Ain't easy being green

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

Forever young

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

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

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

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

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

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.