so batcave was fun on saturday; just about everyone was there, and all these people i hadn’t seen in months: bill, rich, even cj who was in scotland for a really long time. spencer and gundam, as well as naomi and dino and a bunch of people i’m forgetting. syren’s getting me on the list for next week, which should be good.

i’m trying to decide if i want to go see lords of acid tomorrow night.

and right now i need to go deal with an external drive that’s refusing to mount. i’ll update in a bit maybe.

ok, another week’s worth of entries got overwritten somehow. that’s kind of annoying. oh well.

be proud of me: i managed to get myself in bed and asleep by 2 am last night, which meant i woke up by noon today. i’m attempting to get some housecleaning done this afternoon, but all i’ve done so far is deal with the trash. i still need to do the dishes and take my laundry in.

i’ve been attempting to do at least one or two updates a day for my spot on the hardnews camportals, despite the fact that i don’t actually have a web cam right now. i’m just faking it with my digital camera. i’ve got an archive of all the stills to date; i’ll upload them somewhere soon enough.

i’ve been listening to a lot of vnv again lately, it’s good stuff. i’ll probably end up going clubbing tonight if for no other reason than so that i can dance to vnv, which ian will no doubt play plenty of, as he always does. people complain a lot that he plays the same music every week - which is true, but at least his set is a good one. daniel from haujobb is also spinning tonight, i believe on the downstairs dancefloor, so that should be fun.

my nails are red right now. the end.

yes, i’m a fucktard - hot soup drew another incredibly adorable sketch of me that i was going to stick in today’s entry, except that i forgot to upload it before i left the house this morning. spank me, i’ve been bad.

i’ve been updating my image over at the hardnews cam portals once or twice a day thus far; check it out if you haven’t already.

i’m sort of groggy; last night was one of those nights where i fell asleep reading but have no idea when that was, and woke up all confused in my clothes and with all the lights still on.

i didn’t actively decide not to go to the batcave; it just sort of got to be the time where i’d need to get dressed if i were going out, and i didn’t feel like getting dressed, so i didn’t. i stayed in and watched high art instead. i remember chrissy and i rented it ages ago when i was still living at nyu, and i picked it up at hmv the other day when i was hanging out in herald square with gundam. we got dinner at this place called maui tacos, which i remember going to a long time ago with james (the first).

i ran into john at hmv too; he still works at the herald square one although james is now at the one in times square. we spoke about krystal for a little and it made me miss her more. i need to dig up her number and give her a call sometime very soon. maybe today.

on my agenda for today: laundry, dishes. general house stuff. also a long bath. i might head out to long island with gundam this afternoon; haven’t spoken to that particular sexy bitch yet today though.

i’ve been talking to bryan a lot lately and it’s sounding like after his next album he’s more or less through with velvet acid christ. he’s not going to stop working, i don’t think, but whatever he does isn’t going to be vac. i’m looking forward to it, personally.

hee. despite my foul mood, i actually did have a happy valentine’s day yesterday. thank you to everyone who sent me a greeting card - cath and gundam in particular [yay chococat!].

anyway, i must be off to work, but lastly:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CAOINE
my site is two years old today! yay!

wednesday, 14 february 2001 | 8:42 am est

happy valentine’s day, i suppose.

i realized on the train this morning that caoine turns two years old tomorrow. it was two years ago now that i first registered a geocities account and started trying to teach myself html. the first incarnation of the site - back when it was still called [and yes, it makes me cringe too] “the odditorium” - was pretty godawful. its sole purpose was to act as a sort of glorified profile [some things never change] and to keep me from having to email some pictures of me that brian had taken with his digital camera. brian’s dead now. he died at a punk show shortly after he started his freshman year in college. he was eighteen. i miss him.

the site’s moved around a lot in the past two years. as i mentioned, it started on geocities. some time after that, i moved it to internettrash. shortly after i moved to new york and started getting to know people here, cliff offered to host me and i moved again, to nycgoth.com. a few months later, the site made its last actual move to date, when spencer hosted me on thorns.org. i have my own domain now, but caoine.org is still actually stored on spencer’s server, as are most of my other sites. i doubt i’ll be moving any of them any time soon.

i sort of wish i still had one of my first designs, just as a sort of historical curiosity. they were all terrible, of course, but it would be interesting to see the evolution.

anyway. have a good wednesday.

in spite of my subcultural affiliations, i don’t cry very much.

i’ve been sort of moody for the past week or so since the breakup. nothing surprising. to be expected, really. every day is like every other day, except maybe it’s a little harder to get up in the morning, a little more difficult to concentrate during meetings, a little earlier that i need to go to bed.

i got some bubble bath on friday at sephora. fleur d’orange, my favorite scent. i filled the tub with hot water tonight when i got home from work and poured in some of the thick amber goop. i
haven’t taken a bubble bath in forever. i’m a shower sort of person.

i climbed into the tub and had a good soak. i stayed there until the bubbles had all disappeared and the water started to cool, leaving me goosebumpy. and then i started to cry.

there wasn’t anything in particular to prompt it. i mean, yeah, i miss him. i don’t regret breaking up with him - i wish i hadn’t had to do it, but i don’t regret having done it. nevertheless, i somehow ended up sitting naked in a tubful of lukewarm water and bawling my eyes out.

