Happy Halloween!

Oh, ----, you stabbed me!

Ow.
I feel like I've been reamed in the tit.

Which, by the way, I was. More later.

This weekend's going a lot better than Miserable Thursday. I've been doing a lot of thinking as to why I had that breakdown and what this winter will be like for me provided I can maintain the proper mindset.

I imagine everything will be fine.

Fuckup.
Worst. Day. Ever.

Scenic stress breakdown in office. In kitchen. In bedroom. In shower.

I cut off part of my finger, broke shit, lost shit and forgot shit.

I feel like such a cosmic loser right now. I just had this realization that I hate stress and ambition so much that I've resigned myself to a life of mediocrity. All the big dreams I had were just that-- delusions of grandeur.

What I learned at college: I have absolutely no desire to do hard work, aid social progress, be an expert at anything, be famous or well-known or in general change the world.

I am a fuckup.

And I hate college SO MUCH right now. I can't believe I'm going to be in debt for the rest of my life for this shit.

How's everyone else's midterm week going?

Costuming Dilemma
I need some feedback on Halloween costume ideas... I'll post them here, you give me your feedback, and then I'll announce my final decision!

Justin is coming down for the weekend and we're going to dress up and party-hop together. A matching set of outfits would be ideal but is not mandatory. Below is a list of costumes we can create from our inventory. Click the number to view a photo of me in some incarnation of that costume. The #1 picture is really old (though I do have that dress) and the #3 picture is of a different piece of clothing than the ones we actually own.

#1: Renaissance garb- We both have a huge stash. I could dress either as a peasant girl in one of several dresses or as a wench/ swordswoman in tights, boots and a leather bodice. Plenty of accessories and weapons.

Pros: We've got the garb, and plenty of it.
Cons: It's a tired gig, being as we've worn it for the past few years and dress up in garb all summer long at faires.


#2: Anime catgirl and, uh, "master"(?)- Imagine your typical hentai slutty catgirl. That'd be me...although we could try it on Justin. Black, pleated skirt, button-up shirt, high-heeled shoes, collar, bell, and (of course) ears and a tail. Nyaa! Justin would wear his leather pants and a black shirt and probably lead me around on some kind of chain. Or just cuff me. Or put me in a chest harness. Who knows... the possibilities for kink are endless.

Pros: Original costume. Doesn't take a lot of work. May allow for interesting roleplay.
Cons: I might get COLD. And being kinky in public also gets tiresome and stressful if you don't know the crowd and aren't sure how your "performance art" will be recieved.

#3: Straight from the Japanese bathhouse- Justin and I both have bathrobe yukata, the cotton kimono Japanese people use as loungewear, especially at onsen (hot springs). We've also got casual geta (sandals) and could easily rig a getup with bath towels and shower totes so we look like we've just come from (if we shower first) or are heading to the bath.

Pros: Won't see anyone else dressed like this. Will be comfortable and relaxing. Little prep time.
Cons: Chance of getting cold, but not as big. Chance of clothes coming undone in public... HA. Some people won't "get" what we are.

#4: Formal yukata (me)/ Something else (Justin)- Our mismatched costume option. I have a formal cotton kimono for summer festival wear that I was gifted by my host mother. It's beautiful and elegant and quite eye-catching.

Pros: I'd feel lovely and noticed, and it'd be fun for everyone to finally get to see the yukata.
Cons: It takes 45 minutes to put on. It can be uncomfortable after an extended period of time sitting. It was quite expensive and custom-tailored so I'd die if someone spilled a drink on it. Justin's costume wouldn't match.


So, click away on the photo links to get a better (rough) idea what I'm talking about, then RANK your choices from 1-4 and SUBMIT!!

Sticking it to The Man
Guess who just qualified for $149 a month in government food benefits?

That's me, hell yea!

FIRST goal: eat well
SECOND goal: pay off credit card
THIRD goal: put money into savings or student loans

Ha! I guess I found a way to make my work study actually work for me. Now, to get some celebratory FOOD...

ラッキー
I am a very lucky, very happy woman.
It's wonderful to have a year where I can so easily count my blessings.
I hope life stays this good for a long time...
or rather, that I keep my eyes open to seeing the world in this way.

