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Location: Home.
Listening: "Between Me And You" by Ja Rule and Christina Millian.

Just returned from a late lunch/dinner at Hamburger Mary's, about two blocks from our apartment. Never having heard of Hamburger Mary's in San Francisco, I was expecting a neighborhood burger joint, maybe a little dingy, but quiet and homey. Imagine my surprise to find, hidden in a very plain building at the intersection of Broadway and Los Alamitos, a hip little hangout with a dance floor, a fully stocked bar, "Wednesday Night With The (gay porn) Stars", and huge portions of fresh, yummy food. Started with a half-order of stuffed sauteed mushrooms and went on to the Mushroom Mary burger on a whole-grain bun with a scrumptious side salad (crisp lettuce, olives, cucumbers, cheese, red onions, bell peppers--nothing like the little plate of limp greens that "side salad" is usually code for), coffee, and strawberry ice cream for dessert. We were surrounded by small television screens (to complement the huge one over the dance floor/stage area) playing dance videos, and gay couples of all ages holding hands and laughing in the dim light, getting filled up before their Saturday nights on the town. They even host "Club Fierce", a girl bar, on Thursday's. Yip!

Sadly, I'll probably never darken the door on Thursday's--if only because men don't go over very well at girl bars (though I would definitely take Peter if he didn't mind getting some odd looks) and because, if you show up alone, someone always assumes that you're there to get picked up and not (as I would be) just out to shake a little ass. Oh well. All the same, it's oddly reassuring to know that there's a lesbian hangout just down the street. I love my neighborhood.

Peter is now snoozing on the floor in front of the television, trying to get rid of a headache that came on during dinner. I'm amusing myself at the computer before reading or watching my The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, And Her Lover DVD (don't want to wake him too soon). Poking through other people's journals, I found the following little questionnaire in Darcy's and thought I'd give it a spin. Bear with me.

Name Five Bad Habits You Have:

• Fretting constantly about everything from my health to my job to my relationship and back again, with only the slightest reasons for doing so.

• Drinking whole bottles of bad (was Tuesday a good year?) Cabernet because it seems like a good idea at the time.

• Chain smoking when I'm fretting and then fretting when I can't figure out why I'm coughing the next day (I'm bright, me).

• Allowing my past painful experiences to cause me to become very insecure and jealous of my boy, which makes things difficult for both of us.

• Allowing my parents and my own fear of failure to lead me into worrying that I'm not as successful as I should be, and that I'll never find my "true calling" in life because, well, if I haven't done it by now, I might as well give up.

Name Five People Currently On Your Bad Side:

• I have my list, but I won't be so inconsiderate as to copy it here. I'll say that three out of the five are women and two of them are lawyers. Hm.

Name Five Scents You Love:

• Night-blooming jasmine (especially blowing in from the canyons in LA. I mentioned this to Peter when we went to Studio City for dinner with Jenn and Kenny, and he suggested I get a cutting and plant some so that I could be surrounded by it whenever I liked. It had never occurred to me).

• Leather (reminds me of saddles, riding boots, and motorcycles).

• Humidity (wet air has a smell and it smells like home).

• Pork Barbecue (especially billowing up from the below-street entrance to The Rendezvous in General Washburn Alley in Memphis).

• Tuberose Indiana by Creed (the only perfume I wear on a regular basis. It's French and I'm almost ashamed by the price, but it doesn't contain the manufactured scents and chemical preservatives that American perfumes do--the ones that give me headaches and make me sneeze. It's a spicy-rose that's never too heavy but somehow lingers in all of my clothes in a very yummy way).

• OK, Six. Sweat. Particularly sweaty horse and sweaty boy (I'm a confessed pheromone junkie and I tend to remember people by the way they smell before anything else).

Name Five Things You'd Never Wear:

• Pink. (My mother swears it used to be my favorite color. At this point, I won't even drink Blush wine.).

• Stacked heels (those huge shoes that all the girls wear to make themselves look taller. This girl I met once was wearing pink running shoes with four-inch soles on them. I was very confused. How in the world am I supposed to escape an angry mob on The Great Day of the Rope in those? Come on, now).

• Tea-length anything (possibly the most unflattering skirt length ever conceived of. I have never seen any woman who doesn't end up looking like a fireplug in tea-length skirts--not even Cindy Crawford. Incidentally, the most popular length for bridesmaids' dresses. Think about it).

• Anything with a logo on it (I don't wear t-shirts for this reason. I end up feeling like a billboard or, in the case of "status bags", like I'm trying to let everyone know how much I was silly enough to spend on a purse).

• Sequin-embroidered sweaters (my mother has a closetful of seasonal, holiday-themed sweaters with little sequined animals, candy canes, jack-o-lanterns, what have you scattered all over them. No. Bad).

• Six, again. Religious symbols (I've never been comfortable wearing crosses or Goddess symbols, simply because I believe that religion is a very personal thing and I don't want to present myself as an example of any faith, as I'm just a very fallible girl).

Name Five Animals You Like:

• Felines (housecats to lions, I gravitate to anything in the cat family).

• Dogs (I love large, powerful dogs like Danes and English Mastiffs. I love the authority they radiate).

• Horses (especially Dutch Warmbloods and draft horses--again, large, strong animals).

• Fish (I can't swim very well, so they fascinate me).

• Penguins (ever seen a line of penguins looking for food? Brilliant).

Name Five TV Shows You Love:

• The X Files (David Duchovny might not have gotten around to loving me yet, but that's ok--I'm a patient girl. Gillian and I can hang in the meantime).

• Moonlighting (sadly now gone, but it was the show that shaped a lot of my personality later on, disturbingly enough).

