Light in October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."

Arguments with Isaac, Installment #27

On the N, before the Jew's/juice harp debate

Isaac and I frequently go head to head, mainly because both of us are extraordinarily stubborn when we believe we're right.

There was the infamous Stockholm Syndrome debate last summer, which began as a relatively amusing joke about the 49-year-old Swede I was dating at the time and ended as a shouting match that even online research didn't soothe. (In short: one of us claimed that the tactic of treating some prisoners at Gitmo nicely so they would believe the U.S. was on their side was an example of the Stockholm Syndrome--in that those prisoners would hypothetically be swayed to the side of the country imprisoning them--while the other thought that was absolute bunk, claiming that the Stockholm Syndrome came into play only in cases involving things like kidnapping or hostage situations in which the unquestionably innocent victims ultimately sided with their captors. Think Patty Hearst.)

Anyway, that one remains unsolved.

So a bunch of us are out on Friday night, and somehow the subject of the Jew's harp comes up. Why or in what context, I have no idea. Whatever the case, I claim that it's "Jew's harp," as in "the harp of the Jew," while Isaac rebuts that, claiming it's "juice harp," as in "slang-for-saliva harp," and telling me that no Jewish music he's ever heard features this instrument.

The debate rages. I retort that, right or wrong, one will see this instrument referred to as a Jew's harp everywhere. He slaps the table, tells Ali I drive him crazy because I always think I'm right, and on and on. Eventually we just give up.

But then Val sends this yesterday:

Subject: Em 1, Isaac 0

From Wikipedia:

There are many theories for the origin of the name Jew's harp, one being that it may derive from its popularity amongst Eurasian steppe -peoples like the Khazars, perhaps being introduced to Europe from that direction. Another explanation proposed is that it is a corruption of "jaw harp," while a less likely explanation espoused by some is that its name comes from "juice harp" from the amount of saliva produced when played by amateurs. Both of these explanations lack historical backing, as both the "jaw" and the "juice" variants appeared only in the late 19th and 20th centuries . It has also been suggested that the name derives from the French "Jeu-trompe" meaning "toy-trumpet". The Oxford English Dictionary calls theories that the name is a corruption of "jaws" or "jeu" "baseless and inept" and goes on to speculate that "the instrument was actually made, sold, or sent to England by Jews, or supposed to be so; or that it was attributed to them, as a good commercial name...."

And, oh, is the victory sweet. Isaac, what can I say? Sometimes I do just have to be right.

This Week in Radness

It's hard not to be glad of heart and mind in the face of these three things:

1.) The set of Hausbrandt-logoed cappuccino mugs J sprung on me simply because he's a delightful and wonderful friend who knows how much I adore that cute little cannibalistic coffee pot. J, allow me to publicly state the degree of your excellence.

2.) HBO's "Flight of the Conchords," which you can sample at the afore-linked website. It's smart, snarky, creative, and funny as hell--a sort of mash-up of "The Office," "Arrested Development,"and "Extras" with New Zealand jokes and pseudo-music videos thrown in for good measure. (And if you can't get enough of Jemaine Clement, half of the Conchords, keep your eye on Eagle vs. Shark, which Dana aptly describes as "a little bit like the kiwi version of napoleon dynamite, but with grown ups (sort of).")

3.) Finally, as one still in mourning over the untimely cancellation of "Arrested Development," I find solace in the fact that at least George Michael is back. Well, OK, it's not really George Michael--but it is Michael Cera, who played GMB and has since turned his efforts to "Clark and Michael," a show about two best friends attempting to create the best sitcom ever. Watch Cera in the supermarket scene in Episode 1; he has the same sense of quiet bafflement and half-shame that made George Michael such a lovable character.

And then there were two

[After]

Apparently, this is how it works: once the police and the medical examiners have done what they need to do at a crime scene, the fire department sends a rescue truck to clean up.

So a truck pulls up in front of my house, and the men get to work. One takes a spray bottle of something from a door on the side of the truck, others uncoil the hose, another pulls down a broom.

I can't see what they're doing, can only hear the chugging of the water and the low growl of the engine, with indistinguishable voices occasionally calling out above the din. After a while one of the men pulls the hose about 30 feet down the street, and another follows, carrying the broom, which he holds out for his colleague to spray off.

When the truck pulls away, the grey steps are grey again, all traces of red gone; the sidewalk in front of the house is wet and clean.

And on the porch are two doormats, where until this morning there were three.

He was French

I got up from the table this morning to refill my coffee cup and noticed that a police car had pulled up across the street. A pair of policemen knocked on the first door of the three-unit building across from mine and said something to the young woman who answered, though I couldn't hear what.

Within a few minutes, there were more officers milling around, and a truck full of firefighters; by the time I stepped outside around ten to 9, there was crime scene tape tied to our front gate.

