God dammit, I totally lost a blog post. The gist of it was that I had the most action-packed weekend in recent memory.

Critical Mass wasn’t quite rained out on Friday, but I would say that the mass wasn’t quite critical enough. I got there (The Ferry Building at 18:30 on the final Friday of each month) late and joined a group of maybe twenty other stragglers for a subcritical mass. Subcritical Mass was in some ways more fun but noteably more dangerous than real Critical Mass–there aren’t enough bodies to stop traffic and at one point a Honda Prelude came within a foot of hitting me head on at forty-five miles per hour as we biked the wrong way down Folsom Street. We finally found the main group, but it didn’t really have enough people to form a collective conscious. Instead we were a bunch of indecisive assholes, tentative at every intersection, and I biked home to work on feather2pixels.com.

So: feather2pixels.com: check it out. I guess this is my best stab at a first draft. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Not that anyone needs any of this crap. I feel good about the modest format, though even this laughably little took me months to program. I can’t escape computers.

So after blowing $10 on a misloaded film cartridge, the old Polish dude at Action Camera in West Portal showed me how to properly load my new Polaroid on Saturday morning. After producing a few successful shots, I say “I can’t believe I waited till I was twenty-seven to pick one of these up.” Every frame looks like it was taken in in 1976!

That night, after finding my favorite Dylan album on vinyl, I made it back to the Exploratorium for a sound festival, which was a little disappointing by Exploratorium standards, but I saw some old friends and I felt very cool to be known at the greatest science museum in the world. A pepperoni and mushroom pizza with a pitcher of Bud was enjoyed afterwards at Vincent’s.

Sunday started with a surprisingly solid breakfast in North Beach followed by a hike in the Marin Headlands. I’ve never actually hiked there, but the hills smelled strongly of Calfornia and the Pacific was sparkly from the summit. There are endless clusters of abandoned forts up there, decaying in the caustic fog sixty years after the Japanese didn’t invade. A murder of crows kept their eyes on us as we climbed through the ruins and wished that I had bothered to bring along my new camera.

This is Sarah:

After three unsuccessful attempts to find Rocky II at area video stores, I met Krisitin at the Sunset Baskin Robbins. We settled for the original, which wasn’t really a bad thing. And there you go: an exhausting, exhilarating, perfect week. A model for what I want out of life.

Thursday. Trying to remember what I do on Thursday. Get up early, for one thing. Like, last semester early. And after an initial week of superhuman energy I have been sleepwalking through the rest of the month. It didn’t help that I started drinking on Monday this week.

Here are some uninteresting things about my life:

-Lost at trivia last night. Not just lost: last place! What the hell? Things better get back to normal quick.

-Burned up about a gallon of gasoline in 1988 Volvo, riding three miles across town to watch “An Inconvenient Truth” at the Independent movie night with Corinne and Rinne. Awesome awesome awesome.

-Won the lottery.

-And for now I am living up to my 2007 resolution of averaging one movie a week. I caught “Romantico” with the Valeri family on Tuesday after an all out suhsi orgy in the old neighborhood. Remember that I am tired? I embarrassingly nodded off and for a moment got to be the guy who was snoring at the movies.

-Speaking of the old neighborhood: SF changes so fast. I realized that on one block of Polk Street, 75% of the stores had been replaced from the time I moved there in 2003. Businesses that stay are the exception, not the norm.

-I finally have an idea for the fourth postcard. I am realize my dream of a three-stage print.

-My healthy relationship is going great and I think I may have won the upper hand in my unhealthy relationship. But did I fuck up my last emai?

The Rascal is gone forever. We had our final goodbye on Sunday night and it was short and sad. Three years we spent in our little home together on top of the hill with the cable cars, asian seniors, and that bachelor with his dalmation pup. I don’t know how *in* love we were, but I have never loved a girl like I loved her.