Sooooo po'
Yesterday I turned down:

-Breakfast with the Llamas at the Glenwood
-Coffee at Roma's
-Dinner with some Llamas at Olive Garden
-Seeing I <3 Huckabees at the Bijou

And postponed getting myself pierced. Again. Until next weekend.

I've been proud of my spending abstinence, even though in the long run, my poverty now will be negligible. I've lived nearly this whole month on my credit card with somewhere beween $40 and $60 in checking. I ought to make it out alive with about $520 on the card, half of it payable once I get paid at the end of next month.

Here's the super news:

As the government has decided to rape me because I'm a fifth-year senior, thus only rewarding me $4,800 in loans and $2,500 in work study to cover my $17,000 tuition (and thus forcing me to take out $11,000 in bank loans), I've decided to screw them back. I'm getting food stamps.

I attempted application once before and was rejected. Then I forgot all about why and decided I didn't need them anyway. I probably still don't NEED them; they won't SAVE MY LIFE, but they will be a big help, and this year I have the one qualifying factor I DIDN'T the last time I applied: work study. The only other year I've had work study was Freshman, and I got all my food from University Housing.

A hundred bucks a month from the government toward my groceries sounds like a perfect way to make ends meet.

And finally, as I feel I'm entitled to be thrifty, I have to bitch about a beef I had with Cafe Roma:

I took my own commuter mug and tea bag in when I went to meet Alex to chat, full-well knowing (and not caring) that they had a "No outside food or drinks" sign on the door. When I asked if I could have hot water, the guy behind the counter replied, "yeah, for fifty cents."

Excuse me? I understand protecting your space in the market as a small business. But I was there with a paying customer and was obviously asking for a favor, not a freebie. I've always been unimpressed with roma: their coffee isn't that great, their lounge not very comfortable and their counter people seem to be cocky and often pushy or too flirtatious, but I've supported them as an independent business that thrives NEXT to a Starbucks.

Sorry guys, now Starbucks has my business. At least they'll give me some friggin' WATER when I ask for it. Jeez.

Yay!
Also, yay.

That is all. ^-^

平和

[ KAMAKURA PHOTOS ]

Bad Kitty
My cat has a bad habit of waking me up in the morning. When he wants me pay attention to him, he knows that all he has to do is sit on my chest, purring, put one paw out to touch my face, and I'll jolt awake. As I don't get up to feed him when he does this, I'm not sure why he insists on doing it, especially an HOUR (almost precisely) before I get out of bed. There are several obnoxious problems with this:

1) He purrs rather loud and has sharp claws, so it's startling to be woken by a scratchy pat to the face...

2) When I wake up, I usually have to pee... if I go to the bathroom, my body wakes up a bit; if I don't, I had to pee too badly to get back to sleep...

3) If I wake up an hour or less before my alarm goes off, my brain deems it pointless to let me go back to bed. So I toss and turn and generally waste an hour of time in bed.

This morning, I made a mistake and ended up losing more sleep than usual. The cat came up to snuggle me, albeit quietly, and though I tried to avoid looking at the clock or getting up, I finally succumbed to the temptation, saw it was 6:08AM, and got up to take a pee.

I didn't get back to sleep.

I changed positions a hundred times, tried stopping all thought, let my mind wander here and there, and still couldn't get to sleep. After what seemed like forever, Rupert came and sat on my chest again, this time purring loudly. I thought, "shouldn't my alarm have gone off by now?", turned over to look at the clock across the room and saw that it said 6:04AM.

Like a bad dream, was time repeating itself?

God damn my terrible 20/200 eyesight. I woke up at 5AM and convinced myself it was almost time to get out of bed. Then, at 6AM, I convinced myself of the same thing again. So here I am, with 4 1/2 hours of sleep, not nearly as delirious as I expected, but pissed off nonetheless.

Whirldpeas
I left Design class in a brief sunbreak during a downpour and unlocked my bike, wiping the seat with the sleeve of my jean jacket. From somewhere across campus, I could hear the sound of men and women singing, round-robin, in what seemed like an operatic style.

