Corpulent and feminine...

Well, my bit's done as far as the Plastiki is concerned. It's a worthy project, nebulous aims and nominal management aside, and I hope the boat makes it to Sydney. They'll have some trouble getting there, no doubt, what with all the ego involved, but they have a few colorful characters pulling for them so I hope they make the news at the very least. Good luck to them.



A girl at work and I have been playing this game that is as juvenile as it is absorbing; we try to flip one another off in slight and ever more creative ways. It started out as a kind of 'disrespect-you-as-a-joke' sort of thing, but quickly became something much greater when I flipped her off by blowing into my thumb and "inflating" my middle finger. While that kind of junior-high antic is old-hat to me, she'd never seen anything like it. She got so excited that she immediately started thinking of funny new ways to flip me off; she pulled her thumb like a jack to crank her finger up, she put a napkin over her hand and waved her fingers like a magician before quickly pulling the napkin away to reveal her now-erect middle finger, she tied an imaginary string to her middle finger and used it to pull the finger up and down, &c. Ultimately we started hiding slips of paper with a middle finger drawn on them in each other's bags, coats, whatever. She hid a picture of that kind in my paystub. She delivered the coup de grace when she drew a middle finger on the birthday cake she made for me. The whole thing's been hilarious, if a bit uncouth.



All this has made me think of two things - 1) How different people make their 'bird' gesture (with the ring and index finger or without, straight up or wilting back, &c.), and 2) that game in which boys (always boys) form a ring with their index finger and thumb, splaying the rest of the fingers out straight, and display this gesture near their penis in an effort to get their friends to look at it. Once viewed, the 'ring gesture', or 'pussy' as it's sometimes called, entitles the gesturer to punch the viewer (or some variant interaction thereof). I ran a youth hostel for a year and took an informal poll of this 'game' and how it's played among people from all over the world. With only 1 (one!) notable exception, ONLY boys knew of this game. NO girls had ever heard of it, and guys from every country knew the gesture for what it was the moment I made it (most acknowledging this recognition with a pained expression and a shoulder offered for punching). During my 'study' I noted only small variations of display or execution of the 'pussy' gesture, and the only guy who didn't know what it was was from Quebec. Go figure.

So, stay tuned, I'm back on the novel bandwagon.

Homina, homina, homina...

The San Francisco Old-Time and Bluegrass Festival is on this week. Halima and I went to one of the shows last night (this one). It was pretty fantastic to get some of that 'old lonesome' sound in my ears after so long away from the south. There was even a guy there doing a sort of shuffly clog-dance thing right in front of the stage that reminded me of how people back in Tallahassee used to get down to a little bit-o-plucking when the mood took them. After the show we were able to thank a few of the musicians for coming down, and they were all polite and enthusiastic (particularly the bass player for the Clampitt Family. She was super-cute). We plan on going to see a few more shows while the festival's on, but what I'm more hopeful for is meeting a few musicians to play with on a regular basis. Maybe I'll go to one of the 'jams' that are set up this week.

After the show we went to Grubsteak, the local Portuguese-American diner that's stolen my gastronomic heart away. We've been avoiding that place recently in favor of cheeper though less delicious and likely-to-kill-you fare, but the siren of linguica and Portuguese Steak was too much for us last night. As we were leaving a whole crew of frat guys and their sorority dupes staggered in, hooting and carrying on in that singularly banal and annoying 'Greek' way. The waiters looked dismayed, and I felt a pang of regret in my chest as well; every cool little nook blows up at some point. What was your private little slice of heaven yesterday catches the ear of the masses today and will be the 'hip spot' tomorrow. The first time Halima and I ate at Grubsteak, in fact, I overheard the good looking couple sitting next to us say, "Man this place is great. I hope the hipsters never hear about it." Well, my friend, rust never sleeps.

Underneath this paragraph you'll see a couple of pictures; the first is the cabin frames for the Plastiki as they were just after I completed them near Christmas. The second picture is Eva crouching near the doorway of the newly covered cabin mold itself. Yay! We've come so far! Now we're starting to work with foams and PET panels to get the actual construction of the cabin skin going, and while that's underway Eva and I have been busily working away on trouble-shooting the bottle-mounting method. I've worked out how to fit the bottles in a nice, laminar fashion, and Eva and I are now trying to translate my full-size tinkering into a workable template for cutting foam panels to size. It's a challenging drafting/building puzzle and very exciting (if you're a nerd like me it is, anyway).





Later this month is my birthday and the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival besides! I'm going to go to Program #3 - Sharks (pft, of course...), and hope to see long, loving footage of those majestic and terrible fish. There's a panel discussion of shark issues after the films show, and you can bet the farm that I'll be there come Hell or high water. Oh, fuck - I love sharks.