Big, Beautiful, Tasteless California Oranges

Home Home

2010-04-24T02:04:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I'm sitting here idly, watching the people mill around me and waiting for cleaning morning to wrap up so I can go about my day, shop at my stores and eat at my cafes and ride on my busses home, while I'm waiting not unhappily, while I'm comfortable and feel relaxed and recognize familiar faces, while I'm feeling most at home here, because this is where I live now, not just a place I've travelled to, but where my stuff is, and where I live in the normal, unexhausted pace that normal people experience when they are close to their base -

these are the times when I realize most starkly that I'm far, far, astoundingly far, far away from Home.

I get frustrated here, I can't believe the inefficiency and the feigned-or-not stupidity and the effort it takes to live life, and I curse this country and glare at these people and yearn, not for Home, but for elsewhere, other, not this. And I did that at Home, too, because I'm fully coming round to the idea that Laura was right, comforts really are relative, so five minutes of waiting at the post office on the corner of Larkin and whatever felt just as maddening as waiting two hours at the post office in Kacyiru. But it's when I'm happy, relaxed, at my best here, when I'm feeling at home, that I realize that this is good for a visit, for a year, for an experience, for some insight, to shake things up in my smug mind, for a challenge, for a break, for a spell, for a bit. For a bit.

At the foundation of my current relaxed happy state lies the knowledge that in the future, no need to hurry, there will be a time when I can feel like this and simultaneously feel at Home. Where I can sit on the balcony of an ornate old theater hall with unnecessary beautiful decaying detail all around, with a glass of beer in front of me that I'm drinking because I like the taste, and that I can afford without thought, with a shoulder against mine and a hand on my back, with music streaming in that I love instantly, with that life-defining ahhhh that only seems to come when I'm at Home.

Pining for the old brunette.

2010-04-17T08:14:00.000-07:00

What a feeling!

To encounter, to feel giddy, to be infatuated, to be crazy, to be ripped from, to slink back to, to get comfortable, to love, to overtax, to fear, to love, to love, to fear, to love, to lose, to pine for, to wallow in, to despise, to feel foolish over, to dull, to worry, to re-encounter, to wince afresh, to dull, to dull, to reassess, to feel differently, to be surprised, to reassess, to laugh with, to see with new eyes, to feel proud of, to root for, to appreciate, and finally, to love platonically and without complication, without jealousy or need for anything in return, but simply to love, to feel happier for knowing, to feel profoundly appreciative, to feel so clearly and welcome so wholly their impact on you, to feel like a lucky beautiful bastard surrounded by the same.

run along now

2010-03-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

Just finished with my first ever run with my students. It was amazing.

The less good: Right at the end of the run, within a hundred yards of the school gate, we're sort of running "through town". Everyone in town naturally stops and stares at the sight of a hundred high school girls and their one muzungu teacher stampeding through the street. As I run by the side of the road, one twenty-something-year-old guy reaches out and grabs my arm and shakes it, hard. It nearly throws me off my balance. I shake him off and keep running, but I quickly start to see red as my arm stings more and more. After a few more paces, I turn around and walk quickly back to him. The students can see that I'm pissed. I get right up to him and tell him in French that he's never to touch me again, and then I point to my arm and tell him no and bad in Kinyarwanda. As I turn to walk away, he snickers to his friend a bit, so I turn around and stare the smile off his face. As I go to walk back towards the school, all the girls start cheering. I sprint the last fifty yards with the cheers of the girls to back me up.

The very good: These girls are amazing! They took off out of the school gates running with gusto, and kept a totally respectable pace up the giant half-mile hill right and the beginning of the run. They get tired easily, but the slightest encouragement makes them pick up the pace again. I was running my best to try to show them how it's done, but at least six of them kept up with me stride for stride the whole way. They're totally encouraging to each other; there's no one making fun of anyone else, and I am yet again surprised that body image doesn't (outwardly, at least) seem to factor into their actions at all. The thicker ones run just as hard as the thinner ones. Towards the back of the pack, where the most tired runners are, they clap and sing rhythmic songs to keep each other going. Once we were about a mile out of school, we stopped and waited for everyone else to catch up. I led them in stretches, counting down each stretch in a different language, which they find hugely entertaining. High fives and laughs were everywhere. When we were done stretching, we ran back the way we had come, again with enthusiasm and total mutual encouragement among the girls.

I don't want to sound like a cheeseball, and the fact is that these kids drive me crazy for a good 80% of the time. But that other 20% is golden indeed. Their total acceptance and love of each other, their willingness to see the good in others and in their own situations, their excitement over challenges and small privileges, their strength and hard work and intelligence and effort, make these girls a joy to be around. They're certainly teaching me more than I'm teaching them, and today I'm grateful for it.

Here's to Tuesday runs with the students! Hoping to make this a year-long tradition and a good start to the running week.

Wednesday

2010-03-17T01:37:00.000-07:00

I'm in the staff room during our morning break from classes. The teachers get served tea every day during this break, and it was pretty good today, not too sweet and piping hot. Even as I write that, I can't quite believe I'm describing this tea as "good", because if I'm being honest, it actually falls under the general heading of "bilge". The whole room is in uproarious laughter right now, including me, as we're talking (in a lunatic mix of English, French and Kinyarwanda) about poor Peter teaching sex ed to his O-Level biology class. One year ago at this time, I had recently returned from France, was busy at work planning our lab's move to a new building, and was vaguely thinking about going to Africa at the end of the year. I am surprised to find myself now, chuckling over the menstrual cycle with Rwandan men.

With the free time I have in the evenings here, I've been catching up on all that delicious purposeless information seeking that I'd have loved to have done in San Francisco if there were more hours in the day. Here's what's been keeping me from going postal:

PODCASTS

Fresh Air from NPR - I never listened to this in the US, but now I love, love, LOVE to hate Terry Gross's smugness. Plus, sometimes she talks to interesting guests, although usually their smuggery is outclassed only by TG herself.
The Archers - I've revived my love affair with that gloriously mundane English village of my dreams. David Archer reigns supreme. Lillian can die.
This American Life - After being given a whole data CD full of episodes as an (excellent) gift, I've been listening to these would-be-sappy-if-they-weren't-so-damned-good hour-long awe-fests every week.
The BBC History Magazine Podcast and BBC's From Our Own Correspondent - Both really interesting romps through mainly useless brain fodder from olden times and the world today, respectively. I'm totally out of my depth with the first one, but I like to pretend, and sometimes I catch a brief idea of what they're talking about.
A History of the World in 100 Objects - Haven't started listening to this yet because I'm waiting for 100 consecutive days to do so, but I'm weirdly excited about it. I think I'm also going to give my English class an assignment to write the history of their lives in five objects. Thanks, BBC!

BOOKS

One Fifth - Complete and utter drivel, like the worst book I've ever read, and also the most amazingly satisfying when I arrived in a country where all of my norms and comforts were decidedly absent and I just wanted to bathe in a trashy novel and forget that I wasn't in the United States. One Fifth is pure awful, but it saw me through some dark times, and I'm grateful to it.
Table By the Window and Table Number Seven - Two halves of Terrance Rattigan's Separate Tables collection, and both awesome. His plays are all about the dramatic happening within the mundane, and for some reason his stuff really sits well with me.
Baking Cakes in Kigali - As I think I said before somewhere (this blog?), this was a little heavy on the folksy African wisdom for my taste, but it was nice to read, if only because you have to have been to Rwanda to understand what she's talking about half of the time.
Jurassic Park - UNFORGETTABLE AND AMAZING. Why hadn't I read this before?! Why did I throw Michael Crichton under the bus so? I don't care if it's not great literature, I don't care if it's infuriatingly unrealistic, this shit was GREAT. I think I might have skipped a class or two towards the end so that I could read more, and I don't even feel bad about it.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Oh Tess! This started out a tad slow, but became a total page-turner towards the end. As in, it took me about two weeks to read the first sixty pages, and three hours to read the last hundred and fifty. Hardy is my mum's favorite, and I've been meaning to tuck into some of his books for years, but it wasn't until I saw them on display at Nakumatt for just 2.500Frw that went for it. And now, thanks to John, I've got The Mayor of Castorbridge on its way!
The Road Taken - I've only read the back cover and introduction of this Michael Buerk autobiography, but based on those alone, I have high hopes.

And now, one more class before lunch. Wednesdays are the new Thursday. I love them.

a useless post

2010-02-20T01:56:00.000-08:00

So here we are at Bourbon, and I'm swimming in comfort and wondering at this life that has become so pleasant, that has been so pleasant all along.

Friends from New York, DC, San Francisco, Grand Rapids, Madrid, London pass in, say hello, share a story or two, commiserate, laugh a bit, have a coffee, make a plan, pass out. We're weirdos in Rwanda together and that's the foundation that all of our very varied relationships are based on. Billy Bragg, Blind Pilot, and the Avett Brothers are playing and my book of Jack London's Great Short Stories sits open on the table; I've just finished with Batard and now I'm right on the brink of digging into The Call of the Wild. Batard was excellent, the kind of story that makes you gasp at the end and feel a little scared and a little lucky to have read it.

This weekend is a big reunion of my group in Kigali, so about a week ago the emails started circulating about what media everyone has to lend and needs to return and wants to borrow. I'm bringing back Baking Cakes in Kigali, a nice easy read and cool story idea, but featuring a bit too much folksy African wisdom for me (offensive?), and the plays of Oscar Wilde, hilarious, fullstop. At the request of my friends, I've brought to lend out the entire British Office, Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, and all my This American Life podcasts on CD. Finally, I am pretty keyed up about all the loot I'm borrowing: the entire first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Jane has ALL SEVEN SEASONS with her on DVD, so...!), Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (the book!), Breakfast at Tiffany's (the movie!), and Lost in Translation, which I've been craving since I got here. It would be so easy to get any of these things at home, whenever I wanted, but here they feel like gleaming golden treasures and buoys in a potential sea of ennui.

In walks a guy I met at a party last night; he's from Germany but it turns out that he spent the last few months of 2009 researching at Berkeley, hanging out on the weekends in Dolores Park, a block above my apartment. And then we both flew thousands of miles to Rwanda and then finally we said hello. If you meet a fellow foreign aid worker/volunteer here in Kigali, it's not necessarily to get their email or phone number or even their name if you want to stay in touch or be friends; all you have to do is hang around at Bourbon for five minutes and they'll show up. We're all the usual suspects here; you could write a novel if you wanted about a bunch of people sitting out on this balcony and Bourbon and how varied their lives are and they're all really connected somehow and ain't life strange?!

Seriously, quick tale: On Thursday, I read an article from The New Times to my S5 students about a team of heart surgeons from Spokane, WA who had come to Kigali to perform sixteen open heart surgeries due to the lack of qualified doctors here. The next day, sitting here in Bourbon, two guys at the next table strike up a conversation with me and my friends, and I ask where they're from, and they say Spokane, WA. I ask them if they might happen to be heart surgeons, and they say yeah, they are. I tell them that I talked about them with my students for about half an hour the day before, and they're tickled pink. Coincidence? Rwanda.

When you run make sure you run to something and not away from cause lies don't need an aeroplane to chase you anywhere.

