Tonight I walked into one of those typical San Francisco indie book stores and asked the guy at the front if they had the new Sarah Vowell book. They didn’t, but as I think everyone was so dazzled by my coolness that it didn’t matter. Or maybe I should have asked if they had the Noam Chomsky Reader on Sexual Identity instead.

This weekend I wound up going to Hooters for somebody’s birthday. What can I say, it was one of those spur of the moment decisions and lest you think it was some sexist dude-fest, it was a woman’s birthday and her idea. All I can say about Hooters is that I was kind of underwhelmed, both for the food and the, well, Hooters. More like Wonderbra’s if you ask me.

At some point during the night, they bring up whoever’s birthday it was and all the guys whose there for a bachelor party, make them get up on a table, and then all the waitresses would sing to them. Since my friend was both a woman and turning 30, it was actually kind of funny. I do have to say, however, that when the waitresses announced all the soon-to-be-newlyweds to the crowd and started chanting "sucker, sucker, sucker" I couldn’t help thinking that they just might as well put a poll up there since they were pretty much there anyways.

Afterwards, we went to some semi-lame goth bar (by accident- it had a non-gothy name on Citysearch). When we went in there, it was pretty obvious that the main clientele were thirty-something computer engineers who put the leather pants and leather duster jackets on during the weekends as a way to leave their drearily, nerd reality. Which we were actually pretty much told by the people who ran the bar. In fact, when we walked in- a large group of decidely non-gothy totally run-of-the-mill crowd, they were both excited and worried when we walked in. Excited because they had never had such a big crowd before, worried because they were afraid we’d scare off all the regulars. The regulars, as we soon discovered, liked to get up in the back corner of the bar and dance to some 80’s goth tune. By themselves. They danced pretty much just like that dwarf did in "Twin Peaks." All of which made me think that not only could you tell a lot about a person about how they dance, but you can tell a lot about a musical genre about how people dance to it. If they get on the floor, shake their butts, and grind away (like apparently, my girlfriend Jenna Bush did), that’s pretty good music. If they go into a corner and dance like some trippy character in a David Lynch tv series, that’s a pretty good sign that a musical genre, it sucks.