Year: 1998

this has probably been one of the most shittiest weeks i’ve had in a long time. starting off with the insurance company fucking me over several times (and not using lube), and ending with me almost quitting my job, i guess nothing could get any worse. well, save for the fact i was to be in sf to finish working on the project we are doing for alice 97.3, and i didn’t hear my pager, my phone or anything going off to meet dave in the city. i didn’t roll out of bed until 3pm, nearly 14 hours after i crawled in. now it’s early sunday morning and my toes are freezing.
which to say isn’t a good thing.
however, on the bright side, justin cleaned the hell out of my printer, and now the smearing problem is gone. i can now write letters to people, which, i owe some to my mom mainly, and my main excuse for not writing was due to my printer not working properly. now all we need to do is get some rj-45 cable and a hub, and we are all set for our little network.
but what i have been worried about, in a more serious way, is passion. i’m not talking physical passion, i’m referring to passion of anything and everything. the way one likes/loves a movie, an object, a book, something. whatever, it does not matter: just passion. It could be the way you feel about a football team or a softdrink. well you get my point.
regardless, the situation at hand is that lately i’ve been feeling not as passionate. i can’t say how long i’ve been feeling this way, but, all i feel like is that my life revolves around getting up in the morning, going to work (after fighting with traffic for an hour), listen to people moan in the office, come home and go to bed. that’s my life. all the things i’ve been wanting to do or see haven’t been materializing themselves, and i feel hopeless.
i look at justin’s face, at my roommate filtering in and out of her busy social schedule, at the people i work with and their lives, and i still feel like something is missing. i don’t know what it is, i just do. i have never been able to explain the feelings that sometimes rise in my body, and sometimes i’m not able to clarify even when i do say something. i find myself almost on the verge of tears when i see wonderful things occurring around me, and i feel stale and lifeless.
i feel like the plants sitting on our front porch: thirsty for life.
my complete version of things does not always meet what everyone else see’s. mayhap for instance it’s not that i want to go to school to learn (which i do), it’s because i’m hungry for the experience of doing so. i’ve often felt cheated of what i have received in my life, and other times, i feel sickened by what i have let occur. my mind becomes this empty waste pot of nothingness, all because the choices i’ve made. it’s easier to fool yourself into believing you are happy then actually attempting to achieve it.
and justin wonder’s why i’m so ambitious.

again, i could play catch-up. it’s amazing how quickly the month just zoomed by, and the next thing i know, it’s now almost october, and my poor widdle web page hasn’t been updated nor has it been revamped as planned. such is the life when I’ve been promoted (don’t start counting my sheckles yet. it’s basically in name only.), and my hours have switched from swing, to regular joe (ie: 8-5). because of this, since i was getting up early in the morning to work on my site everyday, i had more than plenty enough time to get an entry done for the day. now, i barely have time to shave my legs, so before i knew it a month went by.
changes and occurrences happen as they usually do. for me the past month involved with: having my first fight with Justin, getting into a fender bender, having a close friend die, being promoted. having one of my oldest internet friends come out and visit me. plus add in driving to Vancouver for the final Lilith fair (which i want to write about asap), going to great america with the irish kids, camping out at montara beach last night, suddenly i’m miz social butterfly with no room to breathe.
i have found it’s stifling, primarily how my life was turning out. i saw myself in 10 years still living in sin with Justin, and then i was so busy worrying about this bill or that bill, or whatever, and it drove me insane. I know a part of me has that ‘maternal’ quality to it, but still, it makes me mighty nervous when it comes down to it.
so justin and i had a long talk, and since he doesn’t feel motivated to go back to college, I am. I have been planning on applying to a community college here in SF until i can get my transcripts from my old school and figure out what i need to do to graduate. so come january, it’s full time school for me! yippee! then I will take over the world. as you know, lisa-ism will be revered in all countries and i will be worshipped as i should be.