2010-02-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

During a rare bout of gchat access, I found this old status, and felt like it should be blogortalized rather than lost to the sands of the internet (although I realize that now, with Google Buzz aka every thought you so much as brush up against is now broadcast to everyone you've ever emailed including your ex-boyfriend's mom, nothing is ever lost!):

Benny: i dont care where my progeny end up as long as they dont know where i am

Yessss.

oh hello little blog i didn't see you there

2010-02-14T11:58:00.000-08:00

An interesting conversation with P and A today: Why does there seem to be absolutely zero rebellion or counter culture among this country's youth? Because they're focused, we concluded, on the goals they've been handed, on saving the country. Once they've worked hard their whole lives and saved the country, achieved their goals, perhaps their children will look at the saved country they live in and conclude that technology and upped GDP doesn't automatically equate to happiness, and they'll say fuck it. Perhaps, kind of like...us. Haha. Had we any choice in the matter? Have they? We like to think we do. They like to think they don't.

You're welcome, entire culture of the country I've lived in for precisely seven weeks. I will be speaking for you now.

I really should just stick to liking music, I'm alright at that:

What's been turning me all inside out, reminding me of my old home and making me comfortable in my new home, nightly: The Avett Brothers. Oh, oh, oh, would that I were in California: tour dates in Indio, Oakland, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Quincy.

I keep telling myself that it'll be fine
You can't make everybody happy all of the time...

The weight of lies will bring you down
And follow you to every town
Cause nothing happens here that doesn't happen there
When you run make sure you run
To something and not away from
Cause lies don't need an aeroplane to chase you down.

Well you send my life awhirling
Darling when you're twirling upon the floor
Well who cares about tomorrow?
What more is tomorrow than another day?

New house, new roommates, new music for them to ask me to turn down in the middle of the night.

la la la laaa

2009-12-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

When I think back on the year and a half I spent here, I'll surely think about the shops in the Mission and the views from Alamo Square, and about the opera and needle exchange and of course the flatest of flats. But I count myself infinitely lucky that the first things I'll think of will be my FM and my JM. Through ups and downs, loves, likes, extreme dislikes, sickness and health, mountains of snow and mountains of granite, bound solidly together in hatred of the T and love of San Francisco and each other, even when I'm stretching their patience just a liiiitle bit thin.

Love her,

and him.

And this, forever and always, amen.

photo, typo, lame-o, weirdo, no-go, frio

2009-12-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

Where's my botany photo of the day? I guess I'm not supposed to expect it till 4pm, and it's only 3:40pm now. But yesterday it came at 2pm. I have only been a proud member of the listserv for two days. It's like looking at another planet, but it's my own planet. I just got an email as I write this but it was something from Mike. I'm pleased to get an email from Mike but I wanted that BPOTD.

Have you all seen Ordinary People yet? It's really excellent, my favorite movie after Moonstruck, which I barely count as a movie because it's more of an experience or a frame of mind. Recently I've been accidentally typing words that start with "f" as "ph" words instead, then looking at them squinty eyed until it dawns on me that I made the f/ph switch again and I fix it. I feel like admitting this because Google Wave is the future so you'll all find out what a horrible typo-committer I am soon anyway.

I'm attempting to come up with a way to keep this necessarily cumbersome conversation fresh and light:

Me: So, uh, I just wanted to let you know that this Friday will actually be my last day, so you'll be dealing with my replacement from Monday onwards, and she's excellent, so no worries, but just wanted to give you a heads up to avoid confusion, so, uh...yeah.
Them: Oh my goodness! Where will you be after this, if I might ask?
Me: I'm moving to AFrica [I always say it like that for some reason - AF rica - and am starting to get sick of the sound of my own voice saying AFrica].
Them: Oh My Goodness! What will you be doing?
Me: I'll be teaching actually [always with the fucking actuallies]! So yeah, I'm really excited, but sad to be leaving here.
Them: Oh wow! Well it's been a real pleasure, and be sure to [insert borderline awful comment about avoiding sickness, being wary of the natives, protecting the local flora/fauna, or not coming back pregnant/shaming my parents here]. And keep in touch, ok? Because we want to hear about all your adventures.
Me: Yeah of course, I'll keep in touch for sure [untruth]. It's been a pleasure.
Them: Ok, well if I don't talk to you before Friday, good luck and keep in touch!
Me: Alright, uh, thanks for everything! Bye!

I know everyone means well and this is exactly what I would be saying if the roles were reversed, but I don't know how to bring these conversations back to the realm of reality. Until my dying breath I will detest the perfunctory, even as I prop it up.

M.F. walks by my cubicle all the time and rubbernecks. There is NOTHING going on in here. I'm just sitting typing away, and he peers through the entrance in childlike wonderment as if I were training a cubicle full of highly functional chimps to mix bar drinks or something. Every time he's out of sight, I shake my head involuntarily and laugh, and for some reason it makes me feel good, to know that he's out there, weird as hell, doing his thing. I do weird stuff too and I wonder who thinks I'm weird.

In an email thread amongst my fellow RW09 WorldTeachers today, someone finally acknowledged that mixed in with all the excitement we've been trumpeting into each others' ears recently, he's also feeling nervous and sad. I jumped all over it with seconds and hear hears, and was quickly followed by the rest of the group. Nice to know I'm not the only one who's feeling a bit overwhelmed at the thought of spending some significant time away from loved ones and loved cities. You know it's all your fault right? You know I love you guys too much to leave, right? No no away I go but know that you've made it damn difficult and that that's a great thing.

It's COLD y'all! So, so cold. I love it because it feels like we're in Tahoe all the time now. But being outside even a little is painful. Luckily the Diller Building can't afford heat so I'm pretty much used to it. How cold will it get before none of us are expected to come to work? For some reason, and I'm ignoring the presence of snow here, as it gets colder things seem to get whiter and whiter for me. So I'm imagining it getting ten degrees colder and the whole world gets about twice as white and bright as it seems now, and as it gets colder and colder things get whiter and whiter and eventually it's all so bright that we can't see anything anymore and we just wrap up pleasant under the blankets and wait for some heat to come along and melt some color back into things.

blog, dave, morning, mum, worst, eight

2009-12-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

Almost time for this little blog to close its doors so I return to what I never left which is signing in when my head's buzzing with no clear thoughts and writing what pops up and being equal parts surprised embarrassed pleased that you all give a look in.

Dave walks in and we have a pleasant little exchange he and I. Last week! he says is it? I say and we laugh because god knows I have been looking at this day with the shiny hopeful eyes of the nearly baptized since early June. He gets it and I wonder if Dave knows that he's the only one in this building that kept me on good terms with human kind this year. I'll tell him that before I leave, I'll write it somewhere, because I twist the spoken word too tight.

We got up early this morning and had coffee before work; there was a good amount of time to sit and talk and enjoy the coldest morning I can think of in San Francisco. The ferry and its terminal are crisp white beautiful and the seagulls prance around like they own the place. Having a morning before work is novel and lovely. Feels more like life. Man oh man we can do what we want.

My mom today: "I don't want to sound like your mother, but...". What?

Phoning Mike on our respective UCSF phones is knock-down-drag-out my favorite thing to do at work. When that phone rings and I'm expecting 49755 and I see 53987 instead, my heart does a tiny dance in its own throat and I know I'm in for a treat. I love how the conversations can be about the most significant things going on amongst our circle of friends, or about how he CANNOT FATHOM how phones operate without switchboards anymore, or about me yakking on for three to four full minutes before I realize that he's gchatting with Lees and not listening to me. I love how a 20-minute conversation can end mid-sentence with 'gottagobye' and how invariably as I reach to return the receiver to its cradle I can still hear Mike ranting about friendship and decency and calling me THE WORST. You are! The best of the worst of the best JM.

I started this around 10am today and now it's 6pm. Eight hours is a working day. Four more of these left. Number 9, number 9, number 9.

t-give goals 2k9

2009-11-25T11:11:00.001-08:00

Because it's still good to have goals, even goals like these:

bake bread rolls
watch eps 1, 3, 9 and 10 of BOB
do not arrive late to epic copley family t-give day hike
finish a burnt-out case
make spoon bread
make something pumpkin
sleep 9+ hours each night
put bread sauce on everything
beat each 0f my family members in 1-on-1 cribbage
write two letters
drag something down from the attic

Realistically: Last chunk of time spent at home for two years. <3 t-give 2k9.

my boy's wicked smaht

2009-11-24T07:45:00.000-08:00

ben in all his glory

2009-11-19T15:27:00.000-08:00

Today is a big day for me. Day One of Year Three on the outside.

If you're reading this, there's a good chance that I'm grateful for you, that I love you, even though I probably wouldn't say it to your face more than once a year, and I'd have to be a little drunk.

I'll try to be less cynical this year. I have no real reason to be cynical anymore with mates like you around.

Here's to the terrible twos! I will raise a little hell and I won't forget how good I have it.

things one might write after spending six hours thinking about harm reduction

2009-11-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

Regarding Pulp Fiction and its possible influence on the decisions of someone administering Narcan, Pauli says:

Don't stab anyone in the heart ever with fucking anything.

Wise words kids! Thank you Pauli.

Will I ever be in a situation where I'm lying on the street, unconscious, with someone screaming in my ear "I'm taking all your dope", and will I be unresponsive, and will they see that I'm breathing fewer than nine times per minute, and will they give me a couple of rescue breaths and then shoot me in the northwest quadrant of my ass with Narcan? And if I never get to that point, is that because I was born to Pat and Kev, or because I've never been offered a drug, or because I went to college, or because my train came late one time, or because Ross asked me to remember the number 9?

Is it any weirder to imagine, given life eight years ago, that I am right now sitting in this bay window looking at this street corner, with a rumpled bed and Thao playing on these speakers, making the acquaintance of multiple people named Morgan, with varying degrees of success?

Bring your hips to me, oh bring your hips to me, oh oh. To me!

this is why the people hate the blogs

2009-11-10T23:14:00.000-08:00

This song is undefeated in making me cry! Well done, NMH. Something to be said for consistency, I guess.

remember remember

2009-11-05T11:56:00.000-08:00

Time for my now-annual Guy Fawkes posting. I love this holiday for nothing more than its general what-the-fuckery.

Remember, remember the fifth of November
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up the King and the parliament.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow.

By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys holloa boys let the bells ring
Holloa boys holloa boys God save the King!

And what should we do with him? Burn him!

(...what?)

chicago

2009-10-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

I used to be big-time on the pictures but something about it clicked off and taking them now makes me feel cheap and hollow. So I pressed the capture button on my little red (pink) camera precisely three times during my Chicago trip: one of the underside of my train upon my dad's request, one of Aya and me in the bean because that is what the bean is for, and one of the most depressing eternal flame of all time surrounded by ratty crazy pigeons (Aya: "chickens") to show Lisa.

Here are my Chicago pictures:

My nest on the train. A big white blanket, two pillows, two books, countless crosswords strewn about, a journal, the pen, mangoes (Lisa) apples (Juliette) cheddar cheese and chocolate covered raisins (Morgan) crackers (Tatyana) Cliff bars (Joe) little bread rolls (Pater), both seats fully reclined, a queen-sized square of property that has become my tiny kingdom.

The stretch of the Colorado River through Ruby Canyon that makes my whole self ache for something else. Pure desire.

The absolute blackness of flat Nebraska at some deep hour of night. I already feel like I'm crawling along the ocean floor when along side the train comes a massive truck, red and white lights surrounding its edges and wheels, the most beautiful gem I've ever seen, and I'm Zissou, right at home, swallowed, at rest.

Stepping out of the Amtrak station onto Adams Street and immediately being punched in the face by Chicago. Chicago, that somber city indeed, like a slug to the stomach or an anvil on your toe, like heavy, like brick.

