SanFrantastic

Sniff, sniff

2008-03-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

And so we come to the end. After a whirlwind few months—we went to Paraguay! We saw Iguazu Falls! We bought tickets home to New Zealand!—we leave the city by the bay just when spring appears to have arrived, durnit. The packing guys are here, wrapping up our memories in layers of fish and chip paper. The sleek neighborhood dogs are passing below our windows with their sleek owners and the women at the nail salon across the road are sitting in the big cushy pedicure chairs waiting for customers. I will miss this city.

A few final San Frantastic moments:
* I went and ate sushi with a couple of the interns at this funky no-name sushi place that is somewhere between the Mission and Noe Valley—more Mission than Noe I think. I got there before they arrived and when a typically hip SF guy asked to look at my teapot, I shrugged and passed it over. This set off a stream-of-consciousness prattle that did not end when the rest of my party arrived. I was told about some amazing dance event in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Portugal and told to get in before all the tickets sold out, man. I was advised to write a story about Mayor Hunky’s (Gavin Newsom’s) recent treatment of the homeless in the Tenderloin (according to Mr Hip, one young drunk homeless guy hassled Hunky for money and Hunky has had the police on patrol down there ever since). And I learned that Mr Hip likes to refer to himself as “a sassy little bitch” which I found quite endearing.
* Our friend Megan from London came to stay and we did all kinds of fun SF stuff. The capper was a cocktail at the dear old Carnelian Room, where we watched the sun set and pointed happily at Alcatraz and Coit Tower and Fisherman’s Wharf and the seals on their platforms bobbing in the oily water. Both M and I had a funny experience when we used the restroom. A small Chinese woman was stationed by the door. She welcomed each of us to her restroom, showed us to a stall and when we were seated began to sing and whistle. I wondered if this was to make the situation less awkward—we were peeing in her office, after all—or to help us conquer potential stage fright.
* After dinner at Tommy’s Mexican restaurant where I had the best-ever margarita, Tim gave me a wooden sign reading ‘San Francisco’. He announced that every day until our departure I would receive a San Francisco present. After the sign came a baseball cap, some old-style postcards, kiddies books about the city, a map of wine country, and today my favourite of all, a reproduction of a map of the city drawn in 1909, three years after the earthquake.

New Year, oh dear

2007-12-31T16:50:00.000-08:00

Actually, I'm looking forward to 2008. We have some big plans and I am all about action, so that's good. Besides, 2007 has been a herky-jerky ride at the fair--I have spent much of it feeling nauseous and wondering when I can get off. Even now, having reached the end of the ride, I am clutching my stomach and staring at the ground trying not to chuck.
So to make myself feel better, I have been thinking about what I want to accomplish in the next 12 months, besides the big ones like figure out career, find new home, make some kind of difference in this world etc. They are too stressy for my current state of mind. Plus, I don't really like New Year's resolutions because they tend to be all about guilt and self-loathing, neither of which I am willing to play host to for very long. So I have some spiffy new goals instead. Such as:
1. Get a pound puppy. Finally.
2. Learn how to cook three decent meals. Just three. I will find the Nigella inside and I will enjoy her company.
3. Eat more vegetables. Refer to #2.
4. Make a new friend. It would be very easy as we are slipping back into the lives we left in Auckland in 2005, to just hang out with the same people all the time. While I am very excited to be close to my lovely friends again, one of the cool things about 2007 has been new friendships.
5. Wear heels more often. My bung knee is almost up to the job and heels just look better with jeans.
6. Read more worthy books. I have read some great stuff this past year (and some utter pap) but I have refused to read any of Tim's books about democracy, the Middle East, the global economy, or Christianity. I can't expect him to delve into Joan Didion if I won't do Thomas Friedman.
7. Cut down on the reality TV. It is making me stupid. I have had two guilty pleasures this year: Tori and Dean: Inn Love and Bridezillas. And lately there has been a new one called My big, fat fabulous wedding about people for whom there is no budget when it comes to wedding planning. They will spend, for example, $2,500 on seashells to decorate their tables, or $240,000 on jewels for the wedding day, or $50,000 for flowers. It makes me feel like a better person.
8. Stay on top of the housework. Tim's dropsy tendencies (he'll drop his junk on any flat surface) have squelched my will to tidy, but in 2008 I will fight back.
9. Take more and better photographs.
10. Make albums of the photographs, so I can appreciate all the wonderful adventures we've had and will continue to have.
Happy New Year!!

Best of times, worst of times

2007-12-30T10:16:00.000-08:00

Top 5 books
* The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion. I had been avoiding it for fear of getting too upset, but I found her descriptions of the grief of losing someone essential to be comfortingly familiar.
* No one belongs here more than you, Miranda July. July is so hot right now! And now I see why. Loved it.
* Lucky, Alice Sebold. I have been avoiding this one for years although I adored The Lovely Bones. But after hearing Sebold speak as part of the City Lights and Lectures series I decided to dive in, and it was actually oddly funny and life-affirming.
* Hibiscus Coast, Paula Morris. She is so clever. Made me miss NZ.
* Plan B, Anne Lamott. Another of Lamott's books that I will read over and over.

Top 5 San Francisco
* Hearing Anne Lamott speak at the Jewish Community Center. One of my absolute favourite authors and she is so funny and wise.
* Sailing on the Bay on a gorgeous sunny autumn day. Magic.
* Sipping a margarita while watching darnkess fall on the city from a cozy table at the Carnelian Room.
* Watching the Blue Angels streak across the city from our roof.
* Riding the cable car up California St on a wet and windy night.

5 Most ridiculous
* Winchester Mystery House, San Jose. Is it really so mysterious that this disturbed woman (heiress of the Winchester rifle fortune) would incorporate the number 13 into her home? Or spider web patterns? What is truly mysterious is why people would buy any of the crap they sell in the gift shop.
* Paying $9 to motor down 17-Mile Drive in Carmel. Puh-lease.
* Paxton Gate, Mission St. I go to visit the taxidermied mice dressed like punks and popes.
* Adults dressed like sexy nurses and sexy superheroes and sexy vampires going to the office on Halloween.
* The guy who disguises himself as a bush (he holds branches in both hands and fixes branches to his back and head) and scares people at Fisherman's Wharf. Then they give him money.

I can think of other highlights and lowlights but that's enough for now.

Happy Holidays!

2007-12-29T19:41:00.000-08:00

Good will towards men, etc. The holiday season has had the desired effect--I've lost track of the days and have a seemingly endless supply of chocolate and jellybeans to hand. Lovely. I felt only vaguely guilty when I went to the gym yesterday and spent 50 minutes squeezing a weird spiky ball between my thighs (it was Hello Kitty pink, folks, which made it almost palatable) and realised I would instantly undo all of my good work with the gobbling of just two chocolate coins.
We spent Christmas with my brother and family after catching a Christmas Eve performance of the Nutcracker. Love that ballet, and I don't care how ubiquitous/cheesy it may be. The music is beautiful, the costumes are beautiful, and I have been watching the SF Ballet do it since I was 5. So there.
Other Christmas season highlights:
* Admiring the giant swan in the window of Marc Jacobs on Fillmore St. Bizarre fun.
* A quick burger and bloody Mary at Harry's after picking up some fabu gifts. I love giving good gift.
* My third-ever manicure. I finally broke down and went to the little nail studio across the road that I have been spying on for the past year. I picked a pale pink polish called Bubble Bath.
* The twinkly snowflake lights on the side of the Sak's building. So pretty.
* A verrrry strong Margarita in the Carnelian Room, at the top of the Bank of America building. The view is gorgeous--the bay and city laid out for you as if you were a despot. I felt teary, jubilant, nostalgic, and slightly giddy all at once.
After bidding adieu to the family the day after Christmad we headed to Carmel, a cutesy little seaside village that has turned into a caricature of itself. Dad lived there and practiced medicine when he first moved to the US. Every shop smells like vanilla cupcakes. And it costs $9 to do the 17-Mile Drive made famous by the Pebble Beach golf course and US Open. And if that weren't enough to turn you off, the first ever Thomas Kincaid gallery opened in Carmel 15 years ago. If you're not familar with him, he's the most collected living artist today. He depicts ideal chocolate box-style cottages and village scenes and is known for his technique with light--everything looks all twinkly and elf-like. He designed a whole housing sub-division in my birth city, Vallejo. He makes me feel nauseous but I couldn't stop myself from diving into his gallery and having a giggle. If Santa had known about that, I'm pretty sure I would have been left off the sleigh route. Ah well.

Sentimentality alert

2007-12-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

Feeling nostalgic today. And sick. I have been sick all week--nasty flu-ey congestion and fuzzy head--and nostalgic for about three weeks. We finally made a firm decision about our future--we're heading back to New Zealand next year. I resigned from my job yesterday and that's all folks. I'm glad we have a plan of sorts because I am the original girl with a plan. If I'm not heading somewhere with some objective in mind I am pretty miserable. So that's good. But I love living in San Francisco. It's a childhood dream come true and while I always knew it was temporary I guess I figured it would be a more longterm move than it's turned out to be. We have been here a year. We flew into New York on September 1, 2006 and we moved into our chilly wee apartment last December. So we've experienced all the seasons here and watched our neighbors gorgeously OTT decorations change from St Patrick's elves to Easter bunnies and eggs, to summer flowers, to Halloween ghouls, to Thanksgiving cones of plenty, to Christmas wreaths--and all of it wonderfully American in scale.
Today is cold but sunny. I had to drop Tim off for his Saturday business class and then drove home along California St, past the Bank of America building (tallest in the city, home to our money manager), past two cable cars, past the Fairmont Hotel and Tonga Bar where we have yet to go, past Grace Cathedral where we attended an ANZAC service, past Fillmore St where I do so much of my window shopping and we do our laundry, past the Jewish Community Center where I work out, and finally past our block with its Edwardian apartment buildings and fancy home shops. It is all so pretty.
* * * *
Enough bellyaching--we went to the Dickens Fair last weekend. The Cow Palace, a huge South SF venue for bullriding competitions and monster truck shows, was transformed into ye olde London. Or, I should say, the area where they keep the cattle and such for the big shows was transformed into ye olde London. The big domed Palace itself was a happy place for me as a child. My family used to go for the bullriding and equestrian shows thanks to Dad's country boy roots. My favorite part was intermission when we would eat Mom's egg salad sandwiches while the rodeo clown entertained us. He had huge overalls and tiny dogs would emerge from his pant legs to jump through hoops. I think there may have been a tiny spider monkey too, or that could be a 7-year-old's embellishment. In any case, it was cool fun.
So last Sunday we went to the animal area, where 25 years ago I admired blueblood horses, and it was packed with costumed folks and jewellery stalls and food places, and more costumed folk doing skits and singing bawdy songs. We watched the Irish and Scottish dancers for a while and ate some fried oysters and tried on some hats (a Robin Hood cap for T and a floral wreath for me) and headed home.

Me and the young fogey

2007-11-28T22:11:00.000-08:00

John Denver’s nana is on television. Umm-hmm. Tim was flicking around the channels and stumbled on a 90-minute John Denver special and I said, “No!” and he said, “Rock on!” My husband is a young fogey.

We had a moment

2007-11-18T21:03:00.000-08:00

So I’m seriously starting to wonder if I have an executive-style ulcer cos my stomach has been misbehaving for a couple months now. It seems so 80s and unoriginal. I don’t even have a briefcase, and I don’t feel that stressed. But I have always been good at compartmentalizing and I think that’s my problem now. Nothing in our lives is feeling settled and stable and rather than meet this interesting challenge head on in an adult manner, I choose to deal with it on a sub-conscious level as I sit on the express bus and watch that one lady who applies her eye makeup as we skid down the hills towards the city—eyeliner, mascara, shadow, highlighter the works—and suffer the physical consequences of a burny tum and a bedtime that crawls ever forward. Soon I’ll be going nigh-nighs at 7.30pm.
Anyway, none of this means we’re not having a good time. We finally went to the Fillmore last week. It was tres funky—dark red walls with gold trim, chandeliers, opera boxes, and lots of pissed people in their 40s acting in the irresponsible way they hope their children won’t. There was one woman who fell on the floor and had to be helped up before the main act even bounced onto stage in their ruffled shirts and brocade jackets. It was the Waterboys, who Tim adores. I love Whole of the Moon and Fisherman’s Blues, so I was happy when they played those, and was deeply impressed with the brocade jacketed one’s fiddle playing, but I could have done without the dirty, skunky drunks.
I think that when you get to a certain age, and it varies from person to person, you simply can’t get away with public displays of drunkenness and general out-of-it-ness. Everyone around just resents you.
***
Oh-bama! Mayor Hunky was re-elected, which was no great surprise given his opponents were like cartoon characters, but he’s old hat now. I have a new crush—Senator Hunky from Illinois. We waited in line for an hour and half to see Obama at his SF rally on Wednesday. It seemed for a while that we weren’t going to get in at all because there were just two doors to the auditorium set up with metal detectors and there were over 6,000 people trying to squeeze in there. Just before 9pm everything stopped—the line halted, more police turned up, everything went quiet, and then whoop, whoop, the motorcade burst onto Polk St. We could see Obama sitting in the back of his Cherokee, waving, and then it stopped and he got out and I had my first-ever moment of celebrity worship. He conducted his own energy. As if he’d just jumped out of God’s pocket. It was extremely exciting. He’d been told we were the tail-end folks who might be foiled by the metal detectors and made an impromptu speech about closing Guantanamo and ending the war and other stuff that didn’t sink in because I was jumping up and down and trying to keep my eyes on him at all moments. He was just 10 feet away from us, and some of his energy clearly leapt across the crowd and into the tops of our heads because after he got back in his SUV and the secret service guys folded themselves back into shape (they did not seem happy about the unexpected pit stop) we joined the crowd who surged for the doors. The line unraveled like yarn—that someone had thrown acid on—and although some people tried to stay in formation, it was futile. We ended up getting ushered in a side door with no metal detector and no-one to check our tickets. We could have been very dangerous, I suppose, but like everyone else there that night we felt like Barack-stars.

Another one checked off

2007-10-15T16:51:00.000-07:00

When I was 7 my life ambitions were as follows:
* Become super-duper speller.
* Adopt a shelter puppy.
* Aquire a Barbie townhouse.
* Coax my mother into the baking habit.
* Convince someone to build me a tree house.
* Pass beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
* Learn to ride a bike already.
* Live in one place always like the Brady Bunch.
* I also, as I have mentioned before, wanted to become a singing secretary named either Linda or Stephanie, or perhaps both.
Few of these things have come to pass. I did eventually learn to ride my brother’s yellow banana-seated Schwinn (I will never forget looking behind me to see that Dad had let go and I was on my own. I immediately toppled over and felt such a sense of betrayal). I did acquire a shelter puppy, which didn’t turn out too well. I created a grand imaginary treehouse with many rooms including a reading niche and gourmet kitchen.
And then, guess what folks?
Yar! We went sailing on Saturday and it was lovely. We cruised beneath both spans of the Bay Bridge, down to SoMa and the AT and T ballpark, along the downtown waterfront past the ferry building and Coit Tower, skimming past Fisherman’s Wharf and Alcatraz. And I got to pass underneath the Golden Gate.

Not a morning person

2007-10-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

Overheard on the bus:
Perky blonde commuter with bright pink lippy: “Do you mind if I open the window?”
Greying, balding commuter in grey suit: “No.”
“No, you don’t mind, or you do mind?”
“I do mind. I am cold all day at work.”
“Oh. Well, have a good day.” Muttered under breath: “Grump.”
“Yes. Sometimes I am.”

Joy Luck Crap

2007-10-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

Finally. Fortune cookies for a chica like me. Read in the NYT today about a fortune cookie company in Queens that asked its writers to come up with some more contemporary fortunes. The results include:
“Your problem just got bigger. Think, what have you done?”
“Perhaps you’ve been focusing too much on yourself.”
“It’s over your head right now. Time to get some professional help.”
Love, love, love. Next time I get a fortune cookie I am going to be extremely disappointed if I get a crap fortune like “Don’t worry, be happy” or “Today is an auspicious day.”

