I Do Not Think That They Will Sing To Me

In Which Otis and I Issue a Plea to MC Hammer

2011-08-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

Emily Wilska posted to Michael Richman

Hammer, we're asking you very gently and politely: please strongly consider not hurting 'em.

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The world is a dangerous, endlessly violent place, Hammer. Perhaps it's God's plan; perhaps there is no God. We will likely never know. What we do know, Hammer, is that adding pain to an already painful existence is not the Peaceful Way as Buddha describes it. Ergo, if you should be considering the act of hurting 'em, Hammer, won't you please, please think again?

Emily Wilska

May we suggest perhaps putting on a nice comfortable pair of loose-fitting pants, say, and engaging in some relaxing and rejuvenating dancing rather than hurting 'em? We will uphold our promise to respect your wishes that we not touch this.

Michael Richman

We know, we know. You've toured around the world. From Mother England to the San Francisco Bay area. And while it might be frustrating, everywhere you go, that "It's Hammer go, MC Hammer, Hammer, yo! Hammer!" and the rest can go and play we request respectfully that you simply consider all of these souls to be as much a citizen of the world as you are. Hammer? Are you listening to us, Hammer? MC Hammer? Yo? Hurting 'em doesn't solve anything. Regardless of your latitude / longitude. It's about going and PLAYING, Hammer. Not - we must repeat - NOT - about hurting 'em.

Emily Wilska

Know what, Hammer? You--no one else, just you--have the power to redefine Hammer Time, to take it back, to remove the smudges and the sting. Do people think that Hammer Time, by its very nature, involves hurting 'em? Maybe. Maybe they do. But that doesn't have to be the case. Rise up, Hammer. Heed the higher call. We know you have it in you.

Michael Richman

Hammer, you're a better person than 'em. 'Em are just trying to get a **rise** out of you, Hammer. And you know, what? If you hurt 'em, Hammer, you're just going to GIVE 'EM WHAT THEY WANT. Don't give 'em the satisfaction, Hammer. 'Em aren't worth your time. You know what **is** worth your time, Hammer? Serving God. That'll take the better part of the next decade or two. Why not start now? Or? What about medical school, Hammer? Ever thought of MD Hammer? Now, that has a ring to it, doesn't it?

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2010 Hunger Challenge, Days 4 & 5: In Praise of Distraction/Life Interferes

2010-09-16T22:16:00.000-07:00

Day 4 (Wednesday)
There's a fascinating thing that happens on occasion when I'm with a client and we're deeply engrossed in work: no matter how hungry I might get, I'll reach a point at which I'm so far beyond hunger that I can go for hours without eating. Even once we've wrapped up for the day and I've left, it sometimes takes a while before I realize that I haven't eaten for many hours and am, in fact, ravenous.

Unhealthy as this is, it's actually fairly handy: no need to interrupt the flow of the work I'm doing and no weirdness or worry about when, how, where, and what to eat when I'm in someone else's home or office.

I didn't particularly intend to invoke this hunger legerdemain yesterday, as I was home (which usually means that I get unignorably hungry on schedule) and was working on my own admin stuff, not a project for a client. But somehow it happened. I had a quesadilla (one Trader Joe's handmade wheat tortilla, about an ounce of cheese, and salsa--45¢) in the late morning, and then set to work weeding out, digitizing, and reorganizing my business files.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, I had an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie from the batch I'd made on Saturday (15¢), along with some water.

And then it was 7.30 p.m. My friend Mary called, and as we chatted, I realized that I hadn't eaten for hours and was bound to go downhill fast if I didn't make myself some dinner. 7+ hours on a single quesadilla and a cookie=cheap, yes. Recommended, not especially.

Thanks to the grocery center stipend of free produce, the only part of my meal that actually cost me anything was the pasta (32¢) and the feta (25¢); the roasted potato, carrot, and onion that went with them were "free." Total for the day: $2.12. (After I tallied that late in the evening, I ate another cookie in celebration, bringing the sum to $2.27.)

This get-beyond-hunger-by-working phenom reminds me of a saying my high school French teacher taught me: Dormir, c'est manger, or To sleep is to eat. Lose yourself deeply enough in something else and you might forget that nothing of substance has gone in your mouth for hours.

But that forgetting, of course, can't last.

Day 5 (Thursday)
Can't last, and doesn't. I woke this morning, 45 minutes before my alarm, hungrier than I've been all week. Normally I can find myself at least a few hours into my morning before I'm truly hankering for breakfast, but today, no such luck. I was so distracted and miserable that I had to eat a bowl of cereal just to function.

I went through the day today knowing that this evening I'd be going to a networking meeting for which I'd already paid, and at which there would be appetizers. I wrestled with the Hunger Challenge protocol here: since I'd paid weeks ago, wouldn't it be foolish to go and not eat anything? Also, how much of what I paid for the meeting went toward food, and how much toward the general meeting expenses? Finally, how guilty should I make myself feel for veering off the path here yet again this week?

I decided on a compromise, sort of: I kept the rest of my food expenses today to $2.23, bringing me to $4.50 total for the past two days. To balance that out, I decided I'd let myself eat sans guilt at the meeting tonight.

And then I blew that compromise by buying a glass of wine. It was completely overpriced event wine, and chardonnay at that, but sometimes these schmooze-y meetings are just easier with some vino.

Which brings me to this: so much of my life, whether personal or professional, involves food in some way. With friends, I go out for dinner and drinks, or we gather at someone's house over wine and tables crowded with things to eat. When I network, nine times out of ten a meal--or at least a beverage--is involved. With colleagues, we meet in taquerias or cafes to swap stories and offer support, or we show up at each other's doorsteps with a bottle of something, a plate of something, and then sit and talk and laugh and eat. And eat.

But what if I couldn't? What if I really were subsisting on $28 a week, plus rations of produce from a grocery center? What if every time someone asked me to join in a meal or a drink out I had to beg off because I couldn't afford it? I would, I admit, be totally adrift.

This week, life has interfered with my ability to be completely faithful to the Hunger Challenge. It's jarring to realize the reverse: just how much being hungry and in need would interfere with my ability to live the life I'm used to. Damn if I don't take that for granted.

2010 Hunger Challenge, Day 3: My Cheating Heart (and Stomach)

2010-09-15T23:31:00.000-07:00

Day 3, a Day Late
I admit: last evening I knowingly and intentionally fell (well, leapt, really) off the wagon. In the second of my two planned social outings for the week, I went with my friend Dana to 15 Romolo for cocktails and bar bites, both because--theme alert!--I had a voucher for same, and because I was sorely in need of a cocktail.

All told, the evening cost us each $20--which, for two drinks each, three shared appetizers, and one shared dessert, was not a whole lot (thanks to the aforementioned voucher). Of course, $20 was ridiculously far above and beyond my food budget for the day. It was also worth every last guilt-inducing cent.

In my everyday life--that is, even when I'm not intentionally aiming to eat three solid meals for $4 per day--I tend to be fairly frugal when it comes to grocery spending. A few times a year, I'll splurge on something special, like the Meyer lemon olive oil I bought from a very sweet man at the Castro farmer's market a few weeks back, but I'm generally inclined toward the cheap(-ish): I buy a lot in bulk, stick with pretty simple and inexpensive produce, and resist the allure of the fancy cheeses at Rainbow in favor of the basic cheddar and ricotta salata and Bulgarian feta that are a fraction of the price. (Yes, I realize this is a wildly bourgeois definition of frugal grocery shopping.)

But it's a different story when it comes to dining and drinking out. Since I'm already laying myself bare here, I will admit that I shell out $9+ per cocktail on a pretty regular basis, even though that same $9 would buy me, say, a hunk of cheese that would last all week, or some handmade ravioli, or some other non-essential but lovely foodstuff that I probably wouldn't buy because it seemed too expensive.

Hello, my name is Emily, and I'm penny wise and pound foolish.

I'm also someone who thrives on being around other people, especially when that communion involves food, and doubly especially when that communion involves food and a cocktail that comes with its own back story, as did those Dana and I drank last night. So while there's a big part of me that feels like I should be engaging in some (more) self-flagellation today--after all, people who are really living on food stamps cannot simply decide to take a night off and belly up to the bar at 15 Romolo--there's also a part that's OK with having savored last night: the bar, Dana's company, our conversation, and, yes, that final sip of stout ice cream milkshake at the tail end of our meal that left me feeling, for the first time all week, completely and delightedly full.

2010 Hunger Challenge, Day 2: What $4 (Plus 2 Potatoes, 1 Apple, and a Cucumber) Looks Like

2010-09-13T21:50:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning realizing that part of the crazy-ass dream that filled my sleep (once I finally fell asleep, that is) last night had me in Spain with some friends carefully deliberating whether to spend $2 on a glass of sherry or $2.25 on a glass of red wine. For the record, I went for the sherry, not so much because I was in a sherry mood but because, hey, 25¢ can buy a decent snack. When I finally pulled myself fully awake, I was both baffled by the dream in general--it was insane--and vaguely alarmed that food price calculations have already filtered into my subconscious.

It is literally and existentially exhausting to have to think all the time about what every single bit of your food costs. I've only been doing this for two days and already I'm tired of it.

Here, for your reading pleasure, is a rundown of what I ate today, and roughly what it cost.

Breakfast

Coffee with milk and sugar: 40¢
1 small and 1 medium potato, roasted as home fries: free (I'm counting these as part of what an individual in SF would get from one of the Food Bank's grocery centers; see yesterday's post for details)
2-egg omelet with cheese: 55¢
tortilla: 21¢
1/2 cup orange juice: 13¢
(Technically, I should've counted the ketchup I ate with my home fries, but there comes a point at which laziness takes the day; this was that point.)

Lunch

PB&J on whole wheat: 45¢

Snack

1 small apple: free (I'm substituting apples for pears in the Food Bank's sample list)

Dinner

1/2 veggie banh mi: $2 (I'm guessing; I ate it at the board meeting I went to this evening)
1 mini and 1 fun size Milky Way: 15¢ (I made the mini last for 4 bites and the fun size for 6--not an easy [or fun, frankly] feat)

Snack

1 medium cucumber: free
1 small homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookie: 12¢, give or take

Grand total for the day: $4.01! Of course, without the "free" potatoes, apple, and cucumber, I'd be hosed.

This list reads to me like some kind of crackpot diet plan: enjoy one (more or less) normal meal in the morning, and then go slowly off the rails throughout the day until you find yourself so hungry in the late evening that you're unable to resist the siren song of a cucumber and a cookie (which, let's be honest here, are not exactly packing my stomach right now). The fabulous results? Lingering hunger for most of the day, followed by a gradual descent into loopiness, accompanied by longing for things like avocados and cheese and toast lousy with butter.

Dammit. I'm hungry.

2010 Hunger Challenge, Day 1: Chocolate Is Not Lunch

2010-09-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

Because it was so fascinating (if very literally painful) last year, I signed on again to the San Francisco Food Bank's Hunger Challenge, entailing a week of attempting to eat for no more than $4 per day. (If you missed my posts from last year's challenge, start here and work your way through.) Today was Day 1 of the challenge, and already I have--completely consciously--blown my food budget.

First, a little background: $4 per day, or $28 per week, is the average amount a food stamp recipient in California gets. Trying to eat on this budget, as the hunger challenge suggests, gives you a starkly real sense of just how limiting it is, even if you opt for super-cheap foods like dried beans and inexpensive (read: probably conventionally grown) produce. Every bit of food and drink you consume (with the exception of tap water, salt, and pepper) counts toward this total, whether it's stuff you've paid for or stuff you've been given by others.

This year's challenge features a new wrinkle: participants can supplement their $4-per-day stash with food that represents what a family or individual in San Francisco would receive each week from one of the Food Bank's neighborhood grocery pantries. As an individual, here's what I'd get around this time of year:

Potatoes--1.2 Lbs per Person
Cucumbers--1.1 Lbs per Person
Pears--0.9 Lbs per Person
Carrots--0.7 Lbs per Person
Tomatoes--1.1 Lbs per Person
Stone Fruit--1 Lb per Person
Onion--1.1 Lbs per Person
Honeydew--4.5 Lbs per Person

Having done the challenge last year, I can appreciate (immensely) the difference a few pounds of produce can make in terms of stretching a week's food budget. In fact, I'm about to have a peach in an attempt to quell my rumbling stomach, and am very happy that peach won't make today's budget overage any worse.

Because here's the thing: one of the biggest bummers I discovered during last year's challenge was that there's not a whole lot you--or, more to the point, I--can do socially that doesn't somehow involve food or drink. Even with an event that's not food-centric--watching a movie at home, say--food so often comes into play: you make popcorn, or have a glass of wine, or go to Walgreens and buy gummy-somethings to eat during the film. Last year, because everything that passed my lips counted against my $28 for the week, I gave up several social outings, or whimpered through a few that were, sadly, just painful--viz. my friend Nir coming to my house with a burrito from the Little Chihuahua while I downed a salad and then watched longingly as he ate.

I can deal (if complainingly) with the hunger I know I'm bound to feel while trying to eat on $4 per day, and can deal with the required hyper-consciousness of the cost of every single thing I consume, along with the knowledge of everything I love eating that's off-limits this week because it's too expensive--most cheeses, the walnut baguette from La Boulange I want like crazy, a coffee and breakfast burrito at Arlequin....

But what I couldn't face for another year running was saying no to social events, or giving friends the brush-off for most of the week, or more salad-vs.-burrito showdowns. So I gave in and planned two outings, the first of which was today: a visit to the Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival with my friend Maria.

Insane as it sounds to go to a chocolate festival on day 1 of a hunger challenge, I had a coupon that gave us a big discount: two 15-taste passes for $10, working out to about 33¢ per taste. I had 8 tastes, for a total of $2.64. Not bad for fancy-ass chocolate, except that 1.) it did not exactly (or, really, at all, in any way, shape, or form) make a meal, and 2.) $2.64 is more than half of my daily budget. So even though breakfast worked out to a petite $1.18 and dinner to $1.37, I'm still over budget by $1.19.

Could be worse, but peach or no peach this evening, I'm going to go to bed hungry, because I haven't had enough protein or--chocolate samples notwithstanding--fat today. Neither of those, you'll note, is on the free-from-the-food-bank list for an individual, and I'm not going to exceed my budget any more than I already have.

It would be too facile to say that there's a necessary trade-off between socializing and eating on a strict budget; I could, of course, have had Maria over for something super-cheap at home and spent just as much time with her as I did waiting in line for toffee samples. Nonetheless, it's jarring to realize how much of my time with friends is spent out over food, and how much I love that combination, and how impossible it would be if a single burrito or a few pieces of chocolate truly did undo my eating budget for an entire day.

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time (San Francisco Version)

2010-09-01T15:18:00.000-07:00

Wear thee ye summer clothes while ye may,
Warm weather is always fickle-y:
And these same temps that soar today
Tomorrow will be sickly.

(Sorry about that, Robert Herrick.)

"Her Hardest Hue to Hold"/The Pursuit of Happiness

2010-08-24T23:13:00.000-07:00

This post was slated to begin several days ago as a litany of the sweet and funny and heart-swelling and purely fun and interesting and just plain awesome moments that wallpapered my two weeks on the east coast. I sat, last Friday morning, in my aunt's backyard on the outskirts of Boston, swimming back through those moments and thinking of Robert Frost and his leaves subsiding to leaves, thinking how reluctant I was to fold up the tail ends of my vacation and return to San Francisco.

But then, this evening, S. and I sit on my sofa, suddenly a little heavy and teary after a long and spectacular day, and it's another poet who comes to mind.

Earlier in the day, we drive around Marin, in awe of our unbelievable summery weather (finally, finally). At the Muir Beach Overlook, we stare for a long time out at the ocean, all blue and green and glittering madly. At Stinson, I wade into the water, cold and bracing and tugging at my feet like a sweet ache; we eat ice cream and drink cold caffeine and wander languidly through town. We drive and drive, stopping to snap photos of cows, to Point Reyes. Back south in Sausalito, we sit at the edge of the water and watch the city in the distance, the city to which S. is about to bid farewell, the city in which my life will carry on. Finally, then, back to Hayes Valley for our last supper at PaulK.

And then we're home, sitting on the sofa laughing until we're choked up with the reality of our impending goodbye. We talk and talk--about heading into the unknown and unseen, about having your slate wiped clean, about not promising but hoping, about how to go on when your life isn't what you thought it might be, about believing that, ultimately, people are wired to connect and care and love. (And S., they are, they are, they are.)

S. says something about the unlikelihood of leaving behind what you've done and starting over in the name of happiness and I immediately go über-American on him. You can always start over, I say. If you take nothing else away from your year in the U.S., take this: the belief that you can begin again, the belief in the pursuit of happiness.

And when, at length, I hug him goodbye one last time and watch him walk down my front steps, out into the night, it's Frost who comes to mind first: Nothing gold can stay. (How we both know that, and far too well.)

But then it's Whitman--unabashedly hopeful, slightly goofball, occasionally naïve Whitman, master of lightheartedly beginning again. Who better to wave the flag of optimism for whatever it is that's out there?

And so, S., it's with deep affection, no promises but hope (l'espoir, l'espoir), and some Walt Whitman that America and I bid you au revoir, bonne chance, et a bientôt.

From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

Who's Left and Who's Leaving

2010-06-21T22:23:00.000-07:00

Last night Scott and I sit in the lounge at Jardiniere, sipping fancy-ass drinks and debating which cheese on the platter before us is the most pungent. (For the record, Scott? It was that sheep-y one, case closed.) Within 24 hours he'll have emptied his apartment here in San Francisco and will be on a plane to Boston--a mirror image, nearly 3 weeks to the day, of Jenn's departure for New York at the end of May.

So many of my friends seem to be leaving the Bay Area lately that it leaves me dazed and whimpering. Jenn goes, then another Jen (to Austin and then Boston), then Scott, then Val and Isaac a few weeks hence, then S at the end of August, and then...I can't bring myself to imagine or anticipate who's next. This exodus punches dozens of tiny holes in my heart. Why so much loss, and so many goodbyes, in such a short period of time?

I try to focus on who's still here, on what's unlikely to change. Eric and I spend Thursday evening together over dinner, hilariously inappropriate conversation, and "The Hurt Locker," and I marvel again, again at the dumb luck that threw us together at MS lo those many years ago--and at the fact that he's still here, unlikely to leave. I exhale with relief when Dana reports a part in a new play; I fear, achily, that she'll be the next to go, so this is a stay of execution of sorts, at least for a little while. I hold hard to news of friends here who move to new apartments or renovate their houses or take new jobs, thinking, Yes! OK! This is proof that they'll stay for a bit, right?

To some degree, San Francisco has always been a place of comings and goings: I came here amidst an influx of people like me in 1997, and have watched so many of those people leave in the ensuing years, one after another after another. But now it's reached a critical mass--like having a whole hand lopped off at once, I tell Dana, when all I've gotten used to is losing fingers one by one.

That fell swoop is so much harder.

Adieu, Claude

2010-04-03T08:27:00.000-07:00

After several months of deliberation, I decided earlier this year that it was finally time to sell my car. And on Tuesday, following a week of typically nutjob Craigslist-facilitated interactions around this transaction (more on those in a moment), I watched the two sweet British guys who became the car's new owners drive it away.

It will sound odd or melodramatic or perhaps slightly crazy to say that, in that moment, my heart did something funny, but that's exactly what happened. I felt a sense of relief--this selling process had been, frankly, kind of a pain in the ass--and a wave of happiness as one of the guys said to me, "We'll send you a postcard when we make it to New York" (more on that in a minute, too). I also found myself in the crest of a wave of nostalgia, because this car--this slightly dinged and dented 1993 Toyota Corolla--had taken me so far.

It was my parents who'd found it originally, back in January of 1997, when I was in Boston. We were on the hunt for a car to replace the giant sky blue Buick I was then driving (word to the wise: Buick in Boston=bad idea), and the then-young Corolla was perfect. In honor of its significantly smaller size, we dubbed it Little Car, and somehow we wound up referring to it as "he."

So it was Little Car who accompanied me for my last few months in Boston, and he who allowed me to leave New England in mid-March and head west, first to Chicago to pick up Monique, and then down Route 66 to California. In Texas, after what felt like an endless stretch of road with nothing to offer by way of services, we drove into Claude, a little town where we gassed up and, at the local soda fountain (for real), got snacks and drinks to clear away the west Texas dryness. In gratitude, Little Car got his official name: Claude (pronounced the French way, just because).

Little Car took me up Highway 1 and into San Francisco 13 years ago this weekend. He went back and forth to Sonoma countless times in those early years, anytime a visitor came into town and anytime we could come up with a reasonable excuse for a day in wine country. In Little Car I went back and forth to Palo Alto, and then to Mountain View, sometimes alone, sometimes with Otis or Shayne or Daryl or Deb. On the days we didn't want to drive the whole way, we'd drive only to CalTrain, fueled by Peet's and speeding down (or attempting to speed down) 17th Street, entreating other drivers with Gooooooooooo!

It was in Little Car that my first Shanti client and I would take his two dogs out to Fort Funston each week, evidence of their fur and the sand they carried on their paws still popping up in various crevices in the car, numerous rounds of vacuuming and many years notwithstanding. With my current Shanti client, back and forth to the grocery store, to the food bank, to Mitchell's ice cream. A few weeks back, we drove Little Car to the top of Bernal Hill and marveled at the city below us.

Little Car transported a lot of beloved passengers, from boyfriends to family to friends. A select few even got to drive him; I would sit on the right side and marvel at the change in perspective.

When I traveled a lot for work and would drive to the airport, it was, of course, Little Car who'd be there waiting for me in the long-term parking lot when I returned. Seeing him there meant, simply, Home.