Facing a tall concrete building after stepping out of the bus onto a dark street in Hyde Park, turning around a couple of times, lost and confidently waiting to be found. Out of the quiet comes that familiar clip of boots on the sidewalk and my full name called out, I whirl around and there's Aya, and the full weight of how much I've missed her wells up at the back of my eyes and I'm so glad to be just where I am just then.

Looking out of a third story window surrounded by green and reddening ivy onto trees, a park, a runner wearing long black leggins, the 6 bus, brick and beauty and seriousness. Saul Bellow lived here and I feel it.

A five-foot stretch of the Michigan Avenue bridge smells like bleu cheese, intensely like bleu cheese, like you are fighting your way through a massive round of bleu cheese, and ends abruptly, inexplicably.

Catching my first sight of Lake Michigan in the daylight and realizing I'm right in the middle of Ordinary People, and that what I thought was shoddy 80's camera work was actually an incredibly accurate portrayal of that steely, magnificent, ironed flat, terror-of-God lake. Later, seeing the el stop labeled Skokie and tasting pancakes at the back of my mouth.

Slouching down low on a bar couch in a neighborhood I like but don't know the name of, Aya on my left and Jon, meeting and exceeding all hyped up expectations, on my right. They talk over my head as I look across to the angry belligerents on the bench against the wall, watching them work themselves up, until one of them pounds one fist into the other and jumps to his feet, spits on the floor in a rage, and sits again, exhausted. I snap my attention back to the local conversation but I don't participate and I've had a bit too much and I'm so so content.

A shoddily handwritten sign on the doorway into the el, blue line temporarily closed, an arrow pointing vaguely westward. I never feel danger this late. My first experience in a cab. I am proud of our all-grown-up conversation and I wonder if he listens.

The glittering dining room of the Drake in the late afternoon, a harp, a fountain, all whiteness and brightness, lap it up. Another wedding party comes to rain on our bitter quasi-single parade; for a quiet moment with our tea and our freedom we are better than they are, smarter and better. I realize that I came to Chicago not for the sights or the bricks or the popcorn but to gripe and plot and hope over various liquids with Aya, and that this is what we do and I love it.

An inadequate goodbye in a doorway, a further goodbye note left in thin red pen on a napkin. We'll see each other at Christmas we've still got Christmas there's always Christmas.

Home home home home. Sitting up high on the back of a bench so he'll spot me, yellow backpack on my left, morphing the driver of every small grey car into him until I see them clearly enough to realize that they're a Chinese woman, a blond girl, an old man. Then finally in one car the vision holds and he's here he's getting out he's here and we're two grins and he's here and he's helping with my bags he's here and hello, perfect hello.

today i play

2009-10-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

heartbeats ... the knife
wagon wheel ... old crow medicine show
look at miss ohio ... gillian welch
copperhead road ... steve earle
frankie's gun ... the felice brothers
furr ... blitzen trapper
lady on the water ... blitzen trapper
the breeze ... dr. dog
creep ... radiohead
nice dream ... radiohead
sulk ... radiohead
disco 2000 ... pulp
common people ... pulp
long forgotten fairy tale ... the magnetic fields
kiss me like you mean it ... the magnetic fields
under pressure ... bowie + queen
ziggy stardust ... david bowie
rebel rebel ... david bowie
pale blue eyes ... velvet underground
afterhours ... velvet underground
this time tomorrow ... the kinks
strangers ... the kinks
les champs-elysees ... joe dessin

2009-10-15T13:37:00.001-07:00

new approach: face value.

no interpretation or extrapolation or inference. no guessing or assuming. no wondering. knowing or not knowing, asking, being told, believing, accepting, understanding. fact. happened. make sense.

7h55 - 8h00am

2009-10-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

once every while that smell when i wake up that feel that chill that complete all encompassing comfort that reminder of ENGLAND! and i know today has legs because it started with england.

sometimes it's nice to be scary rather than scared. yesterday, as i walk apace past a kenneth brannaugh lookalike on market street near hayes valley:

jesus, you scared me.

is it the hood? should i not wear the hood?

no no, it's just, you know.

what?

the city, you know.

my map is not done, probably won't get done. i lost my ruler, see. the ruler was the heart of it, because without the ruler there are no little squares, and sans squares continents and countries and counties and towns and individual homes get squashed and reassigned, and i kill and displace millions with the stroke of my humble pencil. so i'd rather let it sit.

Today's Dream

2009-10-07T12:54:00.000-07:00

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.

Many are convinced that mechanical time does not exist. When the pass the giant clock on the Kramgasse they do not see it; nor do they hear its chimes while sending packages on Postgasse or strolling between flowers in the Rosengarten. They wear watches on their wrists, but only as ornaments or as courtesies to those who would give timepieces as gifts. They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires. Such people eat when they are hungry, go to their jobs at the millinery or the chemist's whenever they wake from their sleep, make love all hours of the day. Such people laugh at the thought of mechanical time. They know that time moves in fits and starts. They know that time struggles forward with a weight on its back when they are rushing an injured child to the hospital or bearing the gaze of a neighbor wronged. And they know too that time darts across the field of vision when they are eating well with friends or receiving praise or lying in the arms of a secret lover.

Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. The live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. As such, the body must be addressed in the language of physics. And if the body speaks, it is the speaking only of so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.

Taking the night air along the river Aare, one sees evidence for two worlds in one. A boatman gauges his position in the dark by counting seconds drifted in the water's current. "One, three meters. Two, six meters. Three, nine meters." His voice cuts through the black in clean and certain syllables. Beneath a lamppost on the Nydegg Bridge, two brothers who have not seen each other for a year stand and drink and laugh. The bell of St. Vincent's Cathedral sings ten times. In seconds, lights in the apartments lining Schifflaube wink out, in a perfect mechanized response, like the deductions of Euclid's geometry. Lying on the riverbank, two lovers look up lazily, awakened from a timeless sleep by the distant church bells, surprised to find that night has come.

Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their seperate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truth is not the same.

2009-10-07T09:44:00.000-07:00

Requiem for a Dream, I failed you. You were too rich and too real. I'll see you later.

Hello, Roughing It! What a little romp you are.

chop chop

2009-10-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

I've killed my world and I've killed my time. Thank you, Kinks, for you articulate better than anyone the feeling of becoming a stranger.

I don't have anything to say I'm just bloggingabloggingablogging.

Sat on the balcony for 45 minutes today straining to spy a helicopter. The day was perfectly clear but you'd be surprised how much concentration it takes to look for a helicopter. I thought maybe I could read my book while I watched, but no, you have to keep scanning, left to right to left to right, so you don't miss it. It's surprising what hijinks your brain decides to get up to when left taskless for 45 minutes. First of all, it turns every sound, and I mean every sound, into the sound of a helicopter. When people opened the door behind me, that was a helicopter, and when they came out and sat on the balcony and chatted away, jabberjabberjabber became chop chop chopchopchopchopchop and their voices were helicopters. The T outbound was a helicopter, and the pelicans mucking about were helicopters, and the helicopter that flew behind me, in the wrong position, which was not the helicopter I was looking for, was absolutely a helicopter.

But my brain can wander in two directions at once so while it was busying itself dressing up the sounds of the city in helicopter clothes it was also just leaning on the generate random memory button. Remember when Ross called you on that payphone at school yes I do. Remember when you were driving along Grizzly Peak and you heard At the Bottom of Everything for the first time yes I do. Incidentally remember all the lyrics to At the Bottom of Everything yes I apparently do. Want to sing them right now under your breath on the balcony yes I do. Don't forget about the time you thought your parents forgot about your eighteenth birthday and then they surprised you and it made you cry, don't you forget that. Don't forget that the name of the kid that broke your arm in fifth grade was Brandon Fein. Go ahead and forget which of the Tamayo brothers you had a crush on, but remember that it was either James or Justin but definitely not Jeremy. Remember that they served shrimp at the department Christmas party last year and that the first time you hung out with Aya was at Cafe Claude. Remember that you went to England in the winter of 1995 and that someone surprised you with the plane ticket in an envelope at the bottom of the driveway on a warm day and that you yelled out. Remember Bear. Remember when you found out that Morgan Wagner is the one who makes all the Christmas candy and not Susan. Remember Simon March. Remember Sick Boy. Remember auditioning for county honor jazz band and feeling pretty good about yourself. Remember that your audition number was five. Remember remember the fifth of November the gunpowder treason and plot. Remember, that is to say never forget, that when you were standing by the fridge as a youngster and your brother was taller than you due to his age, not just his genes, he told you to remember the number nine, and remember that it was this fact that surfaced as you read the last words of Cat's Cradle.

Number nine, number nine, number nine.

goals for the weekend

2009-09-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

because it's good to have goals.

going home for the weekend because i love my family and because i ran out of rhino. oh you don't know that rhino is slang for money? my my aren't you behind the times.

run five miles
write to andy and richard and two more
make a fresh fruit pie
make something with pumpkin in it
get a <4 basket in disc golf
finish galapagos ~~and einstein's dreams~~
start the power and the glory
own at cribbage on both sides of the bay

SF Library Big Book Sale

2009-09-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

A really good haul from the friends of the San Francisco Library preview to the BIG BOOK SALE:

A Brief History of Time ... Stephen Hawking
On the Road ... Jack Kerouac
Einstein's Dreams ... Alan Lightman
Requiem For a Dream ... Hubert Selby, Jr.
The Double, Notes from the Underground, and The Eternal Husband ... Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mr. Norris Changes Trains ... Christopher Isherwood
Cakes and Ale ... W. Somerset Maugham
Kim ... Rudyard Kipling
Burr ... Gore Vidal
The Poorhouse Fair ... John Updike
Marabou Stork Nightmares ... Irvine Welsh
Don Quixote ... Cervantes
Economics of the Public Sector ... Joseph Stiglitz

...and three cool (if expensive at $1 apiece) maps: one of the UK, one of colonial Africa, and one of the world to use in my classroom.

Also, inexplicably free/good meatballs, cheesy rosemary bread, and wine.

Thanks to the FM for the ticket! You make standing in line for an hour feel like standing in line for 30 minutes tops.

The Greenest of Grahams

2009-09-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

Got to work this morning in a dark state of grump to find three Graham Greene novels on my desk! My day is turned. Since The Heart of the Matter is so excellent already, I'm just going to make this a full-on Graham Greene month. Deadlines:

by 23 September: The Heart of the Matter
by 30 September: The Power and the Glory
by 7 October: The Lawless Roads
by 14 October: A Burnt-Out Case

Last one in bold because I've been looking forward to it for months. Join in any of those if you'd like.

My favorite co-worker and fellow burnt-out case (and loaner of these books) has nothing at all on the wall in front of his desk but a lone cookie fortune taped without fanfare right in the middle, telling him that he is destined to do great humanitarian works. I don't really ever get a feeling about people but I get a feeling about him. Can't wait to see where he ends up.

diddums

2009-09-17T00:36:00.000-07:00

Weird that I could have written this post, from another random SF resident, nearly verbatim:

Ramona's By The Numbers

What a comforting warm sink it is to feel average.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay...

2009-09-16T22:25:00.001-07:00

...is BORING. There. Thank you Lisa and Noam for staring evenly at that gold circle Pulitzer Prize, wrinkling your noses, and saying meh.

