Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Right Angles, Can’t Lose!

I don’t know if you experience this as well, but hung art, eventually, goes off kilter.

Every few months, you have to tip it to the left, right, up, down. No earthquake, no hurricane, just the earth moving, time passing.

Life’s like that, I guess.

I only started watching Friday Night Lights a month ago, but as a testament to how awesome it is, I’m on Season 4, episode 3. Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose!

It makes me slower. Not mentally. Just makes me think I should take the time, the time Coach and Tami Taylor take to think things out.

WWCTD?

Actually, that, while more pithy, is unfair as we all know Tami wears the pants in that family. The only pants, in fact, since CT wanders around in his little shorts and I KNOW it is SO WRONG, as an LA/SF/any place but the middle of the country (maybe even there, feel free to speak up, MotC peeps!) person to find that attractive, but Dammit! I do! Which is what I would say (I do) also if Matt Saracen asked me to marry him. And probably Tim Riggins, but only if he’d been tested first.

I am just grateful it turns out they aren’t actually (MS & TR, or the actors that play them) their screen ages or I might need some serious therapy.

Anyway, all this is just to say I love this show, and I think it makes you hopeful about things. And it recognizes that art, and a person, go off kilter now and then, but you just set it straight, sometimes with more effort than others, and everything’s OK again.

I like that.

p.s. Making KitchenKonfidence’s Grapefruit and Tarragon-infused Vodka, wish me luck!

Pizza My Heart, Left it in San Francisco, Apparently

Yes, just what I always wanted. To lay my head down on a soft bed of cheese and bell peppers! Oof. Saw these in the dorm decor aisle of my local Target. Let’s not take college life so literally, designers. I may have known somebody, not me of course, that once slept on the floor with a pizza box as a pillow after they had their first shot ever, which was followed by several more, all of which were tequila and which took said person 10 years to get over and be able to handle the smell of tequila again (but thank goodness she did, because a margarita goes with carnitas like peanut butter goes with jelly only! much worse for you and therefore more awesome! WORD), but it certainly was not what I that person aspired to when they picked out their dorm decorations at Target, for heaven’s sake.

My local Target is, if you did not guess it from the title of this post already, no longer in Glendale! But in Serramonte/Daly City (because there are two there, one on either side of the 280, nutty. Kind of like there being two Denny’s, one on either side of the 5 in my hometown, Redding, only better)!

I moved to San Francisco April 1.

You remember my old view?

I do not know how I lucked out to top it, but I did! Check it out! Suck it, old view!

Actually, this doesn’t even really do my new view justice, as to the left you can actually see the entire bay, including the Oakland Coliseum when it’s game night. I will have to post another shot at some point.

Anyway, I am happy. Relatively speaking, let’s not go crazy here. I’m still at a law firm. But the hours are generally better (except this weekend, when a partner cancelled my traveling plans, sweet! But still, generally, better), and Penny is here. And my parents are only a 3 hour drive away.

AND, most importantly, I’m living in San Francisco.

I still love LA. I remember marveling when I first got there at how Everyone. Drove. Everywhere. There was no dragging groceries home on the bus or up a hill. And I love to drive! I am excellent at it. It is one of my few life skills, along with (a) painting my own nails and (b) cleaning the crap out of anything. For those of you who know me in real life and are shaking your heads, please note, I KNOW! I am EXCLUDING parking along with anything else that requires spatial skills, you jerks.

But Northern California is where I’m from and who I am. Which doesn’t mean you can’t live somewhere you’re not from and be happy. It just means I’m also happy to be back. Go Giants!

I’ve been thinking, though, that moving is good to shake things up, but it doesn’t change who you are and how you react to stress. It’s easy to fall back into old habits. I miss this blog because writing here and the comments were an inspiration to me, somehow making me accountable to the world.

So! I am going to launch, here, my little private campaign I’ve been doing here and there, less successfully than I think I will do if I make it public. It is not an important campaign, there is no cause except my own happiness involved. It is just to do ONE thing, each day, that is different. Today I refused to work more than 3 hours (tomorrow’s gonna suck, y’all!) and started making grapefuit-tarragon infused vodka, which I actually had bookmarked to do forever ago and was reminded of when one of my favorite bloggers, Notmartha, also started.

Anyway, all of this is just to say, hello! To nobody at this point, really, but hello from San Francisco! Go Giants!