But the campus acapella group sings only on Fridays.

This music seemed vaguely religious and somehow sad. I followed the sound on my bike past the empty amphitheatre and down the street. There they were, singing as they walked back and forth, up and down the street, a group of people carring a banner that read

VISUALIZE OPTIMISM FOR A DEMOCRATIC VICTORY.

I almost fell off my bike gawking. What the hell did they mean? Were these the same weird, far-left democrats giving away books on campus titled things like Children of Satan and featuring photos of Cheney and Bush?

I still have no idea what they were doing. I think it's one of those things you'll only see in Eugene.

*****

Apparently I'm not publishing enough, as the number and length of the posts on this page keeps falling off little by little. The problem, as usual, is that I'm feeling neither disgruntled nor particularly inspired. I'm staying perfectly content just puttering along at my work and not really picking apart the details. That's not to say I haven't been keeping my eyes open, cataloguing little moments like that above, or forgetting to live life to the fullest. It's all been so easy-going that I'm sort of dozing pleasantly through it. I rather like this state.

*****

Last night I went to the first Eugene Webloggers meetup at The Strand, hosted by Michael Moore (not THE) of Following Edge. It was quite the motley crew and a very mellow meeting, despite having to yell over a rather loud broadcast of OutFOXed on the bigscreen TV.

And I got to take home free pizza! <3

FLASHBACK: Kyoto in March
Dragon Dance at Kiyomizudera

[ MORE KYOTO IMAGES ]

The Minute Hand
I've done more outdoor running in the last two weeks than ever before. Granted, I'm not running very long intervals or distances; usually two miles max in a little under twenty minutes. After the 5K on Saturday morning, I thought I'd be wiped out, and I was, but moreso from the lack of sleep paired with running than with anything else. I didn't even have any residual soreness.

This morning, I went in early as usual to lift weights before class. Everything seemed normal until I got to jog/run 121 and started the two mile run. Instead of taking it as slow as I expected, I shaved 32 seconds off my mile time, paced and chatted with one girl almost the entire way, and then passed two people at the finish to come in fifth with a time of 17:27. And I still had a good deal of energy left to spare.

It hasn't really been a mystery to me why people run... after all, I'm an endorphine junkie myself in different ways. I've simply never been able to get into the high-impact, lung-burning, long-winded trail runs that I think I would mentally enjoy. They're just too physically taxing. Now, who knows, maybe I will be able to get into this running thing after all. It's about time.

Blam.
For my b-day I was given a big dose of anti-depression. A smooch or several from my man, a nicely-sized boyfriend-in-a-box, a desktop light treatment for my seasonal blues, some shiney silver and the usual wad-o-miscellaney-cash.

Tomorrow I'm going to see Michael Moore and then attempt to get myself back on schedule.

Umareta Hi
I feel like a rock star. I guessed I'd feel pretty awesome coming in to the finish line of the 5K race, even with a rather high time (29 mins), but the satisfaction with myself has carried over into the rest of the day, too.

I guess this is how one could hope to feel on a birthday.

I was born on a Saturday, three cycles of seven ago.

inSpiRation

Do it today-- Tomorrow it may be illegal.

Fun Run
In an effort to, I dunno, do something different, I've decided to run my first 5K race on the morning of my birthday, October 16th. This means that this Saturday, instead of sleeping in, which I so rarely get to do, I'll be hauling ass for 3.1 miles at 8:30 in the morning.

"Hauling ass" is a term relative to my pace, of course, which is embarrasingly slow. Justin will be there with me, hamming it up because he's a guy and no matter how out of shape he is compared to me, he'll always be stronger and faster. As much as I hate that, and as competitive as it makes me, I want us to be able to run together.

And I want to learn to think of a 5K run an nothing scary or oppressive. I've run 5K before, twice, around the imperial palace loop in Tokyo but I stopped several times, to catch my breath (air pollution!) and reset my malfunctioning iPod. This time I won't stop.

Here's the course, a loop through campus that Justin says looks like it was run by a crazed gerbil.

