Overnight stays only.

New Orleans, LA
Miami, FL
San Diego, CA
Hillsboro, WI
Pala, CA
Austin, TX
La Bufadora, Baja, Mexico
Lake Delton, WI
Madison, WI
Chicago, IL
Lima, Peru
Cuzco, Peru
Aguas Calientes, Peru
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Iguazu, Argentina
Julian, CA
New York City, NY
Hermosa Beach, CA
Montreal, Canada

Here’s to pins on maps in 2009.

I’ve obviously been slowing down on the one 101-word story per day streak that I had going during the month of October. I enjoyed it while it lasted but, as with most of my little pet projects, I started to lose steam after a while. On the bright side, it lasted way longer than most of my other flights of fancy (Thai cooking, the guitar, Arabic coffee, and microprocessor design, to name a few). The death knell came when, chatting over wine after Thanksgiving dinner, my mom told me she likes the old, longer posts better. Since the whole weblog idea came about solely to keep her updated on my planetary location, she has an influential vote on the Board of Directors at Sqrabbit, Inc. So starting now (this post > 101 words), unless there is a major outcry, I will return to my old rambling style.

In related news, there will be a public reading of the 23 stories from the Fiction 101 contest, of which Conor and I wrote 6 (as I may have mentioned repeatedly), at Caffe Forte in North Park on Monday 12/8 at 6pm. See y’all there, y’all.

“I’m Billy, and that’s Jake.” We were catching some air outside the club when she sat down, and it took only a couple of minutes of chatting for her to reveal an unpleasant personality. Her friend came over and she introduced us.

“Vanessa, this is Bobby and Jack.”

Billy stifled a cough, then said “How do you remember names so well? I’m always terrible at that. Do you have a system?”

“No, just a good memory I guess.”

“Hmm. Well it’s very impressive.”

When they walked back inside, Billy smiled at me and said, “So I guess we’re the Kennedy’s now?”

I work in research. The rat feces lab is right across the hall from the rat faces lab, and each looks down on the others’ work and think that it is silly and pointless. Sometimes the rat faces lab throws rat faces into the rat feces lab, and sometimes the rat feces lab throws rat feces into the rat faces lab. And on it goes, every goddamn day  - feces flying, faces flapping, feces fuming, faces festering. The only winners, of course, are the rats, except those poor bastards have to part with their faces and feces. This place is wild.

She has finished talking and there is a pause. I am thinking. At this scale, at the level of the human drama, everything is a silly game with arbitrary rules set over the millennia and mostly for historical reasons. But knowing the rules and that they don’t matter doesn’t put you above them, doesn’t give you the ability to step around them. Or does it?

I experiment. “What is the shortest sequence of steps I can take that gets us from this lighthearted conversation to making out on a couch?”

She takes my hand and leads me out of the building.

We will not truly have a theory of everything until the repeated application of that final, singular equation - because eventually the physicists will be able to reduce the entirety of the bouncing, buzzing subatomic zoo down to a series of lower-dimensional projections and broken symmetries stemming from just one beautiful equation of infinite dimension, ornamented with pi and c and a spanakopita of Greek letters — until that equation, crunched a googol of googols times on God’s calculator over the history of the universe, produces the brown argyle sock hanging like a tongue over the edge of my dresser drawer.

In the wake of the yes vote on Proposition 8, I’ve been using my mail-order Reverend status (courtesy of Universal Life Church Monastery, who do not discriminate against scientists or heathens) to be a Secret Marriage Vigilante. See those dudes holding hands on the bridge? Married. Boom. I’m a Reverend. Those women cuddling on a park bench? Just wedded their asses in holy stealthy matrimony like a wedding ninja. What’s the government going to do? Unless some sort of gay marriage Delta Force sends Chuck Norris rappelling heterosexually out of a helicopter, I don’t see how anyone can stop me.

If Greenspan was wrong about his economic model, and even admitted it, then what does that mean for the field of economics in general? Clearly we’re due for a paradigm shift away from traditional equilibrium models toward an evolutionary viewpoint that takes into account imperfect information, irrational agents, and positive feedback, so that it can better predict market volatility.

“Potassium!” someone screamed from across the street. Right. I am walking down a heavily trafficked street wearing a giant banana suit. Why am I thinking about these things right now?

“You’d best get yourself five servings a day, bitches! Five per day!!!”

When the rain started we were in La Boca, miles from the bike rental shop. Someone waved us toward a café embedded in the colorful buildings we had come to photograph, promising tango dancers, but we hesitated to enter this obvious tourist trap. Then the rain poured harder and who were we fooling anyway, with our orange bikes and her Asian face? Inside, the food was pricey, a kid suckered us into buying bad caricatures, and the dancers begged us for tips, but, staring out at the downpour over hot espresso and empanadas, our tourist experience couldn’t have been more perfect.

I, Pageliacci, am a very sad clown. Partly because people write on me with markers.