wedding ring

JY's endless muffhunt led us a few weekends ago to a club in downtown Oakland where patrons were smiling and polite as they sweated on one another to the rhythm of terrible music. So many reasons to love Northern California: its attitude of lovey dovey acceptance, its limber homosexuals, its terrible music, its charming, bumpkin patois. (The dance party was called "Hella Gay.")

JY, who like most of us is more sassy and extroverted in the little white square of a chat box than she is in the wide world of non-online life, broadcast with her body language fear of contact, which is exactly the wrong message to send when one is sniffing for truffles. I took the lead in smiling at and hokey pokeying next to strangers. I became one of those people who says "HI!" really loudly and thrusts a hand forward for vigorous shaking - because one lesson I learned from improv is that people respond better to strong, clear decisions, even if they are imperfect, than they do to hedging. Do you shake a hand or hug goodbye a friend of a friend you've just met at a dinner party? It doesn't matter, as long as you commit emphatically to one or the other. I'm not very good at this, and am often doing the bee dance of indecisiveness, alternating hesitant offerings of hand and embrace, embarrassing everybody, so I was happy to practice my social skills on strangers, in the service of securing for JY somebody to snuggle, and soon I had directed the attention of a western shirt-wearing lezzie to JY's erratic dancing. Western Shirt's friends followed her, and then we all crowded around the same twenty-five square feet of space, chatting and spasming. I kept my movements to friendly Jazzercise, to entice the ladies, but not to give them the wrong idea.



While JY worked her dork game on Western Shirt ("I admired her loafers!" she later breathlessly recalled), I did what wingmen are supposed to do and made polite, unintimate noises with my mouth toward Western Shirt's friend, whom we shall call Kati, pronounced Katie. Topics glossed included "Oh where do you live?" and "Well now what do you do?" and "Heh heh heh!" (when the speaker couldn't be heard over the noise). Almost immediately Kati said, "Some people say they work in retail. You ask them what they do. 'Oh, I work the cash register at Urban Outfitters.' No. That's not retail. I work in retail; you don't." She said she was the regional manager of a loose-leaf tea retail store. "My friends think I'm a nerd and all, but I could stay home all weekend reading about maximizing profits." She asked my name, then my last name, then noted that her two previous girlfriends were Chinese and that she liked that "type," and asked me for my number. Rather, she asked me to input her number into my phone - she watched over my shoulder while I did this, to make sure her name was spelled the "Japanese way" - and then had me dial her phone with mine. "I'm going to text-stalk you!" she said, and I said, "Heh heh heh!" and cringed. I got a few flirtatious texts in the next two days, which I ignored, and felt bad about ignoring, and so then I spent a non-billable hour consulting with friends and drafting a properly contrite and ego-cushioning text response, which I never sent.

Those friends also pointed out that I was a fucking coward, and the right thing to do would have been to say at the outset "I'm not interested" or "I have a girlfriend" or "さようなら, rice king!" but I was caught off guard, I wanted to keep the peace to facilitate JY's chat with Western Shirt, I didn't know how to politely reject her - all excuses basically boiling down to I was a fucking coward.

ANYWAY after this episode I decided that since I am a fucking coward, the best way to communicate unavailability to potential suitors would be the most passive way, me being the Chinese type and all -

(Graphic designer Yang Liu's take on the difference between the German and Chinese approach to problem solving.)

- so I asked R, who not only has banana-eating fruitarian friends but also makes silver jewelry and knits on the side, to make me a decoy wedding band, so that when the next awkward situation arises I can push my glasses up or staunch a bleeding nostril with my left ring finger, signalling to future Katis both that my mucus membranes are sensitive to the dry Mediterranean climate of the Bay Area and that my heart belongs to a sleepy passive bottom with a Brooklyn address. Ohhh you're going to get mad at me for writing that and you'll make me delete it, won't you??

R is very talented. She asked me to come to her house for a ring fitting, and she made me a simple silver band that week. It's about a third of an inch wide and gently textured with indentations from a ball peen hammer. It fits perfectly and I love it, and I don't take it off, not even to shower or sleep. S says, "But people will think you're married!" but there isn't anyone who would be fooled into thinking that I'm married that I wouldn't want to fool. S also said, "Nobody put a ring on it...so you put it on yourself!" and then she obscured the rest of her statement with her own uproarious laughter. The joke's on you, S, for I secretly tattooed the words BRISTOL PALIN under that ring! HA HA HA!

Here is the ring, as modeled by R:

R, who is even more obsessed with documentation than I am, has websites to document all of her jewelry projects and her knitting projects. She also put together a pictorial tutorial on the lost-wax casting method of jewelry making, which you can check out here.

30 bananas a day

From R:

i just met a guy here who said he started eating only fruit 6 months ago and has lost 25lbs and is "running faster than ever." he eats 40 bananas a day! 40! he was helping me with my computer and i noticed he was eating a huge plate of only cherries, like maybe 50 of them. i asked him if he had horrible digestive problems, and apparently he's just fine. and then it turns out there's a whole community of people doing this - http://www.30bananasaday.com/page/a-vision.

Update: i run into my new fruitarian friend about once per day in the hallway. he's so good natured and sweet and always answers my intensely probing questions without judgment!

i saw him just now reaching into the refrigerator for a beverage. i craned my neck to see what he picked, and it was a bottle of sparkling fruit juice. i was like "omg, is it ok for you to drink that?" and he laughed and said no, not really, but it contains water and organic fruit juice, which seems fine. he said he ate grapes for breakfast today but also went over to the cafe and got a bean wrap. except he scraped the purreed bean out with a spoon and only ate that, being careful not to eat any of the tortilla. he said the bean made his face sweat and also made him crave more immediately.

more nuggets: he tries to eat 2 heads of lettuce per day, along with celery. so it's not strictly just fruit. he makes a simple green smoothie of medjool dates, banana, and romaine lettuce, and he's working with the chef at the cafe to possibly add that to their menu!

i asked him if he ever gets bored of eating only fruit. and he said "no! there are so many options! you can eat grapes for breakfast, and pineapple for brunch!"

im starting to become very endeared by my fruit eating friend. did i tell you that his officemates call him "fruitbat"? aww.. fruitbat. heehee.

he's been doing this for 6 months! he said he had to ease into it though because you have to train your stomach to be able to handle it all. it's easiest if you eat only the same type of fruit at once. for example, dont eat bananas and oranges together because they digest at different ph levels (?). i dont know if he ever eats cooked fruit. and i dont know why he could eat beans! i did not notice him farting while talking to me, but perhaps next time i'll just ask him. :D i did ask if he plans to do this for the rest of his life and he said yes! that there are other people in the community who've been doing this for 20 years! i am already on track to getting friendlier with him!

overwhelmed by desire

to see the Karate Kid.