And I will leave you with this picture of an emu drinking beer, taken from Tinsley Island:

Cheers to new starts!

All I Want for Christmas Is the Emotional Detachment of Dudes

Well, I think my gift/shipping cost ratio was about 3:1 but I’m finally done with my Christmas shopping.

And man, I am so emotionally drained right now. It is at times like these I wish I were a dude. Why does Christmas shopping have to be such an existential exercise? Maybe some women don’t feel that way, but I feel like there is this crazyass sweet spot of cost, showing you know the recipient, being creative in the way you want to contribute to his or her life, AND not accidentally offending someone that you have to hit, or else you are a Christmas-gift-giving failure and THAT IS A LOT OF PRESSURE.

Let’s take even my mother for example, since she doesn’t read this, unlike many of my gift recipients (if they have realized I started blogging again). Gifts I have considered for my mother in the last 24 hours:

• spices for Indian food (actually got her those from Spice Station this afternoon);
• salt and pepper mills, except I already bought her the spices so I really can’t pay $90 per spice mill, you ridiculous people at Crate & Barrel/Williams Sonoma, and also will my dad eat milled salt? my dad has eaten the same breakfast for 35 years and has probably eaten Morton’s iodized salt since birth, and, dammit, maybe I would have thrown caution to the wind but a quick text to my sister reveals my mother has a pepper mill already that goes unused;
• actually, this list is making me relive the pain of the last few hours but if you imagine many variations of above and factor in shipping time frame, I think you get the gist (In case you are in suspense, I will tell you that after finding that most of Williams Sonoma and Crate & Barrel’s bread mixes and whatnot were already sold out, I went straight to the awesomest source without a 50% mark up because of the name (looking at you, Ina Garten and Thomas Keller), King Arthur Flour, and bought my mother a lovely assortment of bread and scone mixes that I know she’ll love and not be offended by in the slightest. BOOYAH!).

Hm, and now I have no idea where I was going with this. Except that I am glad that’s over and I’m ready for the fun stuff about Christmas to begin! Apparently, based on that photo, I have been ready since mid-November in Hong Kong!

Hope you are having a stress-free holiday season so far, as much as it can be! And if you already celebrated your winter holiday, like Hanukkah, hope it was happy!

p.s./update:

After I published this entry I remembered the second half of this post was about how in a relationship I am pretty sure I have a 12:1 thought:text/email ratio and dudes are 1:1. I am grouping this skewed ratio with the 3:1 ratio in personal appearance spending between the ladies and dudes and crying UNCLE. Except that I’m not really. And won’t ever. Which is probably why I lost steam and couldn’t remember where I was going with this two paragraphs ago. Enh, oh well!

Word

1. Tonight at the Trader Joe’s my check-out dude, after I handed him my ID and he verified that I was, indeed, over 21 (surprise!), returned my ID to me and said, “Word.” I was not really sure what that meant, and normally I ignore other Californians’ speech tics because, well, hey, I just said it was the check-out “dude” who handed me back my ID. That’s how we roll here.

But then as he was packing my sad little groceries of buffalo chicken wings, Puffins, wine and flowers and some baby broccoli (which I put in there out of guilt and which will probably rot in my refrigerator) into my Envirosax and I told him I’d carry the flowers (which obviously weren’t going to fit), he replied, again, “Word.”

And I tell you I spent 10 minutes on the walk to my car (you think I am crazy enough to try to actually park in the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s parking lot at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday? then you are crazy. word), trying to figure out what the corollary in my own lexicon was to “Word.” Essentially he was acknowledging receipt of some communication from me and approving its contents, right? I vacillated between “great” and “thank you” for a while before giving up and deciding I would have to leave this great mystery of life unsolved.

2. Speaking of mysteries, my parents gave me some Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes DVDs for Christmas and they ROCK so hard! I can’t believe Joan Hickson was so ancient and yet bopping along when she made them. And I cannot even believe that E. thinks Basil Rathbone is The Definitive Sherlock Holmes. I have yet to shred that notion until a tiny million sad little pieces with a viewing of the genius that is Jeremy Brett, but that day will come.