That this race is on my birthday seems somehow a good way to commit myself to running more in the coming year, and doing it with Justin a pledge to always keep trying new things together. That's a pretty good present to myself.

The Geology of Things
I was assigned my new support department today, Geological Sciences, which will henceforth be referred to as Geomancy. It seems like a nice place, with lots of cool rocks everywhere, sitting not only in display cases but sort of randomly about the office. In that sense, it seems rather homey-- I tend to collect rocks, crystals, wood boles, and other strange objects from hikes, and place them around my house. It's a sort of eclectic, nostalgic clutter.

The people seem nice, also eclectic, and the building/ facilities rather new. In fact, I've even been given my own office!! With windows!! In the bloody Volcanology building!!

There's an interesting irony in my departmental assignment. My first department was math. Now, I'm no mathematician... but my dad is. He'd always ask me, "So, what are those grad students working on when you go into their offices?" and I'd reply, "I don't know. Some kind of crazy, differential equations with weird... stuff."

Now I'm in Geomancy... and I'm no rock-nazi, but I did grow up around rocks. A lot of them. If I correctly recall, several closets in our basement were filled with them. My mother LOVED rocks. She came in to my elementary classrooms to present on basic rock identification. She took us on "fossil hunt" outings. Although she never finished it, her graduate degree was in Geological Sciences.

So, in a sort of roundabout peripheral way, I'm covering both of my parents' chosen professions. But this time, I'm a little more fond of and connected to my department's curriculum. Geomancy seems fairly relevant in a time when Mt. Saint Helens is threatening to spew again.

Huttah!

SEE JOHN EDWARDS 10/13
John Edwards speaks tomorrow at 12:30 PM at the UO campus on the south lawn of the Erb Memorial Union.

At 3PM he will also be in downtown Portland at the Pioneer Courthouse hall.

Go here to print your "tickets."

Close Encounters
I am so often awestruck by the synchronicity in my life.

The concentric circles, the radius of connectivity-- all keep getting bigger and more beautiful.

The players; the dance. What a tangled web we weave.

Living is inseparable from loving; both can be frightening but, as with anything in this world, with the loss of that fear comes skill, confidence, the ability to be, and joy.

I am amazed.

Kat's Five-Step Guide to an Easy A
I've a word of advice for all the slackers and idiots I've observed fall off the wagon in my five years at university-- and more than a few for those who are still here with me and struggling to stay on. IT'S NOT THAT DIFFICULT. It may be a pain-in-the-ass to be bored but it's just not that hard to get a decent grade if you follow a few simple steps.

1) Come to class. Just sit at your bloody desk and bear it. Unless it's not a mandatory attendance class. Even then, come 60-70% of the time. It just looks good.

2) Get a name that people can remember. Particularly, your professor. Nickname, false name, whatever. "Kat" works for me but go more extreme if it suits you. Don't pick a name to match your low intelligence. No one will like it if you tell the teacher to call you "fuckwit." Except me, I would laugh.

3) The first week of class, establish a record for participation. This will allow you to slack the rest of the term. Seriously. During the first few days of class, answer a lot of questions and try to do so intelligently. If you can't be intelligent, just do it anyway. Try not to be "that guy" and sound like an over-eager imbecille by raising your hand EVERY TIME or sounding like you're THE expert. Just participate. Make yourself known. When the teacher starts to call on other people instead of you (not our of annoyance but out of the drive to get others to answer), you know you've succeeded.

4) Do all assignments. You don't have to do a stellar job. Just DO THEM. ALL OF THEM. And skim the reading. Just skim it. Don't be afraid to start out slow. You don't have to begin with a bang. Leave room for improvement. Improvement impresses professors much more than pompous assholery.

5) Make an effort to, at least thrice, talk to your professor after class. Look outside... see the weather? Use that. They like to be thought of as a human being and if you, too, can resemble something other than a number to them, you're much better off in the long run.

This is not brown-nosing, nor is it slacking off-- nor is it a guide to doing WELL in intelligencia or academia-- it's the simple social politic of the classroom and something that seems fairly self-evident.

Take that advice and use it.

Photoshoot

New images have been uploaded to the Seattle gallery (21) and to Glacier Day Six (3).