boy horse

H and I met recently for Thai food. I picked him up in the Mission and drove us to the Tenderloin. On the walk from the car we passed two independent piles of human excrement. On one particularly offensive looking heap somebody had centered an empty package of menthol cigarettes. There were several of the totally exploded kind of homeless person you don't see too often in New York but seem prevalent in California cities, unshod, deranged, unreachable, around whom you and your walking companion walk silently. H said, "Welcome to the T.L., baby." I didn't know what to call him. Sometimes he goes by his Chinese name, sometimes by his chosen name, H, which had come to him when he found some beached cup shards while walking on Ocean Beach, and never by the name I first knew him by. He had gotten a tattoo of his Chinese namesake, a phoenix extending from his right shoulder to his right wrist, the tail of which was just visible under the cuff of his plaid shirt. It was complete at his shoulder but H was still waiting to make enough money to color in the rest. We ordered far too much food, including a brackish black broth with udon-like noodles, deep-fried pork belly, and a wine-colored, average penis-sized sausage sliced into stretched coins, and ate until we were sick. We talked about whether to wear a helmet at all times. I called us a bunch of pussies for feeling sad about girls. After we pushed the last pieces of pork belly into our faces, H looked over and said, "So. If you had to be half human, half animal, what animal? And which half?" I said winged horse, human head, the conqueror of two domains. H said slug head. We walked back to the car and saw that somebody had stepped onto the menthol cigarette package and left a footlong streak of diarrhea on the sidewalk. In the car H said, "So are you into pissing and shitting, or what? Scat? Because you keep talking about shit." We went back to his apartment in the outer Mission. Very San Francisco, four bedrooms in a Victorian building shared by strangers, closed terrace turned into guest bedroom via Christmas lights and secondhand bed, toilet in a closet, sink in a different room, five hundred pound 1950s-era gas stove with exotic broiling/charring/grilling compartments, storage compartments built into the walls, dirty homemade ceramics, dozens of teas, motorcycle helmets, custom fixies with cruiser handlebars, crap pinned to walls, crap leaning against walls, translucent colored crap hanging in window bays, boy in second bedroom playing the same twenty-second loop of an intolerable electronica project. We had peppermint tea with cookies H's mom had mailed. I was going to stay in the city since I was to be in Oakland the next morning, but H was staying with another person that night so it would have just been me, alone on H's sheetless bed under a naked brown 50W overhead bulb surrounded by mountains of his dirty clothes, books, bike parts, broken things, with garbage trucks making slamming noises up and down South Van Ness. I said I was going to drive home. He said, "What are you reading?" and I said, "Shit," and he said he had been reading sci-fi again. He called it "candy," and said it was a break from political tracts. H is a union organizer. He pushed a battered copy of "Dhalgren" into my hand and told me I would like it. I gave him chocolate covered blueberries. I drove him to his friend's apartment. Just before closing the passenger door behind him, he laughed and said, "Hey, do you remember when you wrote that story about me and you said I kissed like a horse?" Not so, dear H, I said you kissed like a "fourteen year-old boy horse," but I also said you were hot as hell.

24

I've had the misfortune recently of being trapped in cars with twenty-four year olds - can you believe there were twenty of them?! Jkjk. Anyway, here's how these conversations went. The first person was intelligent and clearly a caring person, and in three or four years she might make a perfectly companionable road tripper. But in her 24 year-old incarnation, she was insufferable. She received many more questions than she asked, and even without prompt made declarations about herself, e.g., that she had "like ten years of cross-country running experience" but now preferred to "go on really superlong hikes, like fifteen miles or more." She had lots of ideas about how things should be done, but hadn't yet learned to discern when it is worthwhile to fight to get one's way and when it doesn't matter, and so she steamrolled everyone in the car with bossiness. An interesting thing I learned being around her is that one really easy way to goad recent graduates from U. Penn is to refer to their school as "Penn State."

The second person was friendly and eager to engage in conversation, so much so that even though I was sitting in the backseat on a nauseating grind up from sea level in Fremont to 5000' feet in Yosemite, using 99% of my concentration to keep the In-n-Out double-double animal-style with extra pickles plus cherry milkshake I'd just eaten from spraying forth in a meaty froth all over the red leather interior of her much older boyfriend's little red BMW, she twisted her body around to face me and JY so that we could hear about her experiences spelunking in Yuba County and the various two-wheeled motor vehicles she had owned. Mind you, she was not boastful like the first 24 year-old, but merely excruciatingly boring. "First I had a 150 cc bike. Which is like a scooter. Then I had to get a license. I think anything over 150 cc and you need a license. Then I got a motorcycle. But I had to sell it," so on. I cannot describe to you precisely what made her nattering boring, because in another circumstance, I might be very interested in learning about other people's passions, but just something about the way she delivered those words . . . supernatural forces, zoochosis, or maybe just excessive politeness, compelled questions from my mouth along the lines of, "Oh, how much do motorcycles cost?" and "How come you decided to sell it?" JY looked at me in wide-eyed disbelief at one point, and later, at the campsite, berated me, saying, "Why did you encourage it?!" But boringness knows no bounds of age, and what made her seem 24 to me was not that my contacts spontaneously dried out when I listened to her, but that she was telling us also that she wanted to change her name from Susie Penny (an approximation of her birth name) to Gondolia Pupusa (an approximation of the name she wants for herself) so that when her Edwardian dress designs start to attract notice, her business name and personal name are aligned. This seemed like a very 24 year-old thing to say.

The third person was 24 years old but looked so much like a twelve year-old boy that she entered the Maker Faire on a child (12 and under) ticket that I bought for her as her supervising adult without arousing any suspicion. She likewise seemed like a lively, intelligent, and completely insufferable person. She had just spent a few years, after graduating from college, in New Zealand, and all wayward points of conversation were drawn as if by invisible woolen filament back to the mother sheep, back to the best country in the world, apparently known to nobody but one curly-haired 24 year-old American (though not by choice!) intercontinental air traveler. I'm giving you a ride from BART? "Cheers." It's too hot in the car? "Let me take off my jumper." We pass an All-Blacks bumper sticker on the San Mateo Bridge? "Whooo! Kiwi pride!" Decorations on the child seats on the pushcarts at K-Mart? "We don't have those in New Zealand!" I could not control myself after the jumper comment and snorted, "You mean your sweatshirt? Welcome back to America, honey!" Also insufferable was talk of rewriting classic works of English literature as a stories about a 2010 Kiwi auto race, and cheery intentions to apply for fellowships in poetry writing. What kind of curmudgeonly old person am I that I never want to spend another second with a 24 year-old?

johari and nohari

Fascinating: the Johari Window was invented by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in the 1950s as a model for mapping personality awareness. By describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up.

Even more fascinating: the Nohari Window is a challenging inversion of the Johari Window, using antonyms of the original words. By describing your failings from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of perceived and unrecognised weaknesses can be explored.

ideas

I've been compiling random shit from the Internet in a email folder labeled "ideas," but they're actually just random shit, not ideas. Nothing is happening to them in my mailbox, so maybe here they will help your workday go by:

Infographics

Corporate Catch Phrases I've Recently Overheard
"we'll have to swim against the stream"

"we'll have to climb some mountains"
"X really dropped a bomb on us"
"get up to speed"
"first item on the agenda is whether we fish or cut bait on X"
"reverse engineer"
"deliverables"
"kill these changes"
"i'll ping you" or "i'll buzz you"
"low hanging fruit"
"things to think about going forward"
"aim ahead of the puck"
"shoot for the duck"


Berzerker = Vikings on Mushrooms
This fury, which was called berserkergang, occurred not only in the heat of battle, but also during laborious work. Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power. This condition is said to have begun with shivering, chattering of the teeth, and chill in the body, and then the face swelled and changed its colour. With this was connected a great hot-headedness, which at last gave over into a great rage, under which they howled as wild animals, bit the edge of their shields, and cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe. When this condition ceased, a great dulling of the mind and feebleness followed, which could last for one or several days.

Mussolini on War
War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put men into the position where they have to make the great decision -- the alternative of life or death A doctrine, therefore, which begins with a prejudice in favour of peace is foreign to Fascism; as are foreign to the spirit of Fascism, even though acceptable by reason of the utility which they might have in given political situations, all internationalistic and socialistic systems which, as history proves, can be blown to the winds when emotional, idealistic and practical movements storm the hearts of peoples. Fascism carries over this anti-pacifist spirit even into the lives of individuals. The proud motto of the Squadrista, "Me ne frego," written on the bandages of a wound is an act of philosophy which is not only stoical, it is the epitome of a doctrine that is not only political: it is education for combat, the acceptance of the risks which it brings; it is a new way of life for Italy. Thus the Fascist accepts and loves life, he knows nothing of suicide and despises it; he looks on life as duty, ascent, conquest: life which must be noble and full: lived for oneself, but above all for those others near and far away, present and future.


Eating Ortolans

For centuries, a rite of passage for French gourmets has been the eating of the Ortolan. These tiny birds—captured alive, force-fed, then drowned in Armagnac—were roasted whole and eaten that way, bones and all, while the diner draped his head with a linen napkin to preserve the precious aromas and, some believe, to hide from God.