I stopped in to Adobe Books today because I was five minutes early for dinner, and as usual I couldn't get past the yet-to-be-shelved boxes right in the entryway.

Great Short Works of Jack London
St. Mawr and The Man Who Died by D.H. Lawrence
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Stepped up to the counter ready to pay $22 for the above, and got charged just $15. They'll be worth well over $50 to me. Calculate the consumer surplus kids! Still two minutes to kill before dinner.

That is something I should definitely start on tonight or in a couple weeks.

2009-09-13T19:39:00.001-07:00

It's confusing how with some people you have to work so hard to stay in touch, constantly forcing plans and getting together for coffee and dinners and emailing and always it's the same, what's going on with you, how are things now, what's new, and you're just collecting these facts and filing them away, why, for what? Because you're Friends. They meant something to you once and they mean something to you now, that's what Friends are, they are the people you like to keep in touch with. But it's work, and it starts to smack of emptiness and irk when you realize that the thing you have in common is that you keep in touch. Keep in touch!

And then there are people like you. I couldn't stamp you out of my life if I tried, but I would never try, because that would be like trying to stamp my seventh grade math teacher out of my life: I just don't care. I don't mean that harshly. You don't care about me either. We're not supposed to care. We are pleasant to each other, I'd never dodge you on the street, but we don't click that well, I think you're pretty funny, you think I'm doing ok, that's it. But you're still here.

I wander into T's living room during my first semester at Berkeley. You're on the couch bent over a text book, looking like you just woke up in pajama pants and a white shirt. This is my neighbor from across the hall, she says, and you look up and you smile. Nice eyes, I think you're cute but I think everybody's cute. You sound really stuffed up, do you have a cold? You sort of have a cold. You're majoring in physics. I'm impressed, ok?

I slouch down low in my creaky chair in Wheeler Hall, and you slouch down next to me. No I'm not in this class, just auditing. How are you liking it? You're failing. What's your major now? You're majoring in journalism. I wasn't actually aware that journalism was offered at an undergrad major at Berkeley. You tell me it's kind of complicated and I start taking notes.

You burst into the party and see me right away, it's just a coincidence that I'm right near the door when you come in. You stagger up to me and I see that you're on the far side of drunk, and you pull me hard towards you and try to kiss me on the lips. I jerk my head to the side and you get my neck. Ok ok ok I say, you're fine, just sit down. I get you a glass of water and then I get distracted, I don't see you any more that night.

Sitting out on the street with our sushi and sake and you're being funny, damn funny, and it might concern me that the only thing I find funny anymore is a fellow burnt out case. Congratulations, I say, what was your degree in the end? Biology, you say, and I laugh, well done you. I encourage you to get a job at Bakesale Betty's, but that's just because it's what I want to do. You try to make a plan for all of us to hang out again, but T is reluctant to commit, she's got a busy month. Ok, we'll work it out later. See you around, probably.

2009-09-10T00:28:00.000-07:00

Green light.

You waltz out of the tavern. Yeah, you waltz, please note that you do not stumble. Aya looks at you with a face that's strange, and you realize she thinks it's the last time you'll see each other for a while. No no no you say, I'm seeing you Friday, it's not over yet, not yet. Now you stumble, but you're just giddy.

Red light. Green light.

You're seven and you're sitting on the patio with your feet in a bucket of soapy water, and Caitlin Walt has her feet in there too. You're wearing a shirt that says Earth Day and the a's are shared, you made it yourself, you don't realize how great you are but you'll understand when you're older and not so great anymore. Caitlin Walt goes by Sarah in high school, you can't help feeling like she's not worth so much when she goes tossing away her name. You'd like to go by Joanna Turner but let's be honest that would be stupid.

Red light. Green light.

You walk up to a pile of clothes on the street and are about to kick them high up into the air in your glee but you check yourself because you're not wearing proper shoes. You dodge right just in time and see that huddled amongst the clothes is a person, lying right in the middle of the sidewalk on top of a drain vent to keep warm. You shudder and hope they're alive but that's all you do.

Red light. Green light.

You're fifteen and you're perched right up on top of the fence, one leg on the cemetery side, the other leg almost over, when your pants snag on the chain link and tear clear through the pocket. You say fuck and you're a little shocked because it's the first time you've said That Word out loud. You see Travis and the others a little ahead of you and you're aware of a broad search light creeping slowly towards your back; you drop down and sit behind a stone with one leg stretched out, breathing harder that seems necessary, and you're feeling quite old, and you're grinning.

Red light. Green light.

You're twenty and you're sitting on the cold stone tiles in the hallway in the DR, and Julia and Kathy have gone to bed, and you and Natalie are wearing shorts and long sleeved tee shirts and planning the future. You've never been happier.

Red light. Green light.

You're heading up Market and you get to the beginning of the slight hill. You see the sign that says Awesome Hot Cakes and note like you always note that the first E is just a W turned sideways. You wonder if you'll ever be able to see that with your eyes without noting it with your brain, and you calculate roughly that you'll probably only see that sign 26 more times. You decide to count and after 20 times you'll try the hot cakes. You promise.

Red light. Green light.

You're twenty and you're sitting on the cold stone cement on the driveway in Pleasant Hill, and Mum and Dad are inside, and you and Natalie are wearing skirts and tee shirts and you're crushing the future, you alone. Natalie is crying and you feel terribly powerful because you are the one wreaking all this havoc, responsible for all these tears, but with this power you feel cold and alone.

Red light. Green light.

You're twenty-two and you're in a shabby lovely hotel room in Paris. The windows reach from the ceiling to the floor and they have them flung wide open, even though it's past midnight and freezing. You finish the hand of cribbage and you frantically search for something more, one other thing you have to do, a last task or question or triviality that keeps you there just a couple more mintues, but the time has come to say goodbye, to hug as tight as you can with hopes that it'll last longer that way, to smile and convey meaning with your eyes, you should be good at that by now. You do all that and make your way down the crooked stairs, blind and weak with crying, onto the street, and now you're really stumbling on the uneven cobblestones, and through the haze and the blur at the very back of your head you're mildly annoyed that you're not dressed nearly as well as the people smoking outside the cafe on the corner.

Red light. Green light.

You wait for the green hand and look up 18th Street towards the park as you cross. You think for the hundredth time that you wouldn't really have to leave that block if you didn't want to, and you wonder for the two hundredth time whether you could support yourself working at Faye's. An old man, face inhuman, stops you in your tracks and asks if you can help him out with a single penny. Your bag is lousy with pennies. You tell him no and the worst part of you makes you reach down into your bag and rattle your pennies with your fingertips as you brush past him. You take out your keys and spread out the two square ones on your palm. You can tell which one is cleaner even though the difference is now virtually imperceptible; you use that one to open the iron gate. A bill and a postcard. What day was this? Oh yeah, Wednesday.

Red light.

freewrite on freewriting

2009-09-04T16:34:00.000-07:00

Yes freewriting, you remember it, from your middle school days, where you got to class and perhaps teacher didn't have her lesson quite solidified yet so she set a timer for ten minutes, threw out a topic and told you not to erase.

I always associate freewriting with one Kimberly Simmons, my seventh grade core teacher, because she was the genesis of my biggest freewriting disaster. We had to freewrite in her class every day, just to practice penmanship or something, and she would write some question up on the board to get your juices flowing (does a more horrifying phrase exist?), but she promised, on her honor as a teacher and as a child of God, that she wouldn't read a word of what we wrote unless we drew a little peace sign up in the corner of the first page, which was like a little permission stamp from us. Because we had to store these journals in the classroom you see, so good old Simmons could check off that we had done the work, but she said she wouldn't read them without permission. Me, little Jo, mortified at the prospect of criticism from peers and teachers alike, never, ever drew the peace sign, and wrote quite contentedly about the various and sundry topics assigned, but as the days and weeks and months wore on I began to doubt the divine inspiration of Simmons's topic choices, and freewriting frankly got tedious. So one day, Alex, Peter and I agreed that we would all use that day's freewrite to spew the most bitter vitriol we possibly could against the institution itself. We were protected by the absence of the peace sign, so we really let ourselves go. I used the opportunity to spin off into a diatribe against Simmons's methods in general, and even as I wrote I was surprised at the amount of pent up tween rage that made its way onto the page. Freewriting was pretty great when you let yourself get into it. Alex and Peter agreed. Good freewrite.

That bitch read every word. We all had detention for a week, and not the nice kind of detention where you show up and she tells you to go home, but the kind where she actually makes you do heavy lifting.

Do you see a peace sign, Simmons? My ten minutes is up.

wicked smart

2009-09-02T22:01:00.000-07:00

Ben nags me all day to clean up my room. I get frustrated, I don't know why he should care so much. I clean it just to get him off my case. A brand new longboard is hidden for me underneath all my clutter, the one I've been wanting for months. Mum Dad and Ross find similar-caliber presents, bought with Ben's recent bonus.

We're playing disc golf and his driver winds up in a monster tree. There are four other discs up there already; this tree is so huge and unclimbable that everyone just leaves their captured discs for dead. Ben sizes up the tree and has all five discs within 20 mintues. The best two are for me.

We're walking down the street and Ben makes a game out of forcing himself between couples walking towards him. Old couple is more points. Holding hands is the most points. Never gets old.

Ben's going to my favorite pizza place for dinner. I jokingly tell him that I want leftovers. I get home late to find two slices boxed up on my landing, inside my locked iron gate.

Things that other people find difficult to climb, Ben climbs with no hands.

There are four people I'm bound to for life, no escaping them, no time or distance could possibly erode our connections. I'm glad he's one of them.

collegial hour

2009-08-31T15:50:00.000-07:00

Queasy and out of sorts, starving and can't stomach anything, not even sure how to spell stomach(e), that's the caliber of the day. Boss cordially insists that he will treat the lab to happy hour at 5:45pm and the thought of sitting on one of those tiny metal chairs on that barren concrete wasteland of a quad sipping a tepid beer with some of the more passive-aggressive and burned-out of my workmates is making me repeat the word rage, calmly and coolly, under my breath, over and over. All I want to do is go to the fifth floor balcony and hash out some Friday night feelings, or go to my flat and have an ice cream with my FM, but some sort of weird social decency scale, some level OF HUMAN BONDAGE, is sucking me into that limbo of a concrete quad for an anti-purgatory of a happy hour, and I can't do anything about it, because all my efforts to point out that if we felt like spending time with each other outside of work then happy hour wouldn't have to be mandated are somehow gently deflected or squashily consumed like shooting arrows into a poolful of pudding. I'm left feeling sick and hoarse and dazed and small.

Why are things being demanded of me? They're lucky I'm even here.

2009-08-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

oh, hello august. didn't see you there.

oh, you're leaving? bye bye then.

of human bondage

2009-08-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

I can't remember the last time I read a book that left me with such an ache for more. I feel like I lost someone close, now that Philip Carey is no longer a part of my day-to-day, and I can't believe that my time with him is over. It fits, it's designed that way; this sense of loss, which turns to meaninglessness if you think too long on it, assaults Philip throughout the book, and Maugham's last hurrah seems to be to inject his pain into your heart. But I'll take it. For me, the reason this book was worth reading is the reason life is worth living: To see a life, like a pattern in a persian rug, and to be happier for having known it. Happier as defined by you and you alone.