The Iceman cometh

2007-10-07T17:32:00.000-07:00

I feel guilty because I know the result of the France-NZ World Cup rugby game and the three men watching it in the next room do not. I don’t actually care except for the fact that this will plunge a small nation into a period of mourning, which is so counterproductive and lame I can’t bear it. Also, it will plunge my husband into a period of mourning which I would rather do without. At least he and the others had the joy of watching the Aussies get defeated first. There was fist-pumping and joy-jumping when that happened. Also lots of “shut up Gregans” and the delicious schadenfraude of knowing that was Georgie’s last game and, bum, it was dreadful.
This is Fleet Week in San Frantastic and there were air shows today and yesterday to celebrate. I felt quite sick yesterday watching four little biplanes puttering around the bay, barrel rolling and diving and tipping their wings. They would shoot straight up into the ether and keep going until it looked as if they were still and would surely stall, then barrel roll and head back down to earth. Amazing. Especially cool with the backdrop of Alcatraz, the TransAmerica building, Coit Tower, and a Bay full of sailboats. We sat at Inspiration Point, in the Presidio, with a bunch of neighbors, munching cashews and marveling. Today we went up on the apartment roof to watch the Blue Angels, a Navy sextuplet of Top Gun-style pilots who whizzed over downtown for 30 minutes or so. It was quite thrilling, and it was me who jumped up and down and clapped a few times—especially when they sliced through the sky just above our building. It was almost enough to make me feel patriotic. I have never been a particularly patriotic person—for NZ or the US—because, I think, of the shifting sands of my childhood. But seeing clever citizens doing cool stuff only made possible by the dedication of their government to building big, noisy, expensive stuff, well it makes a girl flutter.

Grumble grumble

2007-10-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

Another work week vanquished, hurrah! Tim and I both feel like we just need to recover this weekend: sleep well, eat well, exercise, clean the apartment, hang with the hams. I have had a thoughtful week, in that I have been spending a lot of time gazing out the train window trying to identify my goals while listening to inspirational music. This week it's been the Dixie Chicks. Every couple of years I have a small crisis regarding my life direction. What do I really want, where do I really want to be, yadda yadda. I have no solid answers as of yet and have responded to the crisis by trying to present myself a bit better, in the hopes that my efforts would make me feel better. To wit, I have worn eyeshadow and liner every day--with red lippy-- and have been bringing pieces out of my jewel box that I haven’t worn in a while. Today’s arm candy: a blue plastic chain link bracelet with a seahorse charm.
I may stop in Fillmore St on my way home and check out the shops. I need a winter jacket. I found this adorable one at H & M a couple of weeks ago--grey with a little belt and just the right length, but not in my size. Of course.
The worst thing is I have not written a bean. In, uh, about six weeks.

Hillary

2007-10-01T19:59:00.000-07:00

We went to Hillary Clinton’s rally in Oakland yesterday. It was exciting to see a little piece of history unfolding before us but she pushed our patience by making us stand in the street for two hours—with 14,000 other people—while one California politician after another made speeches and a gospel choir sang, I think, five songs.
There was an exciting few minutes when Mayor Hunky stormed on to the stage and shared a couple Bible verses (it’s worth noting that this is a man who slept with his best friend’s wife and when he got caught immediately went to rehab). I still think he’s dishy, though. A lot of people think he’ll be Governor of California before too long.
When Hill came on the crowd perked up but I still got the feeling a lot of the folks were fans of Bill and were making do with Hill cos they’re nostalgic for the mid to late-90s, when the US had low unemployment, cheaper gas, and we weren’t embroiled in a sticky oil war.
***
Coming home on the bus tonight I was victim to a sleazy jostler. I have experienced a number of these guys now. They use the movement of the bus as an excuse to lean against you, getting right into your space and lingering there without invitation. It is the perfect social crime—it takes you a while to figure out what they’re up to, no-one else really notices, and you feel prim and fairly ridiculous saying anything to the jostler. So these guys get away with it. Tonight’s guy stunk of cigarettes and BO. He kept checking his watch, really leaning down to see the face, and I noticed he had thick yellow fingernails, quite long, and a silver rose ring on one finger.
After he lurched off the bus, another creepy guy sat next to me. He wasn’t a jostler but he smelled like rotting peaches.

SoCal Sunday

2007-09-24T14:24:00.000-07:00

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Tiring. I am especially tired today because I got up at 4am. This is not the sort of thing I tolerate well, being hamster-like in my personal habits and requiring large quantities of sleep and food, and, naturally, getting bitey if something comes between me and the sleep and/or food.
I was in LA this weekend and for once it was beautiful down there; the sky was blue, not the color of dirty snow. The air was crisp with the first hint of the winter to come and it was warm, but not too warm--I could drink a frappucino without getting cold, but I didn’t sweat while walking down the footpath. Ideal temperature. My visit had two purposes: 1. Visit my brother who was in a motorcycle accident and is in hospital feeling pretty miserable. 2. Interview a Kiwi celebrity for Next magazine. If you want to know who, you have to read the mag. (Note the shameless promotion, Brenda.)
Pulling off the two aspects of the visit required driving long distances on LA freeways in a borrowed black Jeep Cherokee, which was pretty terrifying/funny. To begin with I was nervous about taking up so much space, but I tell ya, sitting up high and looking like a badass is a tremendous advantage when everyone around you is driving as if they were escaping from an avalanche.
In the end, though, totally worth it. Caught up with the family, did my job, saw the Hollywood sign, paid a small fortune for empty carbs and coffee. I feel so American today.

My favorite kind of Saturday

2007-09-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

Started the weekend gingerly with mugs of coffee, a bowl of toffee nut cereal and a couple episodes of Flip That House. I am just itching to tile a bathroom. We walked down to Fillmore St and did some browsin’ and lunchin’.
First up, Marc Jacobs, where I never buy anything, even though I lurve his clothes and if money was no object I would fashion myself after Sophia Coppola and never wear anything but cute Mary Jane heels on my tootsies. There are always bins of cool but fairly useless stuff near the cash register—-pens that look like lipsticks, mirrors inside clamshell compacts, leather bracelets, etc. Today there were also some fun little quilted wallets in metallic tones, so I swallowed my pride and took a bronze one to the counter where the beautiful retail people were perfectly nice although possibly a leeetle dismissive of someone dressed in Banana Republic and spending less than $30.
Then we had lunch at Harry’s Bar. Or rather, Tim had lunch and I had a plate of truffle-parmesan fries and a Bloody Mary. Well, it’s Saturday for frick’s sake. We checked out a sample sale further down the road but it had been pretty well picked over by the time we got there. I tried on a pair of Rock and Republic Jeans just for giggles—-they’re the ones Posh Beckham wears and supposedly helps design. My pair had pale blue sparkles on the bum. They were cute but the denim was surprisingly thin for something costing over two hundred smackers.
Tim took off to get his hair cut and I popped into Crossroads, a consignment store where every now and then you find a gem, and today I did. Hiding behind a pilled Ralph Lauren cardigan was a gorgeous little silk skirt by Marc Jacobs. It still had the tags on it—from Barney’s NY, thank you very much—and the original price: $258. I got it for $42. Ha! That adrenalin surge got me all the way home.

I left my crack in San Francisco...

2007-09-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was our one-year American anniversary. On Sept 1 we landed at JFK, jumped on the subway and arrived exhausted and relieved at a hostel not far from Harlem. My first impressions of New York were of hugeness, a prickle of fear as we walked through a tenement neighborhood to get to our accommodation, and delight at eating my first proper bagel in years, topped with smoked salmon, cream cheese and capers. It seems like more than 12 months have passed because it’s been such a changing time. We have really struggled to get to where we are now—content in a cute little apartment in San Francisco, stocked up with books and sourdough bread, spending happy afternoons wandering the neighborhood and evenings watching episodes of Flip That House on our satellite television.
(Last night’s couple did up a crumbling cottage an hour out of LA, fitting it out with hardwood floors, a smart green and red exterior color scheme, brand new kitchen, and a low-maintenance garden only to have it languish on the market for six months before they gave up and rented it out. The wife was pissed and her man—who she referred to disparagingly as “my tubby hubby”—was oblivious.)
When we landed at SFO a couple days ago, we were pleased to be coming into a stable situation, with all the organizing—finding a car, jobs etc—behind us. We jumped on BART and zapped into the center of the city, avoiding freeway snarls and saving the environment at the same time (Go Us!) but made the mistake of getting off a stop too soon and had to wander through the Tenderloin—crack central. Tired and disoriented from the flight, we trundled along with our suitcase, carry-on bags, laptop, and bright yellow bag of duty free wine. We may as well have sat on the pavement and quacked. Luckily it was 2pm and the drunks and druggies and homeless folk were mostly sleeping/recovering. Even so, a woman with a city library ID hanging round her neck was concerned enough that she came up and gave us directions (in our own city; humiliating). “I’m sad to say, but this is a drug dealer’s paradise,” she said, pointing us towards a safer thoroughfare where we might catch a taxi to clean and manicured Laurel Heights. “Don’t come here at night.”

The singing secretary

2007-09-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

First day of September and it’s a beauty. We have had a slow-as-cold-running-molasses start to the day due to lingering sickness and jetlag but after I have dyed my hair (my roots are such a boring ash brown now; I mourn my teenaged natural highlights) we are walking down to Clement for a bit of time at Green Apple, best bookshop in the Western World, and at Office Depot. I have a weird fascination for stationery shops. From the time I was about seven or eight, in the days when I dreamed of becoming a singing secretary named Linda or Stephanie, I have loved paper and paperclips, staplers and glue pots, stickers and post its, and notebooks and pencil holders, and all that jazz. I think it’s because all that fresh blankness speaks of promise. Well, that’s why I like stationery stores now. When I was seven or eight it was the pleasure of playing with paper and scissors and such, especially brand new ones. I am hoping to buy a board I can use to do some plotting for my newest project. Tee hee.

Are they whingeing again, or just brutally honest?

2007-08-31T16:13:00.000-07:00

From one of the best time-wasters ever, ananova.com:

Brits hate workmates
Nearly one in three Brits quit their jobs because they can't stand their workmates, according to a new survey.

More than 40% dislike at least one colleague, 20% hate the boss and one in 10 can't stand the person they sit next to.

And more than 23% of 2,500 Brits quizzed hate their "desk buddy" so much they find an excuse to move seats.

The poll, by recruitment site www.jobs2view.com, lists the main reasons for not liking colleagues as "laziness, talking too much and cliques".

It found that 27% think of quitting every day, and that just 24% find work important to them.

82-year-old powerhouse

2007-08-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

Just back in San Fran after a lightning trip home. Tim's dad had a massive heart attack two weeks ago and was on life support in the ICU when we flew back to Auckland expecting the worst, a horrible nervy, bumpy flight past Hurricane Flossie(then menacing Hawaii) with an unwanted Sydney stopover, making for nearly a 24-hour trip with minimal legroom and salty, lardy nonsense for dinner. Tim's passport had expired and while we managed to get out of SFO--Orange Alert be damned--we noticed our mistake in Sydney, as did security personnel who rang North Shore Hospital to verify Tim's story.
Tim's dad looked awful the first time we saw him (tubes from every orifice, pale yellow color, unconscious) and strangely small under his warming blanket and shiny metallic shower cap. But each day brought amazing progress. Soon he was breathing on his own, sitting up, drinking cups of tea, recognising family, remembering names, speaking in full sentences. Now he's just about back to normal and he gets tremendous satisfaction from hearing how he cheated death the day he went out for a new letter box and collapsed at the hardware store only to be miraculously revived by CPR-certified staff and a defibrillator salesman who happened to be in the store for a demo. When he hears that he had quite literally stopped breathing and was unresponsive on the concrete floor, he cackles with the joy of coming back to life. He is an inspiration.

Evil exercise genius

2007-08-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

Day off work today, tra la, tra la, so I slept in a little bit, did a teensy bit of writing and then went to the gym, feeling pretty durned chipper. Until I saw that Batshit Crazy Lady was leading the 10am sculpting class. I stumbled into her spin class once a couple of months ago after a particularly grueling work day, and if I hadn’t been a spaghetti noodle by the end of it, I might just have dismounted and slapped her. She pretended we were racing a stage of the Tour de France and gave a running commentary on each hill and valley, complete with stats on the leaders and trivia from her own experience watching the Tour in person. So-and-so is very charming, some racers drink scooners of beer at the end of the day, she has autographed t-shirts from riders etc, etc. We had a competition to see who would win the imaginary green shirt for getting to the top of the highest imaginary hill. I stopped and had a pint of cider at an imaginary pub.
So today my nice gentle sculpting class began with a musical prelude to the 2008 Beijing Olympics—apparently they released one of the songs this week to get people in the mood. It didn’t get me in the mood for my class, however—I actually groaned out loud and had to pretend to be clearing my throat so as not to offend Batshit Crazy Lady, who apparently has no idea just how aggravating she is. We did seven sets of push ups, we had to do squats in time to that nasty song about ‘lady lumps,’ we waved big heavy bars around for the benefit of our triceps—which, we learned, are the size of a stick of string cheese—and got a lecture about skin elasticity. "You don't have to do everything I am doing," she said as she launched into another set of push ups. "I am your sculpting waitress; I am just making suggestions."
By the end I was thinking that perhaps she is some sort of evil genius, because she makes people so mad they keep lifting those weights just to concentrate on something other than her chirping commentary.
And then she tried to convince us to follow her over to the other studio for her spin class, starting in half an hour.
“Just consider it,” she said, as damp women with strands of hair flopping in their mouths openly groaned at the thought. “Well, maybe next week.”

Dammit! If I'd only had another month...

2007-08-09T21:49:00.000-07:00

How cute is this?

A Tortoise's Great Escape

Morning Edition, August 9, 2007 · A rare tortoise disappeared from a Virginia zoo. It's not clear whether a visitor freed it or it slipped out on its own, but it was gone. The Burmese Mountain Tortoise raced away with the speed a tortoise is famous for. Zoo staff found it seven hours later in a patch of bamboo just 20 yards from its pen.

You can hear all about it here.

Shiny boots and no good reason to feel cocky

2007-08-09T13:32:00.000-07:00

Little bit of excitement on the train this morning. I stepped into the car to find not one but three BART police standing in the doorway with their big black boots and official somethingerothers strapped round their waists. I don't know if they pack heat, but they're got suspicious bulges on those belts. Little cans of mace, perhaps? They might have simply been commuting to work--surely one of the (only) perks of being in the BART police force would be free travel--or they might have been on their way to kick some sad homeless loiterer's butt. In either case, their presence made me feel decidedly less safe.

Up that jelly hill, under water

2007-08-08T20:28:00.000-07:00

So tired this week. I feel like I'm walking under water, or through jelly, or up a hill that is not very steep but goes on and on past the horizon. This morning I woke up when the alarm went off then fell asleep for another 35 minutes--only thing that got me out of bed was my arm, which had also fallen asleep. Anyway, my tired draggyness has mucked up my gymming and my writing (I have a new little project, which I'm enjoying) so I am in self-loathing mode. My commute book this week is Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and when I compare my fatigue and sick ham to their ayatollahs and chadors I loathe myself even more. So it just feeds itself, you see?
Speaking of sick hams--Vodka is doing well. Every evening we have to put lady cream on his tummy, and under his chin, and on his legs--all the places he's rubbed his fur off with scratching, poor little pet. It is a two-person operation. Tim holds him by the scruff of his neck and I spread the cream on while he kicks and shakes with fear. It is a pathetic sight.

Itchy and scratchy

2007-08-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

Vodka had to go to the animal hospital today. I noticed this morning when I cleaned out the hams’ cages that he had a horrible big scab on his tummy, and that he had lost fur under his neck and on his legs. He was also scratching like mad. It happened so quickly; he was fine a few days ago, nothing amiss, although I must admit that, given his bitey behaviour when we was a teen ham, I am always careful when I handle him and don’t often see his tummy. I did some quick online research and learned that he might have mites—very contagious and devilishly difficult to get rid of—which sounded like a real treat. I considered going to the pet store for some anti-mite spray, but the poor little dude was damaging himself with his scratching and biting.
So Tim rang a couple of vets until he found an animal hospital with experience treating “pocket pets,” as Voddy’s kind are known in the biz, and we were told to arrive any time after 3.30pm, when the doctor with expertise treating rodents and reptiles would be in.
We got there at 4pm, having first driven to 9th Street instead of 9th Avenue, to learn that the reptile/rodent man was stuck in traffic. It took an hour for him to arrive during which time a swarm of children crowded round Vodka’s cage and demanded to see him (he was tucked up in a wad of toilet paper trying to pretend he was roaming the Siberian steppes) and played a game of opening and shutting the surgery door over and over. Finally, a family with two sick dwarf hamsters—chocolate colored ones who’d gone off their food—went in to see the doctor. Soon it became apparent that at least one of them was a goner. Well, we couldn’t help but form that impression when the older boy came out of the exam room saying, “He’s going to kill Twinkie. I don’t know why Mom’s crying. Hamsters only cost $3. We can buy more.”
Another hour had passed.
A girl with two bottle-cap sized turtles disappeared into the exam room. Outside, a guy with headphones and a floppy blue sun hat started to dance on the footpath in front of a shiny green pick up truck, admiring his reflection. He really got into it. He had no shame whatsoever. After 10 minutes or so he sat down with a flourish, opened a book and read aloud as if making a speech, say a State of the Union address, to a crowd of thousands. A homeless guy wearing an eye patch and pushing a shopping cart full of plastic bags, and boxes, and goodness knows what, trundled past. He parked his trolley, chatted with the dancer/orator, clapped him on the back and yelled a bit. Pulled out a harmonica and began to play. At which point Tippy Toes Blue Hat began to dance again. I am not making any of this up.
Another hour had passed.
Finally, it was our turn. Vodka was weighed—he is a hefty 49 grams—and examined. The vet pulled off the horrible scab and invited us to touch it. It looked like cheese and felt like that old-fashioned almond icing that ends up on Christmas cakes. He turned the lights off and shone a UV light on Voddy’s tum to check for ringworm, which, he explained, glows apple green. It did. He took a skin scraping and checked the sample for mites under a microscope. All clear. And then he cleaned out the cheesy abscess behind the scab which, it turned out, was like nothing he’d ever seen. It went on and on, so deep that when he reached the end of the cheese he could see through Vodka’s skin to his liver. “You could stick a pencil eraser up there,” he said. “Now you have a little kangaroo hamster.”
Another hour-and-a-half had passed.
So Vodka is fine. He has a big hole in his tummy which I have to keep an eye on in case food and other debris gets stuck up there. I have to clean it out with an ear swab every month or so. And for the next week I have to spread vaginal cream on his chest and under his arms to deal with the itchy ringworm.
As soon as we got home he jumped into his wheel, his favorite spot in the world, and hunkered down for some quiet time. I am willing to bet money he was supersonically screaming at Lime: "They poked a hole in my tummy and now I have to wear lady cream. What the f***!"

