little.yellow.different [remix]

Not to hate on "sexual minorities," because then I'd be a hypocrite, but I just wanna say...

Why, yes! That IS the Best Transsexual Personal Ad Photo Ever! (It's kinda like the Mona Lisa — no matter where I stand in the room, it feels like she's staring directly at me. ~~Thank you~~ ~~Damn you~~ Thank you, Jesse)

So, thanks to the powers that be, I have a small web development contracting gig. Sure, it's only for a week, but it'll pay for rent. And all I had to do was sell my soul:

Me: Okay, I think I can finish the DHTML coding, technical specification writing and client interaction for this project in around two weeks. I've e-mailed you my hourly rate — what do you think?
The guy: Hmmm. I dunno. How about this? Instead of two weeks, we'll give you six days. And instead of a paycheck, we're gonna give you a cow and three magic beans.
Me: *pause* Okay.

Wow. So this is how the freelancing world works, huh? Sign me up! (It's a damn shame I can't buy a spine off of eBay, cause god knows I need one dealing with the business side of things.)

I'm going to try to make this my last WTC-related post for a little while. For no other reason because it's sapping all emotion from me, and I'm clear across the country.

Bertie. Remember her? SURVIVORblog 2 winner, had to take her website down because of all the bandwidth generated from her account of seeing the second plane hit the building? She was in Union Square when the candlelight vigil occured, and made this movie. (4.4meg Quicktime movie — please don't directly link the movie from your weblog, if you have one. Instead, download and host on your own server. Thanks.)

I don't cry often. The way I handle stress or drama or pain is to just bottle it up, laugh it off, change the subject. But like Bill, with all the stress of this week, a song heard on the radio caused me to turn into an emotional mass of quivering jelly. (No comments that I already look like a mass of quivering jelly. Bastards.) But instead of Sarah MacLachlan, the song that got tears to well up in my eyes on a random trip to McDonalds was Emotion, by Destiny's Child.

God help me, I'm getting emotional to a Destiny's Child. God help me, I'm getting emotional to Destiny's Child covering the Bee Gees.

From Matt — Don't believe the hype.
I just got a phone call from Min Jung just now — her flight back to San Francisco was supposed to be yesterday, but she's currently stuck in Paris and all her credit cards are maxed out from her nearly month-long trip from Europe. She weblogged about it on Post-SURVIVORblog as well. She's currently staying with, of all people, Dominican nuns, and will be back to the U.S. on ~~Saturday~~ Tuesday.
There's also a great story about how she took a cold bath this morning, thinking the nuns were one of those nuns that suffer for God — ~~what do you call those again?~~ ascetic. Then she met up with them for lunch, and they were all, "What? You took a cold bath? You knew the water heater blew out, right?" Ha. I'll let her re-tell the story. She probably will have a ton to say.

Oh yeah, that and the 90% chance that I'm moving at the end of the month. I'm staying in the bay area, however. More details to come soon.

Since I don't work right now, I've been glued to the television since 6:00am, for a total of around 18 hours. Eighteen hours of the image of the plane smashing into the World Trade Center over and over and over again. Eighteen hours of simulated flight patterns, with the abrupt mid-flight U-turn. I spent four of those hours with Katie Couric. Katie Couric, for the love of God. And of course, the hours I've spent on Metafilter and about a million other weblogs, relieved when people check in and our okay, saddened when I hear about the stories they had to live through, a family member lost.

But as of now, my head is completely saturated with soundbytes and images and information and a pixelated image of a plane smashing into a building, over and over again. And I'm kinda numb. Or in shock. Maybe they're one and the same. I don't know. I'm kinda scared of what'll happen tomorrow, actually.

Evil thought: It looks like MTV is back to showing music videos again. Is this gonna be a very special episode of TRL or what?

Evil thought #2 (2:32am): So I'm watching CBS Morning News. Oh hell no, is that Julie Chen? Girl, shouldn't you be asking Will whether he wants to evict Hardy or Nicole?

...

"i used to live on liberty and greenwich street. i would most likely be dead right now." But Bertie's okay. And Choire (left side) is okay too. Now, to somehow contact my other friend that goes to NYU Law... What's this world coming to?

Update: Dan, Andy and Susannah have some personal accounts as well.

So it looks like Firda has set up a little quiz called Who's Your [objectively high-profile] Weblogger Twin. And Tom takes the quiz, right? And he's apparently just like me. Okay, no problem, right? Right. So a couple of minutes ago, I take the quiz. Well, knock me over with a feather, guess who my Internet twin is? Yeah, no kidding. It's almost sitcom-like:

Ernie: Cousin Tom! It's me, Ernie, your long lost Asian relative from the United States! *cue laugh track*
Tom: *eyeroll* Bloody hell.

The other disturbing thing about Firda's quiz? I'm #4 in my quiz results. So, theoretically, that means three people are more like me than... me. Whoa.