So it was that, when it came time to sell my sweet little vehicle, I hoped, a bit shmoopily, that he'd go to someone who'd be happy to have him. Posting the car to Craigslist got me a crazy number of replies, several of them claiming that they'd pay me whatever price I was asking in cash, no haggling, because they needed a car right away "to get to work/to school/to my band gigs." There were enough of these weird responses that I have to assume they're shorthand for something, though I don't know what.

On Monday, amid the flurry of calls I got (having grown tired of dealing with people by e-mail) was one from a guy in Pleasanton who told me his uncle would come to the city right away to pick up the car, full asking price guaranteed blah blah blah. Said "uncle" then called and brushed off my insistence that I was legally required to get the car smogged by telling me that I should save my money, because he was just going to export the car anyway.

As Export Dude made his way to the city, I got a call from Sweet British Boy #1, who arranged to come by with his friend and have a look. And then there they were, young and adorable and did I mention British. They told me they were in the States for about 3 more months and were looking for a car to take them around--to Yosemite later in the week, perhaps up to Vancouver at some point, maybe all the way to New York, from where they'd depart to go home.

Eureka.

After a test drive and a look under the "bonnet" and some very light negotiating, the three of us shook hands. I went to get the car smogged and, when I returned, found the "uncle" waiting. I told him I'd found another buyer, despite his protests now that he was not going to export the car, but was instead going to use it for himself. (Can anyone explain to me what's behind this type of scam, anyway?) After a while he gave up and went away.

Tuesday morning, I went out to meet with the Sweet British Boys and to hand over the keys. They met me on the street, all smiles, SBB #2 brandishing a Rand McNally road atlas. We walked to the garage, talked about their trip to Yosemite, American road laws, California drivers.

I backed the car out of the garage and pointed them in the direction they wanted to go. We all shook hands again. I wished them happy travels. They said they'd send photos from New York. Then I stood on the sidewalk and watched them drive to the light at Franklin Street, then turn left and drive away.

Girl Scout Cookies Reconsidered

2010-03-13T16:37:00.001-08:00

Phone conversation with my sister-in-law this afternoon

Me: It's totally relative, but I was surprised to discover that Tagalongs have fewer calories than I thought. And my client gave me a box of Do-Si-Dos a few weeks back, and those weren't bad at all.

Sara: Yeah, but Do-Si-Dos are kind of the bastard cousin of Tagalongs.

Me: True. They are sort of redneck-y.

Sara: Do-Si-Dos are like...like Billy Carter. You know--Tagalongs win the Nobel Peace Prize and all. And then there's Do-Si-Dos.

[In case I haven't mentioned, I have the best sister-in-law ever. EVER.]

Maybe it makes sense in the original German

2010-03-12T13:36:00.001-08:00

From Austrian Airlines' online booking page:

Evidently there are no Frauleins in Austria, and the Dr. part matters more for women than for men.

So, since I have to choose an inaccurate salutation anyway, should I take this opportunity to temporarily grant myself a doctorate?

The World Shines (for Krista)

2010-03-05T19:33:00.001-08:00

I'm sorry, but this deserves a "Well, GODDAMMIT!": my friend and colleague Krista, who is smart, funny, sweet, creative, and sassy to beat the band, has been diagnosed with breast cancer--invasive ductal carcinoma, to be exact.

I know this because Krista has been Tweeting her heart out about her diagnosis this afternoon (brave, brave, BRAVE, mon amie!), and has also posted a message to her blog asking people to share some of their favorite things so she has pleasant stuff to think about as she deals with what can only be called some seriously crapwad news.

It so happens, my dear Krista, that I've recently gotten into the habit of adding to the daily summary I write each night a few notes on whatever made me happy throughout the day. This is generally a random, ragtag, not-exactly-puppies-and-balloons kind of list, but it shows me that sometimes glee pops up in totally unexpected forms, and sometimes from ridiculously simple things.

So Krista, here are a few bits and pieces from my lists. If I could bundle them up and send them to you by mail, I would, because I sort of think they'd pop out of the envelope in a huge, delightfully messy, pleasantly chaotic jumble, like a much cooler version of one of those fake cans of nuts with a spring-loaded Slinky snake inside. But I'll mail you some restorative San Francisco chocolate instead, and will give you these moments right here:

The driver of a plumbing van playing a harmonica with his window rolled down while stuck in traffic on Gough Street the other day
Listening to "Wait Wait--Don't Tell Me" on my iPod at the gym and laughing so hard I had to put down the weights I was trying to hoist
Discovering the cheapest Bulleit Manhattan in SF at Bar ($6! For Bulleit!)
Standing in the patch of bright afternoon sunlight spilling through my kitchen window and onto the floor
Watching the wedding montage in "Up in the Air" for the second time
Finding multi-colored popcorn at Rainbow Grocery (even though, alas, it all pops out to be the same color--which is probably some sort of "Kumbayah" lesson for us all from the food world)
Getting a free box of Girl Scout cookies from a client who'd bought multiples
Watching the band geek version of OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" over and over (and over and...). I can't NOT be wildly, stupidly happy every time I see this.

Cheap top-shelf bourbon, harmonica-playing plumbers, and marching band-filled pop tunes can't keep the world and its sometimes-sucktastic realities at bay forever, but for a little while, damn, do they brighten things up.

We're with you, Krista, all the freaking way.

Relative Measure

2010-02-14T21:35:00.000-08:00

From an article in today's NY Times about the suspect in a shooting at the University of Alabama on Friday:

Dr. Bishop and Mr. Anderson have four children, ranging in age from 9 to 18, Mr. Reeves said, and they frequently took them to hockey and soccer games.
He and others who knew Dr. Bishop described her as a normal person, perhaps a little quirky but no more so than most scientists.

Textbook definition of a relative measure, no?

Songs for an Achy but Hopeful Heart

2010-02-08T21:36:00.000-08:00

I just watched, in his Tiny Desk concert from All Songs Considered, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats sing "Going to Georgia," and promptly embarked on a brief but intense crying jag. (You, too, should take 12 minutes and 39 seconds to watch the full little concert, explosion of tears optional.)

What the hell with the sobbing? It's not a depressing song--in fact, if anything, it's precisely the opposite, fast and loud and insane with what sounds like the shiny hope of young love. And yet, it punched me squarely in the chest. So I listened to it again. And again. Then once more.

The last song that (figuratively) knocked me on my butt in the same way was the National's "Slow Show," which I listened to about 5 times on repeat when, on my way to the library early last November, I actually paid attention to what it had to say. That whole "You know I dreamed about you/for 29 years before I saw you" thing did me in--though in a generally good, hopeful way at that point.

A few weeks hence, that all seemed to play out nicely. At least for a little while.

But back to "Going to Georgia." Though the track from the album doesn't quite have the same flat-out, pedal-to-the-metal energy and thrill of the live version, I decided it must immediately go on a playlist, along with other songs that are either therapeutic in their feel-your-pain misery (Elliott Smith, I'm looking at you) or, in the interest of being fair and balanced, somewhere on the spectrum from cautiously to flamingly, unabashedly hopeful.

So here's where you come in. Because I'm in the mood for some surprises, I leave the other entries on this playlist up to you, my, um, extensive readership. Your recommendations for good cryin'-in-yer-drink or I-defy-you-to-resist-hope songs? Lay them on me in the comments. (Yes, sometimes I cry in my drink while listening to the sweet, shiny, hopeful stuff, but don't let that stop you.)

My only guidelines: nothing bitter, nothing angry, nothing saccharine, nothing religious, no speed metal, no smooth jazz (just because), and R&B or slow jams only if absolutely, positively necessary (and, really, when are they ever?). Everything else is fair game.

Gimme what you got. And in the meantime, get yourself to the NPR Music site and listen to John Darnielle's little gembox song stories. They're good for what ails you.

Ebbing and Flowing

2010-02-05T21:26:00.001-08:00

From Live Now

I stumbled this morning on Live Now, a sort of collective art project/"community of happiness" that sprang up in the wake of creator Eric Smith's diagnosis of and treatment for cancer. Live Now is a somewhat indescribable combination of art, design, words, collaboration, and general good feeling--to which I could only say, Yes, please.

There's plenty of interesting work on the Live Now site, but what really grabbed me was the piece above, both because I had to sit with it for a decent amount of time until the meaning and import really sunk in, and because, when they did, they stopped me short. I wanted to pass the message of this sweet little boat along (just 'cause), and I wanted to repeat the words to myself all day, a mantra, a reminder, a goad.

Half of me this week wants to do what's generally easiest when you find the carpet pulled from under your feet and your face in sudden, unanticipated, and generally unwelcome contact with the floor: that is, to withdraw, retract, go fetal and conservative and quiet. It's this half that would stay in bed all day with books and tissues and carbs were it not required to play along as a Responsible Adult.

The other half has decided that this is as good a time as any to write a proposal for the book idea I came up with back in early November and have since largely ignored. Almost without my awareness, this half has climbed the mast of the SS Sure Thing and is ready to do a swan dive into whatever body of water we're sailing in.

Whence this crazy-ass idea? Who knows. I can only say that, on Tuesday night, as I walked to the gym, something in me proposed this pact: If in fact you're about to experience a relationship implosion, you have to promise yourself that you'll return to the book.

Perhaps because I didn't want to give much (more) thought to the disappointment I feared was ahead, or perhaps because I didn't want to pay much heed to the voice in my head ready to commit me so blithely to such a huge project, I simply thought, Yes, ok, fine, done and done, then went inside to read bad magazines and sweat for a while, assuming the insanity would pass.

But then, alone with myself on Wednesday night, I thought, Well, you promised, had some wine, and went online to hunt down a book on writing a proposal and finding an agent.

Is this utterly ridiculous and Quixotic? Quite possibly (though regular readers of this blog should be used to such things by now). But somehow it also seems unquestionably necessary. After all, I can't convince anyone else that there are risks worth taking and potentially illogical passions worth pursuing, but I can convince myself.

The sure thing boat never gets far from shore.

So here's to a completely unsure thing, and to stretching myself farther than I ever have before, and to learning to face rejection again and again and again, getting up every time and trying once more. Here's to Live Now. Here's to what will become "Lost on Me."

"dark though it is"

2010-02-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

As one almost must in cases like this, I turn to Elizabeth Gilbert.

Not her new book--its topic a million miles away from me right now--but rather Eat, Pray, Love, with its dog-eared pages and the notes I made in the margins when I first read it three years ago, right around this same time. (April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot? Au contraire; it's February.)

Last night, it was Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies that I pulled from my bookshelves, because I love Anne Lamott, and will happily do my best to lose myself in her words at any time, and because things last night had not yet stepped off a cliff with both feet. I read until I fell asleep, thinking, after I turned my lamp off, of the final words of the W.S. Merwin poem with which she opens the book ("we are saying thank you faster and faster/with nobody listening we are saying thank you/we are saying thank you and waving/dark though it is").

But now, come morning, an unhappy chat behind me, I'm off that cliff, and it's Gilbert, not Lamott, I need most. I can't shake the vision of those paintings of Jesus in which he has two fingers in the open gash in his chest, right over his heart. At the risk of sounding utterly sacrilegious, I know the feeling today, my man: something in me that was intact has torn open, and I can't ignore the wound, much as I'd like to.

So I return to Eat, Pray, Love.

Being the annoying completist that I am, and now faced with an unwelcome surfeit of free time clamoring to be filled with distractions, I will, of course, read the damn thing cover-to-cover all over again. Maybe twice.

But for now I flip through and read the passages I marked last time, thinking Yes, thinking Remember that, thinking Know that. You made it through--and out--before. You will certainly make it through again.

With my fingers over that new, sore, achy, messy wound, then, I keep reading.

Suggestion

2010-01-24T21:44:00.000-08:00

"I can only suggest you do your best to banish anxiety, possibly with a glass of Champagne, and lay yourself open to the moment when happiness becomes irresistible. I'm writing this at a good time of the year. The beech trees are covered with fresh, green leaves--we are going to have a birthday lunch in the garden. My grandchildren will play in the mysterious sunken copses, disused flint pits now filled with tall and ancient trees, where I also played as a child. The daffodils will be in flower, and the dogs will be jumping over them. There is every possible reason for happiness, but it's a moment of sadness too. How many more such birthdays will there be? It's sad my mother never saw my daughters grow up. Although the poet Shelley was right about our sincerest laughter being fraught with sadness, it's the sadness, in a way, which makes happiness complete."

--from Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life, by John Mortimer

Toward the Light

2009-12-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

"In this strange season, when we are suspended between realization and expectation, may we be found honest about the darkness, more perceptive of the light."--Jack Boozer

This evening, working my way through a hefty To Do list, I step outside to go retrieve my laundry from the basement and am struck momentarily still and silent. It's quiet in my backyard, save for the muffled dripping of halfhearted rain onto cement and the steady whir of cars on Fell Street. It's mild enough out that I've left the kitchen door open while I putter around, mild enough that I'm almost tempted to sit here for a while, just breathing and listening, mild enough that I can barely fathom the true winter I'll be descending into when I land in Boston tomorrow evening. I feel calmer than I have in days.

This week took it out of me. Despite regular flashes of delight--sitting in the dark at Berkeley Rep on Thursday night, S's arm around my shoulder, tipsy on awe and affection; letting what was meant to be a brief stop at my friends' holiday party last night stretch into many hours of fun; et alia--the past seven days have been oddly heavy and exhausting. There's so much cause for levity and brightness these days, but those kids have had to rumble with a murky dimness that, like its literal dark-at-4.30-p.m. counterpart, acts like an unwelcome party guest, arriving much too early, staying much too long, getting embarrassingly drunk, and loudly singing show tunes. Terrible ones. Off-key.

So I was relieved when, there in my backyard, avoiding the laundry for a few moments, I realized that although tomorrow shaves away a few additional moments of daylight, bringing with it the biggest dose of literal darkness we need to deal with all year, come Tuesday we start to change course. Being unable to resist the Obvious Metaphor, I thought, OK, then. There's so much more light ahead. Go that way.

It's all too easy sometimes to be dragged down by the slings and arrows, especially when they seem to come at you (read: me) as if from one of those machines at a tennis club that automatically lobs ball after ball without stopping. What's harder, though critical if you're (read: I'm) to continue functioning like the generally lucky, happy, smiling human you are (read: well, you know the drill), is to let them hit you and then let them fall. Maybe sweep them into a neat little pile, maybe just kick them aside. Walk away from them. Put ice on the bruises. Bandage the places the arrows drew blood. Keep walking. Keep walking.

Enough of this wintry darkness. There's so much more light ahead. Go that way.

Expansion

2009-11-29T20:48:00.000-08:00

Moonrise in Sonoma

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

-from Li Young-Lee, "From Blossoms"

I had forgotten this: the feeling of so much concentrated bliss that it's almost hard to breathe, and nearly impossible to fathom, at least for a while, that anything could ever be wrong in the world. But now I remember.

We spent the day in Sonoma, S and I and his visiting friend, and for hours I was so happy I sometimes couldn't speak. Sitting overlooking the lake at Gundlach Bundschu in the bright sun of late afternoon with my eyes half-closed and S's arms around me; looking up from every sip of wine to see that beautiful and adoring face close to mine; watching out the window as we sped through the heartbreakingly pretty golden hour scenery along route 12, my hand on S's knee as he drove: I don't have adequate words to describe how these things made something in me lighten and expand so much that there was no room for anything other than untempered joy and amazement.

Those two can't last forever on their own, of course; back in the city, with night fallen, there were parking woes, an unexciting and overly expensive meal out, S reaching a saturation point after 5 straight days with his friend, and the annoying reappearance of the real world in the form of outstanding work tasks and bills to pay and planning to do for the week ahead. And, of course, there was our goodbye, utterly untenable despite being very temporary, which has left me listless and unmoored.

And yet, and yet: those hours of sunshine, brilliant skies, baisers volés, hands touching, free wine, effortless joy--they've left me feeling calmer and more whole than I have for much too long, and have reminded me that sometimes fate or good luck or good timing intervenes and kicks open the door that's kept you for months in a murky dimness, leaving you blinking, dazzled, and pleasantly dazed in the sudden onslaught of light.

Grateful

2009-11-21T09:19:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, sometime near dusk, we will sit around my brother and sister-in-law's table, eight adults and one outrageously adorable child. One of that child's grandfathers will ask us to go silent for a few moments, then will say a blessing.

I'm not much for religion, but this grace I can abide. I'll bow my head, close my eyes, listen to what Dad or Rod says, and will give a collective thanks for all of this:

I am thankful more than anything for my darling Kate, the world's best niece. She reminds me that every time I think I've reached the extent of my ability to love someone, I never really have: I can always love more. I know this because every time I see her, or even hear her joyous babbles over the phone, my heart cracks open and expands a bit. It has grown a lot in the past 17 months.

Also amazing is my huge, crazy, immensely loving family. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that every single day, something reminds me just how lucky I am to have the kin I do. We love and support and stand by each other without condition, without preamble, without question. My family may not prevent me from occasionally falling flat on my face, but I never have any doubt that they'll be there to help pull me upright again.

If I had my choice, I'd pull my friends from the near and far reaches of the globe they inhabit--LA, Seattle, Portland, New York, Laos, North Carolina, Chicago, bits and pieces of Europe--and collect them all here in San Francisco. But I'll settle for knowing that they're out there, knowing that there's a litany of places I could go and find myself welcomed with open arms.

Despite what has been an occasionally hellacious and uncertain year work-wise, I'm grateful to have the freedom and flexibility to be my own boss (however inept I may sometimes feel in that role!) and to be able to say that I've created something of which I'm immensely proud.

I'm thankful to my Shanti client for reminding me time and again that love and compassion can cross any tangle of age, race, nationality, gender, and language. Too much of the world forgets how easy it is to just be human together.

And I'm grateful, finally, for this: walking back from Market Street on Thursday night with a smile involuntarily taking over my face after four hours of talking and laughing and pizza and wine; spending all day yesterday feeling funny, that kind of funny I haven't felt in a very long time; swimming in this delightful back-and-forth flow of words and photos and plans and possibilities. It all makes me amazed and awed and hopeful. "Hope is an unruly emotion," says Gloria Steinem. It is. It's also a giant breath of the purest air, and a shaft of early morning sunlight hitting a white wall, illuminating an entire room.

A Votre Sante

2009-10-07T19:40:00.000-07:00

On Saturday morning, I woke up feeling slightly amiss.

I was in LA, staying at my friend D's apartment, down south both to attend a conference and to do some visiting. When I dragged myself out of bed for the first time, I sensed a pang of what felt like indigestion, which I assumed was due to either the vegetable-heavy meals I'd eaten at the conference hotel the day before or to the perhaps-one-too-many Hendrick's gimlets I'd enjoyed in the evening. But after a while, after a few round-trips between bed and washroom, I began to despair that this was regular indigestion because it would not leave me be and was in fact beginning to pummel me with serious and bizarre pain.

And then things sort of went off a cliff: D knocked on the bathroom door, opened it to find me curled up fetally on the floor (cushioned, mercifully, by a bath mat), and, alarmed, asked what was going on. I could only answer I don't know and serious pain and auuuuuugggghhh. He helped me off the floor and back into bed as the lower-left side of my abdomen exploded into excruciating hurt, getting worse by the moment.

Do you want to go to the hospital? he asked, and I said, No, no, I'll be fine, imagining that in fact I would, that whatever this was would pass, that I would manage to make it downtown to the conference as originally planned. And then I became a groaning, writhing mess of hurt, and he said, That's it: I'm calling 911.

At this point, I couldn't speak clearly for the pain, but running through my head was this: no, not 911. That means an ambulance, which means a huge expense, which my insurance will only cover half of. No matter that there was no way D could, on his own, maneuver me into his car and to the closest hospital, let alone that I was likely to improve on my own. But even as I heard him telling the 911 dispatcher his address, all I could think was not Relief is coming but No, no--too expensive.

The EMTs came, strapped me to a gurney, sped us to the ER at Cedars-Sinai. In a haze, I signed what felt like an endless series of papers to get myself admitted, waited for the IV stuck into my left arm to deliver painkillers and anti-nausea drugs, had blood drawn, got rolled into a tube for a CT scan, and spent hours floating into and out of consciousness, all the while trying to beat back flittering bits of thought about how much all of this would cost me.

It was that fear--cost, cost, cost--that kept me from waking D up in the middle of the night on Saturday, hours after we'd come home from the hospital, and asking him to take me back because the pain had returned, that fear that kept me from taking myself to get help on Sunday night when, in my own bed in San Francisco, I was pulled from sleep at 2 a.m. by pain that would not let go. On Monday, I gave in and called my own doctor, hoping, as he examined me, that he wouldn't ask for another scan or any sort of expensive testing.

And that, of course, is insane. I wish my first thought in each of these cases had been Something serious is wrong, and I clearly need help, not If I try to make it through this on my own, I won't need to worry about an unpayable stack of medical bills. And I, it's important to note, actually have insurance.

The intricacies of the health care debate currently raging here baffle me, but this much I understand: there are entirely too many people in the U.S. who don't even have the (possibly) marginal medical insurance I have, and who really would be in serious danger of major financial catastrophe should they find themselves in need of an ambulance ride, a CT scan, a bed in an ER, a battery of lab work. Too many people who might actually forgo care they need, even in an emergency, because they simply can't afford it. Now more than ever, I'm stunned by how crazily wrong that is.

Despite my foray into medical drama, I consider myself lucky: lucky to have had D around to shepherd me through a process I don't think I would've made it through on my own on Saturday morning, and to stay with me all day in the ER; lucky to have friends here in SF who drove me to my doctor's office, brought me ginger ale and bland food, showered me with offers of help, anything, any hour, just call. I'm lucky to be young (-ish) and healthy, these kidney stones aside, lucky that I wasn't dealt a crappy hand in terms of major medical issues. And I'm damn lucky to have insurance that will at least offset part of the costs of what I've just gone through, however hideous those costs may be.

At the risk of stating the overly obvious, it's depressing and painful to contemplate how many millions of people right here within our borders are nowhere near that lucky.