3. I haven’t read anything since Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams over Christmas, which was awesome, but I’m ready to start in again. Only. Not quite ready. Whenever I take a long break from reading I always feel like I have to start in easy, like maybe with a little Twilight series re-read, before I can get into the real stuff. It’s like vegetables. You CANNOT, unless you want a painful and socially awkward next few days, go overboard with vegetables if you haven’t had them for a while. You cannot, for instance, eat, as I did a few days ago, an entire bag of brussels sprouts* for dinner (only 200 calories!) first thing. You have to ease into these things. Word.

This Is Just To Say

1. I’m still alive.

2. Also, I have eaten the plums that were in the ice box. Just kidding. Maybe. But if I did, they were delicious, so sweet, and so cold.

3. I still find time on a Sunday night to catch up with Tori & Dean. I cannot believe I watch this show, I know it’s incredibly contrived, but when Tori talks about the poop baby she’s giving birth to, it makes it all real and I can’t stop watching.

4. Spend enough time around an 8-year-old, and you will realize they are little soothsayers:

a. “You are a girly-girl.” I have stayed in a treehouse for vacation. I brought a boyfriend nearly to tears with my calm reaction to a cockroach intermittently inhabiting my flip-flop during a 24-hour bus ride across Argentina (p.s., if the strongest reaction you ever elicit from a man is due to your ability to withstand an infiltration of insect life, and you read Elle even just at the checkout counter, it probably won’t work out). I have nearly drowned in a river wearing some other woman’s tevas. But it is true.

b. “You like hanging out with us more than the grown-ups.” I am not a mixer. I have my moments, but if my choice is between reading two little girls a Junie B. Jones and trying to make my way comfortably through the morass of adult conversation, apparently I’ll generally choose the latter.

c. “Why do you like to clean so much?” You know, I don’t know. It makes me feel like I’m contributing when a meal is cooked for me. I like things clean. I like the satisfaction of sore joints and a clean floor. It gives me a sense of control in a world full of chaos.

And, with a Clueless reference, as usual, I’ll wrap this up.

Hope you had a great 4th! Hope you had time off and spent it with people you love. Even if they tell you the truth.

Deep, Abiding Questions of Ethics, SUPPRESS YOUR EXCITEMENT, PLEASE

Well, crap. I have nothing to say, really. It’s not just you — friends, boyfriend, family (you know, those who come and go), they’re like, what’s new? And I say: work.

That is, in all seriousness, one of the biggest bummers about working a lot. You haven’t read anything new, heard anything new, or rather, you have, but nothing that ISN’T protected by the attorney-client privilege. You want to be like, I swear, I have been doing something for the last two weeks, let me tell you about it! But instead you have to say: “Work is stupid.”

Anyway, do you remember Highlights magazine? I remember my favorite features of that magazine as being Goofus & Gallant and the one where you figure out which picture is different but I have no idea if those were actually my favorite features or if they were the only ones that were delivered with enough frequency for me to remember, 26 years later.

This question has no point except for it is the only non-work thing I have discussed in the last 15 hours, and also, how hard did Highlights rock??!!

OK, maybe it does have a point, because someone I worked with recently was talking about her college-aged son, worrying about his ethics, his generation heading down the tubes (where do they go, them darn tubes? DOWN is all we know), the same sort of hand-wringing we seem to do with every generation. And I was thinking about myself when I was little, reading Goofus and Gallant, and the answer then was clear: Gallant was a pussy. Just kidding. Really, totally kidding, I was always able to figure out immediately where Goofus screwed up.

And then, as I got older, things got more confusing: there was “The Man” I was contending with, always getting the underprivileged, the underrepresented and me down, there were income taxes and what you could and couldn’t claim (my accountant tells me I am a .5 on a scale of 1 to 10 of aggressive, simultaneously awesome and embarrassing), there was just a general realization that is 100% completely possible to justify A LOT OF CRAP YOU SHOULDN’T BE DOING.

So what I tried to tell this woman worried about her son was, you know, when you’re younger, you’re good at rationalization, right, you’re human, but you haven’t yet developed the self-awareness to recognize when you’re doing so.

But when you’re older, just like you develop (kind of) enough sense to realize you’re just rationalizing a boyfriend’s behavior and really he’s being a dick, you develop enough sense, enough self-awareness to realize you’re rationalizing your own.

So you stop, and you do what’s right.