N's Train of Thought Leading to The Temperature of Ricky Martin

• M sends N picture of Hritik Roshan
• N determines Hritik Roshan does not meet the ideal man phenotype because his face is too narrow
• M declares she has spent a fair amount of time looking at photos of Ricky Martin, and he is very good looking
• N wants to know why Ricky Martin
• M explains that Ricky Martin came out of the closet today
• N declares "if he didn't have that stupid hair, he is very attractive!"
• M and N debate the hotness of Ricky Martin
• N discovers that between 1 and 2pm, "Ricky Martin" became the most popular search on Google
• N notes that Google says "Ricky Martin" is a search of "volcanic" hotness
• N writes, "this settles our query re: how hot is Ricky Martin"
• N writes, "LAVA HOT"
• N Googles "temperature of lava"
• N changes status message to "Ricky Martin = 1300-2400 degrees Farenheit"
• N writes, "i should be a Google spokesperson, really"

Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping or mystery consumer is a tool used by market research companies to measure quality of retail service or gather specific information about products and services. Mystery shoppers posing as normal customers perform specific tasks—such as purchasing a product, asking questions, registering complaints or behaving in a certain way – and then provide detailed reports or feedback about their experiences.

Mystery shopping was standard practice by the early 1940s as a way to measure employee integrity. Tools used for mystery shopping assessments range from simple questionnaires to complete audio and video recordings. Many mystery shopping companies are completely administered through the Internet, allowing potential mystery shoppers to use the Internet to register for participation, find mystery shopping jobs and receive payment.

Hatfields vs. McCoys

. . . The escalation continued in 1882 when Ellison Hatfield, brother of "Devil Anse" Hatfield, was killed by three of Roseanna McCoy's young brothers: Tolbert, Pharmer, and Bud. Ellison was stabbed 26 times and finished off with a shot during an election day fight that took place in Kentucky. The McCoy brothers were initially arrested by Hatfield constables and were being taken to Pikeville for trial. Devil Anse Hatfield organized a large group of followers and cut off the constables with McCoy prisoners in tow before they reached Pikeville. The brothers were taken by force to West Virginia to await the fate of mortally wounded Ellison Hatfield. When Ellison finally died from his injuries the McCoy brothers were themselves murdered in turn as the vendetta escalated. They were tied to pawpaw bushes, where each was shot numerous times. Their bodies were described as "bullet-riddled."

"And now, the always enjoyable giant inflatable beaver."

Something Bob Costas said during the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

The Rule of the Pure Heart and Empty Head
In order to qualify as a holder in due course, the person to whom a negotiable instrument is transferred must act in good faith. Good faith is a subjective test. This is referred to as a the rule of the pure heart and empty head.

qt with dad

Dad has been teaching himself piano very, very slowly for three years without any particular method. He finds free sheet music on the Internet that is horribly transcribed or is arranged for a thirty-piece string section and a French horn, and he can't understand why the sheet music asks him to play 12-note chords. Despite these obstacles, he is very enthusiastic about practicing. On any given night I will hear a gavotte or a waltz played extremely slowly for half an hour to an hour. He plays through the sheet music the way a dental hygienist polishes teeth, sweeping through a region over and over, in any given four-measure phrase playing measures 1, then 1 again, then 1-2, then 1-3, then 2-3, then 3 four times, then 2-4, etc. It is the kind of slow, repetitive, dissonant ivory tickling that directors of horror films choose for the telekinetic-flesh-peeling-by-pupilless-child sequences of their movies.

Yesterday I sat down with him and suggested that he learn to play the left-hand and right-hand parts separately, and to stick to the rhythm. He'd never tried the latter. He understood mathematically that a quarter note comprises two eighth notes, but could not divide the duration of a beat into even halves. Each time he played two notes in sequence, they fell into heartbeat rhythm, or a sixteenth note followed by a dotted eighth:



I got him away from the piano and had him tap a steady beat on the kitchen counter with his left hand and instructed him to tap the counter with his right hand when his left hand was up and when it was down. He found this exceedingly difficult. I told him to think about the steady rhythm of his pace when he walked. I said, Music is like C++. It's just another language. I'm not sure this advice was helpful in any way.

Tonight he burst into my room and started pounding on the door. "Look!" he said. He pounded quarter notes with his left hand and eighth notes with his right hand. He was hitting the hollow door about twice as hard as it is advisible to hit hollow doors. But the rhythm was right on. Then he went to the piano and played quarter notes of middle C with his left hand and C5-D5 with his right. Over and over. And then again. Then he switched over to triplets on the right hand. C-D-E. C-D-E. C-D-E. So on. Again and again.

I also watched TV with him tonight. First it was the Chinese news reporting on the Shanghai World Expo. I asked if he was planning to go, and he said, "No, the ground there is covered in phlegm." Then he reprimanded Boo for chewing rawhide and drooling on the carpet, and reprimanded me for giving Boo rawhide because he might mistake his tongue for hide and just chew it right off. "Do you want to pay that hospital bill?" Then we watched the last half hour of a pretty boring PBS documentary about the huts and vistas along the Appalachian trail. "This must have been filmed in the 1970s," said Dad. "People now don't have beards like this." I noted that thru-hikers often grew beards because it was inconvenient to shave. One bald young man with a wild goatee gave an interview to the camera. "Terrorist," said Dad. "Just kidding. If he were upside down, he'd look just fine." A woman in pigtails gave an interview. "This person's beard is underdeveloped." He overenunciated words he heard in the documentary in an effort to learn them. "Ka TAH din. Mooselookmeguntic." Regarding windspeeds on Mt. Washington, he said, "I stood in a 100 mph wind once." After the documentary finished, he said, "Do you want to watch my favorite show? With music performance?" He was talking about a local weather report channel that simply displays the three-day forecasts for the counties of the Bay Area while muzak plays in the background. He says this is the most relaxing show on TV. He says this show is the best laxative he's found.

Just now, as I was hurriedly typing the above paragraphs, he stopped in my doorway and said, "Dadadadadada! Flying keyboard!"

paul revere

C: the british are such idiots

B: the british are coming! the british are coming!
i wish i were british just so i could announce that during sex

C: [bananarchist]!

B: what

jog

So I spent the weekend running that relay that I mentioned last post. I left my house Saturday at 7 a.m. and returned 1 p.m. on Sunday. The race was fun but totally exhausting.

(Passed out in a church gymnasium in Napa, sometime on Saturday.)

Our team was one of three sponsored by Google. Google's competitive team won for the fourth year in a row, in a time that was eight hours faster than ours. Ruth, my Google connection, dropped out on Friday because of a sudden chest cold, so our van was me, Olivia, her work buddies Wilbur and Mark (Ruth's replacement), Googler Chris and his girlfriend Connie, and Googler Kirsten driving us along. I didn't know anybody besides Olivia when we started but you spend twenty hours sweating in a van with any six people and you'll get to know them pretty quick. In contrast, I hardly recognized the people in the other van. We alternated running shifts with van 2, so we ran Calistoga to Napa on Saturday morning, Petaluma to San Francisco on Saturday night, and Atherton to Saratoga on Sunday starting at dawn.

Holy frakking shift Northern California is the most beautiful Hobbiton in Middle Earth, especially one magical pre-twilight stretch of Highway Whatitsface between Sonoma and Petaluma, holy SHIT it's shorts-creamingly beautiful, your shorts-cream will in turn cream its shorts, so on, ad infinitum, the way the fake wildgrass covers the fake hills in the golden hour. WOWZA. It is really too bad you can't eat landscapes!! It wasn't all roly poly grapevine piedmont, either, there was genuine deciduous action in Napa and then the lemon and fig trees and ornamental horticulture of the Norcal suburbs and then the nighttime view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the SF skyline and Alcatraz and Angel Island and the mouth of the bay from Sausalito and then at the very end a steep rise past some reservoirs through the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz mountains right down to the same golden hour, except the next day, on the f-bombing Pacific Ocean. WTH!?!??!! Parse error!!!!

(Olivia running past a winery near Yountville.)

Let me tell you about my lovely long legs, all three of them. For different reasons, they were each very difficult. The first was 4.1 miles on relatively flat ground from St. Helena to Rutherford. It was supposed to be my easy leg but it was 80 degrees and mostly unshaded, and I set a pace too fast too early and had to back off of it after I got a nagging side stitch halfway. Some brain damage there from the sun exposure.

(Trying to cool down in the shade with string cheese and stretching, while awaiting Chris.)

(The second van exchange point, a typical Napa Valley winey and cheesey picnic spot kind of in the middle of nowhere. There's so much more sky you can't see.)

Leg 2 was 6.5 miles from San Anselmo to Corte Madera with a two-mile climb followed by a long descent, and I started it five minutes after throwing up on the grass at the relay point with a splitting headache that miraculously evaporated once I started running. I think it was caffeine withdrawal, because I downed an espresso right before running and that seemed to heal me. I ran this leg around 10:30 p.m. on a lonely country road through foothills, and after the initial clump of runners split up, it was just me, my headlamp, the fog, and occasional relay vans on the road.

