Chops!

I'm going to get my bangs trimmed. Word on the street (well, the Starbucks line) has it that my haircut is cute, so here are some shitty webcam pictures before I cut off the stylish part. Long bangs look good, but they're really impractical in a food service job, because you have to wash your hands after touching your hair.



Here I am looking reeeeally douchey. However, that thur is my absolute favorite shirt. It's falling apart pretty rapidly. Every time I wear it, I either create or discover a new hole.

Suck it, B of A!

I just got Bank of America to refund seventy dollars in overdraft charges, after only three phone calls (though one of those was to PayPal. Every single customer service representative with whom I spoke was just fantastic; specifically a woman named Taylor, the PayPal worker. Not only did she explain exactly how account transfers between bank and PayPal accounts work, she also emailed me a letter to forward to my bank, requesting that the fees I was charged be waived. It was glorious.

Fortunately, it was much easier than that. I was refunded with barely any effort on my part, and judging by the speed of the transaction, barely any on the part(s?) of the workers in question. Now, however, I'm just angry at B of A's whole overdraft system. If they can refund me so easily, why even charge in the first place? It just seems like they're testing how much they can get away with, and if someone makes a phone call like I did, they're like a 4-year-old caught with a hand in the cookie jar.

I've been talking with people all day about Officer Mehserle's conviction for shooting and killing an unarmed man at a BART station in January 09. To make it clear, I am angry about how easily he got off, and think it's worth further investigation, but I just can't stand behind rioting. Since I don't feel like typing this all over again, I'm going to copy/paste some comments I made on Facebook:

"Well, now that conviction will never be reconsidered, because that would be giving in to rioters, which (in the brains of officials) validates rioting. They don't want to do that. I feel like protest/petition would be more effective, but now it's unlikely. Sad, sad, sad."

"By the way, the people who are going to suffer from those lootings aren't the higher-ups in the corporations. It's the workers being paid minimum wage who will have to clean up the messes, or worse, be without work during reconstruction. Businesses have money (or fake money like credit cards) to take care of destruction like this. It doesn't come out of the CEO's pocket."

I would also like to add that many of the businesses which were ransacked were franchises, which means they are privately owned. So the responsibility is really deferred from the wealth of these companies.

Blah blah blah. Anyway, some of the responses have made me really angry. It just seems like people who are saying things like "disband the BART police!" have the wrong idea about the whole thing. I don't see how that would be effective. I'm sure there are many events during which the BART police were effective, but no one would ever talk about them, because that's their job. This is a case of an individual man doing something that was not supported by the police force. His sentence was not severe enough, and I hope that it gets changed, but I wish folks wouldn't turn on a whole organization because of an individual. That is one manner in which a widespread prejudice sparks, and for some reason, when it concerns cops, prejudice has become acceptable.

That being said, fuck that Officer Mehserle jerk-off, and his ending of Oscar Grant's life.

Brian Baumgartner

I was just half-watching an old episode of The Office, and in one of the moments I happened to glance at the screen, I saw that the character Kevin has the same sunglasses as me.

Olive oil follow up, and more cooking.

The result of the olive oil in my hair was disappointing. After shampooing it out, my hair was just as dry as before, which I later figured out was from a product change. I guess I should have realized that from the beginning, but I've never been one to look for an easy solution. Instead of being logical, I assumed that my hair had completely changed textures in the middle of one day.

Sean's bone marrow transplant was yesterday, and I was not there, just like the first one. Aside from the fact that I had to work, I guess procedures like that just direct more traffic through his room, and he's already privacy-starved as it is. I really don't want to cause any discontent while he's in the hospital. A lot of people (NOT most of his friends, who are really wary about stopping by) assume that because he's in the hospital, any familiar face will be a joy. Maybe that would be true if he were there for a week or two (maybe not, though), but for a month, it's the place that he's living, and I think he'd like it if people treated it more like he's just at his apartment. Sometimes he just doesn't anyone there, and I think it should be his right to utilize his power over the things he actually can control, since so much is out of his hands.

That being said, I'm sure if a friendly phone number were to text him as a prelude to a visit, it would work out just fine.