I'm in slack-jawed awe of anyone who write a book for the purpose of following one life. Of Human Bondage is added to the ranks of David Copperfield and The Adventures of Augie March in this regard. To be able to take someone from basic infancy through to settled, top-of-the-hill adulthood, and to do that justice without a hint of tedium, wow! Maybe I tend to like this genre because the Davids and the Augies and the Philips go through everything I've known so far and then get just a little farther, and even though none of these endings are endings at all, there at least seems to be some sort of contentment reached that signifies the end of the struggling period I've found myself stewing in for the last five years. Or maybe it's just the best writers that are able to tackle these epic life works, so reading them necessarily means reading the best books you've read in a while.

I want more of this but I have to stumble into it. I didn't seek any of these out. OHB sat on my desk for four months before Ian's recommendation made me read the first chapter during lunch one day. Now I want more more more Maugham but I don't want Philip to fade into the background. Now I'm in book limbo where the first page of everything I pick up will be scrutinized against the memory of the last page I just read, and nothing could possibly measure up. Sure sure recommendations are welcome but if you say anything by Michael Pollan it's over yeah?

2009-08-20T12:29:00.000-07:00

So you feel the need to write.

Yes, yes I do.

Why?

Why do I feel the need to write, or why do I write?

Those are the same thing, don't waste my time.

Fine, ok. Because I see things and I think of them in terms of how they would sound written down, and I tolerate things much better when I narrate them in my head. If I can't put words to it then I can't grasp it and I feel the need to grasp things, more now than ever.

But you can't finish anything.

Don't you think I know?

You write out little scenes and then you give up.

Yes.

Because those are the only things you can grasp.

Hm. Yes.

Do you write for other people to read?

I told you, I put things down in writing to give them the gravity they deserve in my own head. That's all I can do, I'm not going to fake an understanding of things that are out of my reach for the benefit of other people.

But you read what other people write, you respect that, you respect it above all else.

Only when they're writing what they understand.

But you don't understand it.

I'm not trying to, I just like the way the words stack when someone knows what they're talking about.

Sometimes you understand it.

Yes, sometimes I do.

What's that?

Heaven.

Do you think your life would be a failure if no one ever understood you that way?

A bit, yes.

Do you think your life will be a failure?

A bit, yes.

private lives

2009-08-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

A Wednesday that feels like a Friday and I'm hun n n n gry.

Many roads I wish I had never started down.

Did I want to have my teenaged ideal squashed like the moldy orange that he apparently is all over my once-twinkling eyes today? I'm sure you're as swell a person as I am but who can possibly look appealing under the harsh glare of the all-revealing limelight? It's not desinged to make you look nice it's designed to make you look filleted. I remember sitting in the van eating chocolate ice cream with peanut butter in it. Can I have that memory back please? Can I put that one on top? Can I make that memory your profile picture and leave the rest hidden? Let's be de-friends so I can only see that ice cream. Please.

I'm out of control of everything. Do other people feel this out of control? Control is a tough nut.

2009-08-16T15:09:00.001-07:00

Do you know the story of Cybelline? There were nine books that contained all the history of the world, and he wanted to buy them. She named the price, and it was too high, so he wouldn't pay. So she destroyed half the books and doubled the price, and he still wouldn't pay. This kept going on until there was just one book left, and he realized he'd better buy it or else there would be nothing left. So he paid a lot more than he originally would have.

Do you understand the point I'm making here?

Seriously? No.

Right, well, look it up on the internet or something.

2009-08-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

People grow on me, almost invariably; my first impression is negative, you're too loud, you're too pretty, you walk like you left the hanger in, you're a HIPSTER, you probably talk about Japan a lot, you should stop being such a fucking weirdo. Give it time, stew with me a little, send me a Christmas card, use the word impresario when I'm not expecting it, grow on me, let me grow on you, don't give it up for free right away, don't think about it, don't force it, if you don't have the time then I don't want your condensed soup just let's pick it up later ok?

Talk to me about the right book when I thought all you knew was parasites and pipettes and you'll grow on me a little faster, but you don't know what the right book is, and you could have picked any one of those books, but you picked that one, so well done you.

When you know someone's read a book you know 300-700 pages of what is in their head. You know that no matter what they think of Larry, they've spent time with him, they know him like you do, or as well as you do in their own way, you have a Mutual Friend. You may be on opposite sides of the office and your lives may be heading in opposite directions but you've both spent a week in 1944 and you care to reminisce.

Surprise me won't you?

Words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

2009-08-03T15:57:00.000-07:00

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

The whole world ought to pass by this bed and say: "That is Franz Kemmerich, nineteen and a half years old, he doesn't want to die. Let him not die!"

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.

He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had befun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

Their pale turnip faces, their pitiful clenched hands, the fine courage of these poor devils, the desperate charges and attacks made by the poor brave wretches, who are so terrified that they dare not cry out loudly, but with battered chests, with torn bellies, arms and legs only whimper softly for their mothers and cease as soon as one looks at them.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

Just as we turn into animals when we go up to the line, because that is the only thing which brings us through safely, so we turn into wags and loafers when we are resting. We can do nothing else, it is a sheer necessity. We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peacetime, would be out of place here. Kemmerich is dead, Haie Westhus is dying, they will have a job with Hans Kramer's body at the Judgment Day, piecing it together after a direct hit; Martens has no legs anymore, Meyer is dead, Max is dead, Beyer is dead, Hammerling is dead, there are a hundred and twenty wounded men lying somewhere or other; it is a damnable business, but what has it to do with us now - we live. If it were possible for us to save them, then it would be seen how much we cared - we would have a shot at it though we went under ourselves; for we can be damned quixotic when we like; fear we do not know much about - terror of death, yes; but that is a different matter, that is physical.

I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?

They talk too much for me. They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot comprehend. I often sit with one of them in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes, that is it - they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being is taken up with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole essence; I cannot even say myself exactly what I mean.

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world's condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim. But who can draw sucha distinction when he looks at these quiet men with their childlike faces and and apostles' beards. Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free.

At once a new warmth flows through me. These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades. I am no longer a shuddering spec of existence, alone in the darkness; - I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.

"Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up - take more, for I do now know what I can even attempt to do with it now."

So long as I do not know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will obliterate it, this picture. But his name, it is a nail that will be hammered into me and never come out again. It has the power to recall this for ever, it will always come back and stand before me.

A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes in its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the crowding apparitions, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support, how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness. We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out. They the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night. Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

2009-07-31T17:42:00.000-07:00

Required reading for all Californians. If you have any hankering for a literary/historical whirlwind romance or any desire for some of that solid gold perspective, read this book. You can have my copy. It reminded me of the end of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, where they get on stage at San Dimas High and romp you through history with the the figures they gathered.

Required reading for all human beings. It only takes 45 minutes! This was my first taste of Mark Twain, and I guess I'm on the bandwagon now.

the daring young man on the flying trapeze

2009-07-30T09:47:00.001-07:00

I first heard it quietly while we were making salad more than two years ago, Nicki singing, mumbling really, under her breath.

He flies through the air with the greatest of ease; the daring young man on the flying trapeze.

Like the time Peter said sit down Jo or the time my Dad said which would you rather be or a wasp, the words cemented in my memory and in spite of their blandness they have never faded. And then this Saroyan inserts himself into the situation; he liked those words too, and he woke up each day in San Francisco too, and hey hey hey:

He (the living) dressed and shaved, grinning at himself in the mirror. Very unhandsome, he said; where is my tie? (He had but one.) Coffee and a gray sky, Pacific Ocean fog, the drone of a passing streetcar, people going to the city, time again, the day, prose and poetry. He moved swiftly down the stairs to the street and began to walk, thinking suddenly, It is only in sleep that we may know that we live. There only, in that living death, do we meet ourselves and the far earth, God and the saints, the names of our fathers, the substance of remote moments; it is there that the centuries merge in the moment, that the vast becomes the tiny, tangible atom of eternity.

He walked into the day as alertly as might be, making a definite noise with his heels, perceiving with his eyes the superficial truth of streets and structures, the trivial truth of reality. Helplessly his mind sang, He flies through the air with the greatest of ease; the daring young man on the flying trapeze; then laughed with all the might of his being. It was really a splendid morning; gray, cold, and cheerless, a morning for inward vigor; ah, Edgar Guest, he said, how I long for your music.

And then:

If the truth were known, he was half starved, and yet there was still no end of books he ought to read before he died. He remembered the young Italian in a Brooklyn hospital, a small sick clerk named Mollica, who had said desperately, I would like to see California once before I die. And he thought earnestly, I ought at least to read Hamlet once again, or perhaps Huckleberry Finn.

I wonder what his final count was when he died, and whether he was anywhere near satisfied with it, and whether that's possible.

what dreams may come

2009-07-29T23:05:00.000-07:00

To be, or not to be - that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep - perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

A new dimension to the pill. What worse reality might the placid life hold?

Nat

2009-07-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think she'd look at me today and be sick with disappointment.

Fair enough, I'd say, but you try living in this head.

Sox

2009-07-12T16:44:00.001-07:00

Rest in peace old boy!

E P I C

2009-07-05T15:14:00.000-07:00

Today: Rewarded for being a tennis fan. As heartbreaking as those last five minutes were, I can't help but be pleased with this, with blowing scores of records out of the water, with an old hack emerging as a formidable, respectable, and lovable tennis force, with McEnroe rabbiting on an on to fill the blessed silence with his largely useless commentary, with family constantly placing and breaking bet upon bet, with Benny echoing my joy and my disgust from afar, with 138mph second serves, with nerves ground down to their bitter nubs after a THIRTY-GAME LONG fifth set, and finally, with this rare, beautiful, unbridled enthusiasm for nothing but tennis.

Federer (2) def Roddick (6) 5-7 7-6(8-6) 7-6(7-5) 3-6 16-14

love fifteen :)

And Another

2009-07-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

I started up a Rwanda blog because I do not want the internet to forget that I was here. Visit please! These blogs will be existing in tandem like icily civil stepsisters for the next six months, after which In Rwanda will take over full time and Big Beautiful Tasteless will be gently euthanized.

inhibit

2009-06-22T00:28:00.000-07:00

verb to hold in check; to discourage from free or spontaneous activity especially through the operation of inner psychological or external social constraints

oh how these inner phsychological and external social constraints are discouraging me from free and spontaneous activity! my tongue equals the weight of 1,000 squids. it's too easy to say the wrong thing.

What. A. Day.

2009-06-20T01:22:00.000-07:00

The most serene of moments. Mark tells me I'm all on my own, that if I can take the boat out 200 yards, capsize it, right it, get the hell back in, and sail it back to a perfect docking then I've passed. It's completely dark now; all the other boats are long put away and everyone else in my class is up in the yard celebrating, exept one, he stays to watch.