keep it simple, stupid
now the whole essence about doing this website, was based on the premise of keeping it simple. i needed a gimmick i could use to keep it short and to the point, while also making it upgradeable. here is the premise: i currently own three domains: simunye.com, trippingonstars.org, simunye.org. simunye.com is the concept that i was going to do internet consultation. at first it was a rocky start, but within the space of a week, i have gotten four contract jobs doing side work for personal and business based clients. everything from basic html instruction to winders instruction. (no can kick my ass in winders, sorry). taking that basis, I’ve gotten pretty handy with hardware, I’ve known software for years, basic lan configuration, some unix (get this: *I* helped justin install linux *tither*), pc crap up the wazoo, and of course, internet crap in general. take my roommate who works for cybercash as a unix support engineer, justin who knows hardware (and soon unix!) like there is no one else’s business. sasha, who knows front page to make bill gates weep and dedicated support (configuration of routers, dedicated lines, dns addressing), and you have talented people who are going to know their shit. christine was bugging me, because already with me doing four clients within the next few weeks, i have overflow, so sometime in my spare time, i have to show her html to make up the slack. argh! but that is going to be the generalization of the business. i figure if these fuck nuts can command buku bucks for ‘NT sever admin’ and don’t know RAS, i’ve got it made.
simunye.org: this is going to take over as my personal site, mainly dealing with the lisa chronicles (which you are reading now), personal stuff about me, my pet projects and what not. plus host the archive for the lisa chronicles. i’m not sure how much space bryan is letting me have for hosting my domain here, but heck, i’m just darn cool as it is.
trippingonstars.org: okay, here is the deal. anyone whose been reading this knows that i’m good friends with will, who lives in seattle with his adorable son liam. will found this place on the web called xlibris.com. what this place does is it will publish your book for a flat rate of $475US dollars. Your book will then be “published” as well as you get a set percentage from every copy ordered. sounds pretty good deal huh? so i’ve been checking into it some more, and i need to find out if we get a Library of Congress number, as well as other cool stuff. so will pitches this idea to me, i think it’s rad, and then I think: the more people who submit to this, the cheaper the cost of the book for the initial start-up. but then the proverbial light bulb goes over in my brain, and i realize that i can also generate money from advertising, and as well as partnering with companies such as amazon.com. at this point though, a lot of this is still ground work that i have to cover, and with three domains now to be filled and idea’s to be completed, i’m going to quite busy.
but the main fucking point i was making here, is that i’ve been spending the majority of my day figuring out how things were going to work, in terms of how i wanted the sites to look. and i realize that the more i spent time on debugging a new idea, the more time i spent making something look like crap. basically i’ll excel at what i know: keeping it simple and to the point. however, the need to be ostentatious is driving me nuts, but i’ll survive.
social engineering for dummies
so tonight i’m whacking away at my web site(s) and justin is sitting on the couch watching the telly. he’s flipping through the channels and all of a sudden i hear an announcer mention something about yobie benjamin. i ask justin to stop and i get off my ass and walk that big three feet into the living room, and take a look at the tv.
i’ve known of yobie (via email, not in person), since about october of 1996. one of my interests then was internet/computer security, and i has subbed myself to several lists pertaining to that issue. one list, dc-stuff (maintained by pete shipley), is basically a bunch of hax0rs that congregate every year in Vegas for DefCon. But you can glean some good information out of the lists, which just like all lists tend to have a bunch of noise.
anyway, yobie is being interviewed about a new virus called “back orifice” put together by a SF based hacker called SirDystic (get it?). Basically, this “virus” is attached to a program, and even with just having the program down loaded onto your computer, enables the other person to have free access to your files. SirDystic’s main point was that it was to show that winders (all flavors) were NOT security conscious, and that anyone can hack into it.