Changing the Question

2009-09-26T20:36:00.000-07:00

I'm staring down the end of the Hunger Challenge as I write this, and I have to admit to both a huge dollop of relief and a pang of loss. Believe me, I am so excited to be able to eat with fewer restrictions as soon as Sunday rolls around that I'm more than a bit tempted to watch the clock strike 12 and then celebrate with a hunk of cheese and a glass of bourbon. But there has been something grounding, and something extremely eye-opening, about this past week that will inevitably be lost when my food budget balloons past $4 a day once again.

The question I started with this week was, "Is it possible to eat on $4 a day?" (For those catching up, this is the average daily amount food stamp recipients in California get.) Then I changed that question slightly, to "Is it possible to eat more or less locally, organically, and very healthfully on $4 a day?"

When, early in the week, I realized that the answer to both permutations of that question would, for me, be a resounding "No," my challenge became to experience just how hungry it's possible to get if, in fact, you try to stick with the healthy, local, organic thing on $4 a day. The answer, in short: Very, very hungry. Literally painfully hungry. Hungry enough that you unwittingly shed pounds, lose the ability to focus and think clearly at times, get tired more quickly, and have to deal with a rumbling stomach with relatively alarming frequency.

[As an aside, I will say here that several other folks who took this year's Hunger Challenge (you can find a list of their blogs and Twitter feeds on the left side of the HC webpage) seem to have made it through within budget, and eating fairly well. Some admit to "cheating." Some took planned breaks from the Challenge. I recommend taking a peek at a few of the other participants' blogs--very interesting stuff.]

Having grown somewhat acclimated to that nagging hunger (though not nearly acclimated enough not to celebrate its coming demise), and fully acknowledging that this week has been an experiment from which I've always had an escape hatch--the ability to blow my budget if I wanted to, coupled with the knowledge that this is a project with a set end point, not my everyday reality--I want to change the question yet again, and this time to splinter it into several.

How, in a country as insanely rich as the U.S. (economic downturn notwithstanding), can so many people go so hungry? There were about 34 million food stamp recipients as of April 2009--up 20% over April 2008. And that's only the folks who qualify for food stamps. According to the San Francisco Food Bank, "In California, a single person is eligible to receive food stamps, only if their yearly gross income is $14,079 or less. A 2-person household is eligible only if they make $18,941 or less. And a family of 4 can't have more than $28,665 in income." This means that if you live in San Francisco and, as a one-person household, make $14,100, you're ineligible.

Will we ever be able to fix what's broken with our food system--farmers who grow crops they know will have to go to waste (but for which they'll be paid anyway, due to subsidies), factory farms that are disasters for animals, employees, and the environment alike, increasingly packaged and processed foods that often seem like the least expensive options? Will we reach a point at which it's possible for anyone who wants to commit to eating locally and organically to do so, regardless of their income level?

And, most pressingly, do I have the power here to change any of this?

Maybe not the big stuff: there's not a whole lot I alone can do to change California's food stamp policies (among the most convoluted and restrictive in the nation) or to make responsibly produced food cheaper or to even begin to have any impact whatsoever on national agricultural legislation.

But there's the small stuff. How many times do I pass the Food Bank collection bin in Rainbow without putting a few cans or boxes of food in it? Um, all the time. I vow to change that. When was the last time I volunteered to be on a food bank crew for a day? Uh, circa 1998, with Otis and DaveG. I think 11 years between shifts is more than long enough.

What the Food Bank needs the most, though, more than the occasional few cans of non-perishables and the occasional handful of volunteer hours (though both, I know, are greatly appreciated), is donations. They're able to exact an impressively high rate of return: for a $20 donation, they can provide $180 worth of groceries to San Franciscans who, unlike me, aren't just experimenting by eating on a budget.

So I'm wrapping up this fascinating, painful, engrossing week by making a $40 gift to the San Francisco Food Bank, in honor of this experience and in honor of my mom's upcoming birthday (October 7). I am amazingly fortunate to have grown up never knowing hunger, no matter how tight things sometimes got, and to have parents who have always fed and nourished me, both literally and figuratively. Mom, thank you, and I love you.

I don't need to tell you all (though, of course, I will anyway) that for the price of one meal out, or a halfway decent bottle of wine, or a few fancy ice cream cones, or a slab of high-quality cheese, or insert-your-own-indulgent-foodstuff-here--for the price of any of this, just once, you can do a lot to support a food bank that's working to battle hunger in your area. If you've been following my Hunger Challenge adventures this week, I truly hope you'll consider making a donation--no matter how great or modest--to a hunger-relief program in your community. (You can find one by using Feeding America's online directory.)

I hope you'll also consider trying the $4-per-person-per-day challenge at some point, even if only for a day or two. It's both jarring and immensely enlightening.

Oh, and my final tally for the week? $28.97, and a profound understanding of how fortunate I am to be able to call this just an experiment, and to call it done.

Anti-Social

2009-09-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

This afternoon (Day 6 of the Hunger Challenge), as I left the gym and contemplated the evening ahead, I realized there was very little I could do by way of socializing that would not involve blowing my food budget--which, truth be told, was already looking a bit threadbare, due to the luxury of a Larabar for lunch ($1.29). I couldn't have dinner with friends (at least not a dinner in which I could eat what they did), couldn't go out for drinks, couldn't have people over for drinks. Going to a movie might've been a possibility, provided I didn't eat or drink anything during the show. No thanks.

Then I looked back at the past few days and thought about the other socializing opportunities I'd had to sacrifice in the name of eating within a $4-per-day budget. I couldn't go to Cav on Monday to celebrate its 4th anniversary with a glass of champagne, because even though the champagne would have been free, everything else would've cost me. (Plus, technically, I suppose even the bubbly would have had to count.) On Wednesday, I begged out of the once-monthly social get-together I have with some of my fellow organizers here in SF because whether we went out or ate in somewhere, I'd have to stick with water. Last night: cheapest just to stay in. Tonight, I'm craving a drink and some company, but I have 27 cents left in the day's coffers.

It's funny (except that it's not): when I imagined how this project would go, I visualized collective dinners, an occasional glass of (very, very cheap) wine, and less impact on my ability to go out and have fun (or stay in and have fun, for that matter). And so we come to another thing I've always taken for granted: the ability to spend money on food and drink as a form of entertainment and communing with friends.

I'm ready for this week to end as much because I'll be able to actually be able to go out and engage in the sort of socializing I usually do (i.e., the sort that involves food and drink) as because I'm tired of eating each meal with a calculator at my side.

Time Slows, Annoyance Grows

2009-09-24T15:43:00.000-07:00

It's Day 500--er, Day 5--of the Hunger Challenge, and the passage of time has all but ceased.

Today has been an in-the-office day for me, and typically on days like this, I'll look at the clock at, say, 10 a.m. and then discover, approximately five minutes later, that it's 1.30 p.m. Today, notsomuch. Regardless of the fact that I'm both getting a bunch of stuff done and obliterating a fair amount of time on Facebook and the like, the minutes have lengthened to hours. I had breakfast around 8.30--the same bowl of cereal that managed to do a decent job yesterday of filling me up for a few hours--and found myself hungry again less than an hour later. I promised myself I'd wait until noon for lunch, and that turned out to be a vow with painful repercussions, as it took about a day and a half for the numbers in the corner of my computer screen to creep to 12.00. And, of course, any feeling of satiety disappeared within the hour.

There doesn't really seem to be an escape from this lingering hunger. Exercising keeps it at bay temporarily, and then, of course, exacerbates it. Busying myself with work and chores gives me something to do but doesn't quiet my stomach. Even sleep can only do so much: this morning, though I would gladly have slept more to delay the need to eat, I got so hungry that I couldn't convince my body to go unconscious again. (There's a French phrase that keeps floating back to me: dormir c'est manger--to sleep is to eat. Evidently that only goes so far.)

I will acknowledge here again that there are things I could do to cut my food costs further in order to be able to eat more. I could go conventional and processed, could cut out coffee (or go the non-Fair Trade, non-sustainable route), could cut out fruits and veggies (second to coffee in terms of expense). But, of course, I'm too stubborn for that, and would (somewhat twistedly) rather deal with a few more days of hunger than give up the part of this Challenge that has let me realize just how vast the divide between Truly Good Food and Truly Affordable Food is.

Which brings us to the source of my annoyance. If you are a person of limited means who wants to avoid food grown with pesticides or trucked in from thousands of miles away, food that's overly processed or packaged, meat from animals that have been raised in cruelty, or stuff from Big Agra, you're kind of hosed.

With a few exceptions, food that's grown and produced in a way that's healthy and sustainable for the land from which it comes, that's cruelty-free for the animals behind (or in) it, that comes from the small, local farms and makers I think many of us would like to support if we could, and that's good for the people who grow, pick, process, package, and sell it--food like this does not come cheap. Some of it is laughably expensive: there's not a visit I make to Rainbow Grocery that does not have me stumbling across something that's so pricey it stops me in my tracks. And some of it is just expensive enough not to make sense if what you're truly concerned with is cost: if you're hungry and on a budget, why would you go for the organic plums at $3 a pound when the conventional ones cost a third of that?

There's a big, complex, difficult, frustrated argument to make here about how broken our whole system of growing, subsidizing, processing, packaging, and distributing food is. I, alas, am too spaced out this week to summon the brain power to even attempt to make that argument with any degree of eloquence or sense. (Besides, I think it's safe to say that many others have made it before me, to much greater impact.)

But I'll just say that that argument has played out for me this week in the form of the realization that when you're eating on a very limited food budget (and perhaps relying on the generosity of others to supplement it), you have to choose to either eat organically, locally, and sustainably or to eat enough. Were this more than a one-week experiment for me, I don't think that would be a particularly hard choice.

Temptation and Hiding Hunger

2009-09-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

I was pleasantly surprised this morning when, despite having eaten breakfast earlier than normal (around 7.30) in order to make it to a meeting downtown at 8, I found myself still feeling pretty satisfied at 10 a.m., the start of a training session I sat in on at a client's office. 10.30 and I was still doing pretty well. At 11, things started to go downhill, and I could feel and hear my stomach start to rumble. I spent the next hour hoping it would stop, hoping no one else in the room would hear it.

There can be something overly intimate, something hard to handle and vaguely unseemly, about witnessing someone else's hunger (or someone else's gluttony, or any part of someone else's digestive process). We might be interested in hearing about others' meals or food preferences or adventures in cooking, but we're happy, I think, not knowing too much about what's behind them.

I've been fairly avidly watching the show "Hoarders" on A&E, both because it's relevant to my work and because it's pretty engrossing. One thing that struck me about this week's episode was how, from the outside of the two featured subjects' homes, it would be impossible to know that extreme clutter lie waiting inside. Hoarding was (check: is) a very private, very hidden issue for both of these people. Unless you happened to get a peek inside their houses, you'd never know about their struggles.

This got me thinking about the secrecy of hunger. If I were truly forced to eat on $4 a day (plus whatever supplemental foods I happened to get), and thus had to go hungry on a regular basis, I can confidently say that I'd do my best to hide it. Because isn't there a sense that if you don't have enough for food, something is amiss--and it's likely something that reflects negatively on you? Maybe people think your priorities are out of whack, or assume you're blowing your cash on something else, or deem something about you insufficient if you can't scrape together enough money to pay for decent meals, especially if you're working. (Factoid: 60% of the clients the San Francisco Food Bank served in 2008 were from working families.) If you keep your hunger a secret, you don't have to deal with anyone else's perceptions, no matter how flatly wrong they may be.

Evidently something like one in eight people in the U.S. does not regularly get enough to eat. One in eight. That's a ludicrously high figure for such a wealthy country, and it means, among other things, that somewhere in the sphere of people you know is likely at least one person going hungry. I'm willing to bet you probably couldn't pick that person out. I know I couldn't.

But here's something interesting: this week, people know I'm hungry (the attendees at this morning's meeting aside). And I can't begin to count how many offers I've had of free food. If the rules of the Hunger Challenge allowed for supplements to the $4 per day I'm allowed to spend, I would probably be able to eat at least one meal a day that was given to me or purchased for me by someone else.

I would have, for example, been able to join the Israeli tonight in enjoying a burrito from the Little Chihuahua. He offered to pay. I demurred, citing the rules. So he brought his burrito over and ate it while I opted for arugula salad (roughly 75 cents). I resisted again when he brought out two mugs to make tea ("That's, like, 20 cents," I said. "Over budget."), and gave in only when he rummaged in the snack drawer, brought out a Canadian Kit Kat, and said, "Come on, can't you at least have one piece?" I did. That was about 20 cents. Over budget, yes. But I couldn't resist.

I dream of a burrito, of a bowl of pasta AND some salad AND bread. I'm longing for a cupcake, a glass of wine, a cup of salted caramel ice cream from BiRite. I would love a bowl of yogurt drizzled with honey and sprinkled with almonds, would be so thrilled to cut off a big slice of the ricotta salata I bought on Sunday and pop the entire thing into my mouth. I just picked up my CSA box this afternoon and felt briefly on the verge of a breakdown as I washed the impossibly plump, impossibly beautiful bunch of grapes that came in it. I ate two. If I play my cards right, I can eat a small handful of them tomorrow.

I am so weary of being hungry, of calculating the cost of every meal, of having to resist not only actual temptations (cupcakes, ice cream, wine, the bottle of Woodford's Reserve sitting in wait on my bar) but also things that, in any other week, would not qualify as temptations: yogurt, grapes, big salads, second servings of pasta, a baguette from La Boulange, as much produce as I can possibly stand.

I remind myself that I need only survive three more days of this and then it's back to reality. I'm so (literally) achingly humbled to truly understand that, for a mind-boggling number of people in a nation that has so much, this is reality. How can that be?

Of Losing, Food Porn, and the Bottomless Pit

2009-09-22T19:36:00.001-07:00

I stood on the scale at the gym today (Day 3 of the Hunger Challenge) and discovered that I've lost two pounds. Since Sunday. Yikes. I'm all for a little bodily rightsizing when appropriate, but a pound a day is not exactly the healthiest way to go about it. Oh, and also? Losing weight in this manner makes you an airheaded, loopy doofus. At least it does if you're me.

It's not an exaggeration to say that being more or less constantly hungry has made me markedly dumber, yesterday in particular. I reached a point last night at which my brain was so conking out on me and my stomach was growling so loudly (for real; it would have been comical were it not so depressing) that all I could do was sit in bed and read. Check that: try to read. I didn't get far before giving up and just going to sleep.

Here's what baffles me a bit: I know I'm eating less than I normally do, and probably have not had nearly enough fat over the past few days, but still, it's not like I'm eating nothing, or eating vapidly. Whole grains, fruit, veggies, protein: check, check, check, check. And yet every time I consume something, it seems to fall deep into the bottomless pit that has suddenly become my stomach. I had a hefty-ish bowl of oatmeal this morning, for example, which normally would be enough to fill me up for at least a few hours. But within 30 minutes I was ravenous again, as if my body had completely forgotten that I had just dosed it with food. Lunch was whole wheat pasta with onion, spinach, and white beans. Time spent feeling full after eating: just about 20 minutes, at which point I would have been delighted to have a second bowl. What gives? Shouldn't my metabolism be slowing down (at least as much as my brain has)?

This constant, nagging hunger and waning intelligence have conspired to convince me that the way to get through this week is to spend time browsing what can only be considered food porn: Mark Bittman's column in the New York Times (his soba salad this week looks so good I could weep); my friend Heather's blog, called Pestle Mortar (her specialties are desserts, which I miss achingly); the site for a new fancy-pants frozen yogurt place in the Fillmore. I read them, salivate, sigh. Meanwhile, my stomach begs with my eyes to just stop already.

I think it's safe to say by now that no, it's not especially possible to eat a filling, local, organic, produce-rich diet--especially not one that includes the blazing extravagance of a cup of Fair Trade coffee in the morning--on $4 a day. Were I thinking straight, I might throw in the towel here, call the experience done and the conclusion reached, and go to town on a block of cheese.

But my addled brain pushes me forward. If I can't prove that one can be truly Pollan-esque on this sort of budget, at least I can get a true visceral sense of what happens when you can't get enough to eat--of how physically uncomfortable it is to be hungry, of how much harder it is to function on a less-than-adequate supply of calories, of what it's like to go through your day in a vague mental fog.

Of course, come Sunday morning, I can go to Fraiche and gorge myself on a bowl of high-end frozen yogurt with organic fruit and some sort of stupendous baked good, then can follow that up with three full meals of whatever strikes my fancy.

This is for the 34 million people in the U.S. who can't.

Hungry

2009-09-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

It's Hunger Challenge day 2, and I'm hurting.

Having gone over budget yesterday by $2.50, I've got a bit of saving to do today and for the next few days if I hope to stay within the $28 limit by week's end. This cost-cutting makes for an underfed and not very happy me.

Had I any faith whatsoever in my ability to make it through this very busy day (including a 3-hour meeting with a new client) without coffee, I would've saved myself 78 cents by foregoing this morning's dose. But because yesterday's alternate caffeine experiment didn't go so well, I made that splurge today, and thus have had to give up 78 cents' worth of food as a result. It's a bit past 4 p.m., I've been up since 7.30 a.m., and I've eaten only a cup of multi-grain flakes with strawberries and an almond butter-and-jam sandwich on whole wheat. To say I'm hungry would be a serious understatement.

If I were smarter and/or less stubborn, I'd give up on the healthy, organic, and local thing and would switch at this point to the cheapest food I could get my hands on, ingredients and provenance be damned. But I'm sorry to say that I'm sort of That Person--the one who honestly loves whole-grain everything, can't handle many processed foods, and gets a little (OK, perhaps a lot) hung up sometime on where her food comes from and what's in it. I'm learning that while it doesn't necessarily take a huge food budget to be That Person, it does take more than $4 per day.

So what happens when you're forced to eat on a very restricted budget and you burn through it too quickly? You try to fill up on whatever food comes your way. (For the purposes of the Hunger Challenge, even food I don't purchase counts toward my daily tally, so this one does not, alas, apply.) You lower your standards, maybe, about what you eat--hunger, after all, is a powerful motivator.

Or, for a little while, you go hungry. Today's (unsurprising) lesson? That really, really sucks.

Numbers, Bulk Foods, and Real Caffeine

2009-09-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

It's day 1 of my participation in the San Francisco Food Bank's Hunger Challenge, and I can already share my first lesson: no matter how much cheaper tea may be than coffee, attempting to substitute the former for the latter as my daily caffeine source is a huge mistake.

I woke up this morning to an empty coffee canister in the kitchen, and rather than make the journey to Peet's for some replacement beans--which, at roughly $13/pound for the Fair Trade Blend I usually get, would have neatly chipped away at my $4/day spending limit--I decided to have a nice cup of black tea instead.

Wrong. Wrong. I am just now, at 3 p.m., getting over the resultant grumpiness, and only because I have just returned from Rainbow with a pound of Jeremiah's pick and am writing this with a cup of same next to me.

Fueled as I now am by real caffeine (price per day: 78 cents), I can begin the mental gymnastics involved in calculating the price-per-serving of the bulk foods that will make up the, um, bulk of my eating this week. The bulk route is the one I normally take, but I'm hewing to it even more this week as I attempt to eat as few prepared and packaged foods as possible. All of this is wonderful for my body, the earth, and the purposes of this experiment, though hideously painful in terms of the math involved.

Today's breakfast, for example, consisted of the aforementioned cup of tea (with milk and a bit of honey); steel-cut oatmeal with strawberries, brown sugar, and milk; a glass of grapefruit juice; and a piece of toast with peanut butter. What did all of that cost? Join me, won't you, on the journey to figure that out.

First, the tea. The bag I chose was one in a box given to me as a gift, so I have zero idea how much it actually cost, but am willing to peg it somewhere around 20 cents. The honey, about a teaspoon from a 16-oz. jar that was $5, comes out, by my calculations, to $0.05. I'm too stubborn to measure or calculate the splash of milk I used, so we'll call it 5 cents as well, though it was probably more like 2 or 3. Grand total: 28 cents, plus mental fatigue.

The likelihood of my continuing this insanely detailed math for everything I eat, condiments and all, is slim. So here and now, I'm making a deal with myself that I will be allowed to guesstimate the costs of herbs, spices, sweeteners, condiments, and oil, lest I go completely mad.

Leaving out the details, I've come up with $1.57 as the costs of this morning's meal. Lunch--Israeli couscous with roasted zucchini and tofu--clocks in at $1.80. The cup of Ciao Bella blood orange gelato I was somehow powerless to resist at Rainbow? $1.09 (and worth every penny). My total for the day thus far: $5.25.

Oops.

For 2/3 of a day's largely organic, largely local, very tasty eating and caffeinating, not bad. But still $1.25 over budget for the day, and dinner isn't even on the horizon. So much for thoughts of arugula salad with melon, almonds, and ricotta salata; since I'm already borrowing against tomorrow, bean and barley soup is going to be more like it.

Of the Hunger Challenge, No Impact Man, and Logical Extremes

2009-09-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

Having recently read The Omnivore's Dilemma and, as a result, spending more time than usual thinking about all things food, I was inspired a few weeks back to sign up for the San Francisco Food Bank's 2009 Hunger Challenge.

The Hunger Challenge, which officially starts this Sunday, is a week-long event in which participants agree to eat on $4 per person per day, or $28 per person per week--the amount the average food stamp recipient in California receives. The purpose of the challenge is to raise awareness of what it's like to try to eat healthfully on very limited funds, to highlight the work that the San Francisco Food Bank does, and to raise funds for the SFFB.

The official rules of the Hunger Challenge require that everything participants eat during the course of a day count toward the $4 limit, including food and drinks consumed outside the house. The only things for which we get a free pass are salt, pepper, and tap water. Everything else, including cooking oil, condiments, and other staples, must fall within the $4/day limit.