Ewww

2007-08-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

The sun is shining, there’s a lovely breeze coming through the window, it’s nearly lunchtime, and I am not in the mood for a rant, BUT I am repulsed by news that a woman in Arkansas has just given birth to her 17th baby. I love kids, I want kids, I am looking forward to kids, but this is just not on, people. The world is so overpopulated it’s making the elephants cry, physically this many pregnancies is a burden no woman should bear, surely her older children have had enough of the baby-a-year scenario (who wants to bet Mom and Dad are going to wake up one day soon with a posse of socially deficient little monsters on their hands?), and Mom’s hair? Just horrendous.
But I defer to someone who can outline the situation with far more finesse. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote this piece in 2005, when Mr and Mrs Arkansas brought baby #16 into the world.

God Does Not Want 16 Kids
Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost?
And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob and he's hankerin' to be a Republican senator and try not to wince in sociopolitical pain when you say that -- isn't more than a little numb to the real world, and that bringing 16 hungry mewling attention-deprived kids (and she wants more! Yay!) into this exhausted world zips right by "touching" and races right past "disturbing" and lurches its way, heaving and gasping and sweating from the karmic armpits, straight into "Oh my God, what the hell is wrong with you people?"
But that would be, you know, mean. Mean and callous to suggest that this might be the most disquieting photo you see all year, this bizarre Duggar family of 18 spotless white hyperreligious interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair, the kids ranging in ages from 1 to 17, worse than those nuked Smurfs in that UNICEF commercial and worse than all the horrific rubble in Pakistan and worse than the cluster-bomb nightmare that is Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise having a child as they suck the skin from each other's Scientological faces and even worse than that huge 13-foot python which ate that six-foot alligator and then exploded.
It's wrong to be this judgmental. Wrong to suggest that it is exactly this kind of weird pathological protofamily breeding-happy gluttony that's making the world groan and cry and recoil, contributing to vicious overpopulation rates and unrepentant economic strain and a bitter moral warpage resulting from a massive viral outbreak of homophobic neo-Christians across our troubled and Bush-ravaged land. Or is it?
Is it wrong to notice how all the Duggar kids' names start with the letter J (Jeremiah and Josiah and Jedediah and Jesus, someone please stop them), and that if you study the above photo (or the even more disturbing family Web site) too closely you will become rashy and depressed and you will crave large quantities of alcohol and loud aggressive music to deflect the creeping feeling that this planet is devolving faster than you can suck the contents from a large bong? But I'm not judging.
I have a friend who used to co-babysit (yes, it required two sitters) for a family of 10 kids, and she reports that they were, almost without fail, manic and hyper and bewildered and attention deprived in the worst way, half of them addicted to prescription meds to calm their neglected nerves and the other half bound for years of therapy due to complete loss of having the slightest clue as to who they actually were, lost in the family crowd, just another blank, needy face at the table. Is this the guaranteed affliction for every child of very large families? Of course not. But I'm guessing it's more common than you imagine.
What's more, after the 10th kid popped out, the family doctor essentially prohibited the baby-addicted mother from having any more offspring, considering the pummeling endured by her various matronly systems, and it's actually painful to imagine the logistics, the toll on Michelle Duggar's body, the ravages it has endured to give birth to roughly one child per year for nearly two decades, and you cannot help but wonder about her body and its various biological and sexual ... no, no, it is not for this space to visualize frighteningly capacious vaginal dimensions. It is not for this space to imagine this couple's soggy sexual mutations. We do not have enough wine on hand for that.
Perhaps the point is this: Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest? In other words -- assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their massive brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will all be, as the charming photo suggests, never allowed near a decent pair of designer jeans or a tolerable haircut from a recent decade, and assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right -- where are the forces that shall help neutralize their effect on the culture? Where is the counterbalance, to offset the damage?
Where is, in other words, the funky tattooed intellectual poetess who, along with her genius anarchist husband, is popping out 16 funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring to answer the Duggar's squad of über-white future Wal-Mart shoppers? Where is the liberal, spiritualized, pro-sex flip side? Verily I say unto thee, it ain't lookin' good.
Perhaps this the scariest aspect of our squishy birthin' tale: Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation. Is that an oversimplification?
Why does this sort of thoughtfulness seem so far from the norm? Why is having a stadiumful of offspring still seen as some sort of happy joyous thing?
You already know why. It is the Biggest Reason of All. Children are, after all, God's little gifts. Kids are little blessings from the Lord, the Almighty's own screaming spitballs of joy. Hell, Jim Bob said so himself, when asked if the couple would soon be going for a 17th rug rat: "We both just love children and we consider each a blessing from the Lord. I have asked Michelle if she wants more and she said yes, if the Lord wants to give us some she will accept them." This is what he actually said. And God did not strike him dead on the spot.
Let us be clear: I don't care what sort of God you believe in, it's a safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables. God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them) lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet's resources faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children, she'd have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door. Stop it now.
Ah, but this is America, yes? People should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want with their families if they can afford it and if it's within the law and so long as they aren't gay or deviant or happily flouting Good Christian Values, right? Shouldn't they? Hell, gay couples still can't openly adopt a baby in most states (they either lie, or one adopts and the other must apply as "co-parent"), but Michelle Duggar can pop out 16 kids and no one says, oh my freaking God, stop it, stop it now, you thoughtless, selfish, baby-drunk people.
No, no one says that. That would be mean.

Deviled eggs and deviled bus drivers

2007-08-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned before that the people in our apartment building are not very friendly, except our lovely landlady and a lovely law lecturer who moved in after us. Well, the two of them invited the whole building to drinks tonight and we were the only ones who turned up--which was fine cos we've had drinks with them on the deck out back before and we don't need the others, but really, isn't that just rude? Our landlady made deviled eggs!
Apparently one guy even leaned out of his window to ask our landlady something about his fly screen or something and then said, sorry, couldn't linger, he had to go "get some exercise."
I was late cos of my commute. I got the jerkwad bus driver with the gold bracelets who goes so fast people beg him to take his foot off. After a ride on his bus I always feel as if my teeth are loose.

Naked

2007-08-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

Hmmm. So it turns out people other than my friends and family are actually reading this thing, which makes me feel rather exposed—ridiculous, I know, given that this is a blog and the whole point is that other people should be able to read it. Tee hee. But these last few months, I really have felt that this was like a souped up postcard. We hung out with the sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf, wish you were here, etc. My first indication that strangers were frequenting the blog was when some guy left a comment advertising his book. I thought that was pretty cheeky but, hey, writers have to market themselves these days, so fair play to him. Then, I had my YA author visit. (See Ha! I deserved that for further information). Now, through secret squirrelly computer detective work, I know that I have at least once had a reader in Mexico. Exciting, no? Also, I seem to have a small following in New Jersey.

Burned potstickers and peanut butter

2007-07-31T21:15:00.000-07:00

Tim is at class tonight so I had a dumb dinner. He really is a most excellent husband--he rang when I was on the bus to tell me how to cook frozen potstickers: throw them straight in a pan of hot oil, brown for three minutes or so, add boiling water to the pan (almost enough to cover), cook for a further five minutes, and you're done. Except I burned them, the fire alarm went off, I had to stand in the foyer fanning the smoke detector with my blazer, the pan boiled dry, I spilled half the potsticker sauce on the kitchen bench, and after all that I was still hungry. At which point I improvised with dessert: chocolate chip cookies smeared in peanut butter.
Another weird day at work today although, unlike most, it ended with champagne. One of the girls at work is getting married, hence the champagne. I edited stories about a potential biological control for fruit flies, a woman who sells accessories made from antique brocade, and an artificial nose that, when tested in Berkeley, sniffed out cocaine, meths and pot. Hence the weirdness.

Ha! I deserved that

2007-07-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

Apologies to Diana Peterfreund, who took a peek at SanFrantastic. (BTW, this is my first celebrity visit. If I mention Ryan Phillippe, will he turn up here too? Please?) Turns out the writing challenge she is taking part in is 70 days, not 70k words. And she only writes a book a year... Which still makes me feel like a lazy bum.

Sick habit

2007-07-30T20:46:00.004-07:00

I have been stalking writers again. Online. They're not necessarily writers I like or even read, but I can't keep away. I keep checking in on this perky young thing called Diana Peterfreund who writes teen novels and ocassionally poses for romance novel covers. She is prolific--three books in about a year-and-a-half--and quite the little marketer. At the moment she is taking part in a challenge to write 70,000 words in something like a month. I am jealous and admiring at the same time although I can't imagine how you could produce 70,000 good words in a month.
I also like to keep tabs on Miss Snark, a publisher who recently stopped blogging but left her archives online, and this literary agent based in little ol' Denver who keeps making big sales. The Jennifer Trio--Weiner, O'Connell and Crusie--are other fave stalkees. They are all chick lit writers I have read at times when I needed a nice, comforting, caramel-choccie kind of literary experience, andf they all have feel-good websites that make you believe they are much like yourself except exponentially more successful.
But theirs are not the sort of books I wish I could write. Mostly I like stuff that makes me feel just a leeetle uncomfortable, like this new short story collection I just finished reading, Twenty Grand by Rebecca Curtis, about misfits and freaks with money woes. Loved it, and in a week or so, when it's had time to settle, I'm going to read it again. I would be stalking Rebecca Curtis, but she doesn't have a website. Yet.

The surreal world

2007-07-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

There’s a woman on television shouting at a group of investment advisors. “What are the financials?” she shrieks. “It’s been a sharp week for the market. Is it still possible to invest in stocks without losing money?” Given that the men are portfolio managers, it seems rather a waste of time.
She is one of CNN’s many Sexy Presenters, the ones who wear heavy Sophia Loren-style eyeliner, spill cleavage, and look as if they are about to bite your shoulder. When I lived in the US in the early 90s the CNN ladies were iron maidens, wrapped tight as bandages in jewel-toned blazers (red! green! royal blue!), their earlobes stretched by the weight of their shield-like gold clip-on earrings. They gave the impression that they were always tired, that after they deconstructed Clinton’s first 100 days in office they were off to a kindergarten open house, and then a cocktail party at the hubby’s office. I’m not for a moment suggesting that you can’t be both attractive and authoritative but I felt a fondness for the battle-mommies that I don’t feel for these lush chicks who waft across the screen in Manolo Blahniks and bed hair.

***

It was a bad morning in the Montgomery BART station on Friday. The man with no legs who usually panhandles up on the street corner had taken the elevator down into the station and positioned his wheelchair right by the exit, so commuters had to pass his outstretched hand to get to work. The drunk guy who is usually asleep on the tiled floor, a brown-bagged bottle in hand, had propped himself up against the wall and was gazing into the middle distance. I can’t figure out how old he is—his hair is mostly grey, he’s lost a lot of teeth, his skin is red and leathery, and his circulation looks very poor indeed given his purple feet, but he could be in his late 40s. The punk cowboy—cherry red mohawk, motorcycle boots, studded leather pants, studded leather vest, fleshy bare arms—who often performs in my station of a morning stood across from the drunk guy strumming his guitar and singing Johnny Cash. “Because you’re mine, I walk the line...” It was a surreal scene, and hard to dismiss.

***

Craigslist has been good to us. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it’s like a giant newspaper classifieds section, except it’s online, free, and offers a ton more stuff. We found our apartment on Craigslist, I got my job through Craigslist, and now we’ve made our first purchase through Craigslist. Craig, by the way, is a San Francisco guy who made millions when he sold his site, and still manages it. There are hundreds of Craigs in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. It makes you sick.
Anyhoo, Crowded House is playing in Oakland at the end of next month and Tim was determined to go. I too was keen, but felt a bit conflicted about it because I had been given the job of procuring tickets to their earlier concert at a winery down south and…didn’t. Was in dog box for several days. But I redeemed myself by stumbling on the aforementioned tickets on Craigslist. I emailed the seller and sent my cell number, which made me feel all nervous cos what if the seller was a psychopath, or direct marketer or something? Didn’t hear a peep for days and thought the tickets must be gone and I would have to move to the dog box permanently. But, luck shone on me yesterday, cos the seller, a softspoken man named Peter, rang and said the tickets were still available. I could have them but would need to drive to a supermarket in San Ramon (40 minutes away) to get them because he didn’t want to send them through the mail and would not accept a cheque from me. Pain in the butt. However, we were already at SFO dropping off our friend Steve (Hi Yvette!) so figured we may as well take a tiki tour of the East Bay and get tickets at the same time. We arrived, cash in hand, at Nob Hill Foods in San Ramon—hot as Hades and a nasty shock after the mild cool in SF—and met a boy-man holding a white envelope. It was Peter, not scary or weird at all. He’d won the tickets in a radio competition and his good fortune became our good fortune: he gave us the tickets for $50 a pop, significantly less than the going rate. Thank you, Craig.

Of science writing, Sinbad and acceptable haircuts

2007-07-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, apologies for the long absence—it’s been a bizarre couple of weeks at work. I am not going to rehash it cos I don’t want to give it any more of my energy, so let me tell you about a science writers’ function I went to on Tuesday. I went along to network—the very thought of which makes me snort—and learn a bit about alternative energy. Did you know that the technology exists to shoot small mirrors into orbit which would travel together in a clump and reflect sunlight away from the earth, thereby reducing global warming in specific regions? If China decided tomorrow to blast a bunch of mirrors into space to reduce their trapped emissions, they could do it.
I mostly wanted to meet some science writers who might be interested in writing for the science section I edit. (If anyone had said to me back when I was writing fashion copy—capelets are chicer than ever!— that I would soon be wrassling with stuff like carbon sinks, parasitic bacteria, the mating dance of the lance-tailed manakin, and thermo-organic electricity or whatever it’s called, I would have swallowed my own tongue.) But this is the situation in which I find myself, so gimme your business cards, freelance science writers!
I went along with one of our dear interns, who is a real science writer and a microbiologist to boot, and we had an hilarious time. For starters, the venue is this seedy waterfront bar called Sinbad’s which has nautical rope-trimmed bar stools, baaaad paintings of the bar as viewed from the Bay, and, inexplicably, many hanging pot plants. The food is so typical of crap buffet food that it is actually impressive. I had steak, chewy as dinosaur skin and covered in a congealing paste of canned mushrooms and brown sauce. Accompaniments included limp green beans and stale bread. The coffee was room temperature and there wasn’t enough milk. It was of the most memorable meals of my life. The man sitting next to me, a chemist with a column in some chemistry publication, got very close to my face and sent spittle droplets onto my plate. He was charming, however, and terribly worried for his daughter, who just graduated with a degree in women’s studies.
The speaker was a whiz-bang engineer from Berkeley who is one of the leading lights in the anti-carbon crowd and had an all-too-thorough Power Point presentation on the whole energy crisis—from the Kyoto Protocol to mirrors you can shoot into space. By the time we left I was hopelessly confused and yawning and deeply amused. I am half tempted to join the science writers' group so I have a legitimate reason to return to Sinbad's and watch sleazo businessmen pick up unsuitable women.

BTW: I finally screwed up my courage and got my hair cut today. I have been scared of hairdressers since the incident in February when I ended up with chunky toilet hair. I am still in budget mode, so the notion of paying $100 for a cut—not to mention color, wash, blow dry and service tip—and then loving my hair and getting sucked into paying for said procedure every 12 weeks, well it’s just not something I can consider right now. So, I went to this little place about two blocks from the apartment that Tim frequents. The turnoff for me all these months has been the big sign in the front window: Men, women, children $14. I love a deal but I spent more than that for two drinks at a rooftop bar in the Mission last night. However, things had got so bad on top of my head (I’m pretty sure I overheard the hair above my left ear telling the crown crop it was time to consider mutiny) that I threw caution to the wind and made the acquaintance of a nice Chinese lady named Daisy who sat me down and chatted at me for 45 minutes or so and—hey voila—I have decent hair again. She had an unorthodox approach to layering that made me nervous: pulling random strands of hair above my head and attacking with scissors from all different angles. A couple of times the scissors got stuck in my hair and I thought, uh oh, toilet hairstyle #2, but somehow she pulled it off.