I woke up in a strange neighborhood today. The morning sun was high and to the south. I was enjoying it on the walk to the 24 bus line, happy to be alive and thinking that maybe I will never not feel alone, but the city will always be here for me. And that’s almost enough–she always gives me back everything I give to her and more. I got to the corner of Baker and Divisadero and a woman on the corner was wearing an SF SPCA shirt. It pleased me. I asked her if she worked there. She did. “Cool,” I said.

Just as soon as I get organized at home, mountains of junk threaten to bury me at work. But it’s not just me. Students, faculty, staff–seems like everyone at the Academy has started the spring semester in a haze of chaos. I had vague plans that today would be the one that I take to assemble my shit together, but now I am thinking that in order for that to be happen I will need to experience a really successful lunch. And then a nap.

Last night I made my first 2007 SF Sketchfest appearance at a Kasper Hauser show with some friends at the Eureka Theater. We started with dinner at the House of Nanking next door, where those in the know let the staff “take care of you,” which results in mountains of fried chinese food appearing on your table in rapid succession until you beg for mercy. Then they bring out two more dishes and a bill for $100. That place rules. Kasper Hauser were great, finally debuting some new sketches and highlighting their new SkyMaul catalog, which came out of nowhere but which I suppose has kept them busy. Like a little kid, I got mine signed after the show.

Speaking of coming out of nowhere, I went on the perfect date Friday night. When she showed up at Tornado in the Lower Haight with a bike helmet and her pant leg rolled up I had a feeling things would go well. After we both had our fill of draft beer from a few hours of dicking around Haight-Fillmore bars I asked her if she wanted to take a walk. It was freezing out but she did want to take a walk, she said. So we hiked up to the buena vista of Buena Vista Park, the romantic possibilities of which I imagine we only scratched the surface of in the form of misty kisses and peeing on myself in the dark. Anyways Indy Sarah is thirty, employed at SF Unified, gentle, a peace corps alumna, and we had an instant connection. What more do you want? That was unexpected.

Seriously, it really is cold here. I guess oranges are about to cost $10 a pound or something. I am much more concerned about the avocados.

The status of my employment on the training cruise is apparently uncertain now.

And my ever-ridiculous codependent internet relationship is taking interesting new turns. Here’s a flavor:

it’s funny you mention foam. on monday i was at a coffee shop foreign to me and by the ocean. i ordered an americano but at the last moment i decided a cappuccino sounded better. the server was enthusiastic but prepared more a caricature of a cappuccino than something i could drink–one milky ounce of liquid buried underneath a ludicrous mountain of foam, bubbling over the glass and tickling my nose.

you could always tickle my nose.

Feather2pixel fans around the globe, please join me in chorus: what the fuck? (Though I refuse to tell you which one of us authored that)

Vacation is definitely over. It’s back to khaki uniforms, Interstate 80, and all things nautical. It’s been a surprisingly smooth transition, though. There are a few reasons why:

1. I forgot how much I enjoy my students. They are really fun to work with and they make me laugh. You know, to myself, in private.

2. Encouraging results. I got my fall evaluations back and they were outstanding. Some highlights:

Damn that makes me feel good. And it’s cute that person thinks I am a professor. For as stressful as it is to impersonate a real person, this job has it’s moments.

And this semester there are no 8 AM classes in lecturer Fischer’s schedule. In fact, I don’t teach until 14:30 on Tuesdays and yesterday was like a dream come true. I didn’t leave my house until noon, which gave me enough time to bike to and from the Pacific Ocean, cook a proper breakfast with bacon, and read about Enron over coffee. Geez, I felt like a million bucks! I was even around the neighborhood for one of the post office’s 2.5 operating hours to drop $40 on stamps (leaving me with $999,960.00). Needless to say, I am waiting for the imminent crash.

Last night I made my internet girlfriend the most beautiful mix CD ever. I put everything together from scratch: the label, the case, the packaging. I’ve passed the point of pathetic, now it’s just a matter of stubbornness: that girl will notice me once even if it kills me.