It's been a week of minor ups and downs over here at Evany HQ.

Some good stuff: I went and saw Dengue Fever at the Make Out Room on Saturday, and they rocked so hard, I nearly fell off. Holy shit.

I was so convinced that everyone in SF would be as fired up to see them as I was, I got there super, duper, embarrassingly early, like during sound check. So yeah, I was the girl -- there's one at every show -- who arrives hours before anyone else, all done up in a sleeveless, slightly wacky fifties top, white clam-diggers, and hornrimmed glasses, and, after roping off seven seats for her friends, primly pulls out a book and starts to read. And what book was I reading? Cyrtonomicon! I know, so perfect ... I really stuck the landing on that one.

While I was busy embracing the Early Girl stereotype, I got myself a margarita to complement the crazy heatwave weather, and it was HUGE. With nothing but a lonely peanut butter sandwich to supervise things, the margarita got a little boistrous and managed to talk me into sauntering over to the merchandise table and chit-chatting with Zac the guitar player (of Dieselhed fame, whom I'm ever-so-slightly star struck by, maybe?). Not much of the conversation stayed with me, except the part where I asked him which size tee-shirt would look best hanging on my rack. I punctuated the question by pointing at said rack. With "my," I pointed to my right breast (your left), and on "rack," I pointed to the left one. I said it twice. "My [pointing] rack [pointing] ... My [pointing] rack [pointing]." He just smiled and handed me a youth size large. I also bought a CD!

The night before that was fun, too. I went out with Jill and Dr. Richard Zach. I asked Richard, who was freshly flown in from Canada, if he'd been writing down lots of numbers on chalk boards up there (he's putting his PhD in "logic and the methodology of science," whatever that means, to good use as an assistant professor in Calgary), and he said, "mostly just 7+5=12." Apparently that's a reference to Kant? Who held up 7+5=12 as an example of an unassailable truth? Et cetera? Anyway, that prompted lots of hilarious funning: Singin' in the Rain references ("I Kant stand him!"), penis-length jokes, and so on. Hilarious.

Oh and yesterday I went to a lovely BBQ thrown by a friend of Liz's. There were lots of nice people, plus one of the cutest, toothiest babies ever -- she was all smiles and squeals, especially when there were bubbles afoot. The BBQ also featured some tender, tender beef brisket. I've been trying to eat less meat these days, but oops! Beef brisket! On white bread! With slaw!

The bad things in life these days mostly center around my registration woes. I think I got a little soft, going to a college where the trees outnumber the students and you get pretty much every class you want on the first go. SFSU is a whole different story. A sad, sad story. I'm going part-time (still have a full-time job, unbelievably), so I'm only taking one or two classes a semester. You'd think that would make it easy, since all I really have to do is find one, good class. But the thing is, I'm limited to night classes, and that narrows things considerably. Plus there just aren't that many classes to begin with. Honest!

Anyway, one class fell through thanks to my dumbness, which made me three hours late for my 9 am registration slot, blablabla, and the class I actually managed to sign up for has turned out to be kind of a nightmare ... for me at least. Everyone else in the class seems to just gobble it up. Things leapt onto the wrong foot the moment the teacher walked in the door and zeroed in on me. "What are you frowning about?" he said in this amazing, semi-hysterical, Snaggletooth voice, "This is a COMEDY CLASS!" Then the teacher played a tape of a warbling Noel Coward song that I couldn't really hear the words to, followed by a husband-wife team doing a deliberately bad version of another song I couldn't hear, followed by Tom Leher doing "The Masochism Tango."

Next the teacher read some delectable Chaucer sections aloud. In ye olde English. I understood maybe every 30th word. Maybe. But my fellow classmates totally whooped it up, laughing, in unison, at all the right moments. Something-something about grabbing a woman by her "coynte," something-something else about a germ-freak oopsily kisses another woman's hairy ass? And, I don't know, pus? Hahaha? Anyway, as I sat there with a weird, stiff smile wired to my face (the only possible answer to "What are you frowning about?"), getting about 15% of what was going on in the three-hour class, it became absolutely clear to me that I'm a total illiterate and way, way out of my depth. Plus there's no food or drink allowed in class! A class that spans the prime eating hours between 6 and 9 at night! (Now that's comedy.) So tonight I'm off to see if I can lie, cheat, beg, steal my way into some other class. Any other class. Please?

Registration woes aside, I also managed to give myself a not-so-cute dye job. I was going for "highlights" -- I had the squares of tinfoil, paint brush, bleach, and everything. This is the fourth time I've done it, and it's always turned out A-OK. But I think I went overboard, did too many highs, not enough lows or something. Because I look like I simply poured a bottle of Sun-In on my head. In other words, I look like Evany Thomas, circa sophomore year of high school. The only thing missing are the braces. And the optimism.

On a possibly related note, my love life is pretty dumb right now, too. Not even anecdotally dumb. Just ... bleh.

The end!

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)