christ, i'm tired. i never found an adequate notebook in SF so i'm stuck staring forlornly at the last blank dirty page of my present one -- one page left, can you believe it? this thing lasted me less than a year. i started it 9/29. (amusing enuf, on 9/29/00, i wrote, "another high point of the day: i ran into the illustrious matt rubin by the cereals. he complimented my presentation at the poetry slam, said i was clearly a performer and an extrovert. i laughed and told him i wasn't, but it had been nice to pretend for 5 minutes or so.
and it was nice." yeah, as i remember it, it was: i won a prize, a little plastic horse and a sheet of alphabet stickers. but see now, i wouldn't say "nice" -- ben wouldn't have it -- and i would have laughed at matt rubin and said of course i was an extrovert. have i always been one or is it a recent development? hmm ....

anyway, that was a tangent. the point is i'm home, two plane rides (with, again, no veggie food) later, weary and feeling rather dull. whole days of travel in which i only hear what others say and have no meaningful interaction have a deadening effect on me. but yesterday was fun: after a fruitless attempt to meet up w/ alyssa for lunch, ben and i went into the city, determined to conquer it on foot. i have to say, we did a decent job: started at the bart station at powell, hiked up to chinatown, wound thru chinatown and north beach (the view from which reminded me so much of jerusalem that i had to continually stop and make weak, whimpery noises) all the way to fisherman's wharf, where tourists thronged for no discernable reason. then we walked along the coast and down chestnut street almost to the bay bridge to the exploratorium. i wish i could have enjoyed it more but a nasty headache that had been sending warning signals all afternoon finally bore down hard and ben had to guide me outside so i could lie down and wait for the pain to get bored of banging around my brain and move on. luckily beautiful weather and ben's pooh stories accelerated the healing process and before long i was steady enuf to retrace our steps and even see a.i., a film which is as muddled as you'd expect kubrick via spielberg to be. i mean, lord: kubrick's bleak worldview and obsession w/ sex and robots and spielberg's crowd-pleasing sentimental platonic-love stories are like oil and water. in this case, the oil is much more interesting than the water and i came away frustrated, wishing that more time had been spent exploring the darker side of the elaborate fantasy-future. the disney-esque part we've all seen thousands of times, altho admittedly it is visually stunning.

tomorrow is the fourth. i don't have concrete plans yet -- but i've scarcely been home an hour. what can i say? that was one of the fastest weeks in recent memory. my parents both met at the airport and fussed and hugged so extensively that it seemed like i'd been gone ten times as long as i had. well. it's over. happy independence day everyone.

and #32, goodnite.