fragments of memory

Very happy to see Rafa win Cincy for the first time, but this is, unequivocally, the ugliest trophy I've ever seen in my life.



Watching the ceremony this morning, even my sister had to ask WTF it was that we were seeing. Immediate googling revealed the name and sordid history of the Rookwood Cup:

The trophies have come a long way since 1899. As part of the agreement, Cincinnati artist Roy Robinson redesigned this year's trophies for Rookwood, making them slightly smaller and lighter, with an earthier glaze palette of burgundy and green. Rookwood's own artists did the sculptural and molding work, including the foliage that carries over the lip of the cup.

Oh, Roy Robinson. You shouldn't have.

( I was already uncomfortable enough as it was, having seen this. )

( Aaaand then I saw this. )

Meanwhile, loved seeing Posey in the dugout tonight. Hoodie on. Smiling.

Before we know it, it'll be time for spring training again. These next eight months are gonna just fly by, you'll see.

...Such as Rafa, for example.

( Probably a tad NSFW. )

Yeah, I can't even believe that actually happened.

Meanwhile, Vegas is nearly upon me and I have no idea what to pack. I have a lot of muddled ideas—jeans with holes worn in the knees, five inch heels, sequins, cheap tees from Urban Outfitters, fleece-lined boots, cocktail dress. We just want to walk around a lot and look at stuff, eat at a bunch of restaurants, and drink. Essentially I don't know if I want to be comfy or be a poser while all of this is happening. Maybe I'll take turns doing both.

Larry was at the Suns game tonight, wearing bright yellow capris, talking with his older gentlemanly friend, and intermittently golf-clapping.

His hair looked magnificent.

The halftime entertainment was this guy, who frolicked around the court performing the Macarena, YMCA, and other assorted dance moves, accompanied by stuffed Village People mannequin puppets attached to his body by a system of poles. Now, I realize that NBA halftime entertainment is hardly the pinnacle of performing arts, but this was honestly beyond anything I ever expected to be subjected to at a professional sporting event.

When I left after the game, the air was full of smoke. There had been talk of immigration protests outside the arena, and for a minute I was worried that maybe there had been a riot and something had been set on fire? But apparently it was just a mulch plant, slowly burning out in the west valley, and the smoke had finally blown downtown.

---

Went out for a belated birthday lunch today at Zinburger (amazing) and received a lovely gift (an orchid). It has been a good day :)

My computer is such a dinosaur that the only way I can utilize YouTube now is to grab the embed code from the webpage and post videos to LJ.

( Which I have done. Oh daddy. )

This is clearly a sign that I need to give up the ghost and buy a new laptop. The thing is, I love my current titanium PowerBook G4: it's so perfect-looking and gorgeous, and I don't like the new Mac styling at all. But I think when your OS is so old that you can no longer upgrade Firefox and Norton Antivirus, and video playback is always going to be choppy and horrific no matter what changes you make, it doesn't make sense to put it off any longer.

I have got to stop reading Into Thin Air right before bed. I'm entrenched in the really dramatic, gruesome part, and it inspired the strangest dreams last night. First I dreamed that I climbed to the top of Everest (no surprise), and it was difficult and torturous as one would expect. Then that segued inexplicably into finding (and I think reading) a fic in which "Zevran/yaks" was listed as one of the pairings. Then I dreamed that I went out to a bar with Adam Lambert, drank nothing at all, had an enormous amount of fun despite my sobriety, he drove me home in a yellow Mustang, and we spent the night in my guest bedroom. All that, and I don't even like Adam Lambert that much, to be honest.

Must've been the resultant hypoxia from summiting Everest earlier in the night.

Larry's busy being tiny-waisted and aggressive with Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie. It's all smiles and jokes here, but let's not forget that Larry and DRC were involved in an angry shoving match recently. I find them very intriguing, honestly.

I suppose that's a good thing, since Larry's twitter has just about ruined the magic for me. There was a moment today where I thought he was actually making a humorous comment, and I felt this rush of hope—and then realized he was talking about something completely different than what I thought he was referring to, and it turned out to be utterly not-funny. Oh Larry. When he's not busy misspelling words, ignoring the most basic standards of punctuation, and being horrifically boring, he's tweeting about being a dad and posting pics of his son and claiming to be straight, and I just can't work with that very efficiently. It makes me tired.