I called out to one of the policemen to ask what had happened. He walked over to me, pointed to the third door in the house across the street, and said there was a deceased person inside, and blood on the steps outside, and thus it appeared that the death was "not due to natural causes." (Some might call that an understatement.) He asked if I'd heard anything last night; I said I hadn't, and had turned in early. The officer handed me off to one of his colleagues, who took my name and contact info, saying that a detective might need to contact me.

By the time I did what I had set out to do--gone to have Josh notarize something for me, gone to the post office, walked home--the street was clogged with vehicles from the Medical Examiner's office, and neighbors were crowded in front of my house, outside the boundaries of the crime scene tape but close enough to watch the proceedings. I chatted with them for a few minutes, then came inside and sat on the sofa so I could watch and listen.

He was French, they said--or spoke with a French accent, at least. And a law student. He seemed both cute and kind of geeky. Dan said he seemed fairly young, perhaps in his mid-30s, and certainly didn't appear to be the type of guy who'd be connected with any sort of criminal element. He just seemed sort of quiet.

I watched the medical examiners bring a gurney to the foot of the front stairs, then drape a white sheet on the front porch. I watched them hand things over the railing to the officers below, who put them in brown paper bags and labeled them with markers. And I watched two men carry out the body of this man--young, French, law student--wrapped in a white sheet through which red stains were spreading at both his feet and his head, watched them wrap the body in the sheet laid on the porch, and tie its ends, and carry this sad and sorry bundle to the waiting gurney.

And then I noticed the blood on the steps and the railing--the incongruous smears of red on otherwise grey surfaces, a literal stone's throw from my own front steps.

The neighbors with the Afghan hound report that they heard loud music last night, though it seemed to be coming from Hayes Street. Dan reports that he was up until 3 working in his living room, in front of the windows, and that he neither saw nor heard anything. Bridget was up at 6, and nothing caught her attention, either.

We take for granted the fact that we live on a street where a young, quiet law student doesn't meet his end on his front steps, barely fifteen feet from a street lamp.

No. Correction: we took it for granted. Now what?

Not quite a tautology...

...but what is it?

From the insert accompanying the Rhinocort Aqua budesonide nasal spray my doctor gave me yesterday:

"USE THIS PRODUCT AS DIRECTED, UNLESS INSTRUCTED TO DO OTHERWISE BY YOUR DOCTOR."

[Caps original.]

Don't you mean Roma?

At Rainbow on Monday, I filled my cart with largely virtuous products, determined as I was to make myself well by tea, plenty of fresh produce, and other ostensibly health-giving foodstuffs. (That determination went right out the window when I woke up yesterday morning still ill, at which point I made an appointment with Dr. Moser that has scored me antibiotics that will kill off whatever weird sinus infection has made a home in my head. Said antibiotics cost me about $10 a pill, so they damn well better do something.)

Anyway. Rainbow.

I browsed through the Traditional Medicinal teas (which remind me so much of the Jed, though that's a story for another time) and settled on the one that looked most relevant to my woes and also least likely to contain anything that would give off the flavor of licorice. (Yes, I probably wouldn't actually be able to taste it, but it's the principle of the thing.) Into my cart went the Gypsy Cold Care.

When I got home, I made myself a cup. This stuff has a 10-minute brewing period, so I had plenty of time to read the box. Then I started thinking about the name: Gypsy Cold Care. And it occurred to me that if Traditional Medicinals were really the forward-thinking, globally aware, culturally savvy company they seem to be, wouldn't they call it Roma Cold Care? Isn't that what gypsies now prefer to be called, their traditional name having been sullied by negative stereotypes?

Hop to it, TM. Your culturally sensitive bona fides are in the balance.

Allergy Information

Let me start by noting that I know food allergies are (quite literally, sometimes) a deadly serious issue, and that therefore there's a lot to be said for the practice of labeling packaged foods with information about their contents and how and where they're processed.

That said, I was bemused to read the label on a container of cashews the other day--and, mind you, this was a container of nothing but cashews, as in "Ingredients: Cashews," full stop--and discover that there was an allergy information panel alerting potential consumers of these cashews that the package, in fact, CONTAINED CASHEWS.

I'm sure there's either benevolence or litigation behind that warning, but it sort of highlights the idiocy of how we do things here in the good ol' US of A sometimes. Have we sunk so low (again) that our product labels not only have to warn us not to dry our hair whilst in a full bathtub or a running shower and to be aware that the beverage we're about to enjoy is extremely hot but also that our packages of 100% cashews contain cashews? One might've hoped we'd have gotten beyond that point by now.

Not Happening

Projects featured in the June issue of Martha Stewart Living I'm unlikely to attempt, now or ever:

• Making my own bias tape.
• Wallpapering my kitchen ceiling.
• Wallpapering a window shade to match the aforementioned kitchen ceiling.
• Lining a glass-topped bedside table with wallpaper.
• Creating a jaunty drinks tray with an old map.
• Making a totebag from an old pillowcase.
• Cooking pancakes with chunks of bacon in them.
• Collecting old watering cans.