Monthly Archives: August 2003

Friday Five: Travelling

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1. What’s the last place you traveled to, outside your own home state/country?
State: Washington
Country: Canada (Toronto, Montréal, and Ottawa)

2. What’s the most bizarre/unusual thing that’s ever happened to you while traveling?
Let’s see… I’ve had someone try to sit on my face. It was on the way back from Ireland in 1998 and we were on the leg of the flight from Chicago to San Francisco. I was *really* sick with what turned into walking pneumonia two weeks later and asked the stewardess politely to re-seat me so I’d be on an aisle. There were some rows in the middle of the plane that were empty, so I lay across one. I awakened three hours later to find a drunk guy about to sit down on my head. I screamed and the stewardess escorted him back to his seat. My mom came back and sat with me for the rest of the flight.

3. If you could take off to anywhere, money and time being no object, where would you go?
Seattle, my grandparents’ cabin in British Columbia, backpacking across Europe, studying Islam in Egypt, Israel, India, Korea,….

4. Do you prefer traveling by plane, train or car?
For the sake of quickness, I prefer plane. I’m also still working on getting my driver’s license.

5. What’s the next place on your list to visit?
Los Angeles next weekend. I get to see my mommy and my daddy and my twin brother and my sister-in-law and my parents-in-law and my friend Brian. (Yes… I do know that I could have eliminated all of those ands and just used commas. Deal with it.)

Strange Politics Karma

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Let’s see… I spent my first 21 years in a state where there is a recall movement going (that is an utter waste of time and money) and the candidates to replace Gray Davis include:

  • Gary Coleman

  • Arianna Huffington

  • **Arnold Schwarzenegger (he is a serious contender)

  • Larry Flynt (whose election would cause a mass exodus of people to the Midwest)

    • (The more mundane candidates: **Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamente, Rep. Darryl Issa, and **Dick Riordan [ex-mayor of L.A.]. The starred candidates are the ones I’d actually vote for.)

    Then… I move to Ohio where the possible senatorial candidate for the Democrats is Jerry Springer. (I’d love to see discussions on the floor of the Capitol if he had decided to run and was elected.)

    Our next state move is probably going to be Minnesota… where the ex-governor was Jess “The Body” Ventura.

    I think I definitely have strange politics karma.

    The Story of “Lepicat”

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    When I was doing my CIT training and during my first summer of counselling at a Girl Scout camp, my camp name was Leprechaun. I got it when I was 13 because I’m tiny, Irish, and a little on the feisty side. A lot of the international staff couldn’t pronounce it, so they called me “Lepi”.

    When I started college that fall, I needed an email ID and I didn’t want to use “jmccabe” because that would be boring. Most of the Jennifer derivatives had been taken and “leprechaun” was too long to use. The server at UCSC is “cats”, so a lot of people have cat-related email addresses. (The various servers are actually named for T.S. Eliot characters like “rumpleteazer” and “mungojerrie”.) I was going to do “lepi_jen” but that one was rejected, so I did “lepi_cat” instead.

    When I acquired my group of friends (many of whom I’d met the year before when I’d been visiting my friend Cougar at UCSC), there were about 8 Jen’s. So… they nicknamed us and my normal nickname was “Lepicat Jen”. Well… that soon evolved into just “Lepicat” (though Cougar still called me Leprechaun) and someone even created a special signature symbol for me. My other nickname was “Kitty Cat” because I can sleep almost anywhere and I had a habit of crashing on people’s beds in a ball while waiting for them to take me down to Long’s to get my antibiotics. (I had almost a constant case of bronchitis my first year of college.)

    So… that’s the story. My college friends still call me “Lepicat” and it’s happened where I answer the phone and the voice on the other line is screaming “Lepicat!!!!!!” (This would be my friend Brian Green, who I will be seeing for the first time in two years on the 18th while Jon is in his Approval interview.)

    Since I Am A Native Californian…

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    I thought I should put my $0.02 in on the recall:

    IT IS A COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY FOR A STATE THAT IS ALREADY IN FINANCIAL PROBLEMS BECAUSE OF STUPID GOVERNORS FOR THE 30 YEARS BEFORE DAVIS WAS ELECTED.