Ain't easy being green

2007-07-07T18:35:00.000-07:00

Tim has written another piece for the Guardian online. Ch-ch-ch-check it out.

Forever young

2007-07-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

This year I managed to spin out my birthday into a three-day celebration of m-e. I had my actual birthday off work, so we went to the SFMoMA to see the Mastisse sculpture exhibit, which was interesting if a little earthbound—he managed to make the most lithe and lovely women bulky and solid as tree trunks. I guess that was his aesthetic because he was one of those geniuses who could do whatever he pleased with his materials and if he chose to create lumpy sculptures that looked like fists then, okay, I’ll pay to look at that. I got the 4th of July off work (Go Team America!) so that turned into a Napa Valley winery picnic day. We sat under oak trees and baked while sipping a lovely white, which immediately gave me a headache, and eating deli salads with bread and cheese. We moved with the sun and marinated in our own juices. It could have been a Matisse painting, that’s how elegantly sloppy it was. Later we went up on our roof and watched the Marina fireworks show. Much of it was obscured by other apartment buildings, so we mostly got flashes of red, white and blue light with the occasional dandelion burst of loveliness. And the final birthday treat was dinner at a fancy pants restaurant a couple blocks down the road where we ate our first expensive, fine cuisine probably since we left NZ. It was nice to blow the budget and blow out the candle in my chocolate cake with ganache.
And so another year passes under the door, never to be seen again. I have been in my 30s for a wee while now, but it still takes me by surprise—not that time is passing but that it has left me virtually unchanged which doesn't seem quite fair. When do I get to be wise and unhurried? If my three-year-old self and my 15-year-old self and my current self sat down together they would laugh their asses off. They would share the same sense of humor, the same taste in clothing and books, the same love of shiny objects, the same passion for Mexican food and the beach and puppies, the same disdain for anything fussy or overblown, and the same self-defeating behavior—quietly watching other people take credit for their efforts, keeping thoughts private which should be shared, and flaring into anger quickly and without warning only to fizzle ineffectually 10 minutes later. The linear progression favored by the wildly, covetously successful hasn’t exactly happened. I mean, there’s a ton of good stuff in my life that I can feel happy about, and I do. At the same time, there is a noticeable lack of drive, career cultivation and other hallmarks of true adulthood. It’s embarrassing. I still like dollhouses, I eat peanut butter out of the jar, and I lavish affection on a pair of hamsters who would happily kill each other. (I met a 10-year-old fellow dwarf hamster caretaker last week who told me he didn’t know any other adults with hammies. This kid ate slabs of quivery raw fish without blinking and still thought I was a bit off.) I am scared of hairdressers. I check out well-dressed women on the bus and try to figure out how they did it. I chew my fingernails then hate myself for it. I actually care what happens to poor, brainwashed Katie Holmes.
I was talking to a friend about this the other week. Blessedly, I am not alone. She was faux despairing because she had just bought a pair of red, diamante-d heels which she wore around the house with trackies because…well, she lives alone and why the heck not? Seems we 70s kids ended up without some essential adult chip in our brains. Is it because we watched Three’s Company and ate too much red-dyed food? Or are we supposed to serve as an antidote to all these whippersnappers pouring out of high schools now with web-based businesses, a dozen cool and useful talents (such as decoupage and jujitsu and chocolate-making), and a gentle disdain for their 30-something aunts and uncles and parents’ friends? I'd like to think there's some useful reason for my bubblegum habit and plastic jewels.

Baby shield

2007-07-02T18:51:00.000-07:00

I am intrigued by those new strap-on baby carriers that position the infant facing forwards on their parent's stomach like a shield. The baby's arms and feet dangle in mid-air, the breeze hitting their cheeks and ruffling their peachfuzz hair, while the parents go about their business, often accompanied by a purebred dog. The strap-on families tend to look cheerful and photogenic, like catalogue people. Do the babies ever wonder, just what in the heck am I doing out here in front? Am I supposed to protect this person? Should I hold up my fists? Why doesn't the dog have to dangle like this? Anybody?

It's all about the quality squirrels

2007-06-28T20:23:00.000-07:00

I've been working on the Berkeley campus for more than three months and have finally strayed beyond the fringes of my office building by taking an official campus tour. First interesting note: the bright-eyed students who lead the tours have to walk backwards the whole time, so they can maintain eye contact and pepper guests with witty bon mots about the Blues. So I learned a lot of useless trivia, which I love, and got to watch three guys dressed in blue and yellow sportswear trying not to trip over their feet for over an hour. Fab-u-lous.
There was a lot of blah-blah Free Speech Movement, blah-blah biggest university library west of the Mississippi, blah-blah Pac-10, blah-blah Go Bears. And then there was the interesting stuff.
Best trivia snippets:
* The highest point on campus is a belltower; bones belonging to the natural history museum are stored in the tower because it maintains a near-constant temperature.
* The campus squirrels have been voted America's friendliest.
* A fountain on campus memorialises a homeless dog named Ludwig who scraped together a living by begging food from students and loved to play in the water. After his death, mourning students did the right thing and named the fountain for him, thereby claiming another honor for the campus--only American uni campus to have a fountain named for a dog. Go Bears!
* And, best of all, Berkeley has produced 20 living Nobel Prize winners, seven of whom still work on campus. Each of these seven has a car park labeled NL, for Nobel Laureate. I have seen them with my own eyesies. Apparently there have been instances when more than seven of the Nobel guys have been on campus for a function and some have gone without carparks.
While the tour did not have the desired effect, I guess, which was to make me feel misty about my association with the university (Go Bears!) it did make me think about my own alma mater and how badly I blew it. I had the grades to get into Berkeley and lived an hour away, but I chose to go study in Salt Lake City, where it snows and coffee is considered a racy stimulant and if you're not Mormon you're not worth much of anybody's time. Strangest choice of my life. And I don't recall any squirrels on that campus. Certainly not chubby, chattery, elfin comics like the ones at Berkeley.

80 hour weeks: The American Dream

2007-06-27T12:23:00.001-07:00

Tim has got a great wee piece in the Guardian about America's working poor. Take a look. There's some plonker who calls himself YanksWorld (I'm assuming it's a man because the writing has a masculine voice) who weighed in on the issue A LOT yesterday when the piece was posted. Apparently he thinks it's just marvellous for people to work 80 hour weeks and take on multiple jobs because it is that kind of work ethic that has made this country great. He doesn't seem to have twigged to the fact that many people are doing this out of necessity, and might prefer to spend evenings and weekends with friends and family instead of coworkers. Oh, yeah, and some health benefits wouldn't go amiss either.

I could not bring sexy back

2007-06-26T12:30:00.000-07:00

My sampling of group exercise classes at my gym continued last night with a humiliating foray into Dance Fusion. This is advertised in the class schedule as a nice primer, appropriate for all skill levels, and less intense than the other dance classes. Lies. Damned lies. What it was was an hour of the most nauseating, cringe-inducing moves from a Britney Spears/Justin Timberlake video repeated over and over and over again. There was the hip grind, the flirty head snap, the hip hop kick, the Flashdance spin, the Michael Jackson Thriller-style groove walking, and the Flashdance super-fast running in place. She's a maniac, maniac on the floor. And she's dancing like she's never danced before. Well, that's for danged sure.
The instructor, as charming and flamboyantly sweaty as you could want, told us to "Have fun with it, ladies. Mix it up" but there was not a lot of joy to be found in that room. It felt like an audition for some terrible reality TV show, and the other dancers were determined to make the cut. They leapt and snapped and kicked their way into a frenzy. I meanwhile, hugged the back wall, half a beat behind the music and on the verge of nervous tears, my teeth drawn back over my lips like a pissy hamster.
And they call this sort of activity healthy.

Sunday blahs

2007-06-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

Sunday night is always a bit of a downer. I am not loving the job just now, so I have that "going back to boarding school" sick-tummy feeling. This is a horribly familiar sensation that was particularly acute for me from 1988 to 1991, when I was actually attending boarding school, and every holiday ended with a nauseous car/plane trip back to school and a sonic-boom fight with my parents. (Let me digress for a moment and describe my reaction to entering boarding school at 13, painfully shy and woefully unprepared for life with a mob of other adolescents, their hormones, their dangerous beauty routines, and their drugs. First, I stopped eating much, and lost about a quarter of my body weight in the first term. Then, I allowed another boarder, who had an interest in hairdressing but no discernible talent, to cut my nearly waist-length hair into a bob. The ends looked like I'd got stuck in a door and had to hack my way out. When my parents turned up for swimming sports, they didn't recognise me in the crowd.)
I had another terrible round of boarding tum when I was working for a certain start-up newspaper (the biggest professional nightmare of my life, and the only time I have consciously walked away from a bad situation instead of standing and fighting), and now I have a mild case which I am attempting to quell through strength of will and renewed physical fitness. After all, this is my birthday week, and I officially hit my mid-thirties, surely a joke. I own hamsters, speak to strange dogs in the street, and still keep track of Paris Hilton. I am not really a proper adult.
To deal to the tummy, I have sucked back a mug of spicy hot chocolate, a big serving of empty carbs, and am now working my way through a glass of Riesling. I made an inspiring list of places we may visit in the next year--Alaska, Colorado, and Montana figure strongly--and I have plans to retreat to bed early with a new book, an autobiography written by a man who grew up in San Francisco high society. It's all about his evil stepmother who sounds like a fabulous character. Horrible but fabulous.
BTW, speaking of horrible, I saw A Mighty Heart, the film about the murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted in Pakistan in 2002 and beheaded. It is based on the novel by his wife, Marianne, and it is really good. I was resistant because it stars Angelina Jolie, who makes me feel like biting kittens. But she manages to avoid the pouty, self-satisfied smirk which has been such a mainstay of her career and does a wonderful job of portraying an admirably strong woman in the worst possible situation.
And so to my book.

You don't think it's, uh, you know?

2007-06-18T21:07:00.001-07:00

So a weird thing happened on the way back from the movies last night. We went down to the Kabuki Theatre in Japan Town (five minutes from the apartment) to see Once, this cute little Irish film about a Dublin busker who falls for a girl from the Czech Republic who sells roses on the street. It was a lovely wee film; I recommend it.
But that is not the point of this story. The point is that on the way home we turned from Sutter Street into Presidio Street, just near the lot where Muni rests the city buses between shifts, and we passed this pale, long, rumpled lumpy thing lying in the road. It looked exactly like a body. It looked exactly like the body of a homeless person sleeping in a blanket in the middle lane.
"What was that?" I asked.
"I dunno. Whaddya think?" said Tim
"It doesn't look good," I said.
"No. Should we stop?"
"I think so."
"Yeah," said Tim, pulling over and parking.
A lady in a Beemer station wagon pulled up beside us. "Do you think that's, um, you know?" she asked, pointing back at the lump. "It's a bit short," she said, "for, uh, you know. But we should call someone." She pawed through her handbag and patted the passenger seat. "Do you have a phone?" she said. "I can't find mine."
"Have you got your phone on you?" Tim asked, turning towards me, possibly the least likely person in a three-block radius to have a cellphone, given my passionate loathing for them and the alacrity with which I lose mine and let the battery run down.
"Nup."
"I'll go have a look," said Tim, jumping out of the car. He walked back to the lump while the Beemer lady and I looked at each other and made worried faces.
"It looks a bit short for, uh, you know," she repeated.
"Yeah." I craned my neck to see Tim's reaction as he neared the lump. I thought I'd be able to sense if it was, uh, you know. But I couldn't. I twisted in my seat. I didn't think to remove my seat belt. It felt like 10 minutes, but it was probably two. Tim returned.
"Well?" I asked.
"I dunno. I called out, but nothing happened. There's a fire station up there." He pointed past the nose of our car, towards the corner. "I'm going to go tell them."
He took off in the dark; I watched until I couldn't see him any longer.
Two more cars passed the lump, slowed and stopped. Car doors opened. Three people gathered next to the lump. They yelled. They kicked the lump. It bounced into the air. They kicked as a group, three figures kicking in unison, and kicked it right to the curb.
Huh.
Meanwhile, Tim had returned from the fire station and jogged back to where the lump had been, to talk to the kickers. And then I heard a BLOOP emanating from the fire station. I turned and saw a red glow. BLOOP-BLOOP-GRURRRR. And then, like a bad joke, a fire engine eased out of the fire station, lights revolving, siren wailing, and drove a block towards us.
Beemer lady and I looked at each other. "I'm out of here," she said, accelerating towards the stoplight.
Tim and I watched the fire engine come to a stop near the kickers. BLOOP!
"It was a pillow," said Tim. "A big pillow."
"Nooo!" I said.
"Yeah."
And we laughed and laughed.

June 17, 2002

2007-06-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

Today is the fifth anniversary of my father's death here in California; in NZ it was yesterday. I ordered my usual bunch of flowers to send to the facility where he spent his last two-and-a-half years, and I had my usual mope. I am grateful, truly grateful, that I was there for his last day, but that was the hardest eight hours of my life.
I always feel like a peeled onion in the anniversary week. While it's true that time is a great healer, it's also true that you don't get over the loss of a parent. You just get used to it.

No rest for the wicked

2007-06-16T18:16:00.000-07:00

I can't quite believe how sore my thighs and biceps are. I am literally having to haul myself up the stairs using the banister, and on the way down I step as gingerly as a granny with a new hip. I have been gymming, folks, and it has turned me into a laughing stock. Well, Tim laughs at me, and points, and occasionally slaps the sore bits and then snatches his hand back quick-as-a-flash when I glare at him. And last night we went out for Japanese (in Japan Town--dinky) with our friends Grover and Carolyn and they laughed at me, too. Hmmph.
I joined the fancy-pants gym down the road in February in an attempt to hang on to the residual muscle definition left from my days at the AUT gym in Northcote, working out with my trainer, Sophie. What with throwing in the job and travelling in Europe and then driving across the US eating cheeseburgers and twisty fries, there wasn't a heck of a lot of definition left, but I determined to keep it. And so began my relationship with the elliptical machine, on which I spin aimlessly for half an hour at a time, while catching up on the latest from Angelina and Brad. A couple of days ago I decided to get myself moving for real--in an exercise class. As a member of the fancy-pants gym, I get into group exercise classes for free (you know, except for the astronomical monthly fee I pay for the privilege of crossing the threshold of Gym Fancypants) and I love a deal, so that was another part of my motivation. The third key factor was realising I had not set foot in an exercise class since buggering my knee at an aerobics class nine years and four knee operations ago. It was time to kill that phobia.
I chose a class called Strength and Sculpt, billed as a non-threatening way to tone and build core stability through the use of bands and balls. I did 15 minutes on the elliptical to warm up and arrived in the studio 5 minutes before the start of class to find all floor space claimed by aggressively beautiful people, bar a sliver of space right near the front. Of course. I found myself a step, three sets of free weights, and a squishy ball thing with a flat plastic base. While I was doing this, I noticed the deathly still of the studio and the fixed way in which most classmates were checking themselves out in the mirrors. I also noted, not for the first time, how big were the rocks adorning most women's ring fingers, and how well groomed they were for people about to sweat to excess.
So, the instructor, a sinewy button of a girl, plugged in her microphone and that terrible be-boppy tinny aerobics music that must be created solely for use in gyms began to throb. I choked back the giggle that always erupts when I hear that music and started to move it, move it. Oh, and did I mention the heavily pregnant woman who glided into place just in front of me as the be-bopping reached its first crescendo? She was mammothly pregnant and pushing those weights around like they were matchboxes. I immediately loathed her.
Thus motivated, I started my first post-knee disaster exercise class with a hiss and a roar and much waving of arms. Bicep curls, tricep dips, side-stretchy moves meant to define the abs, all of that was fine. But when the squats began, with the attendant bum-clenching and knee-grating, I wanted to take a breather. I couldn't of course, because of the pregnant lady, bouncing away like a scolding, just in front of me. By this stage, I had that weird jelly feeling in my thighs, the wibble wobble named 'fatigue' in my calves, but still I moved it, slightly off time, lagging behind the beat. I stumbled a little as we lunge-marched our way up and down the room three times, and was smart enough to slow my pace a bit, but the other exercisers ignored the instructor's invitation to take a breather if needed, so I ignored it too. Above all, I didn't want the pregnant lady to win.
Happily, I can report that I made it to the end of the 50-minute class without incident--knee intact, dignity intact, amen. I took one last haughty glance at the pregnant lady--like the lunatic I apparently am becoming--and strode off home, thinking, ha showed her! Showoffy soon-to-be-mother with her huge diamonds and designer gym gear. Grumble, grumble.
Smug I was. And yet, I suspect she is able to climb and descend stairs without support today, belly and all.