The first runner I passed said, "Hope we don't get eaten by mountain lions!" hee hee hee hee as she pushed her headphones back into her ear for more Dance Hits U.S.A. 2. Turns out cars were more likely to attack us - a relay runner was struck by a car a few miles down the road, but we didn't hear anything about it until Monday. (She's okay, it was not life-threatening, but still...eesh.)

(Mark running in the very very dark.)

Our last runner crossed the Golden Gate Bridge at 2 a.m., and we drove down the Peninsula for three hours of rest. The rest of the van opted to pile up in Chris's living room for naps, but since I was so close to home, I just slept in my own bed. In three hours I was back on the side of the road, cradling a cappucino, waiting for Connie to appear. My third leg was 5.6 mostly flat miles straight down Foothill Expressway. It was 8 a.m., but it was already hot, and I was just plain exhausted, so this leg might have been the hardest.

(My helpful water volunteer giving me an unwanted shower.)

All told, I ran 16.2 miles in 2:10.21 for an average of 8:03 minutes per mile. It is two days later and I am still sore as balls, dehydrated, and sleepy, but I would definitely do this again.

(Chris in Saratoga on mile 3 of a 5-mile uphill, with Connie watching.)

the relay

I'm running in a relay this weekend, 199 miles from Calistoga to Santa Cruz with 11 other people over 36 hours as part of Google's B group. We'll post updates as we go along here.

The relay benefits Organs 'R' Us, which promotes organ donation. Perhaps the organization's eyeball and heart on a stick will make cameos at the relay.

third job

My third job was a couple of jobs I got through temp agencies the summer after my freshman year of college. I recall looking through the Yellow Pages, the real, genuine, heavy yellow bible, for agencies in the area.

I knew no better and wore a black skirt with black Chuck Taylors to my appointment with the first agency; at the end of the twenty-minute appointment, which I hadn't realized was an evaluation, a woman with palimpsestic forehead skin leaned toward me, exhaled latte breath, and said, "Here's just a little tip. Don't wear sneakers to an interview." I was genuinely befuddled, since sneakers to me meant foam padding, whereas there was nothing but rubber and canvas separating my feet from the pavement.

The second agency assigned me to a two-day job stuffing 1000 invitations into 1000 envelopes at the offices of some sort of corporation in Palo Alto. I was given a cubicle and a computer and an envelope moistener and told to get to work. In order to make the work last 16 hours, I calculated that I had to stuff at a rate of 62.5 envelopes/hour, or about one per minute, so I stuffed one, set it aside, and read sonnets and short stories so as not to let my mind soften until it was time to stuff another, approximately one minute later. At the end of the first day, I discovered an extremely well-stocked refrigerator, and slipped two local beers into my bag before driving home. An hour later, I got a call from the temp agency. "Somebody saw you take two beers from the fridge," a woman said. "That's very unprofessional. Those beers are for clients." As an afterthought, she said, "And by the way, that's illegal." I never got a chance to ask her whether it was illegal because I was stealing or because I was not of drinking age, because that temp agency never called me again. Funny thing, I was straight edge then, and I had only taken the beers because my dad had expressed an interest in microbrews earlier in the week. The two beers remained undrunk in the fridge for two years, next to a box of Wheaties, until I threw them away.

A third agency required me to take an office proficiency test before sending me into the field. I want to say that this test involved a high-heeled administratrix upending a box of jumbo clips on a hard-coil carpet and timing how long it took me to pick them all up using pencils of different lengths like chopsticks, but the reality was less spectacular, and I merely typed nonsense paragraphs as quickly as I could to demonstrate my literacy, my toolbar navigating, my WPM. This led to a job scooping lemonade slushees at the Shoreline Amphitheater stop of the 1999 Vans Warped Tour. I started at 9 a.m. and worked until 8 p.m., at which time potential patrons were too sunburnt to move from the sloping grass hill to the lemonade stand, lest they snap their cracklins and disintegrate in the wind. The slurry we scooped was cold and sticky and impossible to control, and sales volume was the bottom line, so when the occasional penny or dollar bill dropped into the vat, one could only fish it out with one's fingers and deliver the change and the slushee to the dehydrated, sun-drugged, drug-drugged, fourteen year-old customer, who sucked his treat to Less Than Jake, Pennywise, Eminem. At 8 p.m., I was given a $5 coupon to redeem for dinner at the concession line.

Richard was also temping that summer, and he left a job at a software company a few weeks before the end of the summer. He recommended that I replace him, and because the software company loved him, I was chosen. Apparently he had been something of a superstar with the ladies of HR, cute and social and young and excellent at copy-making, even distributing sweets before he left ("And he wants to be a dentist!" the ladies cooed, "Is he trying to make us future clients?", guffaws), so everyone seemed disappointed that his broad-shouldered replacement preferred to hide in a cubicle, communicating with nobody besides her beloved acrylic tea cup, until the end of the work day. I got up earlier and earlier, arriving by bicycle at work around 7 a.m. some days so that I could leave by early afternoon. My job there was to transfer 3000 files from glossy red to matte red folders. As far as I could tell, the reason for the switch was purely cosmetic - Silicon Valley in the go-go '90s! Only a mix from J. (featuring, inter alia, Neil Young, Tim Buckley, and Soul Coughing) kept me from licking forks and sticking them into sockets. When I left the job, HR gave me an acrylic tea cup to take home with me, for a job well done.

recent conversations in the new age

A and I go for asam laksa at a Malaysian place in Chinatown. Before we eat, she says, "Can we hold hands?" I'm startled. Why? She takes both my hands in hers, which are thin but strong. She closes her eyes and says I need not do the same, but I do, and I think about how nice it is to be sitting outside with a friend, hungry with a bowl of noodles in front of me.

C says, "Is it ridiculous to pay $75 for a 1/2 hour psychic reading?" Then she says the money might be better spend on "rolf and craniosacral stuff, " to "balance [her] body out." She talks about "sacred knots." It is a question of the relative weight of L.A. spiritual esotericism versus immigrant thrift. "I might need more psychic therapy. I want some guidance...but that's a little ridic, right? $75 for a psychic reading."

R, who hardly knows me, says, "You're a funny person, but you look heavy today." She says, "You want to be an artist, don't you?" Later in the conversation, she says she needs to dangle a pendant over my heart chakra to see which direction it spins. She is from San Francisco and speaks the local language: "Girl, I'm pinay...I can bring it on the dance floor," for example, and "I used to be hella straight."

second job

My second job was cleaning bathrooms in dormitories. I only worked at this job for a week, after finals and before intercession of the winter semester of my freshman year of college.

A few friends and I had bought tickets to go to Paris, or rather, K's mom had bought tickets for all of us at a group discount, and we sent her checks for the amount. We were going to stay in K's parents' apartment in the first arrondissement, so all I had to cover was the price of airfare, entertainment and food. I discovered that working the maximum permitted hours as "dorm crew" would get me close to my cash goal.

The work was tiresome but not horrid. At least I knew exactly what was asked of me. The day I started, a student captain led me in an orientation by way of test-clean. He showed me the supply closets in the dorm to which I was assigned. Each crew member got a mop, a broom, a dustpan, a caddy of chemicals, and rubber gloves. "Don't stick your arm in the toilet past the end of the glove," my guide advised. He said I should clean the toilet first, and then, because we weren't given buckets, I should mix floor soap into the toilet bowl and use the toilet water to clean the floor. The other tasks were applying chemical spray to the mirror, the sink, and the tub, and wiping it off a few seconds later.

I was then handed a skeleton key to the dorm. I would knock on doors first, but most of the time the students weren't in their rooms, so I walked through their dimly lit bedrooms to their filthy, corroded bathrooms. It was finals, and their rooms stunk. Some boys and girls lived in squalor, different kinds, often differentiated by gender. The boys were just neglectful, letting their pubic hair affix in yellow puddles on their toilets. In contrast, the girls expressed their dirtiness through accretion, through gummy rings underneath each of dozens of tubes, bottles, tubs, and cannisters of scented unguent, each of which would have to be pushed aside before the sink could be cleaned, and replaced after. I didn't have a music player so I cleaned in silence. It was January in Boston, and my walks to and from the dorm were made under cold gray skies.

