cheap and easy

you may notice some changes happening around pronstar.org recently. Paul, my widdle luv muffin (even though he is denying me sex because I had a cigarette today) has been working on a web tool for me to update my site with ease from anywhere in the world without having to use nothing but a web browser. we are still beta testing that out — and while we do, i had gone through and started cleaning up my dead links. You may notice the links in the archive section NOW work (when before they hadn’t) and if you were really hard up, you could read all the back crap i wrote from 1995 on to current.
As of today, I’m up to November of 1998 on cleaning up bad links/images/spelling/typos. If you find anything in “Poetry”, “FUCK”, “Essay”, “Short Stories”, or “Past Journals” that has a dead link, typo, missing image: PLEASE LET ME KNOW! This is really really important to me as I’m making sure everything is organized and good to go when we convert it over. I’ve been doing my damndest to make sure everything is working but I know I missed some stuff.
like a bad penny
there has been a resurgence of activity on the lisa-network. first it started out with someone contacting me via aol im asking me about f.u.c.k. and when i wrote for it. which kind of surprised me because i haven’t had an issue published in over a year (probably going on two) and on the 7th (i think) anniversary of FUCK, jericho closed down it’s doors — and you have to admit, 7 years is a long time to run a ‘zine (especially on the internet). and that got me wondering about dear old fuck and as i was going through the archive list, it got me thinking about the mind set i was in when i wrote that. and then it dawned on me that my style of writing always began with a topic bar and the first sentence. there was never a set subject or topic other than what flowed from my head. sometimes i had an idea and i based it off of that — and other times, it was just words that i strung along to make it look pretty.
but the main point is, i had fun doing it.
i miss doing stuff like fuck, because it gave me someplace other than my website to showcase how i wrote. it wasn’t a matter if someone agreed with me or not or if they even liked it, but they still read it, which was an improvement over NOT reading it.
and moving along this curve, i suddenly got a flux of people who joined the mailing list, emailed me and signed the guestbook. while the domain is eye catching (is it not?), i haven’t been updating like i usually have been (even if sketchy) and there is no reason why this influx should be going on —
but who am i to argue?
so i think it’s spring — the influx of people getting what i have to say and the whole cleaning up issues i’ve been having recently with paul working on the back end of this dealie and me just plowing around on the front end. and i was thinking about this tonight when our new friend corey came over and showed us his old zine, verbosity. and again i got thinking.
and if you smelled smoke in Virginia, you know why.
regardless, i want to start a new zine. haven’t gotten any ideas yet, but i do have a few interviews lined up with a few people who are funny (like doug the advertising hound writer and tony, the vegan porn slut and finally keff, the mega star of userfriendly). i don’t have a theme and i probably shouldn’t be doing anything until i get pronstar.org up and running smoothly again, but hey, i’m just saying, if you want to help out, email me and let me know what you can do 🙂 i just am interested in doing something fun and worthwhile again — and basically kick start pronstar.org back into action baybee!
smoke free for five days
see topic
and in other news

  • my brother came and gone. we had fun. we bought him a laptop. we test drove a durango. damn i miss my brother. pictures will be forthcoming.
  • i’m being sued by shelly for a verbal agreement. the court date got moved to may 5, 2000. while some of you asked me her response to me moving from Virginia Beach to Fairfax, take a gander at how she felt about it.
  • i am now a flaming redhead. i bleached my hair from black to yellow to make it red.
  • we are not moving to boston. i think.
  •  i’ve been working at uunet for almost five months now. paul and i have been living together for nearly four. and we haven’t killed each other. joy! 🙂
  • i am tired and all the wonderful joyful things i was going to tell you, i have forgotten.

good night.
x0x0x0x
moi
 

high fidelity

a few years ago, i had written a fairly lengthy email to a mailing list i was on in regards to how i had fantasized my life would be like when i was in high school in comparison to what was reality. to say i was disappointed is a small under statement by far. i was thinking about this recently when i was reading a book (also by said name in title) High Fidelity which chronicles the tales of a 35 year old guy who owns a record store and realizes, he needs to grow up. [side bar: why is it that this book has 184 user comments on it and yet almost everyone one of them HAS to give a brief synopsis? geez.]
Yes, this book the movie of the same name.
just so you know what kind of mood i’ve been in reading wise lately, i’ve been plowed through Model Behavior, American Psycho and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
if that does not give you an idea of what my mind has been like, then i don’t know what does. 🙂
what was my point?
hell if i remember, or that CHiPS is on teevee right now, and after spending time talking to keth, setting up the new amazon associates partner thing and talking to paul about the new cgi crap for pronstar.org, i’ve completely lost my mind in what i am doing.
and i just got sidetracked reading keth’s page. Hon, you are NOT working for inreach anymore and dan doesn’t live in calgary anymore. it’s so time to update your page.
i keep wanting to do shift-a for some reason.
esc – shift a.
so where was i?
so i’m sitting here thinking about a 35 yo who hasn’t grown up yet, a 26 yo who is affluent and off killing half of manhattan and a black transvestite. and i’m wondering about me.
i read somewhere about an infamous pronstar who reinvented herself at 28 and viola there she was.
i’m irritated by an acquaintance of mine who spent quite of bit of time explaining via his journal how it was no longer a journal any more and i was like “this guy is spouting a bunch of crap” and i had written a rather mean and scathing email about how he was being a fake pretentious asshole and didn’t send it. i honestly didn’t see the point. he’s got scathing humour. i once told him he sold out, and he emailed me back saying that everything wasn’t about money and i had this long email in my head i wanted to write to him about how i wasn’t talking about money and giving up his artistic vision for the sake of something or another and then i realised: he’s a bright guy, he’s going to either ignore this for it’s tripe that he think it is or he’s going to respond and i realised that it was too much energy to tell him how i felt, even though, in the past that is something he had wanted from me. and it comes to me, i really don’t know this guy at all — not really. i know of him, and we’ve shared journal entries and talked to each other, but it’s not like we’ve made major impacts on each other. maybe we have and i haven’t paid attention to it but the point being is that i realised that i didn’t care about what he thought any more (one word or two)? i used to think he was a bright scathing wit and he still is, but he’s lost his edge. (And I’m a major chicken shit for writing this in *my* journal, but no one ever said life was fair).
it got me thinking about my own life.
Paul and I are happy.
I need to reiterate this because i’ve gotten several close friends asking me if we are on troubled waters. nope. paul and i are like the the proverbial married couple: fat and happy. both of us have gained weight and are actually fairly successful in our jobs. while we have little time to ourselves (das geek-haus is becoming a popular hang out place, enough to warrant a mailing list).
 