Oh, dear, I feel faint

2007-06-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

I’m back at work, slugging it out with the tissue box and my own squeaky sinuses. My mystery illness has been a real time-sucker, not to mention being generally uncomfortable and inconvenient. I just about fell asleep on the train to work this morning—and that’s after more than eight hours sleep last night, a nap yesterday afternoon, and two sick days last week. What more does my body want? Revenge for too many years eating crackers and cheese for dinner, methinks.
Anyway, it was a nice weekend, mostly, except for when I was in bed with a headache. We went to the SF Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning and rubbed shoulders with the organic, wealthy set and their color-coordinated adora-tots. The market is quite the trendy spot to grab a coffee and wander around getting a tan—yes, the sun was out and it was gooood.
The food is beautiful, eminently displayable, the sort of thing that you’d see in a still life by one of the Dutch masters, capturing every drop of dew on a pear leaf, the glassy texture of the fresh cheese. Most of it we couldn’t really afford. I mean, we could buy cheese for $27 a slab and cured salmon for $75 a shrink-wrapped packet, but then how would we pay the rent? (And wouldn’t you know it, in the middle of my mystery illness the rent check was due and I forgot all about it; the landlords’ suspicions about us have now been confirmed.) So we were a bit choosy, plumping for a sourdough loaf that cost just a bit more than it would at Trader Joe’s, our kinda pirate-themed supermarket, and cherries for a mere $5 a pound, and peaches for $3.75 a pound. And doughnut muffins, which were a deal, actually, at $1.15 a piece, and an innovation I can get behind. Basically, they are doughnut dough rolled in sugar and baked in a muffin pan to avoid the deep fry fat of a traditional doughnut. And yet, they still taste exactly as doughnut-y as you’d want. It’s a neat trick.
And with that, I’m all tired and schlumpy. Damn mystery illness.

Dirty mouth

2007-06-06T20:58:00.000-07:00

My mouth tastes like a bag of stale potato chips mixed with cigarette butts. I've been sick for the past two days--coughing and sleeping and coughing some more--and have that weird spacey feeling you get when you are sick and think hmm, perhaps I won't be going back to work tomorrow, or next week; perhaps this is just my life now. It wouldn't be so bad, sitting around on the sofa with a liter of ginger ale and the remote control. It's boring and makes you feel about as useful as a lump of cheese that's started to turn, but it's not demanding and there's no commute, so it's not all bad.
Today I read about Nicole Richie's shocking weight loss, and the blonde girl off Grey's Anatomy (which is not a programme I can be bothered with but her new film sounds fun), watched a really good Magnum PI episode in which he reunites a couple of Russian defectors, and compared presenters on two of the shopping channels. I really got into it, actually.
One woman, sadly crippled by her stumpy fingers (if you're going to spend your working life displaying jewellery and facial cleansers on TV, you gotta have long, impressive fingers, I feel), was all about the hard-sell: she waved a sterling and semi-precious gem pendant around for a bit and then slashed the price: "That's $39.99, ladies, no $35.99, that's $34.99...that's $30.00...$29.99...that's an unbelievable value that you just wouldn't find retail. These are going fast. That's $19.99! I don't believe it. That is the cost of the materials alone, that just does not take into consideration the craftsmanship you're looking at here."
The other woman, a groomed Southern lady, sat with her ankles crossed like Jackie O, and concentrated on the different ways you could wear the gold chains she was selling, and let me tell you, you just would not believe how creative you can get when you have to. She was shortening necklaces into chokers and looping them around her wrist multiple times as bracelets, she was working out how you might use this pair of earrings in the workplace or to add some kick to your outfit for a summer BBQ, how this piece might work with gemstones and how this stunner could become your new signature look. "Buy this today and you can enjoy it all summer," she said as she fondled a $440 chain made of large circular links, some highly polished and some textured, all Italian crafted.
I was entranced. It took my mind off the bad taste in my mouth (and the weird white spots). It's days like this that make me wonder if trying to have a career and give a poop about it is a waste of time, because I am just as happy watching people sell jewellery on television. And I don't even buy it.

On the road, part two

2007-05-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

Just woke up after a car nap. I love a good car nap and today is perfect—sunny and warm, a long drive home, and scenery that is lovely but repetitive, so I don’t feel I’m missing too much if I close my eyes. I have the laptop across my knees and one of Tim’s sweatshirts hanging in the window to reduce glare, so I am highway-blogging, which is not particularly glam, but better than sitting here eating jelly worms. There is a dwindling bag of jelly worms nesting between our seats.
After yesterday’s stroll round the picture-perfect Ferndale, we had lunch at Applebee’s, a rather good chain restaurant, not like anything in NZ, really. Tim, with his love of a bargain and a good honest feed, has developed a passion for Applebee’s and its celebrity chef, Tyler Somebody, who is often on the box talking up his latest flavor combos, such as chicken with salsa, which don’t sound particularly clever, and certainly not new, but taste fantastic all the same. There isn’t one in the city, so we keep an eye out as we drive new highways. Our first Applebee’s was in Kentucky. Yesterday, we hit the one in Eureka and it was just as good—and practically identical in appearance; the décor is Americana, with lots of road signs and pictures of Cadillacs and football helmets and such. Tim had a quesadilla burger with rosemary-parmesan fries; I had the Caesar salad topped with crispy garlic prawns. Could have fed a horse comfortably. And cheap as chips.
After that, we took a walk in the woods, getting up close and personal with more redwoods. I scared myself silly with thoughts of bears after a mysterious noise, a low, drawn-out keening, went unexplained. It was all very beautiful but I couldn’t wait to get back to the car. And then we drove to Fort Bragg, scene of one of my great childhood disappointments.
When I was about 11, one of my best friends from John Swett Elementary in Martinez, a girl I had managed to keep in touch with during a two-year stint in NZ, spent the weekend with my family. We drove up to Fort Bragg, a former military outpost, now white trash hangout (I’m horrid, I know), and caught the Skunk Train, an old steam engine that meanders through the redwoods to another nothing-much town, Willits. Dad was really excited about the train, and he had talked about it enough that I was too. Sadly, Alyson, a skinny blonde girl who often wore lavender jeans, which I thought were the coolest, was cold and miserable and unimpressed with all options laid before her. Basically, she was bored, which is about as bad as it got for middle class pre-teens in the 1980s. She didn’t like the train, she didn’t like the chile served in Styrofoam cups we ate at a pitstop along the way, she hated our charmless hotel, and she didn’t like my parents either. The years between 10 and 15 were particularly unattractive for me, so I suspect my clothes were pretty lame, and my hair dull, and my music taste dorky. Meanwhile, Alyson had the lavender jeans and a walkman. By the end of the weekend we were no longer friends. When we got home, I cried and cried.
Fort Bragg hasn’t improved much in 21 years. We ate pizza and went to bed.

On the road

2007-05-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

It’s Memorial Day weekend, I get Monday off, and it’s time we saw more of the state, so we packed up the car and hit Highway 101, headed north to redwood country. It’s incredibly beautiful up here, all misty and primeval, with these gigantic trees, older than Jesus, standing guard over the deer and black bears. (We’ve seen deer; no bears.) Some are 2400 years old, and even the “small” guys lining the highway are 400 to 600 years old.
Some snapshots of our weekend thus far:
* We paid $5 to drive through a giant redwood called the Chandelier, although actually it was more of a candelabra. I jumped out of the car and walked through the trunk, tapping the “ceiling” on my way, so I could photograph Tim driving through, with his head hanging out the window like a puppy.
* I was sitting on a smooth log, eating a Crunch ice cream bar when a little girl squeezed on beside me.
“Look at my ice cream,” she said, pushing her multi-colored, stripy lump of little-girl heaven under my nose.
“Wow, that looks great,” I replied.
“Look at my tongue.” She poked out her red and blue tongue.
“Cool.”
At this point her parents showed up, mom holding a very new baby wrapped in a yellow blanket, and my friend was led away. Clearly, the baby had messed up her sweet deal at home and she was looking for attention anywhere she could get it.
* Stopped the car to walk into the Chimney redwood, with a trunk hollowed by a long-ago fire. This tree has its own electrics and a guest book.
* Drove down the Avenue of Giants, 30-odd miles of, um, giant redwoods. Gorgeousness, but we had to stop before we got to the end because there had been a mudslide that the highway patrol had not bothered to signpost before we were practically upon it.
* Ferndale, USA. This is a teeny Victorian town which, rather than being a preserved under glass like a dead butterfly, is a living community that just happens to have great buildings. There is a diner with a long, wooden counter at which a local cop was drinking coffee when I peeked through the window; bank with box-office style booths for each teller; all kinds of candy shoppes, and antiques shops and a blacksmith's, all beautifully maintained and some decked out in red, white and blue bunting in honor of Memorial Day; and a miniature pink house built in 1995 as a fundraiser for maintaining some of the Victorian beauties in the main street, which was adorable except for the dog doodie on the tiny front porch. Oh, and there just happened to be a parade on as we drove into town, with a French horn and all the trimmings.
* Reading the local paper at our blandy-bland motel over muffins and crapola coffee, we learned that “Izzy” Osbourne and the AC/DC chicks’ tribute band, Thundherstruck, were on their way to Humboldt County. As were Joan Jett and the Black Hearts. Sadly, I think it was the real Joan Jett. Oh how the mighty have fallen, rather like ancient redwoods. . .

That's entertainment?

2007-05-21T21:24:00.001-07:00

I just got back from the gym all steamed up, not from the cursed elliptical machine, but from the bizarre Dateline MSNBC program I watched while climbing my way to gluteal improvement. It's called To Catch A Predator and I'd heard about it, in the way you hear murmurings about troubling, exploitative television, but I'd never watched it before. I didn't have much choice tonight because the screen attached to my machine was broken--I couldn't change the channel, and I couldn't turn it off, and I couldn't even get rid of the closed captioning. So I watched it, like you watch a snake swallow a mouse on a nature program. Not because you are enjoying it, but because there is something horribly compelling about seeing base instinct at work.
I will spare you the details cos they are just horrendous/absurd (in one case involving Cool Whip, an American whipped cream substitute, and a cat), but here's the basic outline: men were lured to a Florida house to meet with a 14-year-old boy or girl--depending on their preference--they had encountered in an online chat room, for sexual purposes. But ba-ba-ba-boom, they weren't meeting a 14-year-old at all, but some super-tanned blow-dry guy with a camera team.
He met them as they wandered the kitchen/lounge, looking for the child they'd hoped to meet, directed them to sit on a stool at a kitchen breakfast bar on which sat a plate of cookies and a vase of flowers, then interviewed them. At this point they did not know they were being filmed. He asked them if they had ever met children for sex before, and what in the heck did they think they were doing, and did they realise their behavior was unacceptable. And then he revealed his identity, just as two camera men came out of hiding. But that's not all, folks. Then he told them they were free to go--except when they got outside, police literally jumped from the bushes and pushed them to the ground. This was ostensibly for the benefit of concerned parents everywhere.
Now, I am not for a moment defending these men, ranging in age from 20 to 61, gay and straight, married and not, fathers and not. They were there to harm children, no doubt about it. But explain to me the public good that is achieved with this candid camera-style sting? (The men's faces were not obscured, their names were revealed, their personal lives sliced open.)
Result? The men's families are humiliated, their careers potentially destroyed, their anonymity at the supermarket gone. The men are arrested and charged and yes, put out of action for a brief time, but is that enough? Where's the follow-up care/treatment/prevention? I can't imagine Dateline MSNBC feels any responsibility towards these guys and their families. Forgetting that, is it an appropriate role for me, as a television viewer, to judge men whose lives I know nothing about, and who have been coerced into breaking the law by a television network which stands to profit from its trickery? Should that really be what passes for entertainment--and it is presented as entertainment; the news-value window-dressing is fooling no-one.
I try not to get lathered up about social issues just before bed, but I left the gym feeling quite nauseous.

Wicker, big hair and moustaches

2007-05-20T12:46:00.000-07:00

Tom Selleck is the only man in the world who can pull off a moustache without looking like he belongs on the H.M.S. Pinafore. I loved Thomas Magnum, PI as a little girl, I loved Richard on Friends, and now I'm loving Magnum again, thanks to the forever-70s-and-80s universe that is satellite television.
We watched the first-ever episode of Magnum PI this week--a two-parter that explored his tortured past in Vietnam and his bizarre caretaker role on mystery writer Robin Master's oceanfront estate. I don't think I ever got his motivation as a kid; I just liked watching him tooling around in TC's helicopter and swatting away the girls with that who-am-I-kidding grin. Anyway, I think Selleck grew into his role--or perhaps I was a generous viewer, cos the acting was pretty crapola. But I was also a devotee of The A-Team and Dukes of Hazzard. It was all about the adventure for me.
I also studied the women in these programs for clues as to what adulthood held for me. Given that the ladies were pretty much there to scream, fall for the men's charms--often against their will--and look sexy, I didn't have a lot of scope. And because I also loved the more ambitious Wonder Woman--pilot, heroine and lingerie model--I was most interested in the sexy. I developed a passion for blue eye shadow, gold chains, big fluffy hair, plastic bangles, high-heeled sandals, and deep Coppertone tans. I envisioned womanhood as involving a lot of personal maintenance (manicures, aerobics, drinking diet shakes) and afternoons spent in an apartment with an ocean view, wicker furniture and framed 1920s advertising prints on the walls, waiting for Magnum or similar to turn up and give me something to do. As I "matured" in second and third grades, I wanted to be a secretary by day/lounge singer by night, so I could wear stilettos and file important documents from 9 to 5 then, after work, don false eyelashes and sparkly dresses and drink multicolored cocktails garnished with little umbrellas and fruit skewered on plastic swords.
Life turned out very differently, of course, and thank heavens for that. I still like paper, although I collect piles of it and lose it, rather than file it. I can't wear stilettos and blue eyeshadow has been out and in and out again, but with my coloring it's just not a realistic option. My hair won't fluff and it looks stupid big. I hate wicker and own not one lounge singer-style dress. Turns out I can't sing. But I still love Magnum and my heart still speeds just a little when I hear the theme song and watch TC's helicopter swoop down over the ocean off Oahu.
And I still like the 'tache

Nasty and kinda nice

2007-05-18T13:17:00.001-07:00

I have not been able to stop thinking about this place since I went with Tim a few weeks ago. And even though it's disgusting, I almost want one of these.
I have just learned how to link, and I like it.

Drive me to the moon

2007-05-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

San Francisco bus drivers are a cranky lot. I think it's because they work in a state of constant uncertainty, or at least that's how I feel when I see the 1BX steaming down California St. You never know quite what's going to happen when you jump on board--will you nearly hit a jaywalking pedestrian; will the thingies that attach the bus to the overhead power cables fall off, leaving you stuck on the side of the road until the driver can reattach them; will a drunk cuddle up next to you and slump against your side in an uncomfortably intimate way? Such adventures to be had. The mood of my morning is often determined by whether I get a seat on the bus or not. It's not the standing itself I mind, it's the queasy whoosh of barelling down steep SF streets without something solid to brace against. If I have a seat, I can read my book and enjoy the rollercoaster ride; if I'm standing, I need both hands to hold on. And still I am thrown into the folk on either side of me. I don't know how the immaculate blowdry women with the stilettos and manicures manage to cling on.
For the most part, the general public is pretty polite to the drivers, but they don't always get the same courtesy in return. This morning, the machine you feed your dollar bills into seized up. A young woman stood and waited for her bill to go through. Nothing happened. "It dudn't sing and dance-h," snapped the bus driver. I would have rolled my eyes at him and huffed, but she delivered a sweet "Thank you" and moved down the aisle. Last night, I ended up on Snippety Snipe's bus. He is my least favorite driver for so many reasons: he speeds in a dangerous, not thrilling, way; he is openly hostile towards Asian patrons; he once told me off for pulling the bell strap thing too soon and when I apologized he just kept sniping until I got off; he yells "fuck" whenever he feels like it; he is sleazy. Each time he drops me off I wonder if he is going to speed off before I am all the way down the steps, or shut the door on my handbag.
Still, riding the bus beats the pants off having to drive and find a park.

