goals for the weekend

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

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

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

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...

...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.

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.

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

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

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.