Yesterday was the first time I ever rolled up the windows in my car, looked around to make sure no one was in earshot, and screamed at the top of my lungs.

(Anyone who knows me is probably giggling a little at the thought of me screaming at the top of my lungs. I'm not by nature a screamer.)

Why, you ask? It all started at 8:30AM at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf down the block from where I work. I was there to buy 60 gift cards as part of the Motivation and Recognition program that I am now in charge of at work. (Did you know that Motivation and Recognition can be purchased for as little as $5? It's true!) The line was out the door and I was immediately sorry I had decided to come in the morning, when all coffee places are crazy and the employees frazzled. They told me it would be 20 minutes before they would be able to help me, so I stood around and watched a cute dog outside. It had the face of an old, aristocratic man. Eventually a downtrodden-looking woman of about fifty approached me and said she could help me. She counted out 60 cards, got behind one of the registers and began swiping.

And swiping.

And swiping.

Imagine that 54 more times and you begin to understand. By the time she was done, the line was out the door again and everyone -- employee and customer -- was giving me dirty looks. She totaled it up: $286.

"That's wrong," said the girl at the other register.

"How can it be wrong? I counted it out."

"Should be $300. Sixty times five is three-hundred," said the guy making the drinks.

"How could that happen?"

"Just keeping swiping till you get to $300," he said.

She started recounting the cards, muttering to herself about how it couldn't be wrong. I was silent, trying to be as invisible and accommodating as possible.

"What are you doing?" said the drink-making guy. "I said just keep swiping till you get $300!"

The downtrodden-looking woman fumbled. Her count had been wrong after all. I handed her three more cards from the display in front of the register.

"Thanks," she said, eyes down.

Then she took my boss's corporate purchasing card, swiped it, and waited.

"This is going to take forever," said the girl at the other register.

We waited and waited and waited.

"The card was declined," said the downtrodden woman.

It felt like I had been expecting this all along, like OF COURSE after the waiting and the dirty looks and the swiping of what felt like millions of cards, after that couple with the mean faces took my seat and the dirty water dripped on me from the leaking ceiling and my stomach felt too gross to get a fancy drink that I could have charged to the company, after this poor woman in a crooked Coffee Bean visor spent fifteen minutes of her life swiping these ridiculous cards for me and an additional ten minutes waiting for it to go through, OF COURSE the card would be declined.

I decided to use my personal card and be reimbursed. I no longer cared about anything anymore except getting the hell out of the Coffee Bean.

Unfortunately, the woman somehow cancelled the transaction.

"I'm going to have to swipe them again," she said.

The guy making drinks looked like he was going to kill her. Then me. She started swiping.

About five cards in, I stopped her. "You know what?" I said. "I'd rather get someone else's corporate card and come back. I'll come back."

"You wanna come back?" she said. I could hear the hopefulness in her voice. "Okay, yeah. I'll put these aside for you. I'll put them aside."

"Okay, thanks."

Then I burst out the door, into my car, back on the road, crying a little bit. I was supposed to go to Barnes and Noble too, and to a paper store to buy thank-you cards, but I just went straight back to work, my insides boiling. I wanted to run five miles or maybe punch someone in the face.

Instead I had a nice long scream. It was good.

When Frank Lloyd Wright came to Los Angeles, he wanted to make affordable houses out of cement, turning the ugliest material into something pleasing and even beautiful. It was kind of a disaster, but the Ennis-Brown House and Freeman House are interesting nonetheless.

...to the harrowing incident I reported on October the 2nd:

My boss called her card company to find out why the card had been rejected and THE TRANSACTION HAD BEEN APPROVED. The downtrodden woman was mistaken. Sorely mistaken.

I can laugh about it now. But you can bet I will never set foot in that Coffee Bean again. It's like the scene of a grisly murder to me now.

I'm only half-kidding.

This cat lives at the Schindler House in West Hollywood. The cat that lives at the Ennis-Brown House sleeps in a little structure made of tiles they used in Blade Runner. That made me happy.

One year ago yesterday, I posted my first entry. Back when I knew not a whit about XHTML or CSS. Or what on earth a plug-in was!

Since that entry, I have: taken a good photo or two; exposed my inherent wussiness in the face of a foreign country -- more than once; completely humiliated myself; gone on a business trip; written one of my favorite things ever; turned my life upside down and was subsequently punished by the universe, which chose to place an oily, masturbating sentinel outside my bedroom window (surely you remember); instigated a heated debate about the boys of Trader Joe; quelled my not-so-secret addiction; discovered I like hanging out with myself best of all -- or maybe second best; and, at the end of it all, let out a good, healthy scream.