By the end of the week, I had made what I needed. We went to Paris and had a grand old time. We walked down the Champs-Elysees and through Versailles and ate fresh baguettes every morning and deep-fried mashed potato balls every evening. We drank nine franc wine and sprawled on the beds in the apartment, and I developed a quasi-platonic ache for the person who would become my third girlfriend. Except for K, we interacted very rarely with real live French people, my first such attempt resulting in having a fruit vendor slap my hand - literally slap my hand - away from her peaches. "Touche pas!" she said. K said I had been tutoyered.

I didn't think to check my bank account until much later in the spring. It was only then that I learned that K's mom had never cashed the check I sent her for the price of the ticket. I never brought it up with her but wish I had, to thank her for the wonderful week of experiences she made possible.

first job

It was nearly summer, and I needed something to do. Jobs were apparently posted on a cork board in front of the guidance counselor's office in the administrative building, which I entered occasionally to hand forged excuse notes to the unhappy mistress who processed the rolls, and once to attend a twenty minute college counseling session in which a fossil in an unlit room advised that a person like me would do best in a small liberal arts college situated in a 0-10,000 person, no-cinema locustville. I found the job board and copied all three job listings offered to 16+ year-olds onto the back my hand. $5.75/hr moving assistance. $6.15/hr office. $6/hr afterschool tutoring. I called the numbers; only $6.15/hr office answered; I dropped off a list of my grades at the office at the same time that another girl dropped off hers; more of my grades rhymed with "low pay" than hers; the job was mine.

The job was filing papers for an attorney who made a living as a court-appointed representative for kids whose parents were too busy tearing gold fillings out of each others' teeth to act in the best interests of their children. I remember little about my employer except that his clothes were stereotypically crumpled, and that, on the rare occasions that he was not in court or at his desk with one hand holding a phone up to his face and the other hand thrust through his hair, he smiled generously at me from behind a long, gray mustache. But I discovered Frank Zappa that summer, so I may be jumbling him up with a mother of invention.

It's not likely that Peter knew my name. Five years later, I was thumbing through the back pages of an alumni magazine when I saw a notice that his wife, also an alumus of my college, had committed suicide. I couldn't imagine why somebody would want this announcement to be made in the back of an alumni magazine, alongside ads for lecture-cruises along the Baltic corridor and personals websites with awful, self-congratulating addresses like GoodGenes, or All-IvyFamily, so on.

That summer, I spent two hours each morning in an economics class with a kind young teacher named Robin who in July gave me a copy of The Economic Consequences of Peace to read while the other students did worksheets. I failed to read a single page, preferring instead to doodle "Robin" on the far side of the pink line on my binder paper. Then I would go home and reheat leftovers, and then ride my creaking ladies' bicycle to work. My employer shared with several other solo practitioners an office space across the street from the county court in the third largest commercial strip of my suburb. That summer, as every summer that came before, the California sun was high and hot and I would arrive at work dizzied by glare, fatigued by exertion, and sweating like a peasant. After work, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would pick up my girlfriend, drive to a community college for our ceramics class, ruin my clothes with slip, and drive home at 11 p.m.

Peter employed a paralegal named Marilyn. Marilyn's last name was that of a gentle baby barn animal, also that of the ragtime composer whose songs I listened to that summer at hysterical volumes when home alone. She was kind to me, even as I repeatedly flubbed a very simple job. My main task was to direct home the guests that had overstayed a party of papers on the attorney's desk. It was simple, but it nonetheless exhausted the systems-processing part of my sixteen year-old brain. Court papers went into the left fastener of the manila file, all other papers went into the right fastener, but no matter how many times I had been told that words on an attorney's letterhead were not court papers, I could not file them on the right. Once a month or so, I was handed a supplement to a code of regulations and would spend two hours replacing pages 12:34A-26:77A with pages 12:22B-28:83AB or pasting new but equally inscrutable laws against the back covers of three-pound books. In the time I worked there, I didn't see a single person crack any of the hundreds of identically-bound books on the shelves around the office.

After incompetently filing the loose papers into manila folders, I was to return the folders to filing cabinets in alphabetical order. This I could handle just fine. The filing cabinets were stored in a walk-in closet. I was paid $6.15/hr and on most days even performed at the slowest speed my tasks would take no more than a few hours, but I wanted more time and more money, so I would walk into the closet with folders, close the door, file the folders, and lie on the ground and sleep. Sometimes I did squats followed by frog jumps. Sometimes I opened and closed drawers to understand how the automatic locking mechanism worked. Sometimes I brought in a legal pad and drew faces with distended features or fists from different angles. Sometimes I read the files. Who abandoned, abused, neglected who. Who sought sole custody of who. Who was so unfit as guardian for who.

Once in a while, I would be handed a key tied to a stick and asked to retrieve an old file from the archive. The archive was a damp, dark, oddly-shaped closet under the stairway in the parking garage where unsound file boxes were stacked five-high. Let me remind readers that the arachnids of northern California include tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, wolf spiders, and jumping spiders, most of which inhabit damp, dark, oddly-shaped spaces and prefer the chlorinated flavor of tanned California teens.

Even with all of my dragging on I could only collect a few hours a day and a few days per week of work. My paychecks were often for $35 or less. It was just enough to cover my expenses, which were (1) gas for a car with which I once in a while drove my girlfriend over the hills to a grocery store in a beachside agricultural town that sold artichoke bread made from artichokes lopped off their stems five hundred feet away from the store, and (2) seven dollars once every two weeks for bags of porcelain clay to throw on the potter's wheel.

I did just fine at the wheel -- it was just a matter of believing that your arms, braced against your body, were stronger than the clay -- and I threw pottery of majestic height, but I couldn't be bothered to finish anything I started. The pleasure of overpowering spinning mounds of wet porcelain was more interesting to me than shaving pretty feet or dabbing chromium oxide in floral patterns onto a pot. My hundred and twenty hours at the studio that summer produced twenty-two pots, of which only seven were fired into bisque, four were glazed and completed, and two were loaded into my car and brought home. Neither survived to the following summer, when I quit my job and left for college.

naïf

S falls for my jokes, no matter how hackneyed or sophomoric. Today, I convinced her to (1) look down her shirt and spell ATTIC and (2) say "nispy" over and over again. Her end of the call went something like this: "A-T-T-I-C...ohhhh. Nispy, nispy, nispy, nispy...ohhhh."

a correction

S called to say that T congratulated her on the purchase of a sofa named Eugene. "[Bananarchist], you're giving people the wrong impression of me!" The impatient stamp of a hind paw was audible over the phone.

So, a correction: in the end, Couchzilla brought home a modest Nordic workhorse named Ektorp, not a fussy, pricey layabout named Eugene. I'm SORRY. MY BAD.

love of books

R: but please give me a recommendation. i will say that i've had plenty of time for reading lately.

B: i've been reading crap
entertaining nonfiction, nothing lasting

R: why is it so hard to be knocked out by stuff? there are so many books.

B: they're like people!

R: i guess. most are mediocre.