Go see!

it helps, sometimes, looking back
Even with all this stress, which-- per the norm-- is panning out to be less than anticipated, I'm in a state where I've never been at the start of a UO schoolyear:

I'm emotionally and mentally stable.

Let's see..

Freshman year, I'd just gone through the breakup of my first love relationship, about 3 years long, started a new relationship, and was living in the same dorm complex as my ex. My angst-ridden, intellectualite attitude was NOT well offset by my rich, catholic, good-girl roomie.

Sophomore year, I'd just moved into a rental house with three practical strangers, was in a total state of anal retention, found out one roomate was a total bitch, was left to do all the work on the house, was still depressed over aforementioned breakup and to top it ALL off, took a Depo Provera shot and downward spiralled into a dark, dark place for three months. That was a long winter.

Junior year, I was three months into living in a new apartment with Justin, confused about our relationship, still torn up over the two-years-prior breakup and trying to manage acting as the publisher of a campus magazine which was staffed largely by a bunch of circus monkeys. Woo-hoo.

Senior year, I was... uh. I was in Tokyo. I think "WTF?" best sums up what was going through my head.

This year I'm in a nice place with good roomates, surrounded by friends, have finally resolved all emotional baggage with my ex-- also a good friend and just yesterday celebrated four-and-a-half-years with Justin. I'm practicing being more "present" and enjoying the Now. I just bought two small succulent plants to go on my windowsill with the other eight plants in my room, because nothing makes me happier than growing things. My twenty-second birthday is next Saturday.

Life is good.

It's time for FOOD
One of the banes of my existence here in the work-school-homework lifestyle is repetitious monotony. I'll let myself slip into this pretty readily when it comes to assignments and exercise but what always, always KILLS me, is monotony in LUNCHES. I try to make myself food every day to take with me, as it saves a crapload of money. Unfortunately, I seem to always fall into the same trap-- for a lack of time, creativity and resources-- of making the same sandwich day after day, week after week.

Pick a lunch meat, pick a bread, pick a vegetable and a mustard. Eat and repeat. This works for about two weeks, and then I actually start to become physically nauseous when eating.

Bleahgg.

I'm having that problem right now. So to bypass throwing up, I'm going to splurge and buy myself a tamale or some phad thai at the ASUO Street Faire. Mmmmm. Tasty Goodness.

flashback: freshman year, week four
In the dorms, I was desperately self-conscious. More than your average nervous newbie, I was trying too hard to get to know everyone and consequently, get all my dormmates to like me. Of course, like every person who forces social interaction, I failed.

Last week, I met not one-- but two-- people from my freshman dorm who are still on campus. With one, I had the basic "hey how are you, oh, that's nice, take it easy" conversation. With the other, I had a bit more of a walk down memory lane.

I still feel terrible about what happened. How's your knee? Can you use it?

The accident occurred less than halfway into Fall term 2000. Justin was, at that point, coming down to see me in the dorms almost every weekend and I was still convinced that no one liked me, in part because my boyfriend came to stay with me. We decided to stage a game, on of Justin's favorite, out on the large rolling east lawn (the Humpy Lumpy).

So we got most of the guy's floor and most of the girl's floor together for a game of Clench a Wench. Now, if you don't know what Clench a Wench is, here's a brief summary:

Picture a large circle, like duck-duck-goose, with male and female participants seated alternately. From a list of names, someone calls out a person to sit in the center and another person, of the same gender, to guard them. Then, finally, a third person of the opposite gender is summoned as the offense. That third person must break from the outside of the circle and get to the person in the center-- in order to KISS them, anywhere-- without being tackled, taken down, and kissed by the defense.

This is DEFINITELY a contact sport. A very fun one, at that, but not a game unfamiliar with injury. Bruises, grass burn, bloody noses, torn shirts. These are clench-a-wench battlescars.

You see where I'm going with this.

We'd played for only twenty minutes or so when one of the guys, Andy, an avid karate student took down Sam, a petit, demure girl, with a body drop. And shattered her knee.