State of Blah

2007-05-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

I’m feeling a bit tired and pathetic today, just draggy and blah. It’s a hangover from yesterday’s draggy blahness, which came out of nowhere. I think this job is stressing me out more than I realized. We went to Baker Beach, site of the cow painting, unrolled our little $1.99 grass mats, and scattered pieces of the NYT around ourselves (in a manner reminiscent to the hamsters' behaviour with nesting materials--are we taking on pet-like characteristics and, if so, have we turned into one of those sad childless couples who treat their golden labs like toddlers?) And I, after reading about how people with disabilities these days are getting on with "normal" lives, and to hell with those who might stare (right on, I say; they illustrated the story with a photograph of the amputee contestant from The Amazing Race, Sarah, dancing at a club) turned over and fell asleep. I woke up with grass mat marks pressed into my right cheek and a craving for sweets. We satisifed the craving at a German bakery run by Chinese people in Clement St, which is SF's second, smaller Chinatown. We go there a lot. I got a slice of mocha cake. And then we went home and I fell asleep on the sofa before giving in and going to bed. At 9.30pm. Am I living the big city life, or what?
In my defense, we had a busy Saturday, what with meeting the cow painting artist and all. Also, we got up before 7am to help out with the food drive at Tim's church, something we've managed just three times since we've been here. It's actually fun. There are some tough old ladies who try to sneak extra food--not because they're any hungrier than anyone else but because they can--and I actually slapped away a woman's hands when she tried to take two extra yellow squash. That sounds mean in black and white, but it wasn't. She knew she was pushing it, and I think she respected me for staying on the ball. One old guy had dressed up for the occasion, including a hat, and told Tim he used to have a job that was "clean". We think he meant he worked in an office.
Speaking of people in bad situations, I saw a man going through a rubbish bin for food as I walked to work this morning. This is not an unusual occurrence. There are people who stand outside Starbucks, watching you gulp back lattes and holding out their empty cups. There are a couple of men who sleep on the grass right near my office, are often still sleeping there when I pass. There are people who sleep under freeway overpasses, next to the train lines--I see them arranging their bedrolls from the train. The fact that none of this is unusual is what bothers me. So when I am mopey and tired and blah, it makes me feel like a jerk.

Art patrons

2007-05-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

Tim and I share few interests—we have an embarrassing passion for The Amazing Race; inhale chip and dip whenever we have the opportunity, therefore must ration ourselves, or suffer malnutrition; love reading and writing (though not the same stuff); and derive tremendous enjoyment from teasing each other. And that’s about it. So when we stumbled on a painting—a grown-up, put-it-on-the-wall and admire-it-for-the rest-of-your-life painting—we both absolutely loved while poking around Bodega village, where Hitchcock’s The Birds was filmed dontcha know, we bought it. Even though our budget didn’t really support it at the time. (It should be noted here that we did get a beautiful painting from Tim’s sisters and their families when we got married, but it’s in New Zealand, with our house and barbecue and the rest of our adult lives.)
In our California painting, two cows stand on Baker’s Beach, with a spectacular view of the Golden Gate and Marin headlands. One is a fresian, and the other is that reddy brown and white sort of cow, the one that looks like wet clay. Both cows are beautifully rendered, would look completely at home on the walls of a great ranching home, but the killer part as far as we’re concerned is the striped beach ball that hangs in the air between them, as if one of the ladies has just nosed it towards the other, and both are trying to look nonchalant for fear of losing their cool. Once you’ve spent a few minutes looking at this scene, drinking in the loopiness, you notice a black cow (Angus?) in the background, thundering up the beach to join the game. The whole thing is surreal and lovely. We swallowed our anxieties and whipped out the credit card, feeling confident we had bought the best thing in the gallery.
That was four months ago and today we returned to Bodega to attend a reception for the painter. We were a bit nervous to meet her, given how much we love the painting and how cool we’d imagined she must be. I was expecting, lord knows why, a woman with a husky voice, lavender hair and shiny black boots with the laces undone. I didn’t realize this is who I expected until we met the artist and she turned out to be quite ordinary, with an embroidered waistcoat (I have a weird hang-up about these), and little interest in talking to us, her patrons. We were miffed, I tell you. She even, at one point, took a huge step back towards the wall, positioning herself in front of another of her paintings, a well-endowed mermaid hugging two sea otters, but that didn’t stop us from sidling back into her space and talking at her some more. We so wanted to make a connection with her. Sad, huh? To heap disappointment upon disappointment, the gallery owner served Chablis in the smallest disposable cups I have ever seen—literally not much bigger than a cough syrup measure. So when “our” artist turned away from us again—crying out and practically jumping into the lap of a man she knew to escape us—there was nothing left for us but to get back in the car and drive back to San Francisco, an hour south.

Practically still flapping

2007-05-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

I love sushi—the salty-sweet firmness of the fish and the bite of the ginger—but I have a bit of an issue with raw food, so I’m conflicted. I tend to go for the cheater’s sushi made from cooked chicken and loads of avocado, or the cooked eel thing that tastes a bit caramel-y and looks like a wrapped gift. So today’s lunch counts as an accomplishment. One of the interns had to deliver some magazines to a restaurant on Shattuck Ave, Berkeley’s “gourmet ghetto”, and offered to pick up some bargain sushi on her way back. It was superb, the fanciest sushi I think I’ve ever eaten, despite being composed of many jewel-like slabs of raw tuna, albacore and salmon. Oh, and eel, coiled like a centipede, wrapped in a rice blanket and sprinkled with brilliant orange fish eggs that burst when bitten. I had to close off the part of my brain screaming, ooh yucky, this hasn’t been cooked, and concentrate on the subtle flavor of the super-fresh, practically still flapping, fish, which was deeelishus. Dunking it in lots of soy sauce helped too. I gotta say, I think having interns at my disposal is going to spoil me for other jobs. I try not to abuse my position, but ,hey, who doesn’t like having someone fetch lunch for them? I guess this is why executives get off on having personal assistants.

Feeling hot, hot, hot

2007-05-07T16:45:00.000-07:00

I’m a summer baby—was born in California, in summer, during a heat wave for pity’s sake, and have always been one for warm weather hobbies: give me a choice and I’ll always plump for a BBQ, a swim, and an ice block over an afternoon on the ski slopes and an evening sipping cocoa by a fireplace. But this is ridiculous.
This morning I woke up hot, an amazing occurrence given that our apartment has until now acted exactly like an icebox with polished wooden floors and cheap plastic blinds. I was warm on the bus, I was warm on the train, and I was warm walking to my office. The moment I stepped across the threshold and flicked on the lights, I was pitched right over the I’m-coping-with-this-just-fine line into tropical territory. Opening the windows and fanning myself with a copy of the new issue (which looks great, BTW) did not help much at all. Even sending an intern downtown to buy a fan hasn’t solved it, although the thing is gyrating madly just to my right. I am now so hot I am literally sticking to my seat, which is not pretty given the thin skirt I wore to work today.
So this is the start of summer. I can state with some confidence that we have probably seen the last rain of the season and I will not need my coat again until November. I am thrilled about this, and would do a little celebratory cha-cha, but I’m too danged hot.

Kicking butt

2007-05-06T16:48:00.000-07:00

It really is a year for unexpected experiences. I saw my first karate belt exam yesterday, and loved it! I didn't have high hopes, cos it seemed like it would be a long, drawn-out affair (which it was) and the only person I really wanted to see was my 17-year-old American niece, who was going for her black belt. But it was fascinating, watching people who had worked literally years for their five minutes in front of the big judge and either blew it from an overdose of nerves, or triumphed in spite of themselves. The students ranged from adora-tots in too-big suits to reeeally intense guys who, I sensed, might not have had much else going on in their lives--pure speculation, but I had three hours in which to entertain myself until our girl came out. Anyway, she was great: precise, clean movements, and when she got kicked in the stomach in the sparring section of the test, it made her mad enough to get aggressive in a black belt-appropriate way. So she got her belt. It's worth noting that earlier she had sat her SAT exams (for entrance to university) and later was going to her junior prom. She'd gone in for a pedi which she scratched doing kicks etc.
What's the deal with overachieving teens? I admire them--my other nieces, the NZ ones, are similarly confident wee powerhouses--but it sure makes you feel like a potato. I was a supremely unmotivated, lazy, miserable teen. I didn't want to do homework, or play sports, or develop any kind of useful/diverting hobbies. My favorite thing was to sit around with a book--well, that hasn't changed--and my second favorite thing was to make fun of striving girls who had better things to do with their time. I was militantly anti resume-shoring activities like volunteering at old folks' homes, or doing Duke of Edinburgh stages, or getting good at languages or musical instruments. Mostly, I thought the kids who were really into that stuff weren't exactly genuine--that they were ticking boxes that would prove useful later when they were job-hunting, and that their clubbiness was all about networking, which given that I went to boarding school is not actually far from the truth, I'd wager.
Anyway, I'm glad adolescence doesn't last more than seven years cos it's a bitch.
Today has been hot. We packed books, sunscreen, the New York Times, etc and headed for Chrissy Field, where there is a lovely beach, and sat in the sun reading, drinking lots of water, and meeting new dogs. A teeny poodle came up to say hello and her fur felt like cornsilk. I could have popped her in my pocket and run away with her.

Bad baaa-stards

2007-04-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

It had to be done. On Friday night, we went to see Black Sheep, the kiwi film about eugenically altered sheep who turn on the humans who run their farm--and any other unfortunates who stumble upon them. It's part of the lineup at the San Francisco Film Festival and conveniently was shown at a theatre in Japantown, not even 10 minutes from the apartment. I'm not a horror film fan, so I'm probably not much of a judge when it comes to the schlock variety. There was no time when I felt scared, which is a positive for me, and there were many moments of great humor--I almost weed myself when a tiny genetic mutant from a broken sample jar bit off Oliver Driver's ear. But there were some rather obvious gags--there just had to be a sheep-shagging joke, for example--and the one and only Maori character was the cliched cheeky chappie, which I found a bit disappointing. Still, you gotta love a film in which a bloodthirsty sheep gets behind the wheel of a ute and drives it off a cliff.

Too mean

2007-04-26T19:47:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a story about New Zealand identity, which has been a very interesting exercise. I am feeling more Kiwi than I do when I'm in NZ, no surprise I guess, because I feel most American when I am not here. My editors found the introductory paragraphs a bit mean, and I take their point. They have been removed from the story. But I still like them. So here they are.

***

"That's an interesting accent, darlin'. Where ya from?" asks a heavily made-up woman selling Navajo jewelry and pottery at a Santa Fe boutique. She is a riot of color, a bespectacled parrot wearing a squash blossom necklace.
"New Zealand," I answer with a tight mouth, knowing--hating--what comes next.
"Oh," she says, lazily polishing the counter on which she leans, her eyes narrowing as she mentally refers to a globe. "Where's that? Is it near Nova Scotia? No? Part of Greenland?"
"Try the Southern Hemisphere," I say, less gracious than I would like. "You know where Australia is?"
"Oh! You're that island at the bottom of Australia! The little triangle."
"No," I say, defeated, "that's Tasmania."
As my husband and I drove across the United States last autumn--from New York to San Francisco via Lisbon Falls, Maine and Tucumcari, New Mexico--we had dozens of conversations like this. They were funny at first. Then annoying. Then humiliating. Who wants to originate from a place so insubstantial as to be left off some world maps?

***

I guess I do.

Back from the rabbit hole

2007-04-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

Here I am. I disappeared down the rabbit hole for a while there. Just finished my first production cycle with the magazine. It doesn’t seem to matter where you are, getting a publication through the birthing process is tough—it takes longer and is much harder than it bloody needs to be. But there you are: it would be silly to complain, wouldn’t it, cos I know just how much worse it could be. We drove past the bookstore last night after a night out—dinner at a Nepalese restaurant and a function at the UC, listening to a four-star general talk about his Cold War tour of duty in Germany. (Are we geek chic, or what?) He was funny—much funnier than I thought four-star generals were allowed to be. Anyway, on our back to San Fran, we passed the bookstore, all lit up like a nuclear power plant, and realized that people would still be in there, ringing up purchases and shoving books in bags, smiling away like third runner-up in Miss Idaho Potatoes, and I just felt sick for them. Probably an over-reaction, but I was tired and had polished off a bottle of Indian beer, then been trapped in a hot auditorium with no air circulation.
We’ve spent the past couple weekends exploring our city. I really liked the Mission, after having discounted it after a tense, rainy day spent there looking for cheap furniture. (We went into a shop with secondhand household stuff and found a homeless man sleeping on one of the sofas, poor sod.) After we’d toured Mission Dolores itself, one of the 30-odd missions that form a spiritual spine up the state, we hit the pavement. Of course, I found jewelry I wanted—rings with vintage buttons as the centerpieces. Adorable. I bought one with a brass bird alighting on a branch. Then we stumbled on a bizarre gothic store selling “artful” taxidermied items. I was enchanted with a standing white mouse to which the artist had added two extra paws, so it looked like that Indian goddess. Bird skeletons were dressed in petticoats and hats and such. A wooden cabinet with many tiny drawers was stocked with oddities such as raccoon penis bones. I hate to think what one does with a raccoon penis bone but I bet it’s interesting. I felt a little ill when we walked out, but if Tim hadn’t been there I would have stayed much longer.
BTW. This morning on my way to the train I saw the guitar-strummin’ country boy with the red mohawk again. I think he’s Australian.

Carcinogenic clothing and too much cake

2007-04-08T20:31:00.000-07:00

We had cake for dinner -- a brick of carrot cake for me and a doorstop of chocolate for Tim -- and now we're sitting in front of the telly clutching our tums and complaining about feeling sick. It's been that kind of weekend -- self indulgent and spur-of-the-moment, the way you imagine you'll run your adult life when you're about nine years old.
Yesterday we poked around downtown and picked up some bargains (a new work-appropriate top and jacket for me, a couple of t-shirts for Tim; oddly there was a countertop sign at the shop warning that the State of California felt it important that we know cancer-causing substances were present...), ate Thai noodles for lunch, walked through Chinatown (where I insisted on stopping at the pet shop where we got Vodka and Lime, so I could observe the behavior of the other Dwarf hamsters and therefore deduce what in tarnation is wrong with our moody little boogers) and ended up in North Beach, the Italian part of SF, where we ate blood orange and mojito flavored gelato in the sun. As far as the hams were concerned, there was nothing to see. An exhausted mummy ham lay on her side, shielding a cluster of adorable babies the size of lima beans. Too young for behavioral issues.
Then we caught a bus home and blobbed in front of a Doris Day film in which she traveled to the Bahamas with Cary Grant, which should have been just dreamy, except they weren't married. Not very Doris Day of her.
Today we returned to North Beach to eat toasted focaccia sandwiches at a cigar shop/cafe that no longer sells cigars, walked and walked and walked, and saw the fabled parrots of Telegraph Hill, squabbling as we nosed around other people's gardens and sat for a while on a parrot-watching bench just off a path leading to Coit Tower. It was so appealingly bohemian. Someone's dragged a parking meter up there.
Then to top it off, we celebrated Tim's Washington Post piece by eating appalling quantities of cake at the top of the Macy's building at Union Square. My nine-year-old self would be have been delighted.

I read it in the Washington Post

2007-04-08T20:20:00.000-07:00

Tim was published in the Washington Post today! Check out his searing analysis of The Secret, a vicious little self-help book that blames life's losers -- including the victims of natural disaster and war -- for not thinking positively enough. Cos if they did, they'd all be healthy, wealthy and wise, apparently.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/06/AR2007040601819.html

Miss Bluestocking

2007-04-04T17:18:00.000-07:00

So I'm spending a lot of time on a university campus lately -- the one where I'm working for a month until my fate is decided -- and it's like returning to the womb. I can absolutely see now why some people keep educating themselves for decades beyond the point when any reasonable person would have decided to just get a damn job already, whatever it is.
It's nice on campus. The food is cheap. No-one's in a hurry. There's lots of time for sitting around in the sunshine while your books lie abandoned in the grass. There is always something diverting to notice as you walk around. (The homeless guy who wears an Indian blanket and drinks beer in the quad, swearing at the sky; the fat red squirrels that leap across the paths at unexpected moments; protesters milling around with signs; geek types happily fulfilling their societal function by wearing high-tide pants and thick-rimmed eyeglasses.) And simply by being on campus you appear to be accomplishing something.
Every morning, after I get off the train, I stop for a takeout coffee to sip as I walk through a grove of trees, crossing a creek and passing a giant expanse of lawn before reaching the office. It's just lovely. And when I get to the office, there is time to check news sites and emails, to catch up with the world and myself before diving into the day. There is time to think, which I am cherishing.
It may sound lame, but I really do believe that this is an "improving" time for me, in the way an Agatha Christie-style bluestocking would "improve" herself. I am reading better books (Plath and Alistair Cooke) and magazines (New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly) and paying more attention. To everything.
To borrow a phrase from dear old Martha Stewart, it's a good thing.