Just me and the boat in the blackness. After whooping and hollering and yelling out commands and arguing and laughing for three hours, the calm is surreal. Taking my time, I sheet everything in, I fall off, and sure as Sunday the boat bows to physics and start to tip. I love the feel of the mast finally coming to rest on the water. I jump in, I split my eyes half in and half out of the water for that cool effect, I shore up some strength, and then with two strong kicks I propell myself up into the now-vertical cockpit, over the center grip, and in one relatively smooth motion I'm on the side of the boat, ten feet above the water, and I raise a little victory fist to Mark on the skiff. Completing my circle I hop down on the center board and right the boat easily, but then I manage to clamber into the low side and capsize the damned thing again. I pop up to show Mark I'm alright and repeat. Now the boat is up and I'm in the water, holding onto the high back side, and my energy is gone. I kick and I flail and I try every combination of feet-first-arms-first-head-first-whatever-else-I've-got-first but my sodden carcass will not go in, and now I've lost what little energy I had. Mark pulls up close on the skiff and tells me calmly and quietly that if I can just get myself back into the goddamned boat then the rating is mine to have, but if not, I fail. I'm on the verge of tears. I gather my thoughts. I hoist myself a quarter of the way in, cursing the harness with every inch. I pause, I think about which specific muscles I need to contract next to push on. I contract them. I push on. I'm half way in. I can tell if I just get one more centimeter of torso over the back side then my weight will shift and I'll be home free, but I'm so tired, so tired, and the muscles are not contracting. And even as I realize how cheesily epic I am making this moment, I think about running, and about editing, and about planning symposia, and about hanging shelves, and finding jobs, and being a sister and a daughter, and I think about Doug standing back there on the dock, and I think about Rwanda, and I realize that this beast that I'm fighting in every aspect of my life that I love, this effort, is the key, and that if I don't show myself right this second that I am capable of making an effort, then I will have officially given up, and I will literally and metaphorically sink to a level of mediocrity that will color the rest of my life.

So I say fuckall to my tiredness and to every time I've ever lobbed myself a softball when I should have accepted a challenge and I get back in the boat, and lie on my back and have a little cry.

Then I dock "perfectly" (ha) and get my rating and have a few celebratory beers and a celebratory hamburger and a celebratory deep conversation with Mark and do some celebratory dancing in the yard and take a celebratory hour long stroll to the BART station and get a celebratory walk back to my apartment, complete with celebratory nerves and celebratory excitement.

I've said it tongue in cheek so many times but now I believe it wholeheartedly: Sailing is a metaphor for life. I wasn't sure until last night that I'm going to be ok.

2009-06-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

Friday afternoon and this place is wrapping me in a blanket of achy nostalgia. Toczyski lab is playing their typical Friday afternoon melancholy rap music, and all of third floor north is passively subjected to it, there's no complaining when it's not up for discussion. It makes me laugh how casual Fridays are so roguely observed here, how it's never mentioned, there is no beer:30 here, but people tentatively and furtively let their collective hair down on Friday afternoons, their thin veneer of relaxedness covering an extra tension. Friday is the day where when we mess up, it gets to grow for three full days, rather than being nipped in the bud tomorrow morning.

The wine glass from open house three weeks ago is still on my desk. They said please return them to the kitchen but the kitchen is so far .

My stomach is all tied up in knots like it used feel just before a jazz band concert in middle school. What are these nerves for? I'm all keyed up with nowhere to put it. Jesus, clammy hands and everything! How odd, and how crippling.

I have two staplers on my desk, one of which works, and the other of which does not and is plagued with a litany of issues. It has GENOME written on the back in white-out. It kind of sort of staples things, but it does these weird inside-out jobs, and everything ends up in a bungle. I think I've kept it for this long because it reminds me of when Tim drops Garreth's stapler out of the window. It says GARRET on it in Tipp-Ex because GARRETH wouldn't quite fit.

JP is not wearing his glasses today and it reminds me of Urkel turning all suave in that one string of episodes of Family Matters. I swear I have never seen an episode of Family Matters but I somehow know both the general outline and various subthemes of the show in some detail. Like the knowledge just leaked into my brain any time I passed a TV that had recently been showing Family Matters.

While we're on the subject of TV shows, which "we" are apparently, Dexter is a m a z i n g. Why am I paying for cable? Why is a show that is about revenge killing, and only revenge killing, so good? It's that theme song I tell you the theme song. If I could choose a life that felt like any television show theme song in all of television history then I would choose the life that feels most like Dexter's.

Dum, da dum, da duuummmmm.

my desktop is my new religion

2009-06-16T13:12:00.001-07:00

it was basically a disaster before, with things scattered everywhere, vitals next to meaninglesses, and a massive, pixellated green monstrosity in the background. now though, ah.

2009-06-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

Whoa.

2009-06-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

I miss them so much today that it stings. Why today?

so...which movies DO you like?

2009-06-09T14:58:00.000-07:00

these ones, to start :)

trainspotting

2009-05-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

this book is messing me up and i feel it slowly taking over my brain like the confident virus that it is. i see the ridiculousness as i filter my own life through the book, referring to dime bags of parmesan cheese and arranging my granola in lines on the desk, and as i type this out it comes through my head in a scottish accent. how many times now have i decided to stop reading and to return it to the shelf, decided that there cant be any good in knowing, that some things should be kept under a bucket in the corner. why do i pick it up again and again, whaen ah ken thit it doesnae help us but jist brings us doon. who gets to decide the difference between books and heroin.

can't get enough of this isherwood

2009-05-22T07:29:00.000-07:00

If it weren't so tedious, I would retype every word of his that I read here in this blog, if only to make these slightly-hard-to-find books a little more available to whoever. I stopped dogging the bottom corners of the pages because it was useless, made the book twice as thick.

And now before I slip back into the convention of calling this young man "I," let me consider him as a seperate being, a stranger almost, setting out on this adventure in a taxi to the docks. For, of course, he is almost a stranger to me. I have revised his opinions, changed his accent and his mannerisms, unlearned or exaggerated his prejudices and his habits. We still share the same skeleton, but its outer covering has altered so much that I doubt if he would recognize me on the street. We have in common the label of our name, and a continuity of consciousness; there has been no break in the sequence of daily statements that I am I. But what I am has refashioned itself throughout the days and years, until now almost all that remains constant is the mere awareness of being conscious. And that awareness belongs to everybody; it isn't a particular person.

The Christopher who sat in that taxi is, practically speaking, dead; he only remains reflected in the fading memories of us who knew him. I can't revitalize him now. I can only reconstruct him from his remembered acts and words and from the writings he has left us. He embarrasses me often, and so I'm tempted to sneer at him; but I will try not to. I'll try not to apologize for him, either. After all, I owe him some respect. In a sense he is my father, and in another sense my son.

How alone he seems!

CSC

2009-05-17T19:50:00.000-07:00

What a little gem Cal Sailing Club has turned out to be!

As Alex's first student, I managed to handily capsize our little craft, chucking all three of us into the disgusting, dead-crabby bay water, inside of 30 minutes. Alex in backup glasses, me with all-borrowed clothes, and Tanya rocking nothing but an overcoat:

And then we windsurfed. I will officially be quitting my dayjob, volunteer positions, half-read books, friendships, and all future ambitions, effective immediately. I will only windsurf. Until I die from the STD I definitely got from this communal wetsuit:

Also, this:

I'll miss flat'.

Eichengreen Gets Steinbeck

2009-05-06T16:44:00.000-07:00

I really liked this:

Steinbeck on the Crisis

I started reading because the Steinbeck quote was so good, and was then surprised and pleased to find that the voice of economic reason in the middle and end of the post is good old Eichengreen, who presided over my toughest and arguably best class at Cal.

The Up Series

2009-05-04T00:04:00.001-07:00

I think I've now endorsed this verbally to everyone I've ever met, so I figured it finally merited a post. Plus I am watching 28 Up right now at my parents' house, and needed a reason to practice taking screenshots of Nicholas Hitchon (below).

The Up Series is an effort by documentarian Michael Apted in which he films a slew of seven-year-old British schoolchildren in 1964, and then subsequently films them every seven years (i.e. at ages 14, 21 28, etc.) until the present. He talks with them about their views on family, education, sex, politics, social responsibility, class, and various and sundry other things, ostensibly without slant or judgment. The results are, in my opinion, fascinating, especially since we are now able to watch Seven Up! through 49 Up in rapid succession, rather than waiting in real time for the episodes to air. 56 Up comes out in 2012; catch up while you can!

Show me the man

at seven

and I will show you

the man.

Blind Pilot : Oviedo

2009-05-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

2009-05-01T15:40:00.001-07:00

We need to have a sense of urgency about this. It can't happen tomorrow, it has to be now, today. Other people, they don't understand this, but we can't operate on their time, we have to push them.

I don't understand. Urgency, why? What's the stress over this?

Because we have to be on top, to do things in real time.

I don't understand what you mean. I don't know how else to do things.

It needs to be done in real time, now.

I can't operate like that. I can't feel your urgency in my limbs or in my brain. Do you know what you're saying? Why can't this wait till tomorrow, till they're ready to deal with it?

Because they don't understand, they don't feel any sense of real time. You need to constantly push, to strive, to stretch, to be successful here. Maybe I got the wrong impression when I first talked to you, it seemed that you had a passion and a fire for this, that we were on the same page.

I didn't know then, I don't know now what you saw. I didn't know this was it. I thought you wanted to know, not to say first. I thought I could help that. I didn't sign up to tie the hands of other people, to watch them grow smaller.

What are you saying? Where is this is coming from? If we don't get this done now, then we're dead.

How can that be? How can you throw your words and your weight around like that?

Because we have to be on top. Do you think I got to be on top by being weak, by waiting around? No, I did things in real time, I pushed. Other people, they don't get it, they don't think like us. Nobody gets to be here, that's why I brought you here, because of what I saw. Don't you want to be here?

How can you push everything so clearly into black and white? Can't you see that you don't know where you're going? And you want to take me along, but you don't know where you're taking me.

I don't understand you. I thought I saw someone who wanted to make it.

Where?

Here.

We are here.

I don't understand you.

I don't understand you.

A bunch of high-mass ideas to move about.

2009-05-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

And with a casual flick of his fingers on the keys he chops me down at the knees and what is there to say but you're right you're right you're right and can you blame me do you blame me?

On Portland

2009-04-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

Went to London and Paris and had a great time, but leading the pack by leaps and bounds so far this year for favorite destination city is surprising, underhyped, lowdown, weird-as-hell Portland. I can't keep track of all the times Aya, Chris and I looked at each other laughing, wondering why and how we were having such a great time in a place we'd been practically discouraged to visit.

Having easygoing, funny, spontaneous travel partners helped:

Chris, Busby, and Aya

The primary, essential elements of our trip:

Cookies. All coffee should automatically come with cookies.

Plaid. Turns out this is required in Portland. We literally ended up changing into recently-bought second-hand plaid shirts at a bus stop due to city-wide peer pressure.

Book, specifically Powell's City of Books, which beats Moe's, City Lights AND The Abbey hands down. Please note that this picture is of just ONE of many stacks of used, super cheap copies of Metamorphosis ALONE.

Excellent hosts made the city feel immediately welcome, and are perfect examples of the borderline-creepy friendliness of the general Portland population:

Richard, Kelly and Chris

And the place we stayed was not bad, for $10 each per night:

And the hikes. Oh, the hikes!

But it was the mentality that we could immediately feel, the unhurried pace, the unconcerned attitude, the predisposition to helpfulness and friendliness, that made it painfully hard to leave this place knowing that we'd be returning to San Francisco, to UCSF, to tall buildings and on time and no time and all the time, to a neighborhood where your plaid has to be tight and ironic, to a daily push to BE ON TOP.

Of what? For what? Where is my coffee? I miss Portland.

When everything you read starts to sound the same...

2009-04-23T00:26:00.000-07:00

...listen!

I read a quote in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our FamiliesWWTIYTTWWBKWOF, or perhaps just We Wish to Inform You) which turned out to be from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Made me want to read more, so I did, a bit:

" (hereby abbreviated Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: in the force of imagination that pierces or exhalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures. To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from the bridge beyond the corn-fields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us."