I finished Azadeh Moaveni's Honeymoon in Tehran earlier tonight, so that leaves me with zero books to read now. I've been on a Middle East kick recently, and I think I'd like to continue with it. Can anyone recommend any relevant books? Fiction or non-fiction, I'm down with whatever. I'd welcome the distraction, honestly, because after watching a BBC America documentary about men who have romantic/sexual relationships with life-sized dolls and viewing a (almost certainly Photoshopped, but nonetheless!) photo of Lil Wayne with no clothes on (NSFW, obviously), I'm feeling a bit fragile.

Somehow I just agreed to pet-sit Vinny, my friend's 25 lb. cat, for the next eight days. I don't quite know how this came about, but I've turned the guest bedroom into makeshift cat quarters (I will need to keep Vinny and Simon separated while I'm at work, at least for the first couple of days) and I'm hoping for the best.

Last night, I had a dream that Roger lost the French Open in straight sets. The scoreline was totally wacky, 9-6 in the third, which made no sense whatsoever. I woke up, restless and upset, and turned on the tv to see that Roger was two games from the title. I know I said I wasn't planning to watch, but in the end I couldn't stay away. I do love tennis, no matter how I feel about the final.

It's good for the game, Roger winning :) And he earned those tears, and the celebration. I turned it off a minute or two after the championship point, though. I don't begrudge Roger his win in any way; I'm just a little miserable, still, that it wasn't Rafa falling to his knees on the clay today.

Anyway, buckle_berry, I made sure that I never actively rooted for Roger at any point during this tournament. You're welcome :D

A child in a tiny suit interviews Larry at Anquan's charity event. This is simultaneously the best and the worst thing I have ever seen.




Good lord, words fail me.

( From Sunday: Larry and Kurt Walk It Out under the cut. )

The light rail was an adventure on Friday. I was sitting next to a little girl, who kept elbowing me inadvertently as she ate her KFC. (Mind you, you're not even supposed to have food on the train, but that's another matter.) My ribs are sore as hell right now from coughing, so the elbowing was quite painful and I was on the verge of saying something to her. Except then we stopped at a station, and a transvestite hooker boarded the train and sat down on the other side of me, and that really took up most of my attention from that point out. She was wearing the shortest shorts I'd ever seen, and was continually readjusting herself because there was no way for that tiny amount of fabric to contain...everything. I was trying not to look—really trying. But I kind of couldn't help it at times.

Then a girl with a black trash bag and her cracked-out friend sat down across from me. The friend was periodically convulsing and yipping, in between bouts of relatively (and I use this term loosely) normal conversation. Then he discovered a particularly worrying stain on his pants (his clothes were filthy) and began licking his finger and wiping frantically at the mark. For like three straight minutes.

Anyway, turns out the black trash bag was full of drugs. I know this because they conducted a drug deal on the train. Maybe I'm just naive, but I just sat there like o.O, not really knowing how to react. Meanwhile the transvestite hooker's perfume was beginning to overwhelm me, and I debated getting off the train two stops early, but in the end I simply endured.

\o/ Metro Light Rail \o/

Last night I had some friends over for a potluck. Usually with this group, we go out for sushi, but everyone is so broke right now. So, potluck it was. I kept it pretty relaxed, and didn't instruct anyone as far as what to bring. We ended up with really good food, but every dish (with the exception of the tangerine sorbet for dessert) involved bread and/or pasta and/or potatoes, in some way. Delicious, but we were so overloaded on carbs that everyone was falling asleep by 10:30. Party animals.

Today Angie came over with her baby, Aurora. She got to see my place for the first time, and then we went out to lunch. She had a coupon for the Armadillo Grill, which is a total dive—a run-down sports bar with like 50 televisions and green everywhere: green carpet, green booths, green tabletops. We walked in with our sunglasses and heels and a baby and they didn't really know what to do with us. The hostess ended up seating us way in the back by ourselves, lol. Service was a bit slow, but the food was surprisingly good. I have to say, though, that babies are exhausting. I gave Aurora a bottle at one point, and at the end I was spent. With my ribs the way they are, it hurt so much to hold her, but even without the soreness, it's simply a lot of work! They are heavy! They are messy! They get into everything! I love Aurora, she's like a niece to me, but Angie can keep her as far as I'm concerned :D

( Blah blah blah Larry etc. )