Tiny jaws of doom

2007-04-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

I'm trying not to take it personally, but Vodka has taken to biting me, quite literally the hand that feeds him, and cleans out his cage, and provides him with toilet paper for shredding and every other possible comfort a tiny rodent might want.
He bit my palm just moments ago when we were having a nice, calm little chat, I think because he was startled when the phone started ringing. I dropped him in his playpen (a plastic bin lined with wood chips and appointed with wooden shapes to climb on and plastic tunnels to walk through) for a cooling off period -- after I had given him time to let go of my skin. When he sinks his incisors into me, it's not just a momentary nip, he hangs on until he feels the danger has passed. He draws blood and leaves tiny gashes in my skin. It's really painful.
Now he's circling his playpen, occasionally pausing to chew on his little wooden jungle gym. He has a victorious air. Every time I lean down to check on him he stands on his tiptoes, front paws held in front of him in a protective fashion, and sniffs the air as if to say, "Oi, Scary 50-foot Woman! Come any closer and I'll bite your big stinky nose. Don't think I won't -- you've got my dander up now." He's clearly excited and pleased, possibly recounting our skirmish in his mind and making plans for the next.
I'm not sure what to do about it. This is the fourth or fifth time Voddy's bitten me in the past two weeks. It's rapidly becoming a habit of his. While Lime is a placid, and probably not particularly smart little fur ball, quite happy to sit on my lap and eat treats from my hand, Vodka is determined to make our relationship difficult. I am hesitant to put new food in his cage cos he attacks my arm, and taking him out for a run in the exercise ball seems like more trouble than it's worth. It is ridiculous, but I am scared of my three-inch dwarf hamster. No wonder he looks so smug.

Direct from Heaven, God TV

2007-03-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

Against my better judgment, I allowed Tim to get satellite TV yesterday. I know how that sounds: no, I am not one of those spouses who have to be in on every little decision their beloved makes (although he could probably save himself a lot of bother if this were our arrangement, hee hee), but in this instance I demanded input. And I resisted. For a long time. Because satellite TV isn't cheap, and it sure isn't necessary, and given his viewing habits (he habitually turns on the box as soon as he walks through the front door) I have a real fear of never having a meaningful conversation with him ever again. He finally won me over by doing his pouty puppy face (he can make himself look amazingly like that golden lab who advertises toilet paper) and last night, after a man had come and fixed a wee gray dish to our roof, we stayed in and watched the Colbert Report.
For those not living in the US, Stephen Colbert is a screamingly funny comedian who pretends to be an arch-conservative pundit with an arch-conservative punditry program. In his opening credits he scowls meaningfully and waves a huge American flag as an eagle flies overhead. Stephen Colbert is my #1 secret crush. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, aka Mayor Hunky, is #2.
So, that will be a weekly treat. But among our 200 channels – yes, 200, the naughty scamp – we also get at least three home shopping channels, several of the Lifetime family of channels broadcasting terrible Tori Spelling dramas and the like, the Military channel, and, get this, God TV. I couldn’t stomach the Military channel, but I did briefly check in with God TV and was disappointed to find a very ordinary looking man with an electric blue tie leading some kind of chat show. I had hoped for more.
The unexpected bonus of getting expensive, unnecessary satellite TV? We discovered a door leading to the roof of our building. When you go up there you can see the Golden Gate Bridge.

You can't be serious

2007-03-27T21:26:00.000-07:00

Walking down Telegraph Ave to the second-hand bookstore today I passed a young blonde woman of apparently robust good health sitting on a corner, wrapped in a blanket. I have a lot of sympathy for homeless people but this girl rubbed me up the wrong way. For one thing, there was no discernible reason for her to be there. I could hear Dad on my shoulder: Why don't you get a job, you lazy pup?The world doesn't owe you a living, young lady. For another, as I passed she said, "Gimme some money." As bald as that.

Ramblin' Jack

2007-03-27T19:53:00.000-07:00

I went to my first folk concert at the weekend, and found myself spellbound by a 75-year-old who looked like a Christmas decoration ready to hang.
Ramblin' Jack Elliott is a Bay Area legend, the last man standing who traveled and played with Woodie Guthrie; he appeared on the Johnny Cash Show and sang with Bob Dylan. He knows Springsteen. Springsteen! He started rambling when he ran away to the rodeo when he was 14 and he so clearly does what he darn well pleases, you just have to admire him, although he probably wasn't dad of the year. Pure speculation of course.
He is about 5'2'' and on Saturday night he was decked out in a fire engine red flannel shirt, green kerchief, jeans that bunched around his ankles, short-man cowboy boots and an enormous black cowboy hat that sat right down on his ears. All he needed was a wee gold thread poking out the top and you could stick him on the tree. Adorable.
He told as many stories as he sang songs, and they were great stories about cranky folk lyricists and sun-bleached podunk Arizona towns and jolly good songs sung with a keening worldliness that ya gotta admire: If I Had A Hammer, San Francisco Blues, The Ludlow Massacre. I'm not a folk convert yet but I'm closer, I must admit. Tim will be over the freakin' moon.
We met him afterwards (he was on his way to the bar to get paid) and it was kinda thrilling to shake the hand of a Grammy winner. My first one.

Punked

2007-03-24T18:20:00.000-07:00

Went to the Vivienne Westwood retrospective at the De Young Museum today because it’s too chilly for visiting the redwoods and because there are banners with her mug all over the city. The place was crawling with people in skinny black jeans and studiously messy hair. I’m not a real Westwood fan – I like her 50s throwback suits and her baroque ball gowns cos they are architectural and pretty in an obvious way, and I like that – but I find all her stuff interesting and she sure has been influential. I also admire her rejection of the banal. It’s a tough way to live your life, but more power to her.
Anyhoo, as I was walking around the oddly dark galleries where her clothes were displayed, I kept finding myself standing in front of the same mannequins as Business Barbie (beige jacket, gold stilettos, brown and beige logo bag) and Suburban Gypsy (older, more lipstick, “distressed” skirt and whimsical earrings).
“Oh, that is so cuuute!” they said as they examined a doll-sized white corset atop a bum-exaggerating crinoline skirt. “Oh, that is soooo cute!” they said, pointing at a modern-day pirate’s jacket paired with square-toed shoes. Everything in that dang exhibit was just as cute as a rubber penis-shaped button (Westwood used these for a time in the 80s).
And then Business Barbie found the cutest. Standing before a shiny skintight dress the color of a cat’s tongue, with curious sticky-out bits protruding from the shoulders, she cried, “Oh my god! That. Is. So. Cute!”
Suburban Gypsy: “Oh, yeah. Really cute.”
Business Barbie: “I would totally wear that with white leggings. That would be so cute.”
I can’t imagine what made these ladies think Westwood’s clothes were intended for them. I don’t for a second kid myself that any couture designer has me in mind when they sit down in front of their sketchpad. I just don’t live in that world, and that is fine, although it is nice to take a peek at it every now and then. But BB and SG clearly had aspirations, and that made me feel a little sad for them. Their blandy-blandy identikit outfits would make an ex-punk like Westwood sneer. High fashion is not democratic – it’s just another us-and-them device – and certainly not clothing like that, which squeezes and manipulates your flesh and recalls the champagne and cake-eating days before the French Revolution. Nothing cute about it.
I may just be maudlin because when I ordered my coffee from a sidewalk vendor at Golden Gate Park he asked if I wanted some spiced whisky with it. “That sounds good,” I said. “You’re the first person to say that today,” he replied, taking a paper-bagged bottle from under the counter and sloshing a good couple nips into my cup. I have felt a bit ooky ever since.

All the loo breaks I want

2007-03-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

Three days into the new job and I'm content. I have a desk with a window view, a snazzy Mac and a stupidly shallow drawer that cuts into my knees and HAS TO GO. I am being treated like an adult again, which is lovely. I get to stretch my brain a bit. But best of all are the little things -- being able to go to the loo whenever I want, not just during designated breaks; helping myself to coffee as I wish and keeping a cup full on my desk; taking a lunch break without worrying about the clock.
The last shift at the bookstore was a blessed relief. I sold one membership card (you'll save 40 percent on bestsellers, 20 percent on adult hardcovers, and 10 percent on everything else in store!), almost stuffed up a busy executive type's change and counted it back to her like a five-year-old (sheesh, American bills all look the same), helped a mum find suitable books for her voracious nine-year-old (convinced her to try Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzburgh -- love that book), and very nearly stepped in a plate of cheesecake some slob had left under a chair near the kiddy train set. The usual.
Afterwards, a few of us went to a tiki lounge in Piedmont, a ritzy little town literally encircled by grubby old Oakland, and drank to our expanding horizons. It was the coolest place -- hula girls and velvet paintings all over the walls, taxidermied blowfish for lampshades, black sand glued to table tops. It reminded me of that Brady Bunch episode when the whole family goes to Hawaii and a tarantula climbs into Marcia's tote bag. Or was it Jan's? Cheesy, cheesy fabulousness.

Thank you for the music

2007-03-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

BART station, Berkeley, 5.20pm, Tuesday
A middle-aged busker sits on an instrument case, an accordion draped across his lap, a black beret atop his head. He is waiting for . . . Shattuck Avenue to shape-shift into the Champs d'Elysses, perhaps? Minutes later, as if on cue, he springs to action, foot tapping, head listing from side to side, arms madly pumping away on the accordion. The tune: Money, Money, Money by ABBA.
BART station, downtown San Francisco, 8.28am, Wednesday
A paunchy punk with a cherry red mohawk strums a classical guitar and channels Johnny Cash: And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire, the ring of fire.

Spotted on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley

2007-03-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

A pent-up chihuahua wearing a camo combat jacket.

The cotton anniversary

2007-03-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was our second wedding anniversary. It was a good day.
Being married now is a lot more fun than it was two years ago -- it's absolutely true what they say about the first year of marriage. It's no pony ride. When I look back, I can see just how mulishly I resisted the trappings of coupledom: I was anti shared bank accounts, or credit cards, or decisions about all kinds of things from what to buy at the grocery store ("but I like this type of peanut butter!") to what color we should stain the deck. And we had already lived together for a year and a half.
Coming to America has forced us to meet in the middle on so many issues. We furnished the apartment from scratch -- no 10-year-old offerings from university flatting days, kitschy collectibles, or inherited dining tables to try to mesh into a coherent style. We picked everything together and were chuffed when one or the other of us scored something for free, a word that has become a totem these past, impoverished months.
A trip to the basement to recycle our glass and plastic netted what I like to think of as a "shabby chic" occasional table.
Me: "Look, hon, behind the boxes. Do you think that belongs to anybody? It's kinda dirty but let's take it!"
Tim: "That's my girl!"
And I couldn't have been prouder when I came home from work one night to find Tim sitting in an armchair he found on the footpath across the street.
Tim: "Do you like it?"
Me: "Yeah! Where was it?"
Tim: "Over by the consignment store. I looked out the window and saw it had a yellow sign taped to the front, but I couldn't read it. So I ran down and..." He smiled and pulled the sign from behind his back. In red letters, underlined twice, it read: "Free!!"
Other great scores: a picture of a pretty Renaissance girl (from the basement), a black bedside table for Tim (basement), a $5 bedside table for me (flea market), awkward cutlery that is weighted such that it rolls crazily in the hand (my brother's kitchen).
We now have shared bank accounts, and a credit card, and matching checkbooks, and for the past four months we've also had matching jobs.
Then yesterday I was hired for a month's mag work, so we took a picnic down to Crissy Field and celebrated our liberation from the bookstore and our anniversary with potato bread and spicy hummus and some cut-price Valentines chocolates from the pharmacy. It was a gorgeous day, the first really warm t-shirt day since October. We lay in the sun and read our books and watched tankers passing under the Golden Gate and felt peaceful.
Then we went home and tried to fix our cranky old toilet, which had blocked for the fourth time in two months. Ah, the romance.

Working Girl

2007-03-12T19:40:00.001-07:00

So, quite out the blue, I seem to have found a job. I interviewed with a local magazine six weeks ago. It was a good interview, I liked the editors a lot, I liked the office, the location, the "vibe of the thing" to quote a friend, and then. . . nothing. I reviewed the interview in my mind, playing with it like a blister -- you know you shouldn't pop it, but convince yourself it will make you feel better. What went wrong? Had I got tangled in my own sentences (something I do fairly often while speaking but can usually avoid when writing)? Had I imagined their enthusiasm? Had they taken another look at my CV and decided I wasn't serious enough?
Anyway, today I returned for a second interview and snagged a month's work as associate editor while another staff member is away and, if all goes well, I may just have stumbled on a longterm position. This is what I have been hanging out for for four months, as I dusted and stacked and reshelved and bagged and counted and smiled. This is what I kept telling myself was just around the corner. This is a gift.
I was elated for about 45 minutes. And then, as is my wont, I began to worry about it. What if I'm not up to it? What if they decide they don't like me so much after all? What if it's boring?
So bye bye bookshop, hello proper professional working life in California, train commute and all. Can't wait to see what it's like.

The regulars and some other guy

2007-03-10T10:14:00.000-08:00

Oddballs #1 and 2
There is this couple who come into the bookstore every day and act really shifty -- looking from side to side constantly, circling around the same display tables for 20 minutes, patting the pockets of their jackets from time and time and twiddling with the zips. It is classic shoplifting behavior except they never take anything. Yesterday the male kept picking up bargain-priced baby board books and sniffing the corners. Over and over.
Oddball #3
A beefy guy comes into the bookstore most evenings and sits at one of the cafe tables thumbing through a stack of our weightlifting magazines. Like 10 or 15 magazines. He sits there for hours, sometimes drinking coffee, sometimes not paying a cent for his entertainment. At 11pm, when the store closes and the managers stand by the doors jangling their keys meaningfully, he stays at his table until he is the only remaining customer. Then he stands, leaves the mags on the table for us to put away and wanders off into the night. Lately he has taken to giving me career advice. He reckons I should move to LA.
Oddball #4
A crusty old guy who always has plastic bags in his hands, and poking out of his pockets, and generally looks like his clothes are made of plastic, likes to wanders through the store of an evening. Last time he was looking for a book on how to fight your speeding ticket ("they" are out to get him) but his real passion is science. Global warming is a hoax, people. Dreamed up by big corporations to make them richer. You heard it from Plastic Man.
Oddball #5
A rather dandified man in a chocolate colored suit, highly polished shoes and a fedora walked past my counter yesterday afternoon. "My, my, you are beautiful," he said. "There should be a song for you. My name is Gorgeous, I work by Starbucks..."

Homeless

2007-03-08T10:26:00.000-08:00

It's really hard to feel too sorry for yourself in this city. For one thing, it's just a fun place to be and I feel lucky to be here (crappy bookstore job aside). For another, there is always someone worse off than you trundling up the street with a supermarket trolley full of plastic bags, thrift store clothes and glass bottles. Homelessness is a terrible, scandalous problem. Desperate people beg at intersections, holding weathered cardboard signs explaining that they are wounded veterans, or AIDS patients, or simply hungry. They congregate in the Tenderloin (the city's worst neighborhood, the place where the cheapest prostitutes do their business) and near City Hall, and along Market St and down by Fishermans Wharf.
My drive to work takes me under a freeway overpass where there is a homeless community (carboard boxes, dumpsters, blankets rolled up and waiting for occupants), a heaving mass of suffering, but the person who breaks my heart is a thin woman who appears to be in her 50s and shakes constantly. She has a pair of sunglasses which she wears whatever the weather and she doesn't approach cars like the other folk. She just stands on the median strip and quivers from the cold, or DTs, or Parkinsons, and holds onto her dignity as best she can.
It's not just the "bad" neighborhoods that attract the homeless. We live in a very affluent area, home of yoga mommies and Bentley daddies and some of the most beautiful, manicured homes I've ever seen. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lives here. The Korean embassy is here. And there are homeless people here. I often see a woman with a cart (I think those are the lucky ones; they can amass belongings) when I am walking to the gym or the video store. She wears so many clothes and hats you can't actually see her face. There is a mute man who sits outside the boutique-style grocery store down the road with a clean cup outstretched. I always give him a dollar and am rewarded with a smile, a wave, and what seems like an attempt to make a sound. He is very sweet and I worry about where he goes at night.
We have taken to carrying dollar bills everywhere we go because it is too horrible to be caught short. I don't even really care if they are collecting the money to buy crack or beer. Who am I to decide where they seek comfort? It is awful enough seeing stray dogs wandering the streets, but humans who live out there -- some in wheel chairs, with crutches, one amputee who rolls through the traffic in his chair like someone who just doesn't care anymore -- it is not acceptable in a wealthy, First World city.

The secret of my ennui

2007-03-07T10:07:00.000-08:00

Gosh that Sylvia Plath is a downer. The Bell Jar is fantastic -- wish I'd read it years ago -- but I'm afraid I identify with the main character a bit much. I really like her, I'm sure we could be friends, and now the poor chook is being sent for electroshock treatment.
I was feeling a bit Plath-like last night as I drove across the Bay Bridge towards the bookstore. Esther (the electroshock girl) has got to the point where she can't be bothered changing her clothes or washing because she knows she'll just have to do it again. And again. And again, until lights out. On a lesser level, I have got to the point where I just wear the same thing to work over and over again because there is absolutely no point in dressing well when you are going to be squatting at the base of bookshelves, dusting, lugging huge carts this way and that, and dealing with sticky children. I do wash my clothes, however.
I continue to be amazed at the success of The Secret, the book that purports to condense centuries of wisdom into one teeny little book that will change your life. It is flying out the door. They literally can't keep it on the shelves. Oprah plugged it on her show and the whole country has gone bonkers for it. It feels like a very American phenomenon to me. As far as I can tell, the secret is that you draw to yourself whatever it is you are sending out into the universe. So if you are sending out vibes of satisfaction and success, that is what you will reap. Clearly I am sending out great waves of mediocrity and ennui. And yet I can't seem to stop. What is a girl to do?

