I ordered a new camera today to replace the one that got stolen. I was very careful with the previous one, but this time anyone who thinks about starting to consider so much as coveting it is going to get their fingers broken.
I'm holding off on the cell phone purchase for a little while; I really don't need one right now, although I'm starting to realize I used it a lot more than I thought I did.
This afternoon was good. I got up and went to the Alamo downtown for the SXSW film screening thingy. My friend Greg's short was first and I was exactly on time, so I walked right in, sat down, watched it, and left five minutes later with Greg to have coffee. I liked it, but he didn't seem really happy with it. Neither did the Chronicle, as we found out when we read the review a few minutes later. I thought it was pretty damn charming, but what do I know?
After we split up, I walked around downtown for a while. I stopped by the day show at Emo's to see if my friends were there. I was hungry, though, so I didn't look very hard at all, just walked through once, saw no one, and decided to keep going. I walked back up to Congress and got the kafta plate at Marakesh. If there's a better lunch for six bucks, I wish you'd tell me about it.
Then I walked back up to the Capitol. I had a cigarette on the nice sunny lawn, and then cut through the first floor on my way to work. It seemed very staid in there compared to all the music and hubub a few blocks south.
But while I was thinking about how it felt like a totally different world in there, I noticed something. The Capitol was jammed with bunch of smug white guys in gray suits with lobbyist name tags and tidy, parted hair, saying things like "I know! I know! That's what I told him! But I think we can still work something out," into their cell phones.
Meanwhile, most of downtown--and especially the courtyard of the Hilton at Fourth and Neches--had been jammed with a bunch of smug white guys in ringer tees with industry badges and artfully tousled hair, screaming things like "I know! I know! That's what I told him! But I think we can still work something out," into their BlackBerries.
I guess it's no great revelation that political lobby groups and the entertainment industry tend to employ the exact same brand of bottom-feeding shitbags, but the juxtaposition still made me laugh.