I dunno, that’s what I think. I think of some of the stupid stuff that I did to my friends, boyfriends, when I was younger, stuff I justified to myself (“all’s fair in love and war”). And I know I would never do those things now.

I’m too, like, adult and shit.

Or rather, I know full well when I’m not doing what I should. And I’m old enough to know better.

The Dishes Are Done, Man

Oh, increased frequency of blog posts, lovely thought. And then there was billing 12 hours a day and then there were none. Blog posts that is. Or times I got to see my dad when he was in town. Or laundry being done.

I am rereading The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman right now, which is truly the most magical book I have read since The History of Love and even though this is probably one of the least profound of the many things she has to say, I have to totally agree with her that doing dishes is the antidote to confusion.

I am not even a dishes person, by nature. I go one of two ways: a) cook a huge production meal for a group of people and really wish I hadn’t the next morning when looking at the pile of dishes I have to do; or b) never, ever cook and never, ever do a dish because everything I eat comes with its own receptacle (SAD).

But E. cooks, so I do the dishes when I’m over there. Dish duty is my way to contribute. And I was worried, in the beginning, the same way you worry that maybe you won’t think someone will be as funny three months later, that my dish aversion would rear its ugly head and I’d get lazy and I’d be outed as a mooch, like, I’ll eat your lovely crab cakes, and then I will sloppily rub a sponge over the plates but that’s all she wrote.

Somehow, though, I have grown to love doing the dishes. Things get clean, they get put away, the stove top is shiny again. And not to quote Clueless in every third blog entry, but I can’t help myself, it gives me a feeling of control in a world full of chaos.
There is clarity, there is completion, there is calm. There is no confusion.

The dishes are done, man.

My Laundry Is Still Going; Thus, So Am I

I always thought the level of cleanliness of my apartment was a apt indicator of my mental health, and I sort of still do. But it’s been a pigsty for the last month until this weekend when my mom came and then this week I’ve had more time at home because the man I’ve been seeing was sick — let’s go ahead and give him an initial now, probably will jinx us but I’m tired and willing to take the chance, E. — means my apartment is spotless but I am GRUMPY.

Anyway.

Things I’ve been thinking about:

1. This dude (I assume) in my parking garage with the license plate MAKSTER. Unless it is his last name, that is so 1993 and can’t you relinquish your vanity license plate? Or is it an extra charge to do so? Also, I saw a bumper sticker that Laurie would have loved and probably also been speedy enough to take a photo of that read, “I Hate Vanity Plates” which is hilarious is a ironic/meta sort of way that I can’t put my finger on.

2. E. said to me the other night that people take always the easiest course. Which I’ve been trying to figure out whether I agree with. At first I called bullshit (hello? Gandhi? was that the easiest course?), but you know, whether the easiest course is actually “easy” depends on your value system. Something might be the “easiest” course even though incredibly difficult because you’re committed to an ideal and diverging from that would disturb your world view; it’s “easier” to plow headfirst toward saving the world. So while this might be useful in describing why people make bad decisions, it’s generally not a useful tool for understanding why people do what they do.

3. Ursula commented on maybe my next to last post asking me how I knew the undergarment preferences of my lovers, do I survey them? Which totally boggled my mind until I realized that she is married to someone whom, while he totally made an awesome choice in a wife, OBVIOUSLY, is probably not all that particular. About things. Maybe I am wrong, but her husband Mike is pretty laid back and I really can’t see him developing a detailed list of his preferences in panties. He’d probably just like them OFF, and sooner rather than later (so would you, if you had Urs to come home to). But I have never really dated anyone who wasn’t. Particular. Particular in terms of food, design aesthetic, music, anything, everything, you name it, down to undergarments. I’m not quite sure what it is I find irresistible about idiosyncratic demands — OK, I know exactly what it is, it’s my Capricorn overachiever/general people pleaser nature, like, I WILL FIGURE THIS OUT AND MASTER YOUR PREFERENCES AND THEN YOU WILL LOVE ME FOREVER BECAUSE NO ONE BUT ME CAN MEET YOUR BIZARRE DEMANDS BECAUSE I AM THAT! AWESOME!, but it hasn’t worked out that way to date. As in, I have mastered preferences but still we have not lasted. But you know, I get bored without the challenge, so I’ll just hope one of these times fate/timing will provide so that I meet the test, and they will, too.

Good Morning

I appear to be buying