B: most are just hunky dory but you don't want to spend time
and then once in a while you get an awesome one and you want to lay it open and lick the pages

R: wait, west cost lens: sometimes your energy just doesn't connect. it's no one's fault.
mm lick people's pages
lurid

B: it's so true, my communications chakra just doesn't align
yeah i know it turned me on to write that
i'm going to go finger some legal texts now

R: sick

B: oh patent law essentials, you little slut

R: oh, but ms. [Bananarchist], i'm under 18....hundred pages long!

parsimony

My dear Dad, saving money with a saw:

room and bored

S was here this weekend for a visit, and in addition to watching the perfect sunset over the Pacific and hiking the steep green hills of Sunol and eating bibimbap naked in a Palo Alto backyard, we enjoyed yet another activity that makes the San Francisco Bay Area so uniquely pleasurable, couch shopping for a Brooklyn apartment at a national upscale furniture franchise. My dear S commandeered my car-driving and bag-holding services and bullied us to the SoMa outpost of Room and Board, where couches are given human names, where she sat on one couch after another, declaring each one more suitable than the last, praising most excitedly a pink tweed sofa that felt like a lady's coat and forced the sitter into an alert, upright, secretarial posture, and where I struggled valiantly to stay awake but eventually succumbed to catatonia on a giant, pillowy brown couch reminiscent of a country mother's ample bosom. Other bored children exiled from the adult's showroom literally kicked each other off pumpkiny ottomans next to me as I half-dozed, half-died. Though I had chosen my own exile, my imperious girlfriend nonetheless saw fit to decree an order ("Now stay there, and don't move," she said, piling her crap at my feet) before she headed, nearly salivating, to try a couch named Eugene in a fabric called "Titan Putty." In my stupor, I heard two people pause in front of me; one declared, "Now THAT looks like a comfortable couch!" and they walked off gaily, tittering like piccolos. After ten minutes, I rose and wandered from room to room depressing cushions with the toe of my shitty sneaker, and eventually saw S approaching the spot where she had left me. Her body language said, "I told her to stay right there!" Huff! We wandered around together for ten more minutes until it came time to request fabric swatches from a frowny-faced saleswoman surnamed - not making it up! - Rath, at which point I found myself in front of a showroom laptop simulacrum, which looked like a PowerBook but was hollow inside, typing a Dear John letter to my lover, Couchzilla. She was apparently undaunted by the message, for she kept on fingering the fabrics and saying, "Yessss, I would like a sample of Tatum Spice, and a Xanthelasma Barley, and a Thrush Spot." For her camera, I modeled reading a book in a supine position on that coat of a couch and noted with delight that the title of the showroom book I had chosen described exactly what I was doing: "Laying Down the Law."

S's sofa-fever was only overcome by her need to get on a plane and return to her apartment, which shall henceforth be known only as the mortgaged space surrounding Eugene, a trusted expensive friend whom we take turns sitting upon.

i love your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes

I freaked out about right brain atrophy last week (too sunny here for anguish and art!!) and downloaded a bunch of albums, not new but 2009 albums, as if that would really stop the rot.

Here's one theme in the music I selected: I miss Freddie Mercury. I was looking for a new young thing eager to entertain, ridiculous and gigantic in costume and stage affect, theatrical, clever, playful, musically adventurous. Above all I wanted the voice. Here's a nice description of it, from Freddie's biographer via Wiki: "[it] escalat[es] within a few bars from a deep, throaty rock-growl to tender, vibrant tenor, then on to a high-pitched, perfect coloratura, pure and crystalline in the upper reaches."

(A sweet, pretty song that lets you hear his voice clearly.)

I know that hoping to find in new music what you already know and love is just a set up for disappointment (and stagnation), but nonetheless I hoped. I tried Adam Lambert's For Your Entertainment, Mika's The Boy Who Knew Too Much, some Lady Gaga, even Ke$ha's Animal, because apparently Ke$ha takes Freddie as an inspiration. These are all promising and talented musicians, even messy Ke$ha with her San Fernando voice and obliviousness to Mick Jagger's leather handbag-looks. Lady Gaga's awesomeness everyone has already written about, and I concur.

Mika is often touted as a Freddie because he is a white-looking brown British immigrant and flaming 'mo who plays piano and writes his own music and dances around energetically and has a fantastic vocal range, but tends to write perkier, happier tunes than Freddie. I like his promise. Often he goes to an irritating runaway falsetto, but it's still very impressive that he can do that.

Adam Lambert was last year's American Idol second place finisher. He's also a queeny male lead, emphatically sexual, like Freddie, with a nimble tenor and a show tune presence. But the album is not very good. Adam Lambert doesn't write his own music and his album was clearly churned out quick from the pop mill to cash in on his celebrity. It's catchy and danceable but totally unchallenging, which is a shame because he seems to have a lot of original personality, in addition to the talent, to tap into. Again I found myself wanting Freddie, who could write and perform weird-ass lines like, "Fear me you lords and lady preachers, I descend upon your earth from the skies / I command your very souls you unbelievers, bring before me what is mine":

(Oh dearest Freddie, what is all this nonsense about?)

But let's face it, when it comes down to it, Adam Lambert's facial expression on "once I'm in" at :50 could pretty much convince anybody to have hot gay sex.

And his album cover is perfect.

I also picked out some indie albums, including Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, which I would have chucked onto Highway 101 had I not been concerned about traffic safety and letting phthalocyanine dye to leach into the bay. I got through four songs at a high volume with a heaving stomach. I guess they're supposed to be good for what they do, but hemorrhoid cream is good for what it does and I don't go around putting that shit in my ears. If I wanted to listen to the 200x amplification of burning embers, I would have stuck my head in a friggin fire, okay??

Also, Neko Case's Middle Cyclone. Overall consistent with her older stuff, but one song really stuck out to me. I liked the pulsing brush on the snare, the surf guitar, the vaguely Middle Eastern minor key, and the line she repeats twenty times, "I love your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes."

In an unrelated note, my recent viewing of Muppets Take Manhattan has me concerned that I am Ms. Piggy to S's Kermit.

j

Notes from Wednesday I am too lazy to properly type. A story in sentence fragments.

j standing in the parking lot, my stupid question was "which car is yours?" lessee:
infinitis and bmws for partners
pontiacs and corvettes for playboys
bmv suv for sophisticated midlevel assoc
priuses, corollas for the rest
gray bike w reflective stickers for lesbifrump
then one fifteen year old station wagon spilling over with crap, lefty bumper stickers up to rear window, bike rack but no apparent bike, burned things inside, wicker basket with espresso boiler, paper bags
on dash, sage brush burnt on one end "with car lighter, or my other means of starting fires"
tree air freshener stuck somewhere in the car when she bought it 2d hand, couldn't find it, maybe between cushions, tried to mask with burnt sage
remember: her sleeping in car from SF to telluride - what 19 year old girl sleeps on the side of the highway?; her driving us to arches national park at 75 mph in dying red hatchback with no seatbelts; subway sandwiches on the way to santa fe; "listen to your heart" my favorite song then
relationship of coloradans to cars
grow up driving the only way out of box canyon
live here four years but get lost on the one major road in PA
why was she wearing winter clothes
"wanderlust" tattoo
on afternoon of same day, a break from work to walk to swimming pool on stanford with memories: 1) strange autumn light on summer day, not terribly hot, 2) MB at midnight, 1998, 3) nc-17 underwater motions with m.; fences remodeled, easier to climb; now not willing to disobey the law, a terrible reason to be disbarred; wondering whether j would be interested in a swim
j immediately launched into story about pele, hawaiian goddess she said was out to get her
the goddess of small irritations
rental car accident, bad travel companion, ear infection, car break-in
there are ghosts in the mountains
things stolen out of car: thift store shirts, ancient camping gear, pee funnel
also goddess of genuine tragedy
swine flu death of her supervisor who moved to alaska to make money (why go to alaska to make money?)
saturn returns (again)
her anger at ex-bf not wanting to be around, his idea of "contractual obligation"
too much happening at checkout (balloons, chinless man in bike helmet) to have proper conversation
chocolate stout beer in coffee cups
sandwiches, andes mints, pickles
walk to park on birch street
total darkness except windows of occasional night train on tracks 100' away
eating sandwiches in dark
boys on bikes making retching noises
opposite paths - me only money, no time; her only time, no money
no hurry to get back to moab except she has no money left
camping bf (?)
love languages test
i didn't say much until 8:30, then "i need to go back to work, shut up and eat your sandwich and i'm going to talk about myself and you just listen"
me admitting a nadir in last four months
small pleasures - walks, trees, quiet, sunshine, listening to albums in entirety, space, boo hopping with joy at my return, dad's nonsense commentary
fear of new york
her challenge to pele was 15 mile hike alone without food ("i had a cracker with peanut butter in the car") and minimal water at 13,000ft on dormant volcano, which i called "stupid" and "idiotic." j said i was only the second person with that reaction, most others were admiring, i said again it was stupid and she could have died
time slows when with j
enough history here that when time passes it's not tedious to catch up

[I wrote "dogs who love each other..........................." in margin of the post-it but I think this was empty doodling not related to J.]

muppets take manhattan

WHY DID IT TAKE ME 29 YEARS TO DISCOVER THE BEST MOVIE EVER MADE?!?!?

notes from the week

Pho on Castro Street with new friend, JF, whom I met at a conference in August. She directs the LGBT youth group I participated in when I was a youth. It wasn't like we were new friends at all, she was so welcoming. "'Cause we're both metal monkeys, remember?" Something about the coincidence of our zodiacal signs and our materials. I was worried that she might be more hippie than me (she has an "altar" and "a spiritual practice," but didn't follow up so I don't know what she meant), or just different (she mocked me for using the word "euphemism" and said things were "tight") but in the end we could give and take about our silent meditation retreat experiences, short hair, girlfriends who lived far away. "Skype is my best friend." Nice and easy. I liked the way JF did things. She handled noodle soup. She looked pretty sharp in a tweed blazer with wide lapels and a crewcut, and seemed comfortable in her identity. I asked about pronouns; JF raised an eyebrow and said, "He, she, or they. Anything but 'it'." I have few gender non-conforming friends out here, especially down on the mid-peninsula. Hope we'll see more of each other soon.