To add a slightly Pollan-esque spin to my own Hunger Challenge, I'm going to try to eat as locally and organically as possible while still staying within the $28/week limit, partly to see whether it can be done and partly to get a better sense of what, other than produce, is actually feasible to source from within the San Francisco Bay Area. And no, I'm not going to go hunt my own wild pig, leave a bowl of sourdough starter on my windowsill to catch wild yeast, or boil down part of the Bay to score locally sourced salt.

My thinking about and planning for the Hunger Challenge this morning has coincided with reading Elizabeth Kolbert's review in the New Yorker of Colin Beavan's No Impact Man, the story of one family's attempt to live for a year with zero carbon impact. (There's also a documentary of the same name, and Beavan blogs about both his year-long experiment and his ongoing work here.) It's safe to say that Kolbert--whose reportorial focus in her work for TNY is on climate change issues--doesn't put much stock in the power of "stunts" like Beavan's (or Henry David Thoreau's, or other I'm-off-the-grid-and-eating-locally authors) to impact meaningful change.

I'm torn here. Part of me finds Beavan's experiment somewhat ludicrous and insanely extreme: no toilet paper? No electricity at all? (Did he write his book longhand on the back of recycled scraps of paper or what?) Never being able to take a car, train, subway, or bus anywhere? Never taking the elevator to your 9th-floor apartment, even with a 2-year-old in tow? Trying to get your wife to swear off tampons, coffee, and the newspaper? Seriously? I understand the desire to take an idea to its logical extreme in order to make a point, but the danger of doing so is that you'll turn people off altogether: well, I'm not about to give up toilet paper, disposable feminine hygiene products, the sad "luxury" of taking the bus when it's snowing like hell outside, and the chance to actually hold a newspaper in my hand once a week, so forget it.

Another part, though, respects what he's done, and believes that, yes, in order to reverse the tide of global warming we do indeed need to convince politicians to step up (as Kolbert notes in her review), but we also need to be more mindful of what it's possible to do at a personal level to stop the suckage.

And so it's off to the library to prep for the week ahead by picking up a few cookbooks for inspiration and No Impact Man for some thought-provoking reading. (I cannot possibly be the first one to note the disconnect between Beavan's desire that people purchase his book and his proselytizing about consuming as little as possible.)

Tune in next week for dispatches from my attempt to eat cheap (and local-ish) and to read No Impact Man while resisting the urge to overnight Colin Beavan a case of TP.

The First

2009-09-13T20:23:00.000-07:00

I will forget, sometime in December, say, that there was a night when I stood in my kitchen listening to the first rainfall of the season and almost got teary-eyed because it sounded so beautiful.

I will forget, when things get wet-to-the-point-of-never-really-drying a few months hence, that I went out for a run this evening, managed not to beat the rain, came home wet not so much from the exertion of my workout but from the water falling from the sky, and loved it.

I will forget, on those days when it's raining so hard that even leaving the house becomes a logistical challenge, how I reveled earlier in the smell of newly wet and still warm cement as I ran.

And I will forget, when it's dark at 5 p.m. and that darkness is only made heavier for being so sodden and cold, that something in me was ever ok with this sign that we're inexorably turning the corner towards fall.

But for the moment, I silence iTunes, and for a few minutes just sit and listen to the low hiss of cars on Laguna driving over wet pavement, listen to a steady drip-drip-drip on the back porch that suggests some re-caulking of the walls there lies ahead for me, listen to the tiny music of what must be individual drops hitting the leaves of the tree in the backyard. And for the moment I swear that nothing has ever sounded sweeter.

Self-Admonition

2009-09-05T15:57:00.001-07:00

"When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion. ... Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won't be asked. You won't be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won't be asked whether it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won't be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won't even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished. ... I'm so sure you'll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions."

--J.D. Salinger, "Seymour: An Introduction"

The Moment

2009-08-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, Cape Cod, dusk.

We're sitting around the fire pit in the yard of what was once my grandparents' house (now officially my aunt and uncle's), a fair chunk of the family. The day before we threw a surprise party for my grandmother's 90th birthday ("the biggest surprise of my life," she called it). Earlier on Saturday a clutch of us ran in the Brew Run, I with my cousin Sarah at my side the whole way--a delight on many levels--and then sat down to our annual clambake feast.

After dinner, my Uncle Bob built a fire, and by ones and twos we started congregating around it. Now, with night coming, we're swapping stories, laughing so hard we occasionally double over. We run back and forth to the food tent to fetch cake, and then, just to gild the lily, Aunt Char brings out a platter of cookies. (Later, Sarah will dip that gilded lily in glitter by bringing out the makings of s'mores, and Jess will root around in the dark until she comes up with a few suitable marshmallow roasting sticks.) We stick glass bottles of various colors and sizes into the coals to watch them slowly soften and collapse, then try to retrieve them, with varying degrees of success.

Uncle Eric points out the North Star. Someone points to the moon, heavy and huge, and asks, Waxing or waning? I guess waxing, not wanting to think of the fullness going (too soon, too soon). My niece sits on my mother's lap in her pj's, an earlier attempt at putting her down for nightnights having proved unsuccessful; now she watches the flames rapt, growing quiet and sleepy. The circle around the fire grows as more people drag chairs down to join us.

Pause here.

These few hours--these few days--have been so achingly perfect that for a while I forget that they won't last. Heather raises a toast to Twin Chimneys, the family "manse" (quotes intentional); this is the last summer we'll know it as we have for the past 35 years. Starting soon, it will get the renovation it so sorely needs, and in the process will be stripped to the studs. Starting even sooner, family members will start peeling off to return home, setting off our long succession of goodbyes. And starting even sooner still, people will turn in for the night, our circle like a waning moon, the fire beginning to die down.

But for a while we're all here. Bob throws more logs on the fire. Eric fishes a droopy bottle from the flames. The platter of sweets makes another round. The house glows from inside in the background, still standing. The North Star flickers. We laugh. We laugh. We're here.

Grand Delusion? Of Zipcar and the iPhone

2009-06-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

Among the things I'm sorely tired of is the fact that my car is parked in a garage that's about 5 1/2 blocks from my house, necessitating a trek every time I want to drive somewhere. You'd think that, several years into this arrangement, I would have mastered the art of adding 7-8 minutes onto my estimated transit time, allowing me to get wherever I'm going when I'm actually supposed to be there, but no. I'm late impressively often.

I rent a garage not so much because it's a drag to look for parking in Hayes Valley (it is, but I'm often around during odd times and could hypothetically score some decent spots), but because I am forever scarred by the fact that my car got broken into twice within the first month I'd moved here. The logic goes that I'd rather pay to rent a garage space than pay to have one of my car windows fixed yet again.

But I may be reaching the end of the line here. My car, a luxurious 1993 Toyota Corolla, still runs like a champ, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the automotive equivalent of slow, steady internal bleeding is happening under the hood, and that one of these days I'm going to discover that I need to replace, like, everything.

So all of this got me thinking about the possibility of selling the car, ditching the garage space, and signing up with Zipcar, which has a lot literally at the end of my block. No more stupid trek to Fulton Street, no more garage rent, no more worries about emergency Corolla surgery--just a nice little Mini there when I need it (more or less).

I go back and forth on the math and the pros and cons here. Would I ultimately save money if I joined Zipcar, given how much I drive? Would I severely regret not having a car at my disposal every single time I needed it, no question? Would I be inspired to take Muni more often--and, as a result, to put up with an even longer chunk of transit time?

Come with me on this little logic detour for a moment. Thinking about taking Muni made me think, Well, it could be reasonable if I had a phone that let me go to NextBus to figure out whether I'd be better off waiting for the 21 or whether I'd be better off walking/driving/cursing SF's public transit. And then: You know, a phone like, say, an iPhone. And then: Because if I didn't have to shell out for garage rent, gas, and insurance every month, I'd have an additional chunk of money that I could obliterate on something else, such as one of AT&T's expensive-ass monthly plans. Me, Zipcar, my iPhone: what a happy trio we would be.

All of this sets aside for the moment the fact that I loathe AT&T and fear I wouldn't be able to use an iPhone as a phone in or near my house because of the crappy reception (though Nir sat on my sofa last week and demonstrated to me the upward tick of the bars on his iPhone and then sent a bunch of texts as a bonus). But my desire for a new Apple gadget is such that I might be willing to give AT&T the benefit of the doubt that they're ever going to do a damn thing to improve reception in SF. Hope springs eternal.

So here's my request: persuade me one way or the other. Adios to the voiture and hello to the iPhone? Stick with the Corolla and the (cough, cough) first-generation Motorola Razr (hey, it still works after being dropped more times than I'm willing to admit)? Sign up for Zipcar but wait on the iPhone? Leave me a comment and sway my decision.

Et tu, April?

2009-04-17T18:09:00.000-07:00

There's a line (attributed to Plato here and there, but who knows) that I run through my head on repeat when things get a little (or a lot) sucky in my world: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."

I've called upon those words a lot in the past few weeks, what with the discovery that I owe a staggering amount in taxes (staggering amount paid in estimateds last year evidently notwithstanding), the sudden and unexplained disappearance of the latest garçon, and continued slogging to make up for the slowness of business over the past few months.

And here's what really blows: this month in particular, it seems like Plato is more right than ever. So many people in my life, relatively speaking, have been socked with crap lately. One client is in the midst of a sad and painful separation. Another is contending with a very serious and totally unexpected health issue. My cousin, whose father-in-law recently died after a battle with leukemia, found out today that her 6-year-old son has cancer.

I could go on, but I'll stop the litany there, because I think you get the point.

In a client's office yesterday, I stood for a moment in front of the vase of daffodils set on the reception desk and leaned in to inhale. I had forgotten how daffodils smell: like newness, like starting again, like spring. Like some vague--if frequently un-keepable--promise that sooner or later, things will turn around and the loss and falling and failing and sadness will stop.

Because the receptionist was away from the desk, I lingered longer than I might have otherwise, with my face basically in the bouquet. I breathed in that smell, said a silent Please, and then walked away to lose myself in work. Because how much power can daffodils have against the world?

Sinister

2009-02-09T22:22:00.000-08:00

So, fine: there may have been a bit of vanity Googling happening earlier this evening. And there among the dozens of book-related links (or what I assume to be book-related links but cannot confirm as such, given that they're in a language other than English of French) and other work-related stuff were a few bits and bobs from Sinister.

Can I even begin to describe Sinister? There was a point when I had to try to do that fairly often, to explain how it was that I got to know JDS, how it was we came to decide we were compatible enough to spend several weeks traversing southern Europe together in the summer of 2002, in a car sans AC, en route to and returning from a music festival in Spain. The explanation would go something like this:

"Sinister? It's, um, a mailing list. About this band named Belle & Sebastian? They're Scottish."

And then whoever had been foolhardy enough to ask would more or less immediately find him- or herself sated, not wanting to know any more.

Sinister was (and still is) technically a mailing list devoted to all things B&S. But for several years running, roundabouts the turn of the century, it was much more. It was, for dozens of 20/30/40-something kids like me the world over, a sort of proto-blog. It was a place to post long, rambling messages crammed with literary allusions, news about indie bands, references back and forth to other posts, and more miscellaney than you could shake a stick at.

It was, for me, at least, an excellent procrastination tool: I can't imagine how many hours of Microsoft's time I spent reading and writing posts on Sinister. It was a connection to the UK (where vast swaths of Sinisterites resided), to other chunks of Europe; to J, first in Montana, then in Argentina, then in Slovenia; to sweet indie kids like Laura Llew (whom I found on Facebook but have not yet friended) here in the U.S. It was the source of much of the music I now can't imagine living without.

I read my Sinister posts now (find more, if you're truly a glutton for punishment, by searching the archives for my name) and feel a pang of something I can't entirely describe. There's a fascination in such a clear look back at my younger self, a little sigh at some particularly pungent memories, a bigger sigh at having moved beyond the substance of those memories. There's a sense of opening a time capsule and being able to fully identify the contents but not really having much idea of what to do with them other than hold them for a little bit and smile.

Once, I was in my late 20s, lived a very different life, didn't have to use eye cream every night, actually wrote in a journal, and found friendship and connection and sometimes solace in a random spot: among fans of a band I happened to love. That was Sinister.

Sing it, David!

2009-02-02T08:07:00.000-08:00

Just when you think David Allen is vanilla and corporate, along comes something like this (from his most recent newsletter):

Certainly being able to maintain a positive vision amidst the challenging and often messy day-to-day stuff is a wonderful life skill to hone. But you may need to be judicious and pick your battles. Though the storm you're in is probably going to make you stronger and wiser, right now you might not like it. Your choice is how you get through it - as victim, or as captain/commander. In other words: life's a bitch, and what's the next action?

Long Night's Journey into Day

2009-01-19T15:32:00.001-08:00

On Friday, in those moments of sudden stillness, N tells me that apparently the body releases some kind of paralyzing chemical during sleep, which is why, he says (after telling me not to quote him on this), you sometimes have those moments during dreams in which you're frantically, desperately trying to move but cannot.

I've had dreams like that: I want to run or get up or turn but I'm stuck, leaden, right where I am, as if some greater force is exacting control over my limbs. I wake up with a start, relieved to realize, though it takes some time, that my body is mine again, that I'm free to move as I please.

This morning I thought of that dreaming, of that sleepy paralysis, and realized that, if you (like me) go in for the occasional grand extrapolation, you might say that much of the grand ol' US of A is on the cusp of being pulled out of just such a dream. It was a long one, and exhausting, in which we thought we could move or scream or do something, anything, to stop feeling like so much was out of our control (and quite possibly getting worse all the while). Something kept us frustratingly still.

But it's morning in America, my friends, and I don't mean the Reagan kind of morning. I mean the kind when we wake up and understand that we can move again, understand that our futile attempts to shift our frozen limbs or open our mouths and hear something come out are over, understand that though much of the past eight years were significantly more than just a bad dream, they're over.

Tomorrow morning, human voices will wake us, but with apologies to TSE, we won't drown. At long last, the senseless, useless flailing and sinking are over.

We won't drown. We'll swim, finally, toward what looks once again like a reachable shore.

Procrastination Tools of the Week

2009-01-16T15:39:00.000-08:00

I've had a productive few weeks here in the early stretch of 2009, which clearly means it's time for a bit of procrastination. There's always Facebook, Flickr, and the passel of blogs I follow (see sidebar), but sometimes my time-wasting needs to be a bit more specialized. Here's what I've been turning to lately when I need to kill time creatively.

The Black Cab Sessions
The schtick: indie musicians play songs in the back of a London cab. (What musicians, you might ask? A safe rule of thumb is that if you've heard them on All Songs Considered, they've also played a number in the back of the cab.) It's sort of like a (very) mini concert with only you (and the cabbie and the videographer) as the audience.

For the record: Jens Lekman, you can play in the backseat of my car anytime.

Diamond Dave
Words don't do it justice. Just go there and click around. I defy you not to giggle (or at least chuckle). My recommendation is to leave the site open in its own tab/window all day for easy access when you need a DLR fix, which you might find happens surprisingly often.

Daily Routines
A compendium of articles and blurbs detailing the daily habits of various artists, authors, designers, and other public figures (Mr. Rogers included), Daily Routines has the potential to make you feel both much, much better and much, much worse about your own level of productivity. I especially like Stefan Sagmeister's take on the breakfast of champions.

You're both sentient

2009-01-04T22:11:00.000-08:00

Match.com (yes; quiet) has this new-ish feature in which they (it? whatever) offer for your perusal what they call the Daily 5: five profiles of people they feel you might be interested in, based on your own profile, geography, and stated preferences.

Now, I can understand the need to sort of go wide here in order to cough up five new people each and every day, even in a city like SF, where online dating is not exactly a novelty. But still, there seems to be more than a bit of reaching happening. To wit, the criteria on which today's five potential matches were presented to me:

#1:

You both fancy felines.
Like you, he's not a smoker.
He's also interested in bowling.

#2:

Like you, he's not a smoker.
He's also interested in bowling.
He's athletic and toned.

#3:

Like you, he's not a smoker.
He's also interested in bowling.
He's athletic and toned.

#4:

You both fancy felines.
Like you, he's not a smoker.
He has a graduate degree.

#5:

Like you, he's not a smoker.
Pretty impressive - he has a Ph.D.
Both of you are into swimming.

My list of desirables, I'm afraid, goes far beyond being a non-smoker (though that's, like, 1000% non-negotiable) and being up for the occasional evening of bowling. If Match would tweak the algorithm they use here to include things like "Like you, he can correctly punctuate a sentence," "Pretty impressive--he doesn't use the phrases 'I work hard and I play hard' and 'I'm into exploring new things' in his profile," and "He's a tall, skinny, cute kind-of-alternaboy-but-not-one-with-an-ironic-mullet who has a thing for Canadian pop and salted caramel and understands why you snort drinks out your nose for laughing so hard when watching 'Arrested Development,'" I might put a bit more stock in this tool.

As it is, though, the Daily 5's success rate is currently on par with allowing my 6-month-old niece to select for me. (Actually, she might even do a better job; I should enlist her help.) Perhaps Match can follow the lead of Netflix and offer $1 million to whoever can improve their algorithm by the greatest number of percentage points. I'm happy to be your equivalent of "Napoleon Dynamite" and "I Heart Huckabees," guys; I might well be that baffling in my tastes.

Oh, and in closing, a note to any potential suitors: don't let Match's hackneyed attempt at alliteration convince you to add the phrase "I fancy felines" to your profile. Very much not OK.

Ring out

2009-01-01T16:11:00.000-08:00

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

— From In Memoriam, Alfred Lord Tennyson

2008, you were both a delightful success--book published, business craziness (in a generally good way), appearance of fascinating people on the scene, arrival of World's Cutest Niece--and a heartbreaking pain in the ass. You and I, we did our time. Now Tennyson and I would like to show you the door.

2009, you and I are going to take it slow. Don't get any big ideas and, like, start calling me twice a day or putting your feet up on the furniture or anything. I'm hopeful that I'll learn to love you, but I'm smart enough to hold back until I get to know you a little better. Ask 2008 how to make me happy and how, markedly, not to. It'll tell you, especially if you buy it a drink.

In the meantime, I'm going to celebrate a decent first day of you by pouring myself a glass of wine and continuing to work my way through "Curb Your Enthusiasm" from the beginning.

Damsel

2008-12-27T05:08:00.001-08:00

What, no boi? (From the Digg profile edit page.)

Even the Grinch Had a Heart, Haters

2008-12-22T21:46:00.000-08:00

Try as I might, I still utterly fail to understand why any Californian--let alone 52% of the people with whom I share a state--could have voted for the bigotry, hatred, and small-mindedness that was Prop 8. This past week's ridiculousness (Ken Starr--WTF??) just makes it worse. And Rick Warren? I can't even go there.

Yes, I live in the skewed world that is San Francisco, and yes, I have the benefit of having many gay friends, some of whom are among the most important people in my life. So of course I get alternately weepy, grumpy, indignant, pissed off, and a combination of all four when I hear the hate and lies that are spewed by those who oppose marriage equality.

But the stupidly hopeful part of me has to believe that there people out there who maybe voted for Prop 8 because their religious community told them to (Mormons, I'm looking at you) or because they were pressured into it by someone else in their life or because they temporarily lost their good sense and believed the stupidity about same-sex marriage opening up the floodgates to polygamy (Mormons, I'm looking at you) and incest and men trying to marry young boys--that these people, these otherwise good people (many of whom voted for Obama, as we know) might actually be able to look at the photos of the Courage Campaign's Please Don't Divorce Us project and feel their hearts soften a bit.

Because surely these otherwise good people know that there's enough hatred in the world, and enough bigotry (Mormons--and Latinos, and African-Americans--I'm looking at you), enough lying, enough instability, enough of all of it without having to write it into the state's Constitution.

Surely these otherwise good people, many of whom would never even think of adopting the kids many same-sex couples adopt, and most of whom can chatter on about the importance of a whole, stable family, find it ludicrous and illogical to think of denying gays and lesbians the right to marry, and thus to provide their families with all of the wholeness and stability they possibly can.

(As an aside, I've never understood the right-wing Christian argument that marriage is primarily for the purpose of reproduction, as that would make illegitimate any heterosexual pairing that did not produce a child. Because, what? You're a good, upstanding, god-loving Christian who happens to be infertile and suddenly your marriage is a sham? Tell me, Christians, how that works.)

(Aside Part 2: Florida, what's your damage? A statewide ban on adoptions by gays? How short-sighted and biased can you be? Also, are there, like, thousands of opposite-sex couples lining up just waiting to adopt these children? Oh. No. There are not. Which means that apparently you think foster care is a much better option than stable, life-long adoption. At least Miami thinks you're wrong.)

So, OK, Prop 8 supporters, just do this for me: for a moment, set aside whatever you might think about gays and lesbians, or whatever ill will you might have toward them because you think they're not like you. Set aside whatever you might've heard in church, or on the news, or in the pro-8 campaign ads that claimed that your kindergartner would be forced to learn all about the ins and outs of homosexuality if marriage equality remained California law. Set aside any hate you might feel (especially if you're a Christian, given that "love thy neighbor as thyself" thing).

Is all of that off in a corner somewhere for a few minutes? Good. Now go look at these photos of same-sex couples, their families, their friends, and their neighbors, and see if you don't get at least a little teary-eyed.

Because here's the thing: in those photos, there's nothing but love. Maybe it doesn't look like the love you know and are used to, but I think you can agree that it's love nonetheless--so much love that it might make your heart as achy as it makes mine. So much that maybe, after you've spent some time looking closely at those photos (especially the wedding shots), you'll feel something in yourself start to soften. So much that maybe you'll understand where people like me are coming from--people who wonder, sadly or angrily or just plain incomprehendingly, what anyone thinks could possibly be gained by making hate and intolerance the law of the land.