Though he felt terrible, most of the resentment seemed to be directed at me, as the coordinator of the event-- and I never really lived it down. At first, Sam seemed pretty pissed about the hospital and ambulance bill (why they didn't drive her, I was never sure). Then, it became obvious that her knee was not getting much better. A doctor told her that she would never run again.

When I saw her last week, she was at the gym on a treadmill. I immediately noticed the scars above her right kneecap. She told me she had surgery the summer after sophomore year. At that point, she'd been advised permanently against even walking up stairs. But now, she said, she could even run on it.

I wanted her to tell me it wasn't my fault but instead she withdrew slightly and said, "It might seem like yesterday, but it was a long time ago." I felt bad for even bringing it up because she's right, sometimes the past should stay in the past.

Nevertheless, I'm glad to be where I am now, and not where I was then. We all bear our own battle scars.

GUH.
These 40+ hour weeks are, as expected, seriously kicking my ass.

But I can take it, really. And I can enjoy it, really.

I just need to convince myself of that.

The Gayest Show on Earth
(Transvestites, Homosexuals, and Pornography-- OH MY!)

[ SAN FRANCISCO PHOTOS ]

Yes, yes, I'm here. I'm not dead somewhere in a San Francisco gutter. I've simply been devoured by the insane MESS that is the first week of classes. In fact, the trip to SF was so awesome and the UO is so lame that it's more than enough to make me want to drop out of school and never return. Good thing I only have one year left, eh?

In titling this post, I wanted to come up with something short and eye-catching. Unfortunately, that pretty much ruled out about all of the synoptic phrases I've come up with for describing this trip to friends. For example, "I Saw Magicians... And Then They Took Off Their Clothes," seems a bit too long, and "The Lesbian Charity Worker Hit on Me" a bit too vague.

Somewhere between the all-female masquerade ball where I discussed the proper way to tie a yukata with Fetish Diva Midori, the Shibari competition and Folsom Street Fair, I realized that my introduction to San Francisco was not the same as the normal tourists'. While I was there it all seemed so normal, so routine, but having returned home I find myself with the problem, let's call it the "What I Did On My Summer Vacation Problem," where I either can't seem to bring myself to aptly describe the things I saw OR no one believes me when I do.

[With that said, Monk really tells the story on his blog a lot better than I will-- and from a different perspective.]

Therefore, I took lots of pictures. And had many, many taken of me. Let's just say I'm REALLY REALLY happy that I don't have any plans to ever run for public office. I don't know what cinched that more, Club Shibari videotaping *cough* somethingiwontmentionhere or the professional shots for the photo book on Folsom Fair.

The costumes, ohh, the costumes. They were great-- mine and everyone else's. For the Friday night masquerade, I wore my summer yukata with a white and gold cat mask. On Saturday, Justin, Tammy, and I dressed up in rope slut shirts and paraded as Monk's entourage to Club Shibari. Sunday... I got a very interesting sunburn. At the fair, leather was everywhere, as was body paint, oil and creatuve uses of uniforms, appliances and accessories like I've never seen before. It was another planet.

The weekend was not only a wet dream for the photographer in me, but also gave me a chance to have a good look at a subculture that's always fascinated me. I've always sort of felt like my purpose as a writer/photographer is to observe lifestyles and interests different from my own in order to better understand what motivates people. And, you know, more often than not I find that once I've investigated it-- whatever "it" may be, lifestyle, fetish, subculture, whatever-- I can see much more easily the appeal.

In San Francisco, somewhere along the line, I had a very silly, very obvious and very profound realization-- That there is a very fine line between pleasure and pain. Kay. I know this, you know this, I even LIKE this-- I know that I get a LOT of euphoric satisfaction from a long, hard, muscle-ripping, lung-tearing workout. And that day-after soreness? YUM. In my mind, the appeal of getting spanked now makes a lot more sense. And having done it?

Wewt.