Made me think of a standout passage (for me, anyway) in Augie March, which put words to a sense that I had but couldn't express verbally, as the above passage did again for me today:

"Unless you want to say that we're at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share in grandeur is like a boy's share in fairytale kings, being of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we're comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods, which is just what would please Caesar among us teeming democrats, and if we don't have any special wish to abdicate into some different, lower form of existence out of shame for our defects before the golden faces of these and other old-time men, then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names. But I don't want to be pushed into exaggeration by such opinion, which is the opinion of students who, at all ages, feel their boyishness when they confront the past."

Which reminds me of another takes-the-words-out-of-my-mouth passage that I read recently (and at this point I am fully realizing that this post is for myself alone and is dead boring to anyone else reading this far), this time from Paul Theroux's introduction to Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps (the book itself didn't do anything for me, but the introduction was surprisingly epic):

"Drinking and watching her, 'I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know. The unconscious mind is often sentimental; I have writen 'a shape,' and the shape, of course, is roughly that of a human heart.' This thought is unlikely to occur to the long-term expatriate in an African country, who would never think of a map of the whole continent. Such a person, unsentimental for reasons of survival, would think of Africa as the small town or clearing he is working in. Any maps he thinks of would be maps of his district, or at the very most, his province."

Being able to understand my present location, in geography and history, with any kind of realistic perspective has always seemed to me to be a great challenge, and I guess I've always seen it, and still see it, as an ultimate goal to be reached, maybe even the purpose of life. I don't believe that realism precludes optimism, and that's why I admire Augie so much, because he's able to see the world with such an even, realistic perspective, but he somehow finds hope and pleasure in every moment. He sees life as it is, and he loves it. Can we ask for anything more?

The more I read and the more I see, the smaller the holes in the fabric become. Read and see, read and see.

procrastination station

2009-04-22T16:51:00.000-07:00

why didnt i just take care of it why dont i ever just take the little steps that i know need to be taken on time why am i so afraid of action of following through of tying up loose ends of getting it right am i that concerned that things will be too difficult why am i so terrified of difficulty this is my problem this is the root of it all this is why i suddenly find myself with two hundred and eighty eight dollars worth of library fines for a tiny book on lenin that i never even read its all george orwells fault he wrote animal farm he forced me into my brief and blinding wave of intense need to find out all about the russians why did it dissipate so fast why couldnt i just admit to myself that i didnt want to slog through lenin book why cant i let myself like what i like and stop forcing it i always end up paying now im paying real money so much money and they are holding my transcripts hostage those bastards they are using my need for their gain i never liked the people who work at the library anyway why are they always so glum why arent they ever reading books when i see them why is that guy at the front desk of morrison such a jerk doesnt he realize where he gets to sit all day i bet not a single soul in the world has missed that stupid lenin book who wants it the computer wants it no one is aware of its absence except the nagging hounding computer it sends me mail it demands my money it holds my grades back it holds me back why cant i just sit the computer down and explain the situation i feel i am being reasonable i dont think the book was ever really worth that much and i doubt that i have caused nearly three hundred dollars worth of wear and tear on the computer system ill pay for the book ill pay for the paper ill pay for the emotional damage done to all the students who had to see the word missing next to book title as they frantically pored through the library catalog during the last year ill pay ill pay why didnt i just take care of it why did i look at it sitting there on my shelf so many times and not extend my hand why was i so afraid of it why didnt i listen to everyone else WHY DONT I THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE

Belated Euro Pictures

2009-04-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

All in random order, some representative snaps of a truly lovely trip:

Bloomsbury, where we stayed, and the (fictional) location of Black Books!

My favorite cantankerous old buzzard

Possibly my favorite part of air travel

Me and Nelson's Column

And enter we did

Abject terror at the London Dungeon

Interesting

Trafalgar Square

All of London at our feet and we're on a playstructure at Regent's Park

The martyrdom of St. Pancras

Camdentown, London

Joan Turner.

The Man Himself

Awesome old 8mm camera we found at Granddad's. "You'll never get your paws on that, it's going straight to David as inheritance." - Granddad

The (very young) Turners. My mum on the left!

Completion of the ropes course!

Arrival of The Others

My favorite picture of Ross and Nicki :)

Low tide at the beach where my dad grew up

These old faithfuls had their last hurrah on Grimsby Beach

Olga, the beautiful spy

Ross and my dad's little sister, Jude

Seige

Waiting for the train, a bit too much Irish coffee

This is the best hat I have ever worn

Busby lies in wait

Ben overcome with Parisian emotion

Busby > La Tour

An anthem, to be sung at full volume while rolling through the English countryside:

I hope that our few remaining friends

Give up on trying to save us

I hope we come up with a failsafe plot to piss of the dumb few that forgave us

I hope the fences we mended

Fall down beneath their own weight

And I hope we hang on past the last exit I hope it's already too late

I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here

Someday burns down

And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away and I never come back to this town again

In my life

I hope I lie and tell everyone you were a good wife

I hope you die

I hope we both die

I hope I cut myself shaving tommorow

I hope it bleeds all day long

Our friends say it's darkest befor the sun rises

We're pretty sure they're all wrong

I hope it stays dark forever

I hope the worst is'nt over

I hope you blink before I do

I hope I never get sober and

I hope when you think of me years down the line you can't find one good thing to say

I hope that if I found the strength to walk out

You'd stay the hell out of my way

I am drowning

There is no sign of land

You are coming down with me

Hand in unloveable hand

I hope you die

I hope we both die

::Mountain Goats - No Children::

Thanks for the break, C. Chavez.

2009-03-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

Long weekends from away from work seem to come at just the right time. Madera is all kinds of beautiful, and I'm still eating handmade tortillas.

Today: My "awesome" afternoon left me bustling to Rhett Miller's solo show with hamburger residue and sea salt in my hair and with nothing but Busby in tow. As usual, he failed to disappoint, and I'm left with no words but his:

Breathe and you are strong
All the barriers are gone
Let it carry us somewhere unreachable
I would never hurt you
Baby my virtue has proven itself unimpeachable

Let's just say

There are those long days
There is this dumb luck
There is a brand new way opening up

Streets, buildings and cars
Faraway stars
My fingers move over the borderline
Breath and you're the stranger
There is no danger
You'll fall into that rogue right hand of mine

There are those long days
There is this dumb luck
There is a brand new way opening up

Skin all over you
I'm a worrier it's true
I came over to cushion your breakables
Breath and you are stronger
You don't have to wander
You know my conviction's unshakable

Let's just say

There are those long days
There is this dumb luck
There is a brand new way opening up

There are these long nights
There is this good luck
There is a brand new way opening up

Opening up.

A special treat for those that made it to the end of those lyrics:

Peter dressed as Max, the Grinch's dog, for Christmas.

2009-03-19T09:10:00.001-07:00

My face is really asymmetrical. It's something that's been mildly irritating to me my whole life. I don't mind seeing my face straight on, and I'm fine with my left side, but I can't stand seeing myself from the right. Left side? Normal human being. Right side? Alien chipmunk. My brother had an accident a few years ago that permanently messed up one side of his face, and people say we look a lot more alike now. Nice.

Due to three recent but completely unrelated incidents, I now have a small scar on the left side of my nose, bruises and scrapes all down my left side, and a little chunk out of the top of my left foot. My right side remains completely unscathed.

Huh.

Beware the Ides of March!

2009-03-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

Today. A good day to reflect on that ever so delicate balance between ambition and community. A good day to let the question that sits patiently on the outskirts of your consciousness slip into focus, creating discomfort, creating panic:

Who am I without a friend in the world?

Et tu, Bruté?

2009-03-12T16:44:00.000-07:00

Tell me yourself, I challenge you - answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature - that child beating its breast with its fist, for instance - in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell me the truth.

Muckin Around Monday

2009-02-23T22:28:00.000-08:00

Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth McGovern, Faye's display shelf, and two-dollar Mondays? Alright, Faye's Espresso and Video, I'll bite: More on that as the night develops.

Three Gens

2009-02-15T21:00:00.000-08:00

Love this picture. I think part of my tax refund will be spent on a camera.

Thursday 5:09pm

2009-02-12T17:09:00.000-08:00

The Shins ... We Will Become Silhouettes

Mason Jennings ... Nothing

Mason Jennings ... Butterfly

Mason Jennings ... Jackson Square

The Shins ... Mine's Not a High Horse

Dexy's Midnight Runners ... Come On Eileen

Bay City Rollers ... Bye Bye Baby

The Beatles ... Happiness Is a Warm Gun

Queen + David Bowie ... Under Pressure

The Magnetic Fields ... Kiss Me Like You Mean It

R.E.M. ... It's the End of the World As We Know It

Bright Eyes ... Take It Easy (Love Nothing)

Bright Eyes ... I Believe In Symmetry

This England!

2009-02-11T09:23:00.001-08:00

Every step of my morning commute today smelled like England. The stairs of our flat building, the intersection of 16th and Guerrero, The Pub on campus (ironically the least English place I know), all of them had that completely unique and lovely smell that I associate with England. I think a little pocket of English air wafted across the Atlantic to prep me for my brief trip to the place I've never lived that feels like home.

This one gives me chills:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,--
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

We Miss You Ben!

2009-02-08T11:41:00.000-08:00

whats his name phil kevin works with a guy called phil hes quite strange yeah we got a message from him hes a single guy and hes always at work and he always works all night long oh really why yeah he was calling the other day when we were at the restaurant right yeah phil was like thirty maybe thirty two what are we doing and he had this girlfriend that was really nice but she was pretty weird too they had been going out for like four months are you just going to go in your jeans there jo yes but he was so nice like i really like he knew who he was and didnt need to be any different comfortable in his own skin i like that they know who they are

i suppose its time to brush my teeth what do you think yes oops sorry my stuffs in the way just having a little trouble getting over my bed

abandoned house place hm how do we get up there look sox we are getting all ready sox whacha doing well have to put their collars back on do these just go in that cupboard there any one yeah they can go in that one thats not supposed to go in there who put that in there sometimes i put things in places by mistake and i never find them

they have to wear these yes

hes gonna get excited because he knows hes going for a walk he already got excited does he like it tight on him or kinda loose oh he likes it loose john and hilary like to put the collars on so tight i am always worried they wont be able to eat enough

theres some coffee here

because i brought skis back with me im not going to take them to europe the bike was getting a bit old wasnt it andi bit it was getting old wasnt it eh eh

somebody left some coffee

check this out man youve got a bunch of craziness what what he knows hes going on a walk whats this sox whats going on were going on a walk what what we going where we going grrrrgrrrrr grrr what page is this on well theres one that goes from the coast to the coast whoa how long is that well its only twelve days its only a short section of it

do you want to borrow socks jo no just the shoes are you sure because look theyre falling apart a bit youll want the socks ok give me the socks see where ive put duct tape on them oh i see yeah thanks for the socks theyre a bit big for me so theyll be a bit big for you ok thats great so jo did you want that wine bottle yeah i do

this one here sweet its almost full three hundred dollars three hundred dollars do you reckon yeah ask jo she counts it hey hey hey i count that i count that

2009-02-06T17:28:00.000-08:00

five twenty eight five twenty eight this day should have been over hours ago fridays drag on so long over here why cant the people here understand fridays nevan walks in with a mouth full of cake he doesnt know who its for oh my god five thirty he says five twenty nine i say i had a meeting he says and runs out the door grabbing another piece of cake simon is singing queen in his office for some reason there is a scott in a meeting with davide i want to go to scotland i wouldnt mind being a sheep farmer for a living why are people in small villages always aching to get out of them what a sweeping generalization jo good one jo what the hell jo why am i suddenly so aware of my elbows all of the sudden why have i chosen to draw a world map on my wall instead of just tacking one up like most people do is it because i dont want to pay for the framing yes i think thats it but come on jo consider the man hours you could be doing something else with the fifty hours its going to take you to draw that and fifty hours of your work is worth at least a thousand dollars so basically you are paying one thousand dollars for the priviledge of getting pencil smudged all over yourself while you sketch the world onto your wall maybe a nice framing job would have been a better way to go how much bacon could i buy for one thousand dollars probably a lifetime of bacon actually maybe only a years supply of bacon it really depends on how much you like your bacon when did i switch to writing in the third person i am not in the custom of talking to myself i never stand in the shower telling myself youre not sick youre not sick i never eat half of a snickers and then decide that i dont want the rest i never eat snickers anyway theyre gross i will never understand why anyone would choose a snickers over a regular chocolate bar how can a man whos warm understand the man whos cold?