declined

actual statement from a bank on declining me for a credit card:
“we’ve determined that you have sufficient balances on existing revolving credit lines.”
does this make sense to anyone else?
i don’t see how a company can determine that a household with over 6 figure income feel that 1500 credit balance is “sufficient.”
i just find that to be incredibly funny.
last night, while i was beating my laptop for being such a piece of shit, paul decided to go ahead and pull up my credit report. It seems that equifax will for a low price of 8 dollars give you access to your most recent report. Checking i found that everything in the last two years was pretty darn spotless (no late 30,60 or 120 day reports, no judgements, no nothing). It was the stuff in the early 90s that’s killing me. But what was also interesting is that equifax has the wrong address, wrong birthdate, and a bunch of wrong information about me.
we had had a big discussion with friends about this on Saturday night when we were all sitting around watching kung fu madness. it seems incredulous to me (and paul and derrick and everyone else) just how hard it was to get credit these days. in the early 90s, when i was in my late teens, early 20s; you could walk into any department store and get a credit card and you were virtually on your way. Now, we are discovering with Paul, with /no credit/ file is just as bad as having bad credit. We can’t get him anything: not a gas card, department store card, hell not even a best buy card. he gets declined more often than I do. I told him what we needed to do, and what we are doing, is to get him on on the cards I have that is unsecured but has a high interest rate. he can use this card for all of his spontaneous shopping purposes (as well as finally send me flowers at work 🙂 without having to bug me about it.
i’m pretty happy with my current credit file save for the older and mis-information on it. I’ve worked my ass off to make sure that everything was set up correctly for it so that I wouldn’t have issues matters and concerns about the credit reports when i wanted something (a new car, new house, new body, whatever). my project this week is calling companies that show that i owe money and make a deal: you send me a letter stating that you will remove my bad credit statement from my record and you’ll get your money. sounds good to you? sounds good to me.
brotherly love
my brother, all 7’4 of him, will be flying into DC this upcoming it was an impromptu flight as we had been talking about him coming here for spring break, but it was all dependant if his basketball team won their last game before the playoffs. he wins, he’s got tourneyments to play in. he loses, he is coming to DC. since it was such a late date at getting him a ticket, the price was sorta high (and my brother has the misfortune to live in bfe Illinois where he’s too far to get a plane out of a major city) but well worth it in the end.
i haven’t seen him in nearly two years. i can’t wait.
this magic moment
we had a dozen people over at our house this past Saturday night for “Kung Fu Madness” in which we sat around eating Chinese food and watched bad kung fun movies. since we had stipulated that everyone be gone by 3am, we then carried the party out to denny’s where we sat talking about geeky stuff, while i read the USA Today from that weekend and party goers for Mardi Gras were stumbling in at all hours. As we got dropped off by our friends Lenny and Sunni in front of our apartment complex, paul had asked me if we had checked the mail for Saturday since we hadn’t we started walking towards the clubhouse to get said mail. Paul suddenly called out “sweetie” and as I turned around he jumped up in the air, literally clicked his heels and started singing “chim chimney” from Mary Poppins. It was then that I confirmed what I always knew: I’m going to marry this man.
I had related this to Paul last night when I was sitting here waiting for my windows laptop to stop being pissy (spent nearly 3 hours fixing various problems to get it working — don’t say a word). he looked at me like i had told him that i was insane as if that one defining moment was strangely the reason why i would marry him — and not any other particular moment. what can i say? it’s the little things that mean a lot.
this morning i woke up with him making me breakfast (which we shared while sitting in bed) and singing an elton john song as he brought it in. i giggled as he did this and look over to my left as he sits on the couch working on his laptop (his and her laptops — how wrong is that?). i love paul. i’m in love with paul. those defining moments which last mere seconds is what defines it for me.
x0x0x0x0x0x
moi