It's a Generally Good Life, but Damn That Perpetually Loose Finial

2008-12-19T08:59:00.000-08:00

From Wendell Jamieson's "Wonderful? Sorry, George, It's a Pitiful, Dreadful Life":

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

Yup. And when we're back in Connecticut next week, my sister-and-law and I will watch it (on VHS, natch), lovingly mock it, and let it make us sniffly.

Election Day 2008

2008-11-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

I know the one thing we did right
Was the day we started to fight.
Keep your eyes on the prize--
Hold on, hold on.

Hate Is a Very Strong Word

2008-10-27T22:57:00.000-07:00

But it doesn't quite cover what I felt when I was pulled out of sleep at 3 a.m. this morning by the idiots in the building diagonally behind my house playing Rock Band.

In those first hideous moments of consciousness, when I was trying to suss out what the hell was going on, I assumed they were just (ha--just) playing music really loudly, with no consciousness of or care for the insane hour. But then the song, with its annoying bass line, repeated over and over and over.

I assumed someone in the motley crew would gaze at a clock at some point and think, Hey, it's 3 o'clock on a Monday morning, and the few shreds of decency to which we cling suggest that perhaps we could, say, not have every single window and door in our flat open while we amplify our video game. But no.

Also incorrect was my assumption that, when I went out into our backyard and called up--politely, I might add--to a boy hanging out one of the windows and chatting on his phone, he would respond. No.

So I called the police. They may have shown up, as the din died down for a while somewhere around 4.20. But then, miraculously, I looked at my clock and managed to surmise that it was 4.49, and sound was flowing anew. Redial. Loopy plea to the police dispatcher to do something, anything, to make it stop, as I was losing my mind. She sweetly promised she'd send someone out.

At 5.30, it got quiet, and I tried to calm my racing heart by thinking about Gandhi (what would he do if the Raj blared Rock Band at him mid-sleep, hmmmm?) and Rachmaninoff's Vespers and an eye for an eye leaving the whole world blind. Sooner or later I fell asleep, half contemplating blaring "Morning Edition" out in the yard when I woke up to officially face the day.

Last night I did the responsible thing. But tonight, crapwad neighbors, if I so much hear one thump of bass leaking out your windows, I will not be above scrawling a polite request to keep it down onto an egg and tossing it your way.

Three hours ten minutes

2008-10-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

Things I could have done tonight:

Taken care of the ironing I've been putting off for weeks (literally--weeks),
Worked my way beyond the first week of September New Yorker-wise,
Tackled some laundry,
Cracked (er, crinkled?) the cover of yesterday's Times,
Dealt with the various piles lurking on/near my desk,
Posted some photos to Flickr, and
Written a blog post more substantial than a flimsy bulleted list.

What I did instead:

Watched Gandhi.

Despite the occasionally bad (and, in a few instances, bad) swarthy pancake makeup and old-person hair (did Nehru really have a slightly botched blond dye job when he became PM?), it was 190 minutes well spent.

Notes from St. Louis

2008-09-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

Officially, it's the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial

I.
That spiffy new fall-weight jacket I bought myself yesterday? It didn't come with me to St. Louis, as a peek at weather.com last night revealed a forecast of 80-plus-degree days here through the weekend. I stepped out of the airport this afternoon and found the meteorologists to be spot-on: it was damn hot. That sunny, shimmery, smackdown kind of hot that may be sort of specific to the midwest. (Note: please do not take my word on this. Consult an actual midwesterner for a more accurate assessment.)

Carol picked me up and we drove downtown so we could visit the arch--excuse me, the JNEM--before heading west to St. Charles for our conference. In the park that surrounds the arch, the trees were fully leafed and blazingly green, the grass was perfect, there were ducks happily (presumably) paddling about in the ponds, and it seemed for all the world like mid-summer. I don't need to tell you that this pleased me.

II.
Q. Who visits the arch at 3 p.m. on a Thursday in late September?
A.

Random clutches of foreign men (French? Israeli? Russian? Really could not tell), all of whom take photos of everything, including but not limited to the signs detailing what it costs to take the arch tram, the inside of the tram cars, and the educational video presented while you wait to be whisked to the top of the arch.
Senior citizen tour groups, who may or may not be required by their tour operators to wear, in addition to yellow name badges, cowboy or Amish hats and suspenders.
Floridians
Professional Organizers

III.
On I-70 between St. Louis and St. Charles--a stretch of what I believe is roughly 15 miles--I saw at least three megachurches. One was sort of run-of-the-mill. One bore a sign that said, "Jesus Completely Saves." (Thank you, Jesus, for not doing a half-assed job.) One was very literally the size of a Wal-Mart. In fact, it looked as if it could have taken over a defunct Wal-Mart.

Christ almighty are we not in San Francisco anymore.

Postscript

2008-09-20T19:35:00.000-07:00

"If, in this [2008 Presidential] campaign, illusion triumphs over what we must believe is reality, we will fail as a nation. There is, after all, a point of no return. If McCain wins, history is here big time, scythe, sackcloth and all four horsemen."--Robert Stone, quoted in the New York Times Book Review, Sunday, September 14, 2008

My Take on Election Coverage

2008-09-17T23:27:00.000-07:00

It's that time again: time for me to become exquisitely adept at steering clear, as much as possible, of any and all coverage of the US Presidential election. I cheerfully skip all of the articles in the Times in any way related to the election, the candidates, or the issues. As I do whenever there's a soundbite from our current Fearless Leader, I turn the volume on the radio down all the way and whistle for a few moments whenever NPR starts to veer election-ward. And I don't own a TV, so luckily it's wildly easy for me to completely avoid the hellhole that is TV news.

This came today in an e-mail from Dana:

wilska, i've been trying to follow your media diet but it
isn't working. i'm completely obsessed with the train wreck
that is mccain/palin and the half of our electorate that
seems to want them in the driver's seat. ack. any advice?

I replied,

Love, I approach the news like this:

If I read/listen to/watch this [where "this" roughly equals anything at all having to do with the election], will it in any way make me happier? Will it change my mind? Will it make me see things from a different perspective?

To date, 100% of the time, the answers to those questions have been resounding NOs. I figure that if, heaven forbid, Americans prove by and large to be a group of people who are at best misguided, at worst serious fuckwads, there will be ample opportunity for tearing of hair, worrying about the fate of the country, and scoping out cabins on the Canadian prairie. This may be the last chance I have to believe that there's more good than bad left in this nation, and I'm too stubborn and greedy to give that up.

That's sort of sad but also painfully true. Unless you're a liberal in this country, or a liberal elsewhere who cares deeply about the outcome of this election, it's hard to understand how awful it is to be staring down the gun of the possibility of four more years of Republican rule, especially in the wake of the multi-faceted disaster the past eight years have been. If 2004 was an unbelievably heartbreaking letdown (which it was), multiply that hurt, anger, frustration, and sadness by ten thousand and you have a fair sense of why we're so worried.

And there's nothing we can do with that worry, really. I mean, sure, we all can (and should) do things like call prospective voters and drive people to the polls on election day and donate to the Obama campaign, but beyond that, our hands are tied. It's that feeling of powerlessness, that aching fear that once again we might watch things go horribly, ridiculously wrong, and might realize anew how far the US has skewed to a right that doesn't care for logic or justice, that I can't yet handle.

So I keep myself in the dark. Let the polls heave up and down. Let the lies and hypocrisy flow. Let the pundits pontificate. I want nothing to do with it.

On November 5, I'll start paying attention again, because by then I'll know whether to believe that there is indeed a chance to turn things around here, to claw ourselves out of the hole we've been in, or whether to sigh and give up.

Americans Officially No Longer World's Most Obnoxious Tourists

2008-08-25T09:54:00.001-07:00

"They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit."

--Konstantinos Lagoudakis, mayor of Malia, Greece, quoted in "Some Britons Too Unruly For Resorts In Europe," by Sarah Lyall, New York Times, Sunday, August 24, 2008

You Have No Idea How Much I Love You

2008-08-19T18:07:00.001-07:00

Kate at 2 months old

OK, seriously: this niece of mine makes my heart want to explode.

Mending Wall

2008-08-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

There's an arm draped over my hip. The room is dark, quiet, the Olympics in the living room finally turned off, the offensively loudly ticking clock in the kitchen shorn of its batteries for the night. We talk about TV chefs, books, something else I'm not really concentrating on. I wonder if I would sleep better at home.

And then it snaps into my head: Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

These lines come to me half-bidden sometimes. I'll be standing in my kitchen in mid-afternoon, watching the light seep through the window, and there it is: the end of Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Grey in Philipsburg." Plath's "fountains": anywhere, anytime, always aided by moodiness. Ditto Millay.

But "Mending Wall"? That's a fairly unusual one. I'm not expecting it.

I open my eyes to the blank wall in front of me. I'm still talking, or (half-) listening, but now I'm wondering about Robert Frost. This is the only line of the poem I really know. What random file drawer of memory did I pull it from?

The arm is a limited time offer (though it stays for longer than expected). The warmth, the chatter, the prelude: all of it is limited, asterisked, carefully delineated. That's the agreement, the understanding. That's--oh--the wall.

Got it.

A lifetime ago, back in the first year of G., I held out for a long time on falling for him (or admitting that I had), explaining that, for a panoply of reasons, I felt the need to be the Hoover Dam. But late in the year I caved, and, with a shrug, could only say that the Hoover Dam had sprung a leak. (Within a few months, it had all but completely crumbled and floated away.)

I've never been good with walls--my own or others'.

So it was that last night I found myself staring at a blank expanse of a literal one, an expanse I've fixed my eyes on before, feeling something kick around in my chest as I thought, This can only tide me over for so long. Because these current flashes of delight notwithstanding, all of this feels like an odd, murky combination of scattershot and heavy on the rules and regs.

And what I carry with me all the time, patiently waiting and hoping to find it again, is the sense memory of an early morning last fall, of opening my eyes from sleep to see a boy walking toward me, of understanding, for a little while, what it is to be utterly without walls.

'...Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'

Annual Summer Weather Complaint, 2008 Version

2008-08-08T08:49:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, having hit MoMA with Sean, I went to 42nd Street to catch a train to Brooklyn, where I was scheduled to meet up with Rachel, David, and Joseph. I can't possibly be the first person to compare the 42nd Street Subway station in mid-summer with the center ring of hell, but regardless, it's a comparison worth repeating. It was so hot and so unbelievably humid down there that my skin instantly glossed over with a layer of sweat and condensed humanity, all of which evaporated into a layer of grossness when I got on the air-conditioned train.

But hear me now, people: I would be back there in a second, back to that damp and steamy subterranean hole (and might even put up for long stretches with the fellow who was "playing"--with what I can charitably describe as a modicum of talent--some upturned plastic buckets), if I could be, because here in San Francisco it's 56 degrees and gray.

For two weeks I got to wear sartorial items many of you might take for granted, but which are anathema here in the City by the Bay: shorts, tank tops, flip flops, light, breezy, summery skirts. I got my toenails painted and actually got to see them all day long. I developed a dorky but deep arm tan. I went running in the morning and came back pouring sweat, which somehow managed to seem more satisfying than straight-up disgusting (though it was that, too). I went outside in the evening without a sweater, long pants, and a jacket.

To all of that: so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu. I'm back in San Francisco, and it's August.

I'm Tired of China

2008-08-07T16:14:00.000-07:00

So, look. The earthquake that did so much damage to China earlier this year was unquestionably a disaster, and I have unmitigated sympathy for the people whose lives were affected by it. I also hope that coverage of the relief effort does not get wholly subsumed by coverage of the Olympics, though I realize the chances of that are slim.

[Sorry, an aside: how is it that "fat chance" and "chances are slim" can mean the same thing? Curious.]

But here's the thing: earthquake notwithstanding, I'm so insanely tired of hearing about China. Really, I am--and have been for a while now. I'm tired of hearing about the Chinese government's human rights abuses du jour, tired of hearing about the (shockingly!) unsustainable breakneck development of dour, huge, soulless Chinese cities, tired of hearing about the latest health issues stemming from whatever toxins Chinese factories are using in their manufacturing processes. I'm just so totally and completely done with China.

Which means, of course, that I should be climbing into a cave for the next few weeks, stuffing my ears with cotton, and sewing my eyes shut. Or just, you know, muttering discontentedly sotto voce until this whole Olympics hoo-haa passes and, I hope, we choose another country to focus 85% of our collective attention on. (How about Bulgaria?)

Sweet Baby

2008-08-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

Witness my adorable, darling, well-behaved little niece, Kate. She is a sweet light in my world.

We Are So Much What We've Come from: Part 1

2008-07-30T19:16:00.000-07:00

I come east and, for a while, my world rockets backwards.

I.
Last Thursday we go to see Ian's jazz trio play at the local winery. (Not a typo--there are indeed wineries in Connecticut, and the one in question is actually quite good.) Ian is quite possibly the sweetest, kindest, happiest person I've ever had the luck to know. We were good friends in high school, and although I've seen him only sporadically in the ensuing years, every time I do, it's as if no time at all has passed. Years and miles collapse, and I'm as close to him as I ever was. We laugh, call each other E-N and M-A, say over and over, "It's so weird," referring to a Black Point night several worlds back, the full details of which have long since fallen away.

But this much about that night we remember: for a while we go along with someone's vaguely ridiculous idea and find ourselves in Old Black Point, on a road we don't know, probably searching in vain for whoever we were meant to meet out there, for whatever it is we were meant to do. We likely never meet who we're supposed to or get where we might've been going. Instead, the rest of the group goes ahead and Ian and I start talking--about my ill-advised tangles with Dave, probably, about the darkness of the road we're on, about the unfamiliarity of wherever it is we are. We deem it all weird. Our conversation is by turns profound and heartfelt, light and goofy. It's so weird, we keep saying. So weird.

There was something about that night, our walk, that discussion, those few inky hours--something that, as pat as this will sound, yanked Ian and I together in a way we hadn't been for the rest of the summer. I went home at the end of that long evening feeling like I knew him better than I ever had, and he me, despite our long years of friendship. So weird.

We were so far from that night last Thursday, and yet, as we hugged and talked after he finished his set, as he told me about his daughter and asked me about my business, as we kept up a stream of It's so weird! and It's so good to see you, it felt like there was so little separating then and now, as if, at any moment, Jeff or Jason or Chris might call to us from down the road--What's taking you guys?--and we would quicken our pace to reach them, agreeing with their claim that the night had been a wash rather than letting on--because how could we explain?--that it hadn't. Weirdly, it hadn't.

The Week That Was

2008-07-19T10:59:00.001-07:00

I.
Last Saturday night, Jacob holds his gin and tonic out for me to take a sip and I wrinkle my nose. "Eiww, no thanks!" I say--ok, yell--over the insane din that has enveloped Luna Park. "I'm not a gin girl." My attentions go instead to the Technicolor fruitiness of whatever I've just ordered, and the boy gives up (temporarily) on attempting to share his drink.

Then comes Sunday. [It occurs to me here that this post is about to read like a chronicle of a soused week. So be it.] Boss and I meet up at the Big Four for some belated birthday cocktails and patrician-watching. On my way to the bar, I'd been thinking about what to order; at the Big Four, the Manhattan is my standard, but for some reason I felt on Sunday like going father afield.

So when we sit down at the bar and there in my eyeline is a bottle of Hendrick's gin, I don't hesitate, asking the bartender for a Hendrick's gimlet. I'm wary--too many sips of undrinkable G&Ts have made me gin-phobic--but, upon sip #1, am delighted to discover what may be the best drink ever. Several more of same follow. (Thanks, Boss, for picking up that tab.)

Equally delightful was waking up on Monday morning without the slightest bit of a hangover. Praise be to the clear alcohol! I praised it again on Tuesday, when Erfert, Boss, and I went to Bourbon and Branch and I once again went the gimlet route (with a brief detour through a bourbon-based drink; when in Rome, etc.).

People, I have seen the light! I will probably continue to brook no gin that isn't Hendrick's or otherwise foofy (e.g., cucumber-infused), but give me the good stuff and a masterful bartender and I'm totally Gin Girl 3000. I'm sure there's a lesson here for all of us; I leave it to you to figure out what that might be.

II.
Katie, my editor, e-mailed me on Tuesday evening to let me know that the proof of my book was ready for review. She directed me to the PDF and offered to overnight a hard copy; I took her up on that offer because, as otherwise perfect as my little MacBook is, it does not have a screen that lends itself to easy review of landscape format PDFs.

The proof went out on Wednesday and was due to reach me on Thursday, which it did, though indirectly. I came home from my client meeting that afternoon to find a FedEx box addressed to me on the sidewalk in front of my steps, roughly torn open and emptied of its contents. I was approximately 75 different kinds of baffled when I picked up the box: had the FedEx guy left it on the steps? Had someone taken it from under the front gate? Would not any normal thief, upon discovering the contents of such a box, immediately jettison them? And if so, why couldn't I find a chunk of pages anywhere in the vicinity of my house?

It was while stumbling around, box in hand, that I noticed someone sitting on my neighbor Jody's steps, chatting with another guy who stood on the sidewalk in front of him. I walked toward them and felt my heart threaten to jump clear out of my chest when I saw, on the step next to the sitter--a semi-homeless guy I've seen around the neighborhood, and have previously caught stealing my Sunday paper--the folded-over, rubber-banded pages of my proof.

This will sound pat, but as my brain wrapped around what was happening, my entire body tensed up in what was the largest, strongest, most utterly overwhelming burst of anger I can ever recall feeling. I screamed so long and so loud that, by the time I got back to my house (proof in hand), I was utterly spent. That level of anger? Scary, scary stuff.

Fast forward several hours. My doorbell rang. I opened the door cautiously, and there on the steps was Sandy, a neighbor from down the street. He told me the thief was his brother, Gary, who had severe mental issues. He apologized profusely. I said I knew he couldn't be his brother's keeper, told him in detail what had happened, listened as he told me about how he and Gary's doctor try to monitor him as closely as they can, listened as he vowed to me that he would direct Gary to stay away from the neighborhood.

It was probably the stress of the afternoon and the stress of working under a tight deadline to finish the review and any number of other flavors of stress, but as Sandy and I talked, it was all I could do not to dissolve into tears. Because, yes, it was maddening beyond words to have had my proof stolen, and creepy in the extreme to think that Gary is disturbed and adept enough to pull things from under our gate. In the end, though, I got my proof back, and all I could really focus on as Sandy apologized again and again was what it might be like to bear the responsibility for a family member gone wrong, to know that there's so very little you can do.

That, by a mile, is the harder row to hoe.

III.
The eyelashes. I had forgotten, or maybe hadn't noticed before. The hazel eyes, those I remembered, but those long, stunning, dark eyelashes--those were new.

So a temporary goodbye, defenses, and nice try, though we both knew we were sort of doomed from the start, and that (for today, at least) was sort of the point. Blame the eyelashes, the eyes, the impish grin, the tap of a finger on my bottom lip, our matching pearline shirt buttons, the completed Saturday Times crossword (we missed just one square), a dozen other things that feel like not-unpleasant little kicks to the gut.

But don't make yourself too scarce; there will all too likely be work for you in the weeks ahead, given what This is and isn't and might and might not be. Next time, though, we'll try to be better prepared, you and I. Remember the eyelashes.

Officially the Least of My Concerns

2008-07-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

Baby Kate

2008-06-19T22:05:00.001-07:00

Katherine Rosalie

I'm an auntie! Baby Kate arrived on Monday night, two days before she was scheduled to be evicted from her mama's womb.

Though I won't get to meet her until I go back east in July, I can already tell that she's adorable and delightful and will make her aunt swell with pride for years to come.

The Corner, The Turning

2008-06-16T15:28:00.000-07:00

It's a little early for all this.
Everything's still very bare--
nevertheless, something's different today from yesterday.

--Louise Gluck, from "March"

It was while gazing at another ceiling, with mid-morning light poking in through another window, hearing another set of lungs quietly at work, waiting for another pair of eyes to open, that I thought, Right. This isn't it. That room, those hours, those lungs and eyes added up to something that used to be familiar (a warm Boston apartment, March 2001; a Seattle room near the train tracks, sometime before that; a gray July morning on Geary, not so very long ago)--a sighing blend of acceptance, understanding, and resignation that takes as its unofficial soundtrack Elliot Smith's "Oh Well, Okay" and, if in title and melody only, Cat Power's "Maybe Not."

I've felt this before, and this isn't it.

What struck me this time around, though, was what came next.

Which was this: But still, I'm somewhere else today. I wasn't thinking physically or literally, though indeed I was somewhere else (in a Valley that wasn't mine); rather, I felt like I'd come to a corner and had turned it. Suddenly it felt like I could exhale completely, for the first time in months, and that I didn't have to force myself to loosen my grip on what I'd been holding: it loosened on its own (well, ok, with a bit of a hazel-eyed nudge). Something in me went soft and slack, and for a while I closed my eyes and fell back asleep.

The morning wore on. The light changed. Our breathing changed. A while later, in front of my house, I said goodbye to those other eyes and came inside. Everything seemed familiar. Everything seemed just a shade different.

Dog Poop Police

2008-06-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

Dear San Francisco City Government,
Please take a cue from New York and hire people to ticket the legions of lazy, irresponsible, uncaring dog owners who refuse to pick up after their pets.

Because, really, for such a beautiful city, we have streets smeared in way too much dog waste, and that sucks.

Yours,
Emily

I Had Planned to Buy Riunite

2008-06-03T19:53:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, in celebration of her birthday, Dana had a BBQ fiesta, the unofficial theme of which was "foodstuffs from 1975" (the year of her birth). The festivities got underway in the early afternoon, but Josh and I had to teach a class until 5, so I planned to head over as soon as we were done.

Driving to Joshy's seemed like a good idea that morning. I'd brought my coffee maker to his house the previous day and didn't feel like schlepping it to Dana's on foot or by Muni on Sunday evening, nor did I feel like going out of the way to bring the thing home before heading into the Mission. I also figured that driving would get me to D's more speedily than taking the bus, and had the grand idea to stop at Safeway en route to pick up a bottle of Riunite (on ice, natch) so that I might be thematically proper.