• China Beach (my first glimpse at what lay behind the sound bites and stock footage on CNN. Started me on the road to my current pacifism).

• The West Wing (possiby the most intelligent television show I've ever seen. Allison Janney and C.J. Craig rock my world every week, and I'd vote Bartlett any day you asked me to).

• The Daily Show (Jon Stewart was, in my mind, the only anchor with enough balls to not hide his anger, pain, and fear after September 11. For that, and for his willingness to satirize and make us really think about what the rest of the media tells us about current events, I have infinite respect for him).

Name Five Celebrities You Don't Like:

• George W. "Bushie" Bush (I won't even go into it. We'd be here all night. Suffice to say, I should have tripped George senior when I had the chance at Christmas communion in Houston two years ago--if only for siring such a pud son).

• Condi Rice (not because she's an African-American female and a Republican--that's entirely her choice, and I respect it. I simply despise her unabashed war-mongering and her inability to remember that the Cold War is over and the majority of the world would like to see it remain that way. Not to mention that tanker with her name on it--that's not an indication of her coziness with Big Oil at all).

• John Ashcroft (Big Brother is alive, well, and slowly seizing more and more of your civil liberties in the name of "homeland security". I haven't forgotten his radically conservative record or his membership in the Religious far-Right. The man is a danger to everything our justice system stands for).

• Don Rumsfeld (again--news flash--the Cold War is over. Someone who holds "detainees" at Guantanamo Bay with no regard for the Geneva Convention and then expects the rest of the world to treat American soldiers and prisoners with respect and humanity is either deluded or unforgiveably stupid. Perhaps the most disturbed (and disturbing) of the Axis Of Arrogance (thanks Kenny). He's apparently a sex symbol--and 45% of American women have never experienced an orgasm. Draw your own conclusions).

• Pat O'Reilly (or Buchanan, or Rush Limbaugh, or whatever other ultra-conservative mysogynist he's trying to emulate this week).

Name Five Drinks You Regularly Have:

• Scotch, no rocks, with a water back (I prefer Lagavulin, but Glen Fiddich will do nicely as well).

• Cabernet Sauvignon (I love robust, earthy reds).

• Jack sours.

• Bourbon, neat.

• Boomhauer (invented by my circle of friends. Southern Comfort and Squirt--so named because, after two of these, you'll be talking like the character on King Of The Hill. Yummy stuff).

Name Five Ice Cream Flavors You Like:

• Cinnamon (not found anywhere outside of Texas or the UK, apparently).

• Strawberry Cheesecake (Thrifty cum Rite-Aid Strawberry Cheesecake. Oh, y'all).

• Chocolate Chip (not mint chocolate chip. The old-school Baskin Robbins standby).

• Haagen Dazs Pineapple Coconut Sorbet (ack! It's a tropical island in my mouth! Get help!).

• Pralines And Cream (hard to find outside of the South--if you know where to get some, let me know).

Name Five Random Facts About Yourself:

• My baby toes turn in instead of laying straight (I often end up stepping on them as a result, which has been the source of much taunting from my friends. My dad has them too. It's a genetic thing, apparently, and not helped by my wearing toe-shoes as a kid).

• I can weave baskets by hand (yes, I actually took a Japanese Basket Weaving after-school class as a kid. I was a serious geek).

• I can weave little mufflers and stuff on a hand-operated loom (I asked for a desktop-sized one for Christmas in fifth grade and still have it at home in Memphis. See? Geek).

• I won the badge for selling the most cookies in my Brownie troop in third grade (I was quite the entrepreneur, me. I quit a few weeks later when they told us that camping wasn't "lady-like").

• I took the SAT for the first time in seventh grade (this was through the Duke University Talent Identification Program. I scored over 1000 and got to go to Duke for an awards ceremony, where a kid named Yu Hu swept the top honors, and the mc choked whenever his name had to be announced).

Name Five Random Facts About Your Family:

• My mother's father went to medical school at fifteen and was the first cardiac surgeon to perform open-heart surgery in the South (he was also a hard-drinking, hard-swearing gun collector who patronized various militia groups. I'm apparently just like him, according to my mother).

• One of my great-great-great grandfathers on my mother's side was Chief of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. He died several years prior to the removal.

• One of my great-grandmothers on my mother's side was born on the Cherokee reservation in Indian Territory in Oklahoma and is on the Dawes Roll, with the rest of her family (she was a deeply eccentric woman who consulted her fortune-teller on everything--including whether or not my great-grandfather should sell his wells to Murphy Oil. She begged him not to. He did it anyway. The wells hit big a few years later. Oops. My mother still gets royalty checks each year, but they really don't compare).

• My father built his business from the ground up (he was born the third of four chidren in Mississippi, got his degree in Industrial Design, and now owns one of the more respected commercial general contracting firms in Memphis. He is the only contractor in his office, and manages to work up every bid and oversee the entire process for every job by himself, because he can't find anyone else who works to his standards. He's known as one of the most honest, hard-working, and generous (his crews all make well over minimum wage and have full benefits, including holiday pay, emergency leave, and medical coverage--very rare in the contracting business) men in the field back home. He did it, largely, all by himself and, despite our differences, he's one of my biggest role models. I'm very proud of him and everything he's accomplished).

• One of my great-grandfathers on my father's side was a moonshiner in Mississippi (he sold his product in big jugs labeled "J.S. Andrews--The Cheapest Liquor In Dixie" (one of which my grandmother still has). Combine this with the fact that, on my mother's side, I'm a direct descendant of Sarah Catherine McCoy--of the "Hatfields and "--and my penchant for guns, whiskey, and blood feuds starts to make sense).