Very last showing in Bay Area of Avatar in IMAX 3D with B preceded by diner meal where each of us polished off discuses of turkey breast and B berated me for leaving some fries uneaten. Gulped and rushed to theater only to find ourselves two of only a few dozen patrons in a giant room, and the only two attempting to take cell phone photographs of ourselves wearing 3D glasses in the near-dark. B drawn like sailor to siren song of Junior Mints. Before movie started, B looked me up and down and said, "Wow, the 3D is so convincing!" After movie started, B made grasping motions at Jake Sully's 3D chest hair. At pivotal moments we braided our hair together and stage-whispered "THEY HAVE SEX WITH THEIR HORSES!!" Also, if that shit was so close to that huge planet it would have been absorbed and burned up in its atmosphere, and damn, are they mammals? Because thanks for the mammaries, James Cameron!!!

Friday rainy lunch with L at a favored sushi spot. "Why should I pay three times as much for sushi that tastes about the same?" she said. Leapt over puddles in wool biz cas pants on the walk back to the car. Then 5:30 p.m. insta-meeting in VIP's office. "You know that part of the Godfather?" He was talking about the scene where the gangsters "go to the mattresses" (which apparently means let's work really hard and NOT let's all kill each other) but I made a comment that might solidify my legacy at Law Firm as the associate who believed unbilled waking hours would be punished with interoffice delivery of severed horse heads. "You should be here 24-7 minus sleep." This is a pep-talk? Nervous twitters, moment of silence for carpal tunnels.

Santa Cruz, Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, Fall Creek Unit with R, OZ, D, B, O, N, C. Bagels, pastries, coffee, and skim of Palo Alto Daily News first: Measure A would increase per-parcel schools tax by $534, vote by mail. Perfect in sunny valley, chilly in shaded mountains. D wore an orange hiking layer, then a black hiking layer, then an orange hiking layer. "I was going to wear my orange vest too, but that just seemed like too much." Turned around twice driving to the trailhead; turned around once getting lost on the trail. What was supposed to be seven miles turned out to be eleven, but even exhausted spirits ran high. OZ asked if I knew who Toby Gerhart was and seemed satisfied by my half-hearted guesstimate. O, who wore a sun hat, pulled a spruce brush from the ground and pretended it was a mustache. We passed rusted, crumbling remnants of a limestone quarry and barrel mill. Took trompe l'oeil photos of N pretending 6" banana slug was a tongue. C talked about a job giving hundreds of mice cancer and then trying to cure them. The trees, mix of redwoods and various conifers, were so tall and thin that one felt like humans on Pandora, or hobbits in Fangorn Forest, etc. Fall Creek was loud, clear, and full. We passed only a handful of people, including one lone smiling sociopath in flip flops. It took more than three hours to walk to the midpoint, a mid-sized redwood marked by a placard reading "Big Ben Tree." We focused our frustrations with the conditions of the hike on the tree and teased it like a bespectacled schoolboy. Mediocre, we called it, Mid-height, Unimpressive. N slammed open the chocolate orange on its burnt bark. D shared tuna fish with capers. I shared Pocky. We walked back at a clip playing the song game with the words "white," "name," "river," "car," and "discostick." B told me about the problems with Teach for America. Plans to hunt down balut vendors in the East or South Bay were made. We took a group photo under a tree by balancing a camera on the trunk of a sea foam Corolla and then piled into cars and drove away. R called for a pit stop at a place called - she squinted - "Coffee Eat." We're older, our eyes are going, it was "Coffee Cat." I bought a box of Samoas from a shivering Girl Scout outside Safeway and R read the ingredients. "I don't eat transfats. Or high fructose corn syrup. You see? Partially hydrogenated canola oil." O and I ate five cookies, then I left the box of transfats at the bottom of a trashcan. I drove back with the sun in my eyes and mysterious South Bay reservoirs revealing themselves to the right and R talking about the reprehensible romancing habits of a half-blind boy she knew. I intended to go to a housewarming at night but could not find the willpower to change out of my pajamas. Instead I watched Internet television and layered out of tune vocal tracks for a new saccharine song.

At bedtime, couldn't sleep, rolled from back to side to stomach, stripped jacket, stripped pants, redonned both, drank water, applied chapstick, peed, turned on fan, took pills, pounded a pillow, squeezed out a few frustrated tears, crawled under bed and held Boo's head for companionship, played Don El Don but all the words that came to me were related to this litigation I've been betrothed to for six weeks. Insomnia is so lonely. Long after daylight savings I thumbed a frantic text to S, and then passed out. All I did on Sunday was resolve the fallout from the frantic text, stare at photos of S, debate the virtues versus shortcomings of futons with S, buy running shoes, run, and work.

secretions

The following are the words that came out of Dad's mouth in one two-minute span:

Don't stand next to the microwave, you'll die. You'll get cancer. Don't eat rice. Eat more vegetables than rice. Rice is death by fatness. Why is there so much dish soap left in the sponge? Did you wash your tupperware? Did you leave soap in your tupperware? If you left soap in it, you'll get sick. I'm going to rewash this. It's all soap. Don't touch your dog while you're eating. You see? You're using your right hand, which is the hand you're using for your chopsticks. Don't eat chocolate. Chocolate cancels out running. All that running you did will be no good if you eat chocolate. Don't touch his eyes!! There are secretions!!

After this, he found his way to the piano and spent thirty minutes playing the right-hand part of Sunflower Slow Drag very slowly and very badly.

somos las chinitas

I was tidying up my eight-track when I found this mariachi song that O and I composed and recorded in July 2009. Please forgive: http://www.myspace.com/thecleaverstreeters.

i don't care where i'm going as long as i get there on time

I got a new toy yesterday.

What a difference a banjo makes.

Here's the first truly bluegrass-sounding thing I've recorded. It's about 2009.

cripple creek

I'd be pretty psyched too if I were that horse.

notes taken over a weekend

Dinner with R and O on Friday in city. Blind restaurant. Dining in complete darkness. Ate food with hands. Dropped pants just to make a point. Communicated by dictating. My hand is reaching toward the bread. I'm handing you this glass. Poured wine by ear. Made predictions for 2010.

Morning jog with R and O. Talked about our ideal partners. We listed the things people always list. Shared interests (R needs outdoorsy), humor (can't take self too seriously, can't be pissy about camping in the rain), intellectual compatibility. "At this point, I'll settle for living and breathing," I said afterward, only because it is something the clown always says. We jogged the loop of the Baylands slowly. It was very hot. There were many unhappy dogs. Face turned red all over.