Chunky toilet hair

2007-03-04T11:15:00.000-08:00

Because we are yet to land “proper” jobs that will net us enough money to live comfortably in San Fran, we are on a tight budget. This has been interesting, in an academic sort of way, because neither of us have had to worry too much about budgeting for the past four or five years and we are starting to realize just how incredibly lucky we’ve been. On a practical level, it’s a pain in the ass because every time we want to go to the movies, or buy takeaways for dinner, we have to think about it. That dash of spontaneity enjoyed by professional childless couples is not something we experience too often. Still, there are plenty of free/cheap things to do in the city, so it’s not like we’re bored, and we’re eating well, we’ve managed to furnish the apartment, and I have discovered several fab consignment stores, so really we’re fine. But my hair is a disaster.
Last week, despairing at my scraggly, multicolored mop – untouched by a professional’s hands for nine months and dry as kindling after three at-home dye jobs – I decided to bite the bullet. I handed over $15 to a nice woman with not a lot of English in a clean, comfortable salon in Fillmore Street, home of West Coast jazz. It’s a groovy little neighborhood; we do our laundry there. I throw a couple loads in the machines, sink my quarters into the slots, and bounce out onto the street to window shop.
My favorite consignment store is in Fillmore St. Treasure to date: two pairs of fancypants jeans, a pistachio colored merino sweater, a groovy little fox necklace, and a pair of gorgeous Donna Karan heels topped with feathers and diamantes. (I needed some dressy shoes for a Waitangi Day party at the Golden Gate Yacht Club.) So Fillmore St is a happy place for me.
Anyhoo, about 25 minutes after I walked into the salon with my scraggly nonsense of a hairstyle I walked out with a poorly layered bob – still multicolored cos they don’t do permanent dye jobs at this salon, for some reason that is not clear to me because of the language barrier. I like the length but the layers are so thick they hang together like worms and stick out at eccentric angles. There is no subtlety to the cut. When I pull my hair into a ponytail it looks like a toilet brush. And when I blow dry it and use my velcro rollers, to give it some volume and disguise the layers, it looks like one of those flouncy crocheted toilet roll covers beloved by old ladies and people from the South. I have toilet hair.

What, what, what have I done to deserve this?

2007-03-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Green Day bass player was in the bookstore. He bought a book from my counter, but I wasn’t there. I was in the kids department, shelving books and sneezing from the dust. It’s worth noting that earlier I had to lead storytime, a job reviled by other booksellers. I read two torturously lengthy stories to a brooding 10-year-old (who clearly was killing time until he could go to the gaming store next door) and two toddlers who could not have cared less about Officer Buckle and his police dog Gloria, or the duck who became President. They didn’t even want the cookies I had been instructed to hand out, just stared at me as if I were one of those embarrassing performance artists who hang out at Fishermans Wharf.

Don't throw your shoe at me

2007-03-02T21:49:00.000-08:00

Imelda Marcos visited the bookstore last night. She came marching up to my counter and demanded to know why a cookbook she’d bought the day before had since been marked down by 40 per cent and she had been “tricked” into paying full price. Was furious and told me how the auction house Sotheby’s did exactly the same thing when she was buying “jewels” from them… Okay, so it wasn’t Imelda but looked just like her and had the attitude to match, and she really did make the remark about her jewels. We haven’t had any real celebs at the store since we’ve been there, except David Lynch, who was hawking his new book, a self-help transcendental meditation thing that talks about his admiration for rotting flesh, among other inspirational tidbits. I missed his book signing but apparently he was very charming and had a fantastical quiff hairstyle.

Slice of Lime

2007-03-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

I have been trying to upload a photo of Lime, Vodka and other San Francisco icons to the site but I’m a techno-moron. Lime appreciates the emails re. his wellbeing and all around fabulousness. He has recovered from the latest round of fisticuffs with Vodka and is just now napping in his sand bowl. He is supposed to rub the sand through his hair to control his fur oils but he mostly uses it as a loo.

Just heard...

2007-03-02T21:44:00.000-08:00

Bono was in the Bay Area today -- in Oakland. We work in West Oakland. In the past seven or eight weeks we have barely missed appearances by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Al Gore. Crapit.

Cheers m'dears

2007-03-01T12:34:00.000-08:00

Thank you everyone who sent supportive emails and made postings yesterday. I announced my blog to the world, went to the gym, and when I got back I had all these nice messages and a lovely warm feeling inside. Aww.

Vodka and Lime

2007-03-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

I was a pets-deprived kid. We moved a lot when I was growing up. A lot. From California to New Zealand and back again something like nine times before I made it to university and was able to stop the insanity. So I wasn’t allowed pets; I can remember the little speech I got each time I begged for a puppy. “It’s not fair to an animal to take it on, to care for it and love it, and then move away. It’s not responsible.” Given that I was an exceedingly responsible child, I would nod and cry a little bit and imagine a golden day when I would live with puppies and ducks and a cat and maybe a rooster. Just for kicks.
When I was nine someone left a goldfish on our doorstep in a plastic container with “Andy” written on the side in blue crayon. We were living in Martinez, California in one of those housing developments in which there are just four styles of home and they are repeated up and down the streets like a chess pattern. Our rented house was big – two stories, a guest bedroom with its own bath where my Great Aunt Winifred (former head matron at Green Lane Hospital in Auckland and a cheat at bridge) was ensconced for what felt like months, two living rooms, three bedrooms upstairs, two more bathrooms, and a little storage room off my bedroom where I kept dolls and art projects.
I loved this house; its ordinariness, its beige façade, the wet bar just inside the front door, the teeny little backyard with planter boxes and a slab of weed-free lawn, the way it blended in, was a stamp of validation. We may have behaved like a troupe of gypsies but, for the two years that we lived in that house, we disguised it pretty well.
Andy was handsome, a deep orange with a nicely shaped tail and a big O of a mouth. He lived on the kitchen bench. I fed him flakes every night before I went to bed, talked to him, watched him circle his bowl, tapped on the side to see if he was paying attention, and wished, wished, wished he were a puppy.
A boy up the road had a pet snake; his mother had to buy live mice from the pet store to feed it which I found barbaric but at the same time just the teeniest bit thrilling. Andy was so dull that I don’t even remember when he finally flipped onto his side and had to be flushed.
When I was at university I had a pair of rats. Pretty much everyone I have ever mentioned my rats to has been disgusted at the thought, but they were scrupulous about their grooming and I was scrupulous about cleaning their cages.
Houdini was white with grey patches and beady brown eyes. He had a bit of a temper problem and once bit my father on the nose, leaving a mark that was there until the day he died. Ruby was smaller, a pale ginger and white, with red eyes. Ruby was my favorite. I couldn’t help it. He would rush to the door of his cage when I walked into my room and wait for treats. He loved grapes and chunks of cheese and crackers but he was willing to try anything. I used to catch Dad feeding Ruby potato chips and bits of chocolate and nuts, treats he really shouldn’t have had everyday, but he was such a decent little guy you couldn’t help but want to shower him with riches.
When I took Ruby out of his cage, he would settle into my sleeve and take a bath, washing his face, and behind his ears, and pulling his snaky tail through his legs so he could check its appearance. He was tremendously tail-proud. Sometimes he would sit on my shoulder. When I was studying, I would shut the door of my room and he would run around sniffing books and jumping into shoes and, occasionally, chewing on electrical cords.
When Ruby developed cancerous tumors and started to slow down, at the age of 2, I was sad for weeks. He lost interest in treats, only wanted to be held when he came out of his cage, gave up his exploration of shoes and electrical cords. He died in my lap and Dad buried him behind our apartment, in a tea box lined with tissue. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
About a month ago, when my mother was visiting from New Zealand and we were Goodwill shopping, looking for furniture and other necessities, I found a small wire cage. It had a wheel, water bottle, ramp and food dish. I picked it up and while Tim didn’t recognize the look on my face, my mother did. It meant trouble. I wouldn’t put the cage down. Literally. I walked around that Goodwill shop in the Haight looking at small wooden tables and cooking pots with the cage in my arms and that look on my face. Next stop was a pet shop in Chinatown.
My intention was to get a nice little white mouse. Maybe two, so they could be friends. And then I saw the dwarves. I had never heard of dwarf hamsters but immediately fell in love. They are like ordinary hamsters in most respects except they are much smaller (about three inches long) and, according to the literature, they are highly social. My guys are Russian dwarves. They are grey and white with black stripes running down the middle of their backs and short white tails that are hardly tails at all but little nubbins. They are called Vodka and Lime and they loathe each other.
At first I thought their fighting was play – dwarf hamsters are known for their energetic horseplay. They “box”, which means they stand up on their hind legs and wave their little fists around and yip. It is hilarious to watch. But when Vodka and Lime fight it appears to be for keeps. Vodka clearly wants Lime dead. He bites him for real, and poor old Lime ends up cowering in a corner and showing his tummy in submission. It shakes his equilibrium. So, I had to buy another cage. It’s a great cage – there is a removable penthouse, tunnels and platforms to play on. Because Vodka is more energetic, he gets the fancy cage. Tim reckons I am rewarding him for bad behavior.
Lime has really developed since Vodka moved out. He is happy to be held, runs on his wheel all the time, and has gained weight. All good. Until yesterday the cages sat next to each other on one of the little wooden tables from Goodwill, cos I figured the little men would like to smell each other, even if they can’t be trusted to live together. Around lunchtime, Tim heard a commotion in the dwarf part of the lounge and found Lime cowering in his food dish (he likes to get right in there and sort through his seeds) in the corner of his cage and Vodka maniacally biting the bars of his own cage and reaching his paws through, trying to punch Lime. It was a bad scene. Tim called time out and put Vodka in the hot water cupboard for bad behavior. Lime buried himself in his wood chips and sulked. Crisis averted, but I’m pretty sure Voddy thought he was being rewarded with a trip to the day spa.

Overheard at the grocery store

2007-02-28T11:01:00.000-08:00

“It’s not because she’s pooping so much that she has the diaper rash. She actually has a yeast infection.” Really loud woman on cell phone.

Huh?

2007-02-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

Last day off, we went to Baker's Beach, on the city's west coast, which has fabulous views of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's just beautiful. We took our books and watched container ships passing under the bridge. When we turned around to walk back up the beach, a man had stripped all his clothes off (kept his sunglasses on, though) and was throwing a boomerang out to sea. Gosh, I laughed. It was freezing and overcast and spitting with rain and, frankly, he needn't have bothered.

By the book

2007-02-28T10:54:00.000-08:00

Back at work today after two days off. Tim was sick which meant we didn’t go anywhere or do much but we did manage a trip to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a lovely museum with a notable collection of Rodin sculptures (The Thinker sits in front of the building, sending out a pensive vibe) and a small but perfectly formed array of Impressionist paintings, fine European furniture and ancient bits and bobs such as Etruscan vases. The current special exhibit is a collection of French jewelry – gorgeous, intricate enameled brooches featuring birds and butterflies, diamond necklaces and bracelets worn by socialites and movie stars, and angular 50s pieces with enamel inlay and lots of highly polished gold. I particularly liked the chunky chalcedony necklace and bracelet set commissioned by Wallis Simpson. The stones were a lovely purple blue, the size of gumdrops, and the feature element of the necklace was a large flower which could be removed and worn as a brooch. Clever and beautiful.
It was sheeting with rain when we finished at the Legion, so we came home and watched the Gilmore Girls on TV. Then Tim went to bed and I stayed up reading a book of essays about turning 30. I crossed the Rubicon nearly three years ago, but for whatever reason I am feeling the dread now. Perhaps it’s the new wrinkles around my eyes or the fact that last year I threw in a perfectly acceptable magazine job with some status and good pay to work at a bookstore while I figure myself out. I moved country, left behind my lovely little wooden house to pay exorbitant rent on an apartment, and happened to arrive in San Francisco at the same time print journalism is in its death throes. Oh, yeah, and I dragged my husband along with me, my accomplished, ambitious husband who now sells books too.
This is my third foray into the world of retail. I briefly worked at JC Penney when I was at university, selling shiteous ensembles in the Petites department. Polyester dresses gave the illusion of being “outfits” when in fact the apparent skirts, blouses and vests were one-piece wonders. Even necklaces were sewn onto these things, so the busy, diminutive businesswoman would never have to worry about accessories. I was on commission and I actually performed reasonably well – those creepy “outfits” sold like hotcakes, but then, I was living in Salt Lake City and there wasn’t much of a fashion scene.
I had worked as a journalist in New Zealand for three years when I moved to London, and already unsure that a newspaper career was what I wanted out of life, decided to bum around for a couple of years instead of try to snag some impressive writing job that would serve me well when I got back home. I was probably scared I wouldn’t be able to snag an impressive job of any type, let alone a media one, I don’t actually remember. But I ended up selling perfume at Harrods and Harvey Nichols, lovely stores both, but, for me at least, spectacularly unsatisfying places to work. At Harrods I had to dress up in a stylized sailor suit to sell the new Jean Paul Gautier men’s fragrance, and when that promotion finished, I swapped my stripes and polka dots for a purple crushed velvet dress to sell perfume that cost 1000 pounds a bottle and came in a Baccarat crystal pyramid. It smelled like patchouli and I just couldn’t get excited about it despite the promise that if I managed to sell a bottle (nigh on impossible, I would say, after customers got a whiff of the stuff) I would get a commission of 100 pounds. It was the Christmas shopping season, the store was packed at all times, but my stand with the giant display crystal pyramid was an oasis of calm. I ended up amusing myself by gift wrapping my supplies: stapler, scissors, ruler, assorted pens and pencils.
And now I am working at a bookstore. The upside is I get a good discount on books and that I actually like books and do not feel morally sullied by selling them (although I do have a problem with the get-rich-quick titles, which I don’t believe can work and to which far too many people seem to pin their hopes). There is no commission to worry about and the work is pretty low-stress unless you are unlucky enough to be assigned a shift in the children’s department, where you spend eight hours cleaning up after kids who don’t know any better and their takeout coffee-clutching parents who seem to feel entitled to treat you like a nanny. The downside is being treated like a nanny.
And then there’s the membership card. Basically it’s a discount card that gives customers an automatic 10 percent off everything in store, sometimes more. It costs $25 for a year (so of no use unless you spend more than $250 a year on books) but the real benefit to the bookstore is that membership increases foot traffic. So it's up to us to push the card on customers, and mentioning its many benefits is part of the spiel we have to reel off as we pop books in their crinkly green plastic bags. I am a hopeless card salesperson because I resent the whole system and if someone tells me they don't want a card I'm not going to push. Tim doesn't push either but he's very good at extolling the card's virtues up front, and people looooove his "cute accent". (A woman who didn't see his wedding band asked him out for a coffee around Christmas time. Not to be left out, I had a man slip me his business card a month or so ago and ask me to phone him after I'd checked out his website. How California is that? Blech.) Tim has been the store's top salesman for the past three weeks, pushing aside a rather strange older woman who makes it her life's work to be the ultimate card salesperson. When customers approach the counter she kind of whispers at them, which causes them to lean in closer and gives the impression she is sharing privileged information when she explains the way the card works. It's fascinating to watch people falling under her spell and signing up.

Welcome to my blogoverse

2007-02-27T13:32:00.000-08:00

Welcome everybody! So this is my first attempt at a blog and I must admit I feel just a wee bit cooler and more urban than I do on an ordinary day. It's about time I jumped into the blog-o-verse or whatever it's called. After all, this is San Francisco, man, and everybody here is very webby.
But, while I may be living in the birthplace of the Flower Children (and they are still around, let me tell you, wrinkled as old plums and oddly out of step with the rest of the world, but doing their thing and loving it, bless them), the most chilled city on the West Coast, possibly in the whole United States, I am still me and therefore I have goals for this little venture.
First, it's a way to keep people in touch with what I'm up to which I'm sure will be a tremendous comfort to my mother, far-flung friends and random folk who accidentally stumble onto this page. Second, I actually feel a physical need to write something because while I have trotted out 20,000 words of a second novel I stopped my daily writing exercises as soon as I got the ruddy job at the ruddy bookstore, which means I am starting to lose faith, and am growing frustrated and morose. And bitchy.
And last of all, I am sick to death of people saying, "Oh, you're a writer? So do you have a blog?" Seriously, it comes up at least once a week, and people look at me with these encouraging, expectant California grins while I kind of shuffle my feet and turn pink and say, "Um, no. I'm not really a technical person." Well, I'm still not, but now I do.