2004-04-07 - 10:50 a.m.

monday i got to my studio for the first time in a week and painted until it got too cold. my college exboyfriend called me and we reminisced about our trip to the olympic peninsula. sometimes i think he's the sweetest person alive, and sometimes i'm certain he's delusional.

chess club convened despite the cold. i let alex push me around his shogi board. i just have no head for that game. i love chess variants and have played mongolian chess, thai chess, chinese chess, hostage chess (the list goes on). but shogi is a japanese chess game and its simply too different from western chess for me to grok. for one thing, all the pieces are marked with kanji rather than being symbols like most other games. for another, captured pieces return to the board for the opposing side, and i never got the hang of this move. i also irretrievably suck at go, another japanese game. something about the japanese style of board games just doesn't compute for me.

but after breaking my head on shogi for a half an hour, i kicked ass on the chess board, easily defeating my next two opponents. i hammered j into a corner, so much so that i actually felt kinda bad. chess is such a zero-sum game: most of the time someone wins and someone loses. i find it somewhat comforting.

tuesday, the bearded curator came to my studio to look at my work. i'm not sure how i feel about him personally, but he seems fantastically well-connected and i'm hoping he'll give me a leg up. in any case, he was very supportive of what i'm doing. he gave me some very good feedback. it's hard to say if that will be a fruitful relationship for me or not, but it's a step in the right direction.

cb had called to see if we could get together tuesday night. i'm still fence-y about him but i agreed to see him. unfortunately, he had to cancel due to work obligations the following morning at the crack of dawn. i was mildly disappointed but also sort of relieved to have a night off. no sooner had i escorted the curator to the street, my phone rang and ab invited me out to dinner. we met at the spitting devil and continued on to a decadent meal of snails, tuna, leeks, and frites at fada. ab is a fantastic date.

loopy and smiling under the springtime full moon in libra, i picked up a bottle of wine and a coupla movies on the way home. i laughed almost all the way through 'journeys with george' (but i was shocked by the force of our president's charisma). i found 'matchstick men' a little cynical for my tastes, but i've decided that sam rockwell might be the sexiest man allive.