Afterward biked to the train and took it up to the city. I wanted to go to the MOMA to look at different things. I wrote in my journal on the train, and then I read a few pages of A Gathering of Old Men, but wasn't captivated. MOMA was good; biking there was good. To remember: curatorial description of Andy Warhol screens of skulls as "portraits without the flesh?" LMAO. Old man chuckling and rhythmically thrusting pelvis in the dark, at his lonely end of the bench in screening of Bruce Connor's Ray composed of images of naked writhing women set to Ray Charles song. Diane (Dee-ANNE) Arbus photos...seen them before, but they're old friends good for a visit. One nude shot of herself in bedroom mirror she sent to her husband. Twins from Roselle look weirdly like KF. Portraits could be gothic mockery; in college I thought they were beautiful, ruinous, and indifferent; now I think that she must have made these people believe she cared about them but must also have known that to document them as they were would be to betray them. I noticed how direct the titles were. Ewen Gibbs' fine line drawings (finer than pointillist) of San Francisco city scenes - WOW. Exhibit of photography of California. A state photographed since its inception; photography invented ten years before Gold Rush. Staged photography used to counteract San Francisco's deserved reputation as lawless land of unwashed testicles. Early photos show lumberjacks with axes in front of 63-foot circumference redwood sections. This one felled to be a single-piece dinner table for a party of forty in Europe; this one to serve no apparent purpose other than making grinning men feel triumphant. Later photos of unassimilated Chinese grocers selling yams. Chinatown. Handpainted signs with terrible calligraphy. Some description of the "exotic pageant of America," a cliche but for the first time I thought about the reference, and imagined a slow-moving parade of weirdos of all different skin tones, heights, and nose shapes. Liked photographs that Ed Ruscha took of giant empty parking lots in Los Angeles; lines looked like leaves. Walked through Yerba Buena on way back to Caltrain and read about the carousel that had escaped 100 years of fire, earthquake, and destruction and made it from the heavy hands of the German craftsman to the sticky fingers of two boys shouting "I want the camel! I want the camel!"

Took train home listening to C grouse about seven hour Saturday CLE and then me making hurtful uninformed declarative statements to S. Biked back feeling bad, went to dinner with family.

Sweet Tomatoes salad buffet restaurant, Santa Clara. Across the street from Costco. Completely filled, even the plastic-penned outdoor seating area. 100% of patron population was multigenerational East Asian and South Asian families, and large white people. 90% former, 10% latter. Servers Mexican. Tomato-print carpet. Bedlam in salad line, broken windows theory, tuna tarragon and Asian Chicken Salad and shredded beets spilling out from serving bowl onto tray onto floor. Crusts of bread missing single bites left on trays to be cleared. Unskilled balloonist making swords and dogs for tips but popping every other balloon, startling patrons. Zero to fourteen year-old children everywhere. Dad looking so wistfully at young Chinese families I thought the teeth were going to be wisted right out of his beatific head. Remind R and A to hurry up and reproduce. Shuttling soups back to Grandma, who sat next to her cane. Uncle Five making fun of Dad for (1) carefully composing salad, then deliberately upending bowl of steaming New England clam chowder on top in lieu of dressing; (2) carefully spreading vanilla soft serve on pumpernickel bread and urging us to try the same; and (3) shouting nervous admonitions re: not getting into car wrecks from the bitch seat of the car. Mom using hand sanitizer before filling salad plate, then again after filling salad plate. Me rolling up four cupcakes and a fistful of sunflower seeds into a napkin destined for the ziploc in Mom's purse. Helping Grandma to car. Getting home. Getting on phone. Feeling bad, feeling stupid. Slept like dead dogs under dead logs.

Run at Crystal Springs cross country trail. Fifteen degrees colder than Palo Alto, windy, foggy. View of San Carlos (?) on east, reservoir, hills, and 280 at west. Mud splatters everywhere, inside shoes. Few people. Enough elevation that I had to think about running while I did it, self-berating for motivation. "Sheep Camp Trail" that started promising but was merely a straight half mile of gravel downhill to a turn-off from 280. Drove back to sunny Palo Alto slowing on highway to look at absurdly picturesque gathering of oblivious cattle sunning on bright green grassy hillsides with no structures but highway and gigantic steel satellite dish in sight; thought of driving up 280 holding S's thigh and telling her that I resented these particular cows for their simple happiness. Sat outside Wahoo Fish Tacos with bag of dimes and nickels growing warmer in my hand and naked thighs cooling to subzero temperatures while attempting by telephone to restore S's confidence in her fickle lover. Work on Sunday afternoon: a metaphorical fire, a panic, fire squad runs in circles with hands waving overhead, fire miraculously dies. Home, work, phone, journal.

why do girls make me cry?

A new song.

do not, kissing photos

Dad sends me forwards in Chinese that I can't read. Gmail offers the following translation of one, line breaks in original:

"The rise of environmental consciousness, it was bought drink bottles, put
the empty bottle left behind when the water bottle,
"But the doctors said saved to
"The ball, you may forfeit their own!
"Experts, examine the bottles, once the heat hit, only about 40 degrees,
the plastic material will be released
"Put carcinogens ─ antimony,
[ . . . ]
"So poisonous, why should we spend fast printing system?
"Do not ask me, I am not willing to!
"Who called you a half-hour cross-pieces should be the boss .. "
"* Please keep in mind **: *
"* Do not, kissing photos *.
"* Do not, take photos of food pad. *
"* Do remember to take finished photos ** you wash your hands. *

At least the tone of panic comes through.

ragtime nightingale

One day in late January, L asked me to go to her house to be there when she received the delivery of the electric piano she had bought off Craigslist. We took a break at 9 p.m. from our document review to head over. I was wearing shorts and a thin shirt - I had wanted to run; it was only .8 miles; I had been sitting in front of a computer all day - but L was worried that the delivery would arrive soon, and so we climbed on our bikes and rode. I didn't have time to change back into pants before we left. Goosebumps rose along my arms and legs, and I alternated breathing on the fingers of my left and right hands to keep them warm.

Her house was a two-bedroom bungalow across the street from the graduate housing dorms at Stanford, with a duplex rented out to strangers behind it. Much later, she gave me a lemon from a tree growing out of the gravel in the yard. There were no lights on in or in front of her house, so she used a green keychain LED to find the keyhole. It cast a funny glow on her front porch. We left our bikes there, and I went to stand in front of her radiator.

There were almost no furnishings in her house, just a black upright piano ("utter garbage," I think she called it) and an old sofa in her living room; a spool-shaped wooden table with two white folding chairs in the dining room; a neglected fridge; and a simple desk with a laptop in the office. I didn't look in her bedroom.

That afternoon we had had a conversation about music. She mentioned that she was working on a recording project involving the works of Joseph Lamb. I said, "I love Joseph Lamb." She looked surprised that I recognized the name. I said, "Of course, he and Joplin are the two most famous ragtime composers." I felt that I sounded forced saying this, and drank hurriedly from a cup of hot water as soon as it was spoken.

I couldn't remember the name of the Joseph Lamb song I loved, my favorite rag, one I had tried to learn as a guitar duet in 1999 with M, who refused to participate. I looked it up in the afternoon: "Ragtime Nightingale."

In her house, L moved quickly from place to place. She turned a flame on under a pot of water and said, "All I have are these frozen Russian dumplings, but have as many as you'd like." Neither of us had had dinner yet. She moved to the piano and played the first few measures of Ragtime Nightingale.

The delivery of the electric piano interrupted her. She instructed me to watch the water while a man unloaded the instrument and its stand from his little hatchback. She murmured appreciations ("Oh, this is perfect" and "This is exactly what I wanted") as he bent over with the plug to the socket. I rolled ten dumplings into the boiling water, and burned my hand on the splash.

The man left, and L sat down to test her piano. She pushed a few chords down, then ran a chromatic scale over all eighty-eight keys. She tried the concert grand, electric piano, and organ voices, then started Ragtime Nightingale from the beginning.

L is slim, poised, and quiet, and she plays that way. There was very little movement in the house: her hands moved very lightly over the keys; I sat very still just to the right of the keyboard and watched them as she played through the rag; in the kitchen, the dumplings gurgled and overcooked. The music came very naturally from her memory. L played a fourth section that wasn't on the recording I owned. I mentioned this and she said, "But it is in the song."

After the performance, L went to the kitchen, fished the ten dumplings out of the water, and served us five each with sour cream. We talked about our immigrant parents and our plans for escape, but mostly I put my head into the food and made shoveling motions with my hand. After dinner, we biked back to the office. I was freezing on the way back, too.

L is a ragtime composer. This is my favorite of L's compositions:

spray 'n' wash

So far the highlight of my day has been sitting on the toilet, searching labels of consumer products for entertainment, and realizing that Spray 'n' Wash anagrams to "Ashy Prawns."

Bar study and fourteen hour workdays making me feel a bit batty. It is Valentine's day, time for perfect tender. Let me overcome my rule against perpetuities. Let me attain perfection. Let me avoid oral stirpes.

westlaw!

My search strings are so fucking excited! (contract! agree! licens!) inten!