I parked the car on 8th Street at Natoma around 9, putting my toolkit in the trunk and triple-checking all of the locks before I walked away from it for the next eight hours. It was Sunday. The daylight was broad. There was nothing visible in my luxurious 1993 Toyota Corolla save for a bag of plastic bags (destined for the recycling bin at Safeway), an empty printer cartridge (on its way to Office Depot), a packing tape dispenser, my garage door opener, my mileage log, and the piece of plastic that fits into my cassette deck (yes) and allows me to play my iPod through my stereo.

Evidently, this bounty was temptation enough for the denizens of 8th Street. Around 5, as Josh and I left his house and walked toward my car, we saw one of our students heading toward us. "Did you get our messages?" she asked. We said we hadn't, and she replied that she and another student had called both of us from around the corner as they came upon my car (bearing magnetic signs on the doors with my business name, which is how they knew it was mine) and noted the glittering pile of glass on the sidewalk next to it.

Adios, driver's side window. Hello, giant mess. Loot scored by whatever crackhead or tweaker or just plain asshole broke into and ransacked my car: garage door opener, mileage log, tape dispenser, bag of bags, empty ink cartridge. No doubt you're having a field day with those highly valuable things.

In the end--after driving to the carwash to vacuum up as much glass as possible, after calling Glass Pro to arrange an appointment the following day, after sitting in front of my garage for a while and waiting in vain for one of the other car owners who parks there to come or go--I did make it to Dana's. In fact, she and Brad were good enough to let me park my window-less car in their garage that night. I was late in arriving--even later than anticipated--but things were still swinging when I got there, and there was still plenty of Champagne Jell-o mold to enjoy.

But I'm sorry I showed up empty-handed. D, your next bottle of "wine product with natural flavors" is on me.

Headline of the Day

2008-05-23T14:48:00.000-07:00

Thanks, New York Times, for this info we didn't know we needed:

Bacteria Thrive in Inner Elbow; No Harm Done

Please Don't

2008-05-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

A few things Stadia Suites, Santa Fe, DF would like you to know:

Rules and Regulations

4th Clause. It is strictly forbidden to:
A) Make annoying noises, start a fight, introduce musicians, pets, and in general, cause disturbances that make other guests feel uncomfortable.
B) The use of Suites for gambling or any other illegal action that may disturb the public order or break the law.
C) The use of electrical outlets and appliances for a different purpose than the one originally intended for.
D) To damage the furniture, ornaments, or any other Stadia Suites' properties by giving it improper use.
E) Carry out any act that may damage the other guests, the property and employees or that goes against the social rules and good behavior.
F) Any act that can cause damage to the hotel, to the rest of the guests or affect the commonwealth.

[I'm happy to report that, as of night #2, I'm still on the right side of these rules and regs: no pets or musicians introduced, no electrical tomfoolery, no improper use of ornaments, and no damaging other guests. Two more nights to go.]

John Cougar Mellencamp, I Beg to Differ

2008-05-16T21:18:00.000-07:00

Hold onto 16 as long as you can
Changes come around real soon
Make us women and men.

In the midst of the heat this afternoon, Jenn and I sat in my living room talking about the downsides of self-employment and minor workaholism. We'd come to no solid conclusions (to contract out or no? Will s-e taxes kill us both? Is it ever totally possible to separate the personal and professional realms?) when Jenn looked out the window and asked, "Well, what's happening here?"

On the stoop of the house across the way (i.e., the house that's born more than its fair share of vexations and bad luck) we saw what appeared to be a young couple, a boy and a girl who seemed to be around 15. They sat close, both facing ahead with their feet on the sidewalk, and the girl appeared to be crying. Though we couldn't hear what they said (not even when, channeling my always lovely but sometimes nosy grandmother, I opened my front door), we surmised from what we could see of their faces and body language that we were witnessing a breakup.

Jenn and I kept chatting, and the probably-a-breakup continued, with more tears from the girl and a relatively straight but clearly sad face on the boy. When J left around 6.20 and I opened the gate to walk her out, the pair looked up at us briefly before turning back to their grief.

That grief continued until well past 8, with varying degrees of drama (including, at one point, the girl on her knees on the sidewalk in front of the fellow, in a posture I can only describe as beseeching and somewhat Shakespearean). I didn't see them leave.

There is, I think, a particular flavor of heartbreak and sadness and disappointment that you can feel only in your teens. It's so sharp and new and often unexpected that it's hard to know what to do with, and the first few times you feel it you're sure--up and down sure--that it will never go away.

It does go away, of course, and after enough times through the cycle of elation and crashing and emptiness and utter overflowing goodness you come to understand that none of it lasts forever. But no one can tell you that and have you believe it; you have to go through the wringer a few times on your own. For many of us--for me, at least--much of that wringer-going happens somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 19.

And it's for that reason that, as Jenn and I tried to spy this afternoon, I said, "15: an age I'm happy I never have to be again." It was a great place to be for a little while, that land of teendom, but I was happy to move out of it, and happy not to have to go back.

And so, sweet weepy teens, at least one of whom appeared to have your heart broken this evening, I would tell you that things will mend in time, that your first love is almost never your last, that someday soon-ish all of this will fade, but you might not believe that telling. So instead I'll say that despite whatever sweetness your high school years may bring, and regardless of what John Cougar Mellencamp might claim, there's a lot to be said for letting go of 16 as soon as it's gone.

Burnout

2008-05-15T22:49:00.000-07:00

Last night, as Josh and I were moderating a panel discussion on burnout at the NAPO chapter meeting, what started as a flutter of fatigue somewhere in my chest rapidly, and scarily, became the sensation that I would fall on my ass (or my face, depending how I stood) if I did not get out of the room and sit down immediately. I whispered to Josh, I need to go, and slipped out of the room as unobtrusively as one can slip out of a room one happens to be at the very front of, with all eyes in her direction.

In the hall, I found a chair near an unused conference room and sat down with my head back, my pulse racing and a thin veneer of sweat on my face. I eventually got up and made my way to the bathroom, where I sat for a while before splashing some water on my face and slipping back into the room via a side door. There I stood, propped against the doorframe, until the panel was over.

The irony was not lost on me: while moderating a discussion on how to avoid burnout, I managed to spiral down into my own little pool of exhaustion-induced messiness. (You turned a totally different color, Josh said to me later. That was freaky.) Even despite what was more or less an Actual Day Off last Sunday, I still feel like I've been working non-stop for months. That has seemed like a necessity, but it's a pace I can't sustain, and the thought that I might wind up as some sort of overwork poster child is an unpleasant one. I will not become a Lifetime movie, so help me god. My body will see to that, evidently, even if my mind disagrees.

In Defense of Organizers and Civil Debate

2008-05-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

Al Gore was the guest on Tuesday's Fresh Air. He'd been invited on the show to discuss his book The Assault on Reason, which, from what I gathered from Terry Gross' description, is about how Americans' increasing unwillingness (and inability?) to engage in reasoned, thoughtful, civic debate, preferring instead the combative and dismissive Fox News/CNN/Bush Administration model, is ultimately leaving us less informed and less capable of sustaining a healthy democracy.

It was fascinating to hear Gore speak, both for what he had to say and for the way he said it: if ever there's been an aural definition of "reasoned, measured tones," this was it. He spoke calmly and unflappably, with pauses between his words and rarely even a hint of a raised voice. It was as if he were, solely by his tone, defying the yellers and the absolutists to take issue with his message.

Tuesday also happened to be the day that Merlin Mann, whom I respect and admire quite a lot, posted to 43 Folders about the NSGCD and its resources for the chronically disorganized. In describing the NSGCD (short--if barely--for the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization), he referred to it as "primarily a trade group for 'professional organizers'". That's true enough to a certain extent, but I wondered why Merlin had put professional organizers in quotes. So I posted a comment and asked.

Then he posted a reply, and I posted a reply to his reply, and I asked some of my colleagues to read the whole kit and caboodle, and some of them left comments, too. It was all--from my perspective, at least--very Al Gore-ish: no yelling, no flaming, lots of general calmness and well-reasoned attempts to argue varying viewpoints.

But it's interesting: in the wake of the first point/counterpoint Merlin and I had, the message I most wanted to get across was not so much that professional organizers are worthy of a level of respect that quote marks deny, but that his apparent view of what we do--put crap in boxes, go to the Container Store, and try to make things look pretty without doing anything at all to address the underlying issues of overconsumption and unexamined keeping--is way, way off the mark. I said as much in my second comment, as did several people who commented after me, POs and clients alike. Yet what a few of the commenters who didn't identify themselves as either being organizers or working with organizers seemed to latch onto was that initial sense of being taken aback by the quotes.

Let's channel Al Gore, people, and move beyond the punctuation to read the rest of the discussion. It's about having your profession sort of maligned through an inaccurate and incomplete description, and about trying to explain why you take issue with those inaccuracies and incompletes. But beyond a point, there's only so much you can do or say to ask people to read (or hear) and absorb your words. Is it inevitable that, no matter how logical, calm, or well-reasoned the other side's argument might be, we'll always revert to our own bunkers, determined that we're right (or at least not wrong)? Do we ever really have the capacity to bring someone around?

I wish I could convince Merlin Mann that the work I do is no more fluffy, inconsequential, or unimportant than the work he does, and that although professional organizer might be a funny-sounding title, it's a serious profession. I hope he takes me up on my offer to help give him a clearer sense of what POs actually do, and how, in many ways, it's not a far cry from what he does.

But all of that is beyond my control: he's the only one who can choose what he thinks and does. Ditto for the people who can read all the smart, insightful, thoughtful things written in that comments stream and only take away that a bunch of POs have their label makers and binder clips in a snit over nothing more than the use of a bit of punctuation. In this, as in any discussion or debate, all I (or anyone) can ever do is put my words out there in a calm, balanced, and (I somewhat hate this term, but, alas) constructive way and hope that they fall on at least a few appreciative and open pairs of eyes and ears.

March

2008-04-25T22:32:00.000-07:00

By Louise Gluck

The light stays longer in the sky, but it's a cold light,
it brings no relief from winter.

My neighbor stares out the window,
talking to her dog. He's sniffing the garden,
trying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.

It's a little early for all this.
Everything's still very bare--
nevertheless, something's different today from yesterday.

We can see the mountain: the peak's glittering where the ice catches the light.
But on the sides the snow's melted, exposing bare rock.

My neighbor's calling the dog, making her unconvincing doglike sounds.
The dog's polite; he raises his head when she calls,
but he doesn't move. So she goes on calling,
her failed bark slowly deteriorating into a human voice.

All her life she dreamed of living by the sea
but fate didn't put her there.
It laughed at her dreams;
it locked her up in the hills, where no one escapes.

The sun beats down on the earth, the earth flourishes.
And every winter, it's as though the rock underneath the earth rises
higher and higher and the earth becomes rock, cold and rejecting.

She says hope killed her parents, it killed her grandparents.
It rose up each spring with the wheat
and died between the heat of summer and the raw cold.
In the end, they told her to live near the sea,
as though that would make a difference.

By late spring she'll be garrulous, but now she's down to two words,
never and only, to express this sense that life's cheated her.

Never the cries of the gulls, only, in summer, the crickets, cicadas.
Only the smell of the field, when all she wanted
was the smell of the sea, of disappearance.

The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink
as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson.

And everywhere the earth is rustling, not lying still.
And the dog senses this stirring; his ears twitch.

He walks back and forth, vaguely remembering
from other years this elation. The season of discoveries
is beginning. Always the same discoveries, but to the dog
intoxicating and new, not duplicitous.

I tell my neighbor we'll be like this
when we lose our memories. I ask her if she's ever seen the sea
and she says, once, in a movie.
It was a sad story, nothing worked out at all.

The lovers part. The sea hammers the shore, the mark each wave leaves
wiped out by the wave that follows.
Never accumulation, never one wave trying to build on another,
never the promise of shelter--

The sea doesn't change as the earth changes;
it doesn't lie.
You ask the sea, what can you promise me
and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

Finally the dog goes in.
We watch the crescent moon,
very faint at first, then clearer and clearer
as the night grows dark.
Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns and violets.

Nothing can be forced to live.
The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.
It says forget, you forget.
It says begin again, you begin again.

Important Clarification

2008-04-20T23:24:00.001-07:00

Serving Suggestion

OK, this is a terrible photo, but it was the best I was willing to do for the sake of a snarky blog post, so bear with me.

The product pictured above is a bag of cinnamon crunch granola made specifically for people with food allergies, which, I'm happy to say, don't affect me but, I'm less happy to say, do affect my friend Connie, the original purchaser of this breakfast treat. It turns out that this free-of-everything-else (wheat, nuts, soy, flavor) granola contains flax seeds, which Connie can't do, so she offered the bag to me.

And here's what I find delightful and maddening in equal measures. The image on the front of the package is of a very simple, totally unadorned bowl of granola--no fruit on top, no milk peeking out from under the granola clumps, nothing. It's very literally a bowl of granola. In the background there's an orange gerbera daisy and a few sticks of cinnamon. And down in the bottom left corner, below the big green "Allergen Free" emblem, are the words "Serving Suggestion."

Now, OK, I've complained here before about ridiculous food labels (notably the can of 100% cashews that bore a "Contains cashews" notice), and I'm sure there are all sorts of ridiculous American litigious reasons behind this, but seriously. Are there people who really expect that, upon opening this bag, they will discover not only granola pellets but also the bowl, flower, and decorative spice sticks pictured on the package? Must they be encouraged to go ahead with their planned consumption of this cereal even if their breakfast table does not identically resemble the one shown here? Do they truly need the reassurance that this is a suggestion--only a suggestion!--and not the required serving method and layout?

I understand the whole "Serving Suggestion" disclaimer on food packages that show their contents all tarted up in some sort of foodie version of the boudoir photo, with parts that glisten and garnishes so ripe and fresh they threaten to explode, but seriously, this whole granola photo could not be more straightforward unless it showed the cereal in a heap on a table with the open, empty bag lurking in the background. And even then, perhaps the manufacturer would have to clarify that the table itself was not included.

Are we as a nation really this dumb?

Desperate Times &c

2008-04-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

Having finally given in last night and e-filed the tax return for which I owe the United States Treasury my weight in gold, I did the only thing I could think to do to keep my mind from wandering toward thoughts of, "Right, then, how am I actually going to pay that sum?" I did the only thing that, at that moment, could bring succor, could provide temporary protection from the (figurative) wolves of the IRS at my (figurative) door.

I went to iTunes and downloaded some Air Supply.

And now, though I'm still somewhat mystified as to where I might procure all of the funds the taxing authorities are asking of me, at least the soundtrack to this mystification includes "Making Love Out of Nothing at All." Better yet, I discovered that I still have a credit on iTunes from the gift card I got from Greg and Sara for Christmas, so I didn't even have to pay anything. That's 99 cents I can hand directly over to the Feds.

Who writes this stuff?

2008-04-06T11:20:00.000-07:00

From the Netflix envelope for Hotel Rwanda:

Amid the holocaust of internecine tribal fighting in Rwanda that sees the wanton and savage butchering of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, one ordinary man (Don Cheadle) musters the courage to save more than 1,000 helpless refugees by sheltering them in the hotel he manages. Djimon Honsou, Nick Nolte, and Joaquin Phoenix co-star in this powerful film (sort of an African version of Schindler's List) directed by Terry George.

I know "the holocaust of internecine tribal fighting" is a fairly accurate description of the Rwanda disaster, but really, who thought such a highfalutin' and contorted turn of phrase would bring people swarming to see this film? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't internecine mean "within a group"? And wasn't the fighting between the Tutsis and the Hutus actually between groups?

And then, on the other end of the descriptive spectrum, there's "sort of an African version of Schindler's List." Perhaps they should've added, "Just substitute Don Cheadle for Liam Neeson and a hotel for a metalworking factory." All very oddly reductive.

Still, my hopes are high that the movie itself will rise significantly above the quality of the envelope copy.

Random nattering

2008-03-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I forget the simple, ridiculous joys of IM:

missquickly [Dana]: want anything from le big apple?
me: hmmm...
nothing springs to mind
missquickly: some real estate perhaps?
sorry, projecting
me: nah, I'll take my real estate in a snow-less clime
too wimpy
missquickly: ahh
been living here too long [nose wink]
me: the blood has thinned
missquickly: the skin too
me: indeed
missquickly: it's going to be so cold over there, even now!
it's supposed to snow in boston tomorrow
me: yikes
I don't miss it
missquickly: i romanticize it
but i'm glad not to slog through slush for 5 months
me: perhaps you're hearing the call of the Alaskan wilderness
missquickly: nice
me: no, wait, that's Eddie Vedder
they sound so similar
missquickly: the tender moose meat and fine accomodations
are you in mill valley this weekend, or was that last weekend?
me: that was last weekend
missquickly: how was that?
me: not bad
the hotel was nice but unexciting
missquickly: like mill valley
me: and I'd never before realized just how crazy small town MV really is
it's like 1955
missquickly: which could be kind of awesome
me: except for the bands of disaffected Mill Valley youth
missquickly: MV skin heads?
me: such as it were--sort of poor little rich kids
mini Chris McCandlesses in the making
missquickly: oh no
they break the fourth wall
me: they'll, like, hike up into Mt. Tam with only a few Twix bars and some Vitamin Water for all of the summer
missquickly: ha!
and live in an abandoned refrigerator they find at the top
me: [grin]
missquickly: actually i think they sell hot dogs on top of mt tam
me: well, surely at least a few of these kids are vegan
missquickly: are twix vegan?
me: though there may be Tofu Pups
probably not
missquickly: mmmm
me: I love peanut butter twix
just for the record
missquickly: good to know
more than kinder eggs?
me: I enjoy Kinder Eggs for the toys, but the chocolate doesn't thrill me
I find myself unable to comprehend white chocolate
I mean, what's the point?
missquickly: true
i think it's not technically chocolate
it's... white
me: quote chocolate unquote
missquickly: indeed

On Vassar, San Francisco, and film

2008-03-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

From Following Sean

Several months back, my dear friend Ryan called from New York to tell me that he'd seen our names on the big screen, in the credits for Ralph Arlyck's film Following Sean. Ralph is a documentary filmmaker based in Poughkeepsie, New York--based, in fact, directly across the street from Vassar College, where Ry and I went to school. We were both active in the Film department there and made a few short pieces together (including Hershey: A Chocumentary and Postcards, both of which I'll digitize one of these days and post to YouTube, though the former piece is irreverent and silly enough to potentially piss off the Hershey powers that be; luckily, Ryan's a lawyer--but I digress). We both also held internships with Ralph at some point.

So I finally got around to renting Following Sean, which I found fascinating, not only because of the people who are the heart of the film, but also because it glides back and forth between San Francisco and Poughkeepsie. Now Ralph is on Haight Street; now he's shooting from his front door at home, with a view across Raymond Avenue to Chicago Hall, where his wife Elisabeth teaches (and, in fact, was my professor for a few French film classes). Now the sun is shining in the eternal springtime of Northern California; now snow is starting to fall in the Hudson Valley. It was exhilarating and poignant and curious to watch the film bounce between those two worlds, both of which I know so well.

And it was, of course, a delight to see my name on screen, though the film came out years after I'd graduated, moved out west, and given up the dream of attempting to subsist on the income of an independent filmmaker in the expensive world that was dot-com-era San Francisco, and though I now have only sketchy memories of working with Ralph. But my name there, the names of fellow film students, Steve Leiber's credit as Executive Producer (I also interned with Steve and his wife DeDe at the kick-ass Upstate Films in Rhinebeck)--all of it was a pleasant little trip back to those days when my life was so much celluloid. They seem such a long time gone.

(On a side note, the other movie I watched this week was The Squid and the Whale, which I'd forgotten was directed by Noah Baumbach, another Vassar alum. So it's been a sort of mini, unintentional VC Film Fest here in my house.)

!!!DIRECTED BY SEAN PENN!!!

2008-03-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

With all due respect to those who enjoyed it, and to those (perhaps it's just the singular he) who "really really really liked it," allow me to opine: Into the Wild sort of sucked.

I'm speaking here, of course, of the movie. I really liked the book, and in fact have just re-read it in an attempt to reassure myself that I was right in remembering that it was engrossing, balanced, and well written. (It was, and is, despite Jon Krakauer's slight overuse of the word "morass," which I can forgive.)

So good was the book, in fact, that I had high hopes for the film. And I tried--really tried!--to like it, despite the fact that Dana channeled my thoughts when she said, less than two minutes in, "Oh, no. Terrible, terrible title sequence." I tried to overlook that weird, puffy-lettered abomination. I tried to comprehend--and then, failing that, to not actively hate--the illogical split screens used throughout the movie. I tried to make my peace with the dueling voice-overs. I tried to resist fidgeting during every scene that went on just a bit too long (which is to say pretty much every scene). I even tried not to cringe when Emile Hirsch looked directly into the camera time and again, despite the fact that he was meant to be utterly alone.

I tried and tried, but to no avail. Dana and I were a chorus as we watched: "Oh, no." "No, no, no." "Yes, Sean Penn, we see your directorial hand here." "What? Why???" "Not again. No."

Here's the thing: Krakauer's book is unabashedly personal. He makes direct connections between his own foolish wilderness exploits as a young man and Chris McCandless'. He equally points out McCandless' shortcomings and errors and defends the guy from those who excoriated him after his death. And he writes in a seamless combination of first and third person. You always know Krakauer is there, but he's almost never the book's center of attention.

All of this means that, by the end of the book, you're left slightly annoyed by the foolish things Chris McCandless did but nonetheless holding at least a few shards of empathy for him. And you ache for his family.

Not so for Sean Penn's McCandless. The movie is so overblown and showboaty and drawn out that, by the end, you (if you are me) just want the poor boy out of his misery, as much because he's hanging on to such a wretchedly awful existence as because you just want the damn movie to end. The rest of the McCandless family? You might feel a pang for Chris' beloved and abandoned sister, but his parents seem like such one-dimensional, materialistic beasts that Chris' willful disappearance from their lives seems almost understandable.