    OK… let’s look at the situation: a disgruntled politician who lost his bid for Senate is funding the recall and is running himself. Yo! Issa wants to be king — like he’s going to settle for anyone else having the governorship? California had problems LOOOOOONG before Davis was elected. It’s a state of 32 million people speaking 200 different languages which really has two separate cultures (north and south) and grows most of the nation’s food even though it’s really just a well-irrigated desert. In other words, it’s a tough state to govern and believe me, the previous years of Republican tyranny before Davis were just as bad. I remember having a 5 period day in middle school with science alternating with PE so that my school could have its performing arts program. That was 1992-1994… BEFORE Davis.

    Oh yes… the economy is crappy everywhere and Silicon Valley is one of the worst places hit because there was an overexpansion in productive capacity known as the Dot.Gone bust. Yes… power bills are high — y’all are the ones who voted for deregulation in 1996. Don’t say that PG&E didn’t warn us — I remember the TV ads. You made your beds — now lie in them! Do you really want a schmuck like Bill Simon, Darryl Issa, or Larry Flint governing y’all? I mean.. Davis isn’t perfect, but at least he isn’t a smut peddler, someone who alienated himself from his own party, or a disgruntled person with weapons violations.

    Gene Robinson

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    CNN.Com: Episcopalians delay vote on gay bishop

    I’m not in favor of his consecration as bishop because he is in a same-sex relationship but… I also think that someone is pulling some pretty nasty tricks to keep him from being bishop. If these allegations are true, why were they not brought up in the months between when the people of his diocese first elected him bishop and the General Convention?

    From the email alleging the misconduct:

    “My personal experience of him is that he … does not maintain appropriate boundaries with men. I believe this is an alarming weakness of character that alone makes Gene unsuitable for the office of bishop.

    “When I first encountered Gene at a … convocation a couple of years ago he put his hands on me inappropriately every time I engaged him in conversation. NO GAY MAN HAS EVER BEHAVED TOWARDS ME THIS WAY [capitals in original] — and I have had over 25 years of associations with gay male colleagues in the Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and San Diego show business communities.

    “If I were a straight woman reporting heterosexual harassment by a straight male priest, would you hesitate to take the matter seriously? Well, I am a straight man reporting homosexual harassment by a gay male priest from another diocese.”

    Out of fairness here, the final vote is being delayed to look into the charges. Still… how exactly did Canon Robinson touch this man inappropriately? Did he hold his hand to long? Did he touch his shoulders? Did this person wait to report it until he found out that Canon Robinson was gay???

    I know that given my past I shouldn’t be so skeptical of this man’s allegations because I too was afraid of being believed about this at one point. Still… why did this person wait until the eve of the final vote to report this? That makes it just really suspicious.

    The other charge is that a website that the Canon started has links to erotic pictures. Canon Robinson denies having anything to do with the site for a few years. My questions: what made these pictures so erotic? Two men holding hands? Was it straight-up pr0n? Do they really think that someone with that much to lose (I’m talking Canon Robinson) would affiliate himself with a site like that???

    I’m really disappointed here. I mean, yeah… I don’t want him consecrated, but give the man a fair shot!

    Being a Domesticated Lepicat

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    If you want to hear the story behind my nickname of “Lepicat”, let me know in the comments section and if enough people ask, maybe I’ll post it. đŸ™‚

    The past few days have seen me baking bread, making lasagna portions to freeze (it’s cheaper than frozen dinners and much healthier), making fruit salad, and doing other miscellaneous things around the kitchen. We got a new blender after our old one (which someone had given to us because they didn’t want to take it when they moved) started smoking while blending my chai shake on Tuesday, so I’ve been having fun with it.

    I also finished a lap throw/afghan last night that had been sitting in my crocheting/mending pile for 6 months because my wrists were so worn out from working on it. (Note to self: two-ply afghans are just as bad as three-ply ones and can cause major “carpal afghan syndrome”.) I decided to just finish the row of double crocheting around the edges to make it look pretty and it only took me 45 minutes to finish. I washed it (mostly to get the cat fur off since my cats have both nap-tested it numerous times) and I put it in my big black suitcase to give to Mom when I head to the Promised Land in two weeks. (Well… the icky deserty land surrounding the Promised Land — can you tell that I hate L.A.?)

    My next project: squares for a patch work afghan. I’m hopefully going to have it done by Christmas though I think it will be finished when it’s finished.