Here's to another 364 days! Hopefully I'll stay right-side up this time. Which should keep the greased-up men from lurking outside my window....

I think you could look at just about any person and determine within a few seconds whether or not they had ever roasted beets. Beet-roasters have a certain look, I can't explain it. I think I probably look like a beet-roaster. But listen: until tonight I had never done it before.

It was surprisingly easy. And peeling the skins off of the hot pink beets was one of the more satisfying things I have ever done. Kind of like pooling glue on your palm and letting it dry, then pulling it off. But better.

Besides beets, other happy things about autumn are: persimmons, pumpkin butter, the permission to wear scarves in L.A. without looking like a pretentious jerk and not having to wash my car because it is raining.

For Halloween, I am going to be this Mark Ryden girl.

...at the Neutra House in Silver Lake, which feels like a big treehouse made of glass. I wanted to move in.

I work with a girl who was raised in a cave. Or maybe by robots. Yeah, definitely by robots.

Yesterday I was in the office kitchenette, telling a co-worker about the most recent and painful events of my life, when she walked in. (Maybe you shouldn't have been talking about your awful personal details in the office kitchenette, you say. You're probably right, I say. It won't happen again.) She grabbed a soda from the fridge and I lowered my voice and began talk in vague generalities. I don't want Robot Girl saving the painful events of my life in her Memory Cube, after all. But instead of realizing that we were obviously talking about something private -- something involving the words "broke up" and "told me it was never going to work out" and "cried myself to sleep last night" -- and excusing herself quietly, she instead walked over and planted herself in between us, sipping away at her Cactus Cooler (or is it Cactus Coolant?) and saying nothing. Just watching us.

The conversation ended for me at that moment. Though I appreciated the kind words of my non-robot co-worker, who began telling me a story about his own heartbreak and woe, the only thing I could think about was getting out of that kitchenette FAST. My eyes may have widened in disbelief the moment she walked over. I may have begun answering in grunts and gestures rather than words in an attempt to curtail the conversation. I may even have invented a fake task that I needed to get back to and almost ran out of the kitchenette. To tell you the truth, I really have no memory of the end of the encounter. Maybe my shock at the complete lack of social skills has wiped out my memory. Or maybe, just maybe, while she was standing next to me, calmly pouring soda into her Feeding Tube and recording our conversation via her Automated Voice Capture System, she somehow managed to sneak an electrode to my temple and wiped my slate clean.

Listen, I don't ask much from you, dear reader -- a comment here and there, some click-throughs to Amazon, almost nothing really. But I am DEMANDING that all residents of Los Angeles see the Bodyworlds exhibit at the California Science Center! I went last night and it was one of the most interesting museum experiences I have ever had. While it's true that I seem to have a weird fascination with internal organs, there is no way you could walk away from this without a better understanding of your body and more of a sense of wonder at human life itself.

Plus there are some gross-out things you'll be thinking about for ages....

Fake blood for bloody tears: check.

Fake rose for hair: check.

Fake eyelashes for no reason other than they make any costume better: check.

Frilly white dress found in children's section of thrift store, most likely used as First Communion dress for portly 12-year-old girl: check.

I am prepared to conquer Halloween once again.

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Here is a scary story: yesterday I was in Chinatown buying shoes for my costume. Sitting outside Wonder Bakery, sipping oolong tea and eating a really good cream puff, I saw three college-age guys in trucker hats and fake vintage t-shirts standing in the middle of the plaza. One of the guys was taking a picture of the other two, who were using their fingers to stretch out the corners of their eyes.

You know, like the kids used to do in elementary school. Like I used to do in elementary school, until my dad saw me do it and exploded with rage and I realized I had been making fun of myself all along.

I'm sure those guys thought it was funny because it was ironic, just like their hats, like their t-shirts. They aren't truckers! They aren't "Homework Champions of East Elementary"! They aren't racist!

I wonder if the old Chinese men sitting around the plaza -- men who have lived through anti-Chinese immigration laws, through WWII-era pamphlets detailing the differences between Chinese and Japanese faces, through antimiscegenation laws that weren't completely repealed until 1967 -- I wonder if they got the joke.

(And no, I didn't stand up, march across the plaza and call those guys on it. That's the part that scares me the most.)