And did I mention the title sequence?

A good director writes his or her signature all over a film but never, ever points out that signature. It--and all of the techniques and stylistic twists and directorial decisions that go with it--is what gives the movie its flavor and feel, but all of that is lost as soon as the director calls attention to what he's doing. This is why I hate Jean-Luc Godard: to me, his films are a succession of "hey, look what I did!" "Hey, did you see that clever trick I just pulled?!" "Missed those last 16 jump cuts? Here's another!" Putting all of these stylistic flourishes in the forefront flattens the characters and steamrolls the story.

So it was with Into the Wild. There are characters there, and an interesting story. When Penn chills out enough to let those two elements come together quietly--as when Hal Holbrook's character bids Chris/Alex goodbye--you can catch a glimmer of what the movie might have been (and what the book is). But then along comes a slo-mo sequence followed by a split screen montage accompanied by some overly florid narration followed by hell knows what, and you forget what you're actually supposed to be focusing on.

I wish Penn had stepped back a bit and trusted that he could've relied on the cinematography and acting (which, despite a few wooden or mushy moments, was pretty good) and the essentials of McCandless' (and Krakauer's) story to carry the film. It would've been, I think, much richer and more touching than the Hollywood-heavy thing we got instead.

Be My Guide, Be My Pilot

2008-03-16T09:12:00.001-07:00

I'm such a word nerd that one of the first things I do when life issues a kick to the gut (or the heart, or the head, or even the shins) is set myself on a mission to find succor in writing. There are my own scribbles, of course, which anyone valiant enough to still be reading this blog has had the grace and patience to put up with, but what really interests me is what others have to say.

It's perhaps a slightly odd instinct, this--seeking comfort for your own aches in someone else's words--but often it feels like one of the most important things I can do to keep myself afloat. My own attempts to find the words to explain things to myself are mightily abetted by reading the words others have used to try to work their own stuff out.

So I've been doing a relatively huge amount of reading. Some of it doesn't really count as far as succor goes, such as The Smartest Guys in the Room, which I'd started back in early February and finally finished a few weeks back, or anything whatsoever in the Times or the New Yorker. But much of what I've been reading I've chosen precisely in the hope that it has something wise and comforting to impart.

There are the reliable standards: that Amy Bloom essay, Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg," a few select passages from Sylvia Plath's journals (pre-Hughes, natch). These I love as much because they're smart and striking as because I've held them close before and know they have the power to soothe.

There are also a few standards that I don't have much patience for this time around. I recently took my Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay off the shelf and turned to poems I'd long ago starred and underlined and notated, but they didn't do it for me. Millay is a brilliant poet, and one of my favorites, but she's short on the uplift, and as I read I found myself thinking, Christ, Edna, cheer up a bit. For Hugo's final lines--"and the girl who serves your food/ is slender and her red hair lights the wall"--Millay counters, "Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark/Till I become accustomed to the dark."

Thanks, Edna, but no more darkness.

What's been my most steadfast companion for the past week or so, though, has been Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. I'm sort of amazed that this hasn't yet been an Oprah's Book Club Selection, because it's truly primed for such. But that's not a bad thing in this reviewer's opinion. The book is smart, funny, profound, insightful, and as much of a life raft as anything else in my world at this particular moment.

I've been reading a bit of Eat, Pray, Love each night before bed, and sometimes a few pages in the morning, so it sits on my bedside table with a pen and a small heap of half-crumpled tissues. The pen I use to make notes in the margin, to underline passages I want to go back to, to highlight sentences that make me cry in recognition or understanding or hope. And thus the tissues: absorbers of these few nightly tears. It's become a mini ritual.

What's so striking for me about Gilbert's book is not so much the parallels I see in our lives (very few) or any resonant desire I feel to follow the path she does (very little). Instead, I think it's that she presents nothing as "I just..." There's no "I just needed to tell myself..." or "All I had to do was..." or "It was as simple as...." She has revelations and breakthroughs and breakdowns and all of that, but none of it is one-part or easy--and, really, how much of this stuff ever is? I rail against anything I read or hear that suggests that there are straightforward or unencumbered or quick or easy ways to disentangle ourselves from whatever's most vexing in life. I don't buy it. That stuff is messy and hard and complicated and fraught, and it makes little sense to me to try to pretend otherwise.

Gilbert doesn't pretend. And for me, that makes her experiences all the more valuable, all the more trustworthy. That's so much why I read others: to try to mine something from what they've been through, from where they end up, from what they deal with along the way. That requires feeling some sort of connection, though, even if I can't draw direct parallels between the writers' lives and my own. I have to believe that as similar or dis- as our experiences may be, taking that verbal journey through someone else's will, ultimately, contribute something meaningful to mine. Eat, Pray, Love makes me believe that.

I'm coming to the end of it, and am more than a bit tempted to turn right around and start it again. Because, although in words different from my own and about a life that's not mine, it says, in large part, what I want to say to myself but can't yet. And that's a rare thing, I think, like that line in Neko Case's "Guided by Wire": "Someone singing my life back to me." Elizabeth Gilbert is writing her own life back to herself, unspooling a great long length of rope to pull herself from her worst moments in an ocean of misery back to stable land. My straits weren't nearly as dire or as treacherous as hers, but still. There's immense comfort in being able to put a hand on that rope for a while.

I {Heart} Justification Spam

2008-03-13T21:09:00.001-07:00

Over the past few months, I've noticed a fascinating new breed of spam. From what I can see of the message contents in Gmail's preview line (which is, blessedly, not a lot), all of these messages are for Viagra knock-offs of some sort. It's the subject lines that fascinate me, though.

Consider today's collection:

I wanted to see what all the fuss is about
I wanted to get a promotion
It was an initiation rite to a club or organization
I wanted to breakup another's relationship
I wanted to get rid of aggression
I wanted to gain access to that person's friend
I was under the influence of drugs
I was drunk
[And my favorite:] I wanted to see what it was like to have sex while stoned (e.g., on marijuana or some other drug) [Important clarification. Thanks for that.]

It's Justification Spam! Surely you've received an e-mail offer for sexual performance-enhancing products and considered using them if only you had a passable reason (or excuse) to. Well, look no more! There are so very many. So very, very many.

Thrill-a-Minute

2008-03-07T20:54:00.000-08:00

I hadn't anticipated the boredom.

Sadness I expected. Loneliness? Yup. Longing? Check. Those I knew would be coming. But what's been most striking in the past week is how bland my days have become.

For years, many spent in long-distance relationships, I was used to being on my own much of the time. Aside from work, social outings, and time with friends, I was alone. I ate dinner alone, watched movies alone at home, went to sleep alone, woke up alone. It was such habit for such a long stretch that I stopped minding, even if I didn't entirely stop noticing.

Starting last summer, though, I got used to having someone else in my life every day, reliably and without fail. Even the boring stuff (like cooking dinner) was more interesting when I didn't have to do it solo. And the fun stuff, of course, was off the damn charts.

So now that's the yawning hole. I can't possibly fill my days and evenings enough to avoid the fact that I'm back to being a one, where for such a pleasant stretch there I was a two. And though this is straight out of some terrible Lifetime movie, I've been laughing so much less lately, not because my outlook has turned maudlin, but because the person who made me laugh every day is gone.

That things would go from Technicolor to slightly faded and tattered pastels. That I'd so acutely feel the shift away from having someone to turn to at the end of the day. That listlessness would move in and make itself at home. Somehow, all of these things I didn't know to expect.

That Kind of Thing

2008-02-27T21:33:00.001-08:00

You've seen the image before--in a movie, in a photo, in an ad. Someone's sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands on his knees, his gaze cast forward in a way that's possibly blank, possibly vaguely worried, quite possibly full of mourning. The upshot is always "There's this difficult and unpleasant thing facing me (a funeral, a courtroom in which I lose everything I now have and know and love, a truth I couldn't imagine) that I wish I didn't have to deal with, but I'm a functioning adult with the desire to remain such. So I must confront it. I must wade through it. I must believe that sooner or later I'll emerge from the other side."

On Sunday morning, I actually found myself sitting on the edge of my bed with my hands on my knees, only half conscious that I was adopting that posture. A few hours later, I sat in my car in the Inner Sunset, in much the same position, trying to steel myself for what was ahead. And when I came back to the car a bit over an hour later, with what felt like every bit of my face swollen with crying, I sat still for a few moments and thought, All I have to do now is get through this and go on.

In an essay that appeared in O Magazine a few years back (a piece I've quoted here before because it's trenchant and heartbreaking and flat-out, whatever you might think of O), Amy Bloom writes, "What I hadn't understood, until recently, is that sometimes love is not enough. And that is the worst news-from-the-universe I have heard for some time. ... Love takes us further than we thought we could go, but it does not take us past the limits of our nature. And that is a hard thing to know."

On Sunday afternoon, I heard a truth that crumpled my heart but, at the same time, set something inside me to calmness. It was a hard thing to hear, but nevertheless I felt a tinge of gratitude to hear it. And for sure it's a hard (and painful) thing to know, but even I would rather a hard truth than a soft lie. Sometimes love is not enough.

So I return again and again now to that edge-of-the-bed image: each of us, for a while, sits there feeling too heavy to stand, knowing that what awaits us is a horrendous goodbye, a run-in with heartbreak, an encounter with the understanding that we're no longer what we once were, or we no longer have what we once did, and once loved so much.

But sooner or later we do stand. We stand and (to quote Marge Piercy) hold hard, and let go, and go on. Because there's no other worthwhile choice

I can't even think of a fitting title

2008-02-25T21:02:00.000-08:00

Yes, pops, just plain loony

So I had this serious and heartfelt and vaguely profound post bubbling around in my head all day, and I came home all set to actually put it in words and get it up here. But I reached my front door to find a package from my Dad, inside which was the little fellow on the right in the photo above, along with a card: "Because sometimes life is just plain loony!! Love, Dad." This sent me into a spate of half-laughing, half-sobbing, in a way I don't think I could replicate if I tried, because it's all just so unbelievably...something.

Here's the thing: after the breakup with G. in 2004, Erfert brought me a bottle of booze and a stuffed ptarmigan from Wild Republic's line of Audubon birds ("with real bird calls!") which, when squeezed, sounds a ridiculous but delightful ptarmigan call. The ptarmigan was soon joined by others (a loon, a chickadee, a bluejay, a thrush), all of whom perched on the back of my sofa.

Though I can't remember exactly when or how, last summer Erik took a liking to the loon (that's him on the left above), and eventually he became our steadfast companion, coming with us to Vancouver and perching with us when we watched movies and calling out his loony call through all of it.

One afternoon, one of us squeezed the loon and, rather than his standard "whooOOOOoooOOOooo," he let out what sounded like an angry squawk from some other bird altogether. A while later, he added to his repertoire a sweet songbird-like chirping. And he'd switch between these calls and his normal one seemingly at random. (I swear I'm not making this up; there's video-recorded proof.)

Over the last few months, the loon started to lose his voice, his calls (all three) growing increasingly metallic and warbled. By a couple of weeks ago, he was all but silent. Squeeze him now and you get the aural equivalent of seeing someone who's always been robust and healthy withered away to skin and bones.

During our weepy pow-wow yesterday, Erik told me that he'd watched the short video of the loon he'd taken back in late summer and said he heard a radical difference between what the loon sounded like then and what he'd become. I choked back a heave/sob thing and said, "Loved to muteness."

So when I came home today and unwrapped another loon, this one with a call that's loud and strong and clear, it felt like there were a billion messages coming down from the universe, but I couldn't understand any of them.

My Dad sent me a stuffed loon to help soothe my broken heart. This loon is sort of small and runty compared to the original loon, but he calls out clearly. The original loon--our loon, the loon so beloved by the boy I love(d)--is bigger and fuller but now can only warble weakly.

It all means so much. It all means so little.

The "Jeopardy!" Effect

2008-02-23T19:11:00.001-08:00

In the summer of 2003, my sister-in-law Sara was selected to be on "Jeopardy!" Sara's mom and Aunt Sandra and my brother and I all went to LA for the taping of the show and a mini-vacation.

She came in second, beaten by a guy with lightning-fast reflexes and an all-too-thorough knowledge of the arcane and the trivial, and although we all told her repeatedly how proud we were that she'd even made it onto the show, she was understandably disappointed.

The next day, Greg and I dropped Sara, Diane, and Sandra off at the Getty and headed to the Bel Air to soak in the ambience (and the booze) of the hotel bar. After a drink, I asked how Sara was doing, and Greg replied that she was truly sad, though he couldn't quite understand why. Just placing on the show was a major accomplishment, he said, and she knew we were all oozing with pride. Plus, though she didn't get the first-place prize money, she did still walk away with much more than she'd come with.

I don't remember the exact arc of the conversation (as the waiter came around with another pair of drinks), but I do remember I told him that I could understand Sara's sadness. It's like this, I said, taking out a pen to draw on a napkin. Our everyday lives are here [line toward the bottom of the napkin], and every once in a while something happens that catapults us up to another level [line in the middle of the napkin]. From that level, we can see greater things [top of the napkin] than we ever had a view of down below--and, even better, not only can we see them, we also start to believe that they're actually reachable.

And that's where Sara had been for so many months prior: on that second level, with the potential for so many amazing things so clearly in view. Not only that, but even everyday life looked a bit better from where she was.

But then she didn't win, and all of the sudden that higher level shrunk away. Sure, she was still in a better, more interesting spot than she'd been when she started, but now she had to sit with the disappointment of having lost what she so truly believed she had a chance at reaching.

I've been thinking a lot about that conversation over the past few days, and I think I understand a bit why this breakup feels so innards-destroying, so heart-shredding: because after a long time hanging out at that workaday level, last summer found me perched happily on the level above. And while it was great to be able to fathom even better things ahead and above, the truth is that I was just so unbelievably happy to be where I was. I got so used to that happiness, so used to the delight of being able to face each day with a sense of calmness, a sense that things, after being wrong for so long, were now right and sweet and good.

Now, though, not only has the upper tier utterly disappeared from view and stretched way beyond my grasp, I've been punted out of level 2 as well. I had so hoped--and so come to expect--not to be back down here again anytime soon.

Hold On, Hold On

2008-02-19T17:00:00.000-08:00

A story on "All Things Considered" this afternoon sets me to tears. It's about a family in Michigan whose son/brother was a service member serving in Iraq who'd adopted two dogs there, a Labrador mother and her pup. When this fellow died (in his sleep, on Christmas Day), his family decided to bring the dogs back to Michigan.

Toward the end of the interview, his sister tells Melissa Block that the process of bringing the dogs to the US involved the help of many (politicians, other service members, and so on), and reminded her how many good people there are in the world. Hearing that makes my heart catch and my eyes flood all over again.

Today could be so much worse, I remind myself. I'm baffled and profoundly, wrenchingly hurt and shocked. I've lost something huge, something I never even began to think was remotely at risk, something I'll miss in ways I can't yet begin to comprehend. But as ever, I'm reminded of the good people who stay in my life even after someone I adore so much leaves, and who gather around me so I can only fall so far.

Walking San Francisco

2008-02-17T18:33:00.000-08:00

Because I evidently feel there's not quite enough happening in my life (you know, what with running a business, teaching classes, writing a book, planning the year's travel, and generally attempting to function as a responsible adult), I've decided to undertake a new project: by the end of 2008, I intend to walk every street in San Francisco.

This project is partly an attempt to get to know my city in more detail, partly an attempt to exercise on a very regular basis without necessarily feeling like I am, and partly an attempt to indulge my completist tendencies. I'm excited about it on all of those fronts.

I'll be blogging about the experience over on Walking San Francisco, complete with photos, notes on interesting experiences along the way, and perhaps a random fact or two from time to time. Come visit, won't you? (And if you're in or near SF, come along for the walk--or part of it, at least.)

Weakerthans Set List, 3 Months Late

2008-01-04T22:23:00.000-08:00

Erik and I went to see the Weakerthans when they played at Slim's here...on October 3. So, fine, this set list is a bit late, but still.

Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call
Civil Twilight
Over Retired Explorer
Benediction
Reconstruction Site
[unable to read my scratchings on this one]
Night Windows
Relative Surplus Value
Sun in an Empty Room
Left and Leaving
Tournament of Hearts
The Reasons
Time's Arrow
History of the Defeated
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute
One Great City!
Pamphleteer
Confessions of a Futon-Revolutionist
Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure
[a cover of something that included the line, "If being scared was a crime, we'd hang side by side."]
Exiles Among You

There were a few more songs, perhaps; we left partway through "Exiles," which was part of the encore, because I gave up hope that they'd play "Watermark" or "My Favourite Chords," and because we both had to go home and do work, oldsters that we are.

It was a fun show, though, and a completely different experience from seeing them at the University of Calgary back in 2003.

Lights Gone Dark

2008-01-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

By early January, I'm generally ready to see the trappings of Christmas gone, especially if they've been kicking around since sometime in mid-November. What's always a disappointment, though, is the concomitant disappearance of Christmas lights and the resultant plunge back into early and unmitigated darkness.

Don't get me wrong: I don't want to see displays of lit-up reindeer or flashing Santas for more than a few days after the New Year. (In fact, I'm not sure I ever want to see such displays, but that's another matter.) What would be nice, though, is if the lights strung through trees outdoors or hanging from eaves could stick around until, say, mid-March, when there starts to be visible hope that daylight will once again last beyond 4.30.

As it is, all of those lights tend to disappear sometime around Twelfth Night, leaving us with what feels like an endless stretch of inky night to contend with.

Two Sites You Should Visit

2007-12-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

Get thee to Free Rice to revel in the absurd but entertaining and rather addictive combination of testing your vocabulary skills and donating rice to UN world hunger abatement programs.

Then make your way to the snarky, trenchant, and bitch-slappy Predatory Lending Association site, the brainchild of one of Dana's friends. Take that, Cash 'N' Go.

Home again, home again

2007-11-30T08:40:00.001-08:00

I spent Thanksgiving and the weekend following in northern Illinois at my sister-in-law's parents' house. The holiday was great and delightfully lazy: with the exception of some minimal exercise, I passed much of the time eating, lounging, and playing board and card games with the others assembled there.

On Sunday, the Wilska portion of the clan went to O'Hare en masse, and my westward travel meant I was the last one to fly out, which meant spending the vast chunk of the day at the airport. I didn't mind at first, as Greg got me into a waiting lounge, where I was able to sit in front of a fire and sip wine while contentedly working away on my book. But then 7 p.m. rolled around, the lounge closed, and I was spit out with my fellow travelers.

And then things went downhill: a short delay turned into a longer one, which turned into loading us all onto a plane only to unload us 45 minutes later because of mechanical issues with the aircraft, and a terminal change, and a plane change, and all told two hours gone.

Then downhill again: the moment the pilot sounded his ding to indicate that we had reached the altitude at which tray tables and seat backs could be adjusted, the guy in front of me put his seat all the way back. Because this fellow was quite tall--probably somewhere in the 6'5" range (and yes, I did feel for him: it must suck to try to fold that size body into a tiny coach class seat)--he managed to push his seat even farther back than it would otherwise go, giving me about 6 inches of space. For the entire 5 hour flight.

I was so exhausted and tired of traveling that I feared I might lose it and burst completely into tears or run screaming through the aisle. I didn't, but just sat there and tried to sleep. In that space of semi-consciousness, I started thinking about putting a stop to Thanksgiving travel away from the west coast, and focusing more on building the holiday up to be something special for me in my own city, rather than always going elsewhere. It's an interesting consideration, because where does the stress and strain of traveling to or from somewhere start to outweigh the pleasure of actually being there? That point almost came for me on Sunday night.

But then, finally, we were on the ground at SFO, and the tall dude put his seat back up, and I walked out of the terminal and directly into the waiting, open arms of my boy, who drove me home and put me to bed. And as much as I enjoyed my time away, I am so glad to be back--so intensely, powerfully glad to be back.

Teen Anthems, How I Love Thee

2007-11-18T18:01:00.000-08:00

So, I'm sure Death Cab for Cutie's "Transatlanticism" is already an infamous emo-esque teen anthem. How could it not be, with Ben Gibbard's plaintive, repeated "I need you so much closer" and what sounds like the entire band joining in for the both heart-squishing and hopeful "So come on" refrain at the end of the song? It's all so ridiculously sad and sweet and pretty, and you can almost here the young, teary voices singing along.

I'm sure there were teen anthems around when I was a teen, but my musical taste at the time ran to REM, the Smiths, Drivin' 'n' Cryin', and a passel of other bands that, on the main, did not turn out anthems of any sort. We certainly didn't have anyone like Death Cab or Dashboard Confessional or any other soulful boys crooning at us. So I'm coming to all of this years too late, but unabashed. I would've gotten the anthem-loving out of my system much earlier if only I'd had the chance.

Since I didn't, I must make up for lost time, so it's "Transatlanticism" and "Hands Down" and "No Exit" (which probably doesn't officially qualify for anthem status, but should) on repeat, accompanied by fond thoughts of my own teen-dom, as well as equally fond thoughts of being miles and years and worlds away from it now.

While I Get My Head on Straight

2007-11-06T18:22:00.001-08:00

Seen on Geary; photo by Dana

There are currently at least a dozen things I should be doing, but somehow it seemed pressing to post this photo, which has been sitting on my desktop for about six weeks now. I dedicate it to J, both because I think he'll appreciate it with a keenness unknown to others, and because I've been a horrific friend and have sent him not even the merest hint of a note in months.

Other things I haven't done in months:

Had a day entirely bereft of work-related tasks
Read an actual book
Cooked a meal that required more than 2-3 steps

In my dream world, I'll have time for all of those things--as well as regular correspondence with far-flung friends--soon. More truthfully, I might hope for them when I am moored in Connecticut over Christmas, and/or sometime in late February. In the meantime, stay tuned for wildly infrequent posts (which may or may not center around mild whimpering about the chaotic states of my schedule and To Do list) and enjoy Dana's photographic brilliance.