I made some work pants into capris today. I'm not generally a supporter of that pant length (on myself, anyway), but today I just couldn't stomach anything else. I cut almost a foot off, hemmed them, wore them to work, and all was happy until I got home. Since I've been a vegan, I'm losing weight, and the pants in question no longer fit. I decided to just run a seam 5/8" inside of the outer-leg seam (I am probably making legitimate sewers cringe with this language), which worked out just fine until I broke my needle on a grommet. Blah blah blah, I now have a pair of capris with a home-sewn seam down one leg and not the other. I replaced the needle, but the machine didn't work anymore after that. If my serger still worked, I would use that, but it also broke on me a few weeks ago.

Maybe it's me?

This is getting extra-long, so I'll just finish by saying that I baked vegan sweet potato buttermilk biscuits after the sewing failure. I used to make Bisquik biscuits all the time as a child, and these were similar. The one I ate was just lovely.

As a new blog writer...

I guess I shouldn't wait so long between posts, but sometimes I'm just so uninspired. I'm sitting at the kitchen table with olive oil in my hair -- something I was inspired to do after yesterday, when my hair decided to do whatever the balls it wanted. I was making a pizza, which required the use of olive oil, and as I was cleaning up, I started running my olive oil covered hands through my hair, slowly adding more and more.

I really hope I don't end up regretting this.



The pizza that began it all.



This is semi-unrelated, but I just love my espresso maker.



The first photo I posted was probably the least flattering of all the oily hair pictures I took, but it gave the best view of the dress I'm wearing, which has been my favorite for three years. It was a purchase made at my favorite vintage store in San Francisco when I still lived there. I wore it to class almost every day for a few weeks.

Missing opportunities

I feel like I'm supposed to be learning something about how to deal with helplessness. Like, at some point in the future, through something traumatic, I'm going to be able to just sit back and let things happen, because of something I'll know about this helpless feeling that I currently can't shake. I have many issues with being out of control -- this manifests itself most accessibly in vehicles I am not driving/piloting -- and I think that if things continue as they are now, it's just going to drive me crazy. However, I have always gone through my life refusing important lessons, no matter how conveniently packaged they are, no matter how simple it would be to just tear off their wrappers and devour them. The more likely scenario, I think, will be that at some distant future point, I'll be struggling to remember how I dealt with what's going on now, because certainly I must have figured out a constructive way.

It's hard for me to accept that I'm twenty-two with a fiance going through horribly rough treatment for a notoriously awful disease, and I'm going to come out of it with less clarity than I had when it began.

Jay-rad

Here is an article that was in the Sac Bee today.

This article concerns the brother of a high school friend of mine who worked on changing some legislation involving motorcycle safety courses, and at what point in obtaining a motorcycle license the course is required. My friend Jarrad passed away at age 18 after a motorcycle accident that took place immediately after he received his learner's permit. Sawyer Cole (Jarrad's brother) and a friend of his (the brother of a close friend of Jarrad's) got something passed that makes the motorcycle safety course mandatory before the motorcycle learner's permit is obtained.

People in the comments section are raising a big ol' fuss, as usual. However, I think this is a pretty reasonable law (especially since I think the only people required to follow it are those under 21). First of all, with an automobile permit, it is required that the learner drives with a licensed driver, even if the learner is over 18. Since on a motorcycle it would be far more difficult for a licensed driver to communicate information to the learner in-route, I think that gap could use some filling. I mean, besides some restrictions on when and where a permit-holder can drive (they are restricted from nighttime driving and freeways), motorcycle permits don't seem all that different from licenses.

Anyway, Sac Bee commentators are freaking out because they think that this means that Jarrad's family is blaming his death on the lack of legislation in place. I have no idea if that's true or not, as I haven't talked to any of them in years, but I can't imagine that's what anyone is saying. It's certainly not what I'm trying to get across, especially because of what I understand about the accident itself, which was kind of freakish. I just don't think it's unreasonable to require a bit of know-how before you're allowed to rampage around town on a potentially dangerous vehicle -- especially because an ignorant motorcyclist could make a fatal mistake that involved another vehicle, who could ultimately take the blame.

Look at how handsome Jarrad is!



Here he and I are around 2006, sharing a quick, platonic smooch.