So, aside from having returned from SF with a general sense of amazement, disbelief and, bewilderment, my memory of the weekend goes something like this:

FRIDAY:
I flew all over the bloody country just to get to Oakland, CA about the same time Justin, Sam, and Terry were arriving. We booked it back to the Savoy hotel in the rented soccer-mom mobile, changed into costume posthaste, scarfed some pizza and went out on the town. The boys went to some bars in the Castro-- which, if you don't know, is SF's gay district-- and were hit on by pretty much every male living resident, including the homeless. The girls went to an all-women masquerade ball hosted by The Exiles and over pounding music, we attempted to socialize. There were magicians. Then the magicians took off their clothes. I had no less than two conversations in Japanese on the dance floor. Then I met Fetish Diva Midori, who was about as haughty as I expected a pro domme should be, and we chatted about yukata no musibikata before calling it an evening. Then we all went back to the hotel and no one left the room until 2AM.

SATURDAY:
Up late, late breakfast at a classic diner. Justin and I decided to explore the "tourist" side of SF while the others went to go do business on the dark side of the city and attempt to sell more of Monk's rope. J and I walked through Chinatown and up Nob Hill only to find out that the trolleys to the waterfront were not running and we had to take a very crowded, but free, city shuttle bus in order to get to Fisherman's Wharf. It was all worth it-- the driver's son stood in the front of the bus the whole ride and provided very cynical and hilarious commentary the whole ride down.

Then he told us to have a nice day and get off his bus. Must've gotten $20 in tips.

We walked the wharf, saw a few local attractions, souvenirs and street performers. I could've watched the social dynamics of the sea lions for longer but it was getting damn cold. We grabbed some sourdough and cracked crab and headed uptown but were less than a block from the pier when we were accosted by a charity worker who told me, after I informed her we'd already donated, that I had "a nice mouth."

"I bet you had braces when you were a kid," she said. "With such a nice overbite. You should have kept it." Then she gave me her card. "Call me."

Weirdest pick up line. Ever.

We got back to the hotel just in time for another costume change, this time as Monk's entourage in order to advertise for him at Club Shibari where Bridgett Harington (of ropelover.com fame) was competing with Monk's rope. We had a lot to drink-- flogged each other like good friends do-- and then watched Bridgett toast the competition.

And I got a free t-shirt. But that's another story. Hee.

SUNDAY:
Up at dawn, woken by THIRTY STRAIGHT MINUTES of sirens right outside our window. We downed some coffee and pastries, threw on the next set of costumage and headed to the fair to set up Twisted Monk's booth. Our booth neighbors included Canes4Pain.com and a magazine for gay blacks and latinos called Flava Men. We were right in the center of the action. When the doors to Folsom opened, they opened wide. I'd heard the fair sees 10,000 people in the span of four hours and that was no joke. When Justin and I left the booth midday to tour Folsom for ourselves, we could barely move, let alone walk. If we'd wanted to browse and booth shop, there would have been almost NO WAY we could have done it. But Folsom Fair, it seems, is more about making a scene than shopping.

Nevertheless, Monk sold a lot of rope. Almost all of it, in fact. And whenever he or Bridgett demoed rope-bondage in front of the booth, whether with Justin and I or with Tammy, traffic stopped. And gawked. And the rope sold.

The best part about Folsom was, in spite of the freaks and geeks, how safe and consensual it all felt. There was plenty of illegality going on-- public nudity, sexual activity, pot brownies-- most of the things that go on at the Eugene Country Fair on a larger scale. The police were there and when I talked to them afterwards they said the worst they had to deal with all day was heat stroke. The rest of the "illegal" items, they just let slide for Folsom. It's all contained. And walking around in a sea of gay mean, I really didn't feel like a piece of meat [err, with a few exceptions]. I'd almost have felt ignored if it weren't for the fifty-million photographs being taken of me.

Actually, I felt like a rock star.

When the day was over, we were all exhausted and overstimlated. So, of course, we went out for STEAK and had some red wine and big, fat fillet mignons at John's Grille (featured in The Maltese Falcon). Then, because Justin and I had to get up at 4:30 in the friggin' morning, we went to sleep. Hardcore.

MONDAY:
Up at 4:30 and FIVE HOURS from Oakland back to Eugene. I could have driven the whole way in just three hours more. GUH. And then, back to real life, where when people asked what I did over the weekend, I could only laugh and shake my head.

If you only really knew.