Light in October

2007-10-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was stunning--one of those late San Francisco summer days that makes you forget how crapwad July and August were (and even more so this year than normal). The sun virtually blazed, there was the sweetest hint of a breeze, and even come 4 p.m., the fog didn't come scraping in.

Erik and I spent the day out by the beach, then walking through the mid-Richmond on a futile quest for the highly rated pizzeria I was sure was out there somewhere but just couldn't find. (Sorry, babe; it was actually not on Clement but on 21st, and closer to California.) Ultimately it was Pizza Orgasmica for us, then a ride back across town on the 44.

Back at la Casa de Irving, we lie (laid? lay? whatever) down for a nap with the full force of the sun pushing through the west-facing windows. By the time I got up, the light was fading but still gorgeous, and shortly thereafter I walked up Carl Street with the sunset at my back.

We seem to be having quite a few of these really pretty days, in which even the far western reaches of the city stay beautiful and fogless well past dusk. But the flip side, of course, is that the more stunning the light gets, the less of it we have. Once the sun starts to go down these days, it seriously means it: I got on the N last evening in slightly waning light, and when the train emerged from the East Portal tunnel, it was dark out. That was a matter of minutes.

In a few weeks, it'll be full night by 6 p.m., then earlier by the day. As ever, I'm not ready for so much darkness.

North Carolina

2007-09-21T07:51:00.000-07:00

I fell asleep to crickets, and to the sound of the wind poking at the curtains. I woke up to heavy silence. It was so much different from either my home (fan always on to block the traffic, the neighbors, the sirens screaming up Fell) or Erik's (the N, the N, the N).

Monique recently bought a house here in Winston-Salem, where she teaches at Wake Forest, and I decided to come out and visit her. On the way back from the airport in Raleigh last night, we stopped in Carrboro for dinner, and I watched the quiet, sleepy, rain-soaked street through the window as we ate.

As we drove into Winston last night, Monique told me that after hating it here for the first year ("I mean, I really, really hated it"), she's actually come to like it, and I can understand why: because it's possible to live well here, to buy a beautiful house for less than what you'd pay to rent a shitbox in San Francisco; because there doesn't seem to be the sense that if you're not always busy, you're either lazy or something's amiss; because well into September, you can fall asleep to crickets.

I'm off soon to go for a run, something I'd been avoiding at home because I got so tired of chasing through the same dirty streets over and over. Something tells me I won't need to dodge piles of excrement (human or animal) on the sidewalks here (though I will report back to confirm that).

By the time I fly home on Monday night, I may well be ready once again for the dust and bustle of SF, but for the time being, I'm happy to be thousands of miles away from it.

Had to Be Done

2007-09-07T18:03:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, rather than working on the book, doing the weeks of Quicken data entry I've been studiously avoiding, or committing myself to any other task that could remotely be considered an efficient use of time, I frittered away a good hour and a half downloading missing album artwork in iTunes.

For this, I blame Erik, who started it all a few evenings ago. And damn if this isn't an engrossing, addictive, rabbit-hole kind of task--at least for someone like me, who tends to be a completionist when it comes to things like this. (Why can I not be a completionist about, say, storyboarding, or finishing the text for my kitchen chapter, or recording payments received from my clients?)

I have to say, though, that the process is something of a pain in the ass. To get iTunes to recognize an album that you've added to your library from another source (whether a disc itself, another MP3 downloading program, or via some other method), you must be sure both the artist and the title appear in your library exactly--and I mean exactly--as they do in the iTunes store. In the world of iTunes, perplexingly, Belle and Sebastian and Belle & Sebastian are not the same band.

On one level, I can understand this: there are plenty of artists with very similar names, and an even greater number of albums called essentially the same thing. But why not take a tip from Google and offer users the option of confirming that, yes, by "Belle and Sebastian" they did indeed mean "Belle & Sebastian"? That would save us, collectively, a lot of anguish.

It's also a bit maddening that there are albums for which the iTunes store refuses to cough up artwork, even though the artist and title in my library match those in the store precisely. But there are some battles that evidently can't be won, and, in the grand scheme, probably aren't really worth fighting.

Back to the Rooftop with the Otis

2007-08-27T22:39:00.000-07:00

As I set out on my run earlier this evening, something I saw while walking through Hayes Green or heard Ira Glass say on my iPod flooded my head with memories (patchy though they may be) of sitting on Ote's roof back in Boston and talking about Buddhism while consuming entirely too much wine.

That was in the summer of 2005, when I was still relatively raw and achy from the hell of the previous November, and though I can't entirely recall the specifics of our conversation, I do remember tearily protesting to Otis something about how defeatist it seemed to agree with the Buddhist take that life is suffering if, indeed, you were suffering. I think I said something to the effect that the only way I could keep myself afloat was by believing that that wasn't so, at least not in the long term, and by holding fast to all of the moments that in fact argued against life as suffering.

So I thought of that today, then immediately wished to have the chance to replay that evening, that conversation, from my current perspective. I wanted the Now Me to be able to tell the Then Me that there would come a time when happiness wouldn't require slathering good memories with mortar and working them into a wall that would hold back the bad ones, when it would seem entirely possible to feel that life was good and right and full in general, rather than just in fits and starts, in moments that could disappear as quickly as they had arrived.

Then I ran.

After I got home, and was standing at the sink doing dishes and mulling over the verbose, pseudo-analytical e-mail I'd sent Dave earlier (which, as an aside, included references to both one of Aesop's fables and--yes, D, wait for it--an essay from O Magazine), I changed my mind. I decided that, even if I were given the chance, I'd want the Now Me to let the Then Me hack through things on her own.

Readers with sensitive stomachs will want to skip this paragraph, because there's no way I can word it (at least not at this hour) without it sounding at least a bit pat. For those still with me: what occurred to me at the kitchen sink is that I'm retrospectively grateful for all the crap that's come before now, because it makes me realize how intensely awesome now truly is. Though I would've likely told off anyone attempting to get me to see this at the time, there's something to be said for having your heart julienned/sucker punched/danced upon with hobnailed boots/all around broken, because when you sew it back together and the scars finally cover over, it comes back smarter and stronger.

A word I find myself using frequently these days is lucky. I feel immensely lucky that Erik found me, lucky to have friends and family whose hearts are swelling right along with mine, lucky to have taken a risk a few weeks back, lucky that it paid off. And I feel lucky for all those years of having not enough; they've made me even more thankful to finally feel like everything is growing full.

This Is the Room, One Afternoon

2007-08-25T22:47:00.000-07:00

Em and Erik, Land's End, 8/24/07

Over dinner on Thursday, Dave regaled me with stories of his latest dating adventures, and we wended our way through a conversation about relationships in general. I listened, I gave him the Female Perspective (this female's perspective, at least), and I tried to explain something about how much dysfunctional relationships from the past can teach you as much about what you flat-out, hands-down, for-real-I-mean-it don't want in a normal relationship as about what you do.

Faithful readers of this blog--and/or the friends who have been forced to hear my sniffly tales of woe in the past--will know that I've hacked my way through more than enough imperfect (read: often severely flawed) relationships, and have been privy to more than your fair share of complaints and moroseness about same. As such, you can surely imagine that I've developed a finely honed sense of what I'm not looking for in a relationship, including geographic and/or emotional distance, a lack of interest in being involved in my world, a propensity toward dalliance, and a refusal to engage in at least bits and pieces of PDA.

It's my sheer delight, then, to shout from the rooftop (OK, type from my sofa) that I am the lucky objet d'amour of perhaps the sweetest, kindest, SF-dwelling-est, public-kissiest, most open, most involved boy I've ever had the good fortune to know. He is so good, and amazes me on such a regular basis, that I scarcely know what to do with myself.

I had forgotten what a delightful predicament that is.

San Francisco summer night

2007-07-14T14:51:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's been within 6,000 miles of me anytime during June, July, or August will know how vociferously I complain about San Francisco's summer weather. It is, in short, unnatural, and although I'm sure I should've learned to deal with it uncomplainingly by now, I haven't.

But last night was an exception. D and I left the Presidio Social Club, passed the fellows dressed in 30's garb (about whom we were wrong: not a bachelor party at all, but in fact a common group outing) standing outside near their classic cars, and went not toward the Yoda statue as vaguely planned but instead back to Lombard. At the corner of Divis, we debated the merits of going into the Marina for drinks (decision: few to none) and opted rather to make the trek back toward Geary.

Divisadero is a ludicrous street to walk up, as it's insanely hilly for approximately 400 blocks (OK, fine: 5 or 6 blocks). But we gamely trudged upward, and though it was ass-kicking, it was also quite nice: the fog was visibly rolling in and the foghorns were lowing somewhere in the distance. It was windy but not bitterly so, and the temperature was pleasantly cool enough to offset the effects of climbing huge hills.

And somehow the fog made everything seem oddly hushed. Granted, the fact that we were walking through Pac Heights partly explains the odd hush--evidently, no one leaves the confines of his or her mansion past 9 p.m.--but still, it was as if someone had clapped a mute on the neighborhood.

We hit the apex and started down again, pausing at the corner of Divis and Sacramento to consider the bar there before deciding that the clientele were too young and boisterous for our liking (D: "I mean, that guy just bought, like, four beef jerkies at the convenience store") and heading toward the Fillmore. A block or so in, the silence fell again.

Of course, later on, after we'd spent time at the bar of the Elite Cafe (quite lovely, I might add) and set out toward Geary, the wind had picked up and cooled off enough that it ceased to be pleasant, and Geary itself was just plainly cold, and the quiet was broken by people and traffic and the general hubub of the street.

But for a while there, I didn't rue the weather, didn't wish for a proper summer, didn't complain about our off-kilter seasons. I just walked and talked and listened and fell fully in love with my sweet city all over again.

Thanks for the clarification

2007-07-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

In my spam folder this morning:

"An Increase in Girth (Width) with One Easy Pill"

Though, really, if you so doubt the intelligence of your target market, why not claim that your pill increases both girth and width?

Summer Plath

2007-07-10T18:52:00.000-07:00

While sitting on the bedroom floor tying my sneakers this afternoon, I let my eyes scan the bookshelves for potential books to take with me on my (desperately needed) vacation next week. The one I wound up pulling down--though, truthfully, I can't imagine lugging it across the country with me, even less so actually chopping my way through its pages again--was "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath."

I actually read this book--the whole damn thing--back in, what, 2000 or so. It was in the fall. I remember having it with me when I house-sat for John and Lynne, remember reading passages from it in an attempt to block out the creaks and groans and other disconcerting sounds the house made as it settled in the wind at night as I lay in bed, waiting for sleep.

It ultimately took me months to finish, because when they say "Unabridged," they mean it: this is, like, every word the woman ever wrote in a journal, save for those torched by Ted Hughes. She wrote a lot, much of it brilliant, fair chunks of it not. For me, at least, the book wasn't a quick or easy read.

But there's much to fall in love with here, including the passage sharp-eyed readers of this blog will have seen quoted repeatedly ("...not so, not so, for in the parable the wells of the valley are sweet in their ripeness...") and are surely cringing at the thought of seeing again.

What I opened to today, mainly because it was marked with a red Post-It flag, was an entry from August 17, 1952, that begins "Band Concert on Friday." It's a long, dense, intensely detailed description of an outdoor concert, and what's most striking is the fact that Plath is able to take this ostensibly happy event, describe it as such, and yet, partway through, still bring a high, clear note of loss and sadness and regret to the whole affair.

But that, of course, is the most wrenching and beautiful part.

"And the kids, all of them, will dance, keeping time to music, chorusing 'Now We Go Looby-Loo' and then the teen-age couples will come out to the arena, and there will be waltzes, dark sky over, and the lights soft and the good big summer feeling inside you with the light gentle and the night cool and friendly. Always with the queer regret, blurring all the other summers into a fine nostalgic brew--distilling all the tart sweetnesses into this one, with the sea of music skipping over the time, and the feeling in you warm and it is our town, we all together, very sweet, all summer lights, sometimes almost tearful because it is so moving all the time. The fluid color the fluid sound, toward its ending. ('Into many a green valley, drifts the appalling snow./ Time breaks the threaded dances and the diver's brilliant bow.') And now I am sitting here crying almost because suddenly I am knowing in my head and feeling in my guts what those words mean when I did not know the full impact of them in the beginning, but merely their mystic beauty.

So it all moves in the pageant toward the ending, it's own ending. Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers. For all the writing, for all the invention of engines to express & convey & capture life, it is the living of it that is the gimmick. It goes by, and whatever dream you use to dope up the pains and hurts, it goes. Delude yourself about printed islands of permanence. You've only got so long to live. You're getting your dream. Things are working, blind forces, no personal spiritual beneficent ones except your own intelligence and the good will of a few other fools and fellow humans. So hit while it's hot."

Maybe they didn't mean it quite like that

2007-07-03T21:05:00.001-07:00

American Heritage Dictionary:
siren song
n. An enticing plea or appeal, especially one that is deceptively alluring.

WordNet:
siren song
noun
the enticing appeal of something alluring but potentially dangerous

Alaska Airlines Insider, July 3, 2007:
"Heed the siren song of Canada, from Victoria to Edmonton. And, if you travel between September 5 and November 15, 2007, you can save 20 percent on travel—on all points Alaska and Horizon fly across the western Provinces."

Transitional

2007-07-01T21:40:00.001-07:00

My head is so completely fried from having just worked my fifth consecutive full day (with two more looming ahead) that I can barely type, let alone form coherent and incisive thoughts. But before I drag my sorry self to bed for some magazine reading and sighing alarm re-setting, I figured I'd try to get out of my head the kernel of something that lodged itself there earlier today, at some point during the process of packing my client's monumental collection of glassware.

So it's this: I find it both fascinating and somewhat disconcerting to be in the midst of so much transition without actually being in transition myself. There's the move job for Client #1, whom I've known and worked with weekly for about a year and a half now, and for whom I think this process is slightly traumatic and significantly sad, though she's not letting on. There's the move job for Client #2, whose home I unpacked when she moved here late in 2005. To say that the prospect of (and preparations for) moving again has her seriously freaked out would be pretty accurate.

And then there's the goodly chunk of time spent with the ex-Chicagoan over the past week. It's interesting to be able to play the role of Long-Time San Franciscan, to pilot someone around to all of my favorite spots, to inculcate someone into the cult of Complaining About Muni (though, truth be told, he'd most likely get there on his own quite soon). But it's also fascinating to try to vicariously relive the experience of being new somewhere, to remember what it's like to leave huge chunks of your life--friends, family, stuff, routines, haunts--behind, with no clear sense of when (or whether) you'd be able to gather those chunks again if you needed them.

At dinner last night he was (seemingly uncharacteristically) quiet-ish, and told me how looking at pictures of his old apartment on iPhoto earlier in the day reminded him of how many books he'd either given away or left in Chicago before he moved, and how what had been eight full bookshelves was now, here in San Francisco, barely two.

And it could well have been fatigue, or boredom, or frustration, or some indefinable emotional lacuna, but what I sensed while he spoke was a tinge of sadness and longing that neither the Pinot nor the sea bass nor the restaurant--and certainly not I--could do much to assuage.

I said something about how books are often the hardest thing to give up, or the thing we miss most when they're gone, or maybe something about how sometimes we wind up letting go of too much, though our original intentions were good.

And those are all true, but it occurred to me later that I wanted to tell him a totally unrelated story, of how, after my car got towed within a few weeks of my own move to SF (ostensibly because I'd blocked someone's driveway, though I remain skeptical), I called my parents in tears, sure it had been stolen.

That was the spark that set things off: I thought someone stole my car. And what kind of city must I have moved to if, less than a month after my arrival, and in the fairly safe neighborhood of Noe Valley, and (if I remember correctly) in the middle of the day, my car could be stolen? I remember weepingly telling Mom how achingly I wanted to be back in Boston, how heartsick I was for what I gave up, how I was sure I'd made a mistake.

She, of course, talked me down, gave me the registration info and license plate number, reminded me that I would acclimate to this new place sooner or later. I called the DPT and discovered that the car had been towed, not stolen, and that I needed only to endure the (hideously painful) process of paying the fine and retrieving it from impound to get it back--no police report, no searching for the thief, no attempting to find an alternate means of transporation in the meantime.

Ultimately, I drove home relieved, but still with the heavy sense of piteously missing a random assortment of things and people and places that, at that moment, summed up all Boston had been for me: David and James and brunch at Fritz and Harvard Square and Tealuxe and Patrick and sitting with Paula in the back yard and Val and Kelt and Kristina and, for god's sake, even Hemagen. I was thousands of miles from all of it, and the longer I stayed in San Francisco, the farther and farther away I'd get. I came home--which, at that point, was the house on Cesar Chavez with Amy and Kristin and the unbearable polyamorous hydrocolon therapist who was soon to tell me that she wanted me to move out because she didn't like my "negative energy"--and curled up on my twin futon in my tiny room and cried, for everything gone.

That was the closest I came to packing up and reversing my route and re-ensconcing myself in my Boston world. But, of course, I did none of that. I don't remember what came next: possibly I called Hemagen and had Dave make me laugh, and got sniffly when James told me how much he missed me, and smiled at Anthony's voice calling out my name in the background. Possibly I went down to Palo Alto to report for work, and let that maddening but sweet little world buoy me up. Possibly I turned myself over to Kristin and let her be the dose of familiarity I so desperately needed. I can't recall.

What I do know is that as the weeks stretched into months, I became less aware of what I'd left behind and let myself fall in love with new stuff. It would be pat (and patently untrue) to say I didn't still have my moments of aching for Boston, but in time they dulled enough that I largely stopped noticing them. Within a year, I was mad and stupid with love for San Francisco.

So I didn't tell the ex-Chicagoan this story last night (though, D, on the off chance you're reading this, I'm telling you now), and maybe that was for the best, all things considered. But I still sort of wish I had, because I wanted to acknowledge what I thought he might've been saying without actually saying (though, if indeed he didn't mean a thing beyond what he actually said, the point would've been moot at best), wanted to let him know that even a raging homebody like me can eventually adjust to something and somewhere totally new.

But I think what I most wanted to get across was that, yes, I know what it's like to miss another city's mass transit system, or a particular book you've left behind, or a bar, or a certain kind of weather, or even a stretch of sidewalk that's so familiar it bores you just to think about walking it. I know what it's like to ache for what you've known for so long, even if it doesn't seem ache-worthy.

I know how transitions like this can carve out and julienne your heart, and make you doubt yourself and your decisions and the people popping into and out of your world.

And, on the flip side, I know what it's like to watch someone do his best to gamely adjust to what's now utterly known and unquestionably familiar to you. I know, annoyingly, that there's nothing anyone else can really ever do to mitigate the sucktastic parts of these transitions for someone, as much as you (read: me) wish there were. And sometimes change follows change follows change.

So D, keep missing that chunky OED and Chicago's less lackadaisical transit drivers and the Hide Out and the sweet bartender who used to work there and the sensation of frozen nostril hairs (if not the resultant bloody noses).

But in the meantime, there's City Lights and Aardvark, the relatively un-touristed Hyde Street cable car line, the view into the great nothingness of the Pacific from Land's End, seriously kick-ass cocktails at the Presidio Social Club, and the heart-rending prettiness of driving north across the Golden Gate, which, on a good day, makes me choke up with love and awe and gratitude.

Only two-ish years behind the times

2007-06-24T22:12:00.001-07:00

On Friday, at the tail end of my run, I stopped off at the library to troll for decent DVDs to borrow. (As an aside, there was a guy also browsing the racks who kept giving me sidelong glances and little grins, despite the fact that I was pink in the face and fairly literally dripping sweat. I mean, how gross do I need to be, dude, before I cease to be a candidate for a pick-up?)

Anyway, I was somewhat amazed to find the shelves fairly full, and equally surprised that there was a relatively new copy of the first season of Grey's Anatomy. The ENTIRE first season. This entirety is important because there's some piece of my genetic code that makes me jumpy and ill-at-ease at the prospect of watching a TV series out of order, or with significant pieces missing. This also explains why, once I start a book, I almost always feel the need to finish it, even if I actively hate it and spend as much time cursing the author's name as I do reading his words. But again, I digress.

So Grey's came home with me, and after dinner and drinks with Val, Isaac, and their couch-surfing German that evening, I came home and popped in disc 1.

OK. I know. It's been, what, two years since the show made its debut. And yes, I know. It's as trite as can damn well be that I, a 30-something straight American woman, instantly fell in love with the show. And yes, I will step in line with the 9 billion others on the face of the planet who think that Patrick Dempsey could melt steel.

But whatever. It's an engrossing show. Blame it on hormonal imbalance or copious wine consumption, but for a few episodes there I had tissues essentially attached to my face. The actors are interesting. The gross stuff isn't excessively gross. Alex is nearly the spitting image of J, (though the latter, of course, isn't a syph-carrying, pompous-ass, fairly loathsome womanizer), which makes me giggle. And did I mention the Dempsey steel melting?

The disadvantage to having no cable--not even basic!--is that I almost never watch actual TV. It's just too painful, even with the tiny signal boost my rabbit ears offer. This means that I'm always behind the times in terms of TV shows (save for those I presciently mentioned last week, which I'm sure will become booming hits, at which point I can say I told you so, just this once). But when I finally get my act together to catch up, I get to do so with a vengeance, and watch entire seasons with no waiting between episodes and no commercial breaks.

Now I just need to wait for Season 2 to land on the SFPL's shelves.

ESP not Included

2007-06-18T14:04:00.000-07:00

From the Times Travel section, Sunday, June 10, 2007:

"Turning Snapshots into Photographs
Photo safaris combine picturesque guided tours and in-the-field camera lessons. Fees usually include intuition, lodging and some meals."