Some Pegs

2009-02-03T11:20:00.000-08:00

tea and bread

costco

ordering the most expensive possible option at lab lunch

prime suspect

ballet

getting to the health and education chapters in my book

excellent ingredients dinner

london/paris

2009-01-22T14:15:00.000-08:00

"To be generically against markets would be almost as odd as being generically against conversations between people (even though some conversations are clearly foul and cause problems for others - or even for the conversationalists themselves)."

I pushed it to the back of my reading list after one page of the forward. Inspired by the praise of Lisa's uberecon friends, I dove in again, with dividends: the introduction actually gave me chills. This one just might be a little life changer. We'll see.

You're In Every Song I Know

2009-01-15T14:13:00.001-08:00

je suppose que je dois toujours etre ici pour mes chats

2009-01-07T01:37:00.000-08:00

I'm just sitting here wasting my time
Till you come home
From your escapades
In the backyard
With your friends of late

I'd be worried if you didn't do this every spring
When the grass grows
And there's birds and trees
And the sun shines
And you don't need me.

2009-01-06T08:52:00.001-08:00

this pretty much sums it up

2009-01-04T11:33:00.000-08:00

When I Can't Write, I Read

2008-12-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

"To-day the sun is brilliantly shining; it is quite mild and warm. I go out for my last morning walk, without an overcoat or hat. The sun shines, and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends - my pupils at the Workers' School, the men and women I met at the I.A.H. - are in prison, possibly dead. But it isn't of them that I am thinking - the clear-headed ones, the purposeful, the heroic; they recognized and accepted the risks. I am thinking of poor Rudi, in his absurd Russian blouse. Rudi's make-believe, story-book game has become earnest; the Nazis will play it with him. The Nazis won't laugh at him; they'll take him on trust for what he pretended to be. Perhaps at this very moment Rudi is being tortured to death.

I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling. You can't help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the teacosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past - like a very good photograph.

No. Even now I can't altogether believe that any of this has really happened..."

Christopher Isherwood, early 1933

The Secretest of Santas 2008

2008-12-19T23:44:00.000-08:00

My worst day yet at work was totally transformed by a sweet sweet Top 5 Secret Santa, complete with dance-offs and inadvertent gopher impressions from Juliette. Cleanup of the carnage tomorrow morning :)

The Magical Season

2008-12-16T15:43:00.000-08:00

A pristine Christmas scene with the traditional dead body in the background.

Memories!

The Berlin Stories

2008-12-15T10:55:00.000-08:00

A joy. I've only gone through one of the two stories so far (The Last of Mr. Norris - Goodbye to Berlin is still to come) but already I'm going to perch out on this limb and say that Christopher Isherwood is maybe the most masterful character developer I've ever read. Funny and sad and depressing and delightful, an even and open-eyed portrayal of the Communists and the Nazis, a sweet taste of the Berlin of the 1930s delivered on the silver spoon of the lovable hatable Mr. Arthur Norris.

We'll be there by 9.

2008-12-14T19:06:00.000-08:00

Four turtles reunited to summit another mountain.

Winter things.

Pre-ski flat preparation, all done by Mike.

The prize.

FM portrait misexecuted :(

Stealth picture of that guy with a sandwich.

The door that would not open.

Mike reveling in the luxury of the Sands.

First tree.

Good Old Pater

2008-12-09T11:51:00.000-08:00

Texted to Dad, 11:45am: The moon is waxing gibbous
Texted to me, 11:47am: Thank goodness ;-)

Cela que j'ai fait aujourd'hui.

2008-12-08T15:50:00.001-08:00

Today was one of those "They're lucky I'm even here" days. So:

Ellie snagged me a packet of M&M's, so rather than chomp them down straight I decided to burn some calories digesting the stats:

16 Blues
11 Greens
5 Oranges
11 Reds
6 Browns
6 Yellows

Trying to dredge up standard deviations and likelihood of getting that many blues will be fodder for the treadmill tomorrow. Mindless math is the only thing that pulls me through my runs. I was pleased by the overabundance of blues, but what happened to yellow? Little disappointed. If I had my way, orange would be out.

Ate the Cal colors today and saved the harvest festival for tomorrow. All in all, thanks Ellie!

I also did this:

A Photoshop Romp feat. Nevan Krogan and a Ribosome.

2008-12-07T23:20:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in a while because 1) I was on post #108, which is a key number in LOST around which half the plot revolves, so I thought I should stick on it and see what happened (nothing), 2) I didn't mind having S.C. Moore stare me in the face as my most recent post, and 3) there has been nothing blog-appropriate to write recently. My book is sluggish at best and is sapping my energy in good and bad ways I think. My journal has seen a lot of action this week. It seems to be busiest when I am not.

Things:

I'm saying goodbye tonight to a handful of people that I never expect to see again. Our paths could easily cross, but it wouldn't be unusual if they didn't. I don't have much nostalgia left for this place; I've stayed a semester too long and everyone is worn down to the stubs of their being. I'm surprised at the one person who made me a little choked up, though. After a year-plus relationship of good, strong sarcasm and mutual schadenfreude, it took an unexpectedly sincere goodbye to show me what a good friend I'd made. With him I will keep in touch.

James Dean in East of Eden was pretty terrible. Go on, bring on the hate.

Regular, original Oreos are such a major disappointment now. Anything less than Triple Stuf requires removal of the top cookie at this point to get the ratio anywhere near palatable. Mint Stuf and Chocolate Stuf are treason.

The combination of table my dad made, lamp my mum found, and teapot my gran gifted is making the east side of the comfy purple couch one of my favorite places in San Francisco. Also, I like to see how long I can stand not turning on my space heater in the flat by pretending I'm in Bastogne. Related Note: Band of Brothers Is So Good. Even though I'm sure I can borrow it indefinitely from Ben, I think I might buy it myself, a rarity for me, because I love it so much. I am tempted to do an epically long Band of Brothers post, but I know there is absolutely no way to do justice to such a worthy showcase of such worthy subjects. If you are even a smidge interested WWII and are not too squeamish about the atrocities contained therein, please invest ten hours of your life in Band of Brothers. There.

My hair is now long enough to warm my ears again. Just in time for the year's first real cold snap, and it's about bloody time, because it's December 7.

Still no rain. SF disappoints on that front.

I hope there is some cake in my future, or some warm tea. I want to get a couple of little egg cups so I can have soft-boiled eggs and toast for breakfast. I guess I will need some bread too. Apparently egg cups are not a standard thing here? Fellow Americans, confirm or deny.

Sleepily sleepily churning on, missing deadline for the last time.

Bright Young Things

2008-11-16T13:08:00.000-08:00

Very good I say. This movie is quite the inspiration for next month's novel fest, which everyone that reads this should participate in. 50,000 words, 31 days, at least 124 cups of tea, and no plot? No problem.

If I have a type, Stephen Campbell Moore might just be it. And the fact that he coincidentally shares a name and a personality with my protagonist is a plus. Watch the movie! Write a book!

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

2008-11-11T16:56:00.000-08:00

On the last day but one of my visit I was taken to Llanstephan in a governess cart pulled by a short, weak pony. Grandpa might have been driving a bison, so tightly he held the reigns, so ferociously cracked the long whip, so blasphemously shouted warning to boys who played in the road, so stoutly stood with his gaitered legs apart and cursed the demon strength and wilfulness of his tottering pony.

'Look out, boy!' he cried when we came to each corner, and pulled and tugged and jerked and sweated and waved his whip like a rubber sword. And when the pony had crept miserably round each corner, grandpa turned to me with a sighing smile: 'We weathered that one, boy.'

Thursdayne

2008-11-06T11:51:00.000-08:00

Test of the new lab camera. Many boredom shots to be taken.

2008-11-05T11:22:00.001-08:00

A very lonely day.

Wish I were asleep.

"I remember..."

2008-11-05T02:33:00.000-08:00

So mumbles Robin as he drifts in and out of consciousness next to me at the DC.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I can think of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli'ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

Happy 22nd to Laura and best wishes to Guido, wherever he may be.

2008-10-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

¿Atrévase me piden de dónde vino eso?
Temo ambas respuestas.
Envidio y respeto a la persona que puede decirle lo que usted necesita oír.

Mi solamente esperanza
Es eso que usted es Michael Fitzsimmons a mi Peggy Sue
Y quizá, en una noche estrellada,
Le inspiré, una vez.

Young Ones

2008-10-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

Once in every lifetime,
Comes a life like this,
Oh I need you, you need me,
Oh my darling can't you see...
Young ones!
Darling we're the young ones.
The young ones
Shouldn't be afraid
To live, love, there's a song to be sung
For we may not be the young ones very long.

She & Him

2008-10-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

When I was a little bit younger
The strain I was under could make me cry.
Now I'm a little bit older, a little bit bolder
Never so shy.

Sweet darlin', come hold me
Just a little bit longer now...

Thank you Benny and Juliette for this.

Some Recent Randoms

2008-10-11T21:49:00.000-07:00

Flattin' with Hughesey.

Shelves: straight.

The ANGry MONSter.

R.I.P. Mother's.

Sweet Pete.

Pater goes overboard with kayak prep.

Kayaking dins. Sanny was the size of my head.

kAYAk. Nice skirt!

Skeptical about the kayaking getup.

Random Bits from Sunday Morning

2008-10-05T13:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday: a good day.

Nathan Yan/photo

Today:

Mike Pelayo/photo

Sitting here in the kitchen at the flat; Juliette's sitting next to me talking on the phone to the world-famous Vicki Hughes; Mike and Lisa are away changing the world, but they'll be back soon to watch the game. Comfortable and happy all.

I made a serious sin of omission in my previous Top 5 post. Somehow, Ordinary People didn't make my Top 5 Movies of All Time. This movie shaped my life and topped my list for a good 5 years, and I threw it in the gutter with all the other movies that missed the list, with America's Sweethearts and Blue Crush and Casanova. My apologies, Timothy Hutton. My apologies, 1980.

Now it is a few hours later and Mike and Juliette are in the kitchen arguing about two Italian phrases, one of which means "to have a party" and the other of which means "to cut someone's head off." How did we all get to this point, in this kitchen, in this city, with each other, with these pints of ice cream and cups of tea, wearing these clothes with these haircuts? Historical path dependence.

Time to go lie on my heavenly bed, read about German history, and pretend I'm still in school.