Okay, who cares about hacking into winders? I can see this guy’s point, however, what he doesn’t seemingly get is going to be the backlash of this. now not only are all the kiddie point and click guru’s going to attempt to hack into some poor unsuspecting person just downloading their pr0n off the net or whatever, which is going to translate into mass hysteria if that person suddenly calls his isp (which with my luck is going to be the one i work for, but i don’t do phones anymore, hurrah!), and is there going to be problems!
ugh, never research anything on the net. you could spend hours.
to make a very long story short, yobie mentioned about how the common set of hackers is basically ‘social engineering’ ones: basically ones who know nothing but think they know everything. i quipped ‘hrm, must be talking about se7en.’ Justin laughed.
good night sweetheart, yeah it’s time to go
footnotes now that it is 12:53am, 9.21.98
*The archive for the lisa chronicles should be up tomorrow (or today literally), and no later this week, depending on my work schedule. shit i have to drive to menlo park tonight. damnit. okay, later this week it is.
*hopefully all websites will be functioning at full force later this week, a week and half from at the latest. by the end of september for sure.
*i am addicted to coke slurpees. so you can guess that I’ve been sucking down while doing this.
*any potential authors who want to be included in my little project, smack me on the ass and tell me to get a move on it. oh yeah! send me your short story and I’ll see what i can do. *neither Photoshop 4 OR 5 likes winders 98. hrm. justin just installed Linux. should be downloading the binaries to gimp then. actually, I got the itch to install Linux so bad, i spent some major time dinking around with him then working on this. blow me. 🙂

Friday night, i went out with sasha, matt, deidere, and M to a bar in the mission called zeigeist. we lolled around outside drinking snake bites (half full sail and half apple cider), ragging on co-workers, all whilst i read the sf bay guardian (which has become this leftist rag over the years).
what intrigued me was the fact that in the personal ads in the back of the paper, it seems that ovary eggs are a profitable business now. with baby boomers, and those fucking yuppies wanting to have kids, but finding that they can’t. ads placed asking healthy women to call, and these same said women would be paid up to (if not beyond) $5000! i was aghast and greatly intrigued at the same time. my devious little mind started to think of all the cool things i could do with 5000 bucks: i could pay off my loans, i could pay my car payment for a year, i could finally get to Europe!! the idea’s were just bouncing around in my head.
but i knew, deep down in my heart, that i wouldn’t be selected. and the reasons were fairly obvious to me:
i smoke.
i have heart problems.
diabetes runs rapid in my family.
i’m not in the most excellent health condition.
i’ve done drugs in the past.
and i’m sure, if i sat here i could probably list everything wrong with me, so my little dream of selling one of my oh-so-plentiful eggs went down the tubes as reality smacked me in the face.
actually i lit a cigarette, and realized with the hostility in this town about smokers, one blood test and they would wave my ass away with a ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ deal.
sigh.
hey, i figure, if i’m not going to be having kids (gawd forbid!), then someone should take advantage of my surplus eggs. I mean, yes, the thought of having babies has appealed to me in the past, and sometimes I do get a hunger to bear little rugrats, but, I’m not in the position to take care of anyone other than myself at the moment.
as i said to justin this evening, while riding down the escalator in macy’s: i’m 26 years old, i only make $30k a year, and i haven’t even graduated from college yet! I can barely take care of myself at the moment, and another person would just be more of a burden then anything.
let the boys be boys!