it’s embarrassing. i feel like the teenager i haven’t allowed myself to be in years, regardless of when my twentieth birthday actually occurred. i don’t like to feel vulnerable, and it’s not often that i actually allow myself to be vulnerable. i don’t know what it is; i guess somehow i just feel like i need to be tough, or at least appear so.

but i’m not. i’m just a girl sitting here in an old cure t-shirt with wet hair and tears in my eyes.

mrf. so much work. penny arcade is just about all set at this point - there’s a couple more things i need to take care of, and then i should be done with it for a while except for the occasional tweaking that will no doubt arise. so now i’m focusing on getting my father’s site up - which will, with any luck, happen tonight. after that it’s the usual list - my own sites all need work, especially precarious.org, which was lost entirely when spencer’s machine went down a while ago. i’m also working on a profiles section for wombitty.com, and there’s a couple of new projects i’d like to tackle if i get the opportunity. then, you know, there’s also my actual job. some chick criticized me once for something along the lines of “pretending” to be a designer without ever actually designing anything. the fact that she’s got other issues with me and was just groping for excuses aside, i had to laugh - what else do i do? i design for nine or ten hours a day at the office, then i come home and work on my own projects and on freelance stuff. sure, caoine.org might not be redesigned every weekend like it was when i was in school and had nothing else to do, but that’s also because i like the current design, and i think it’s at a level now where it neither needs to be nor should be altered so often just for the sake of doing so. that said, i do think it’s about time for it to be redone. it’s on my list, believe me.

so it occured to me today that wednesday is valentine’s day. it never fails that i end up breaking up with someone shortly before that particularly overemphasized holiday, and this year is no exception. i think i’ll buy myself some roses and go see snatch with gundam - we’re going on an anti-date.

the excellent Quatoria [of #penny-arcade on irc.penny-arcade.com] hooked me up with the soundtrack to jet grind radio [or jet set radio, if you're japanese or a stickler], and it’s fabulous. i’ve been listening to it all morning and no fewer than four of my coworkers have demanded to know what they were hearing and where they could buy it. unfortunately, you can’t - not yet - but if you have the opportunity to snag it on mp3, do so. it’s sex in soundtrack form.

one last note: those of you who frequent my irc server and who also use aol have, no doubt, noticed that you can no longer connect from an aol address. sorry, but that’s the way it is, at least for now. i’ve had too much trouble with irc kiddies during the past week or so. i’ll remove the ban at some point, but until then, do without or get a real isp. the server in question is, of course, irc.thorns.org 7000. the party’s in #thorns.

anyway. back to work for me. ta.

i shouldn’t be awake yet; i didn’t get home till after four this morning and i have no idea what time i went to bed, but it was just one of those mornings where once i realized it was light out, i couldn’t go back to sleep. i’m finishing the post-club snack i bought last night at a deli after i left batcave - jing, which is this sobe drink i used to be addicted to until it stopped being available in very many places, and those bugles things. heh.

today i’m probably just going to work. i have a lot of stuff i need to catch up on - what else is new, right? if i have time, gundam and i were thinking about going shopping in chinatown, but i don’t know for sure if that’s going to happen.

it’s very cold out. just the walk from the subway station to the club last night left my hands so numb that i couldn’t feel them until i’d been inside for about twenty minutes. my windows are all shut right now and i can still feel this freezing draft from outside. i guess that’s february for you. i prefer spring and fall, personally - winter’s too cold and summer’s way too hot, at least in new york.

batcave was okay, i guess. i didn’t stay till closing like i usually do. i think i had a little too much to drink, which tends to make me either really giggly and repetitive or really moody; last night it was the latter. i was missing jim a lot, too. sigh.

i think i’m going to go play some tekken now. ta.

remember a few months ago when i mentioned i wanted some god damned toys for my desk? well, i’ve been slowly acquiring them, and now i’ve got this miniature menagerie going on. there’s spooky, the nubbly skeletal squeak toy from jhonen vasquez’s i feel sick that i’ve had for some time. then there’s a skeleton pez dispenser that used to live on my desk at home, but which has been relocated to my work environment. tekken 3’s hwoarang joined the crew recently, thanks to MrTails [a regular in the irc channel - which would be #thorns on irc.thorns.org 7000 for the uninitiated among you]. i owe much gratitude to gundam for the newest arrivals: one of those gorgeous japanese jack skellington [of the nightmare before christmas fame] figures, and, from the matrix, a squiddie. wow! my desk is now no longer a barren wasteland inhabited only by empty jolt bottles and stacks of cd’s, but is quite thoroughly populated. i’m still trying to get my hands on more tekken 3 action figures, though - yoshimitsu and ling xiaoyu in particular.

my mood’s improving a bit. i went directly home after work and took a very long, hot bath. tealights were involved. so were bubbles. it was good. after that i pretty much just went to bed, and i’m glad i did. i woke up not hating life this morning for the first time in too long. i’d still rather be at home in my warm bed munching cereal and reading than be here at work, but it’s okay.

after work today, i think gundam and i are heading to the sanrio store for some more obnoxiously cute hello kitty and chococat paraphernalia. i’m looking forward to it.