed baseball tee-shirt and found a way to pedal a borrowed bike all the way out to the Pacific Ocean and up to the Dumpling King. Of course I didn’t mention it, but I was proud of her. And over a BYOBed bottle of Shiraz, she also also helped me settle a longstanding internal battle: Tajine on Polk Street does in fact make the best lamb ever. Unfortunately, the photo booth at Lost Weekend Video was out of order, but they had plenty of working copies of Knocked Up (Is it just me, or was this Judd Apatow’s vaginal counterpart to his dick-centric Superbad?). Mom’s jet lag got the best of her, but at least she found my Mission apartment comfortable.

How much has this man aged in the last seven years?

Just as I’m starting to feel totally unappreciated in my teaching career, good old Lisa R. shows up at my office with a rainbow roll in one hand and an orphaned dachshund puppy in the other.  Last year, I was compelled to graduate Lisa R., who seemed to miss a lot of April class but pass a lot of quizes.  It worked to my advantage.  According to rumor, she made a donation to the alumni fund on the condition that I was rehired this year.  At any rate it was a welcomed gesture for a down and out teacher and her pup had a really long tongue.

Raviv leaves tomorrow morning after a week or so in the Bay.  Saturday ended up being the perfect day.  We toured the Haight (“all this street is nice”), watched an unlikely throttling of the West Virginia University Mountaineers, stopped by a little art show (all my postcards sold out on opening night!), and met up with a Bud-drinking Adrienne at The Bottom of the Hill for the best show I’ve seen there in a while.  Raviv actually just got back tonight from a one day trip to LA.  As I sat at my desk, overlooking the yellow glow of 24th street, he appeared out of nowhere.  Without thinking about it, I suddenly felt happy he was back.

And now it Raviv is in San Francisco. Raviv is my Israeli cousin who’s come on his first trip to the United States with a special diplomatic visa for the purposes of teaching the U.S. military how to train bomb sniffing dogs. Yeah. I’m not entirely sure what he’s been doing with himself while I’ve been at work, but at night I’ve tried to counteract three months of Marines with immersion in the full Bay Area experience in all its precious glory. So we hit The Parkway theater for sing-a-long Popeye, ate a Sushi Zone feast (complete with an epic two hour wait), and, last night with Freckles, joined a well-timed Critical Mass. At this point, he probably misses the Marines.