my entry into the slam! contest is finally up. I’ve received fairly good response from my friends about the story I wrote, and even positive feedback from strangers about the meaning of the title in reference to the piece itself. those people i know, think my story kicks ass, and I should win. But I just chided them for the fact that they know me, and they aren’t overly objective about the whole deal. But it’s nice to be loved. 🙂
don’t hate me because i’m beautiful
lately i’ve been feeling awfully icky about myself. i’ve gained about 15lbs, which i really don’t need to gain, and i haven’t done much with myself in terms of dolling up. my standard attire (as seen from the picture i took recently), that my idea of getting ready pretty much means blow drying my hair! when the gang and i went out Friday, it meant that i actually got to put on make up for the first time in a few months, and feel pretty about myself. sasha lamented about how i don’t wear makeup to the office. i said “why should i? who the hell am i going to impress at fucking work?” so on Friday while getting ready to go to work, i had to dump a lot of make-up that i owned because it was old and worthless, and sort out what i won’t wear because it’s cheap and doesn’t work/stick/look good. which left me with my usual: powder/mascara/lip liner that has seen better days. i vowed to myself that i would purchase new stuff over the weekend, and so on the times i’m heading out to do whatever, i can feel like a girl again. nothing is more exhilarating then buying new lip liner. 😉
so justin and i trot off to the mall, and after buying this detangler he drools over, i asked the counter chick if they did walk ins? and if they did, specifically color treatments? she replied in the affirmative, and brought out this short, badly done haired older woman who asked me how long my hair was. i took the clip out of my hair, and let it drop to my shoulders. it was still wet from my shower a few hours previously, and the rich scent of my shampoo lingered for a moment. she fondled a few strands and told me my hair was too thin, and badly damaged, and she couldn’t do anything about it. I was like look mrs troll, i’ve done everything to my hair, and it’s healthy and strong as hell. you simply have no idea what your talking about. she said that she refused to work on it, and sent me over to a competing salon with a: “those girls will do anything.” statement.
i flipped my hair back up, and marched out with justin. i grumbled about the wench, and justin placated my fears by telling me an old wives tale: “never have your hair done by someone who has bad hair.” simple, yet truthful, i acknowledged this as the woman who waited on us looked like a troll, and her hair was a mess! thinning, badly needing of a touch up of color, and badly arranged on her head. hrmph. The irony of this is that the place was called ‘Lisa’s Beauty Supply’.
the receptionist at Heidi’s took us in, and 3 1/2 hours (and $125 dollars poorer), I walked out as a glorious redhead, and my hair healthy, bouncy and a few inches shorter. The woman who did my hair was the store manager, so I got in good with the right person. We argued a bit about shades: having dark brown hair, any reddish color ends up as auburn, which is fine, but I wanted to be REALLY RED. She says that red fades, and no matter what I do, it will go back to being auburn anyway. I pointed out a picture of a model with this orange-red hair, and declared “THIS IS WHAT I WANT!” She shook her head slowly, and told me that with the condition of my hair (did I mention a few months back, determined to get rid of the wave i had in my hair, i gave myself a straightening perm?), with bad coloring jobs, and not being cut in over 6 months, I was more or less asking for trouble. We compromised with that after this treatment, if i wanted it to be that particular color (which would mean bleaching my hair white, and then adding color), she would do it no questions asked. I sulked and agreed, and am pretty happy with the results. The almost blue-black color I dumped on my head last summer is almost completely cut out. the frizzies that perm i gave myself is gone, and my hair feels good again, not icky like it had been these last few weeks. while i’m happy i took the plunge, my checking account is mocking me for the expenditure. but i look at it this way: i may be broke, but you do only live once!
justin and i walked out of the mall, both a bit poorer (i splurged on my definicils mascara by lancome, and port lip liner from clinque. throw in two bars of nautica soap for my brother, and it had been an expensive day), but i was feeling slightly better about myself.
we sat in my car for about 20 minutes before we left, talking about my plunge, and i said: “you know justin, it’s always amazing to me how when i’m feeling icky about myself i either eat, or if i decide not to eat, i spend money i don’t have to spend’. he nodded in agreement and started talking about my obsession with clothes, shoes, bags and do-dads. the money i could be saving for a trip to Europe, or to do whatever, i was blowing the minute i got it. my bills were being paid, but it was a shuffle of monies at the time it’s occurring. and i’m tired of that. we agreed that since i inherited a tennis racket from cathleen, and justin bought one today, that instead of eating or shopping, i was going to play tennis. and goddamn it, it will kill me to exercise, but i won’t look like this any longer.
society is so fucked. for instance, in a mag i read some months back (cosmo, vogue, one of those glossy mind wasters), they did a poll of average American men about women’s shapes, and it all came back they want someone with meat on their bones, not a kate moss! so why the fuck are vendors, clothes manufactors and others always putting size 2 models in the fucking ads?
i was reading in cosmo today, letting the color seep through my brain, this story written by an emmy-award winning comic writer who could no longer wear a size 4 anymore.
i cringed.
i have NEVER gotten down to single digit sizing, even when i was younger. it seemed i went from jr’s in the kids department at sears to a size 11 in my jordaches when i hit puberty. even at my thinnest, i couldn’t wear anything lower then an 11, and that was on a good day!
i just don’t fucking get it.
to me, it is not about sizing anyway, it’s about how i feel. the weight i lost last summer, i’ve gained half back, and i still need to lose X on top of that. uck uck uck.
clothing for me has always been an issue, so it’s not necessarily a weight problem. i’ve always been busty, and shirts never seemingly fit right. because i have a long inseam (32inches, average is 29), my pants are always too damn short. i have to wear mens jeans for my hips and legs, and scout around for good shirts to fit my bosoms.
and justin wonders why i obsess about clothes!
okay, that is a poor excuse, but fuck, i’m determined that i either balloon up and shop at lane bryant or i get my ass in shape.
What’s even worse, is that there is a store in the mall we go to, that sells the funky off-beat clothing i like in ‘plus’ sizes (what an oxymoron). the problem with this is that their version of 3x is a size nine! i bought a 3x skirt from there, and it fit my roommate, who is a 9/11, better than it fit me. go fucking figure that one out. and it wasn’t a mis-tagged skirt, majority of their clothes are like that.
speaking of which, if you look at the lane bryants website, do not tell me that woman is a size 14! Because if she is, i’m freaking miss America.
I’m feeling a bit hostile this morning, so excuse me.
the crooked spine
in any endevour i will do to earn some cash, i found this cool thing via amazon’s web site.
basically what it is, is that you sign up free of charge as an ‘associate’, and link back to amazon. for every sale that they get, referred from your website, you earn a percentage (as high as 15%) on the purchase. kick ass!
since i’ve been html’ing my books and cd’s for a year now, and basically thought it was a waste of time, except for those who were actually interested in that crap, this basically allows me to open up a ‘store’ and have the readers browse my selections i have. if they like anything i have, they can go to amazon’s site, via the handy links i provide, and boom! they buy something, and i’ve got sales! the advantage for me is that i currently have close to 300 books and 200 cd’s. The cd’s are already html’d, but the books i’m working on now. actually the cd’s need to be linked back to amazon, but anyway, what a cool idea!
justin named our store the crooked spine, so please visit and let me some words on what you think this is cool or not! and remember, tell amazon we sent ya!
what would you do
when i went to deposit my check today, i was fumbling around attempting to stick the envelope in the deposit slot, when it wouldn’t take. i looked up at the screen and saw that the atm had already accepted ‘something’ and said thank you for my deposit. i got my statement, and sure enough, shows my new balance with my alleged deposit, however, i was still holding the cash in my hand.
i did another transaction, and was able to slide the envelope on through, and when i got my statement, it showed my ‘first’ deposit, and my actual real deposit, giving me double what i ‘actually’ had.
i show this to justin, and bitch about the machines fuck up. and then another bright idea hit me: what would i do if the bank DIDN’T correct this mistake?
i thought about it, and eventually my sleazy ass decided that i would keep the money. justin said he would report the problem to the bank to have it fixed. I was aghast! this boy has morals! Justin further his comment about how he was walking down market st. the other day, saw a dollar bill lying on the ground. even though he didn’t have any money on him, justin walked right on by. a few blocks later, a beggar asked him for dollar. justin pointed down the street and told him where the dollar was.
okay, he’s honest, and maybe i would probably report the problem if the bank doesn’t catch it, but my head is still spinning with the thoughts of the extra money: woohoo! so i ask you, what would YOU do?
would you:
report it
spend it
do nothing
I’ll keep the poll up for a few weeks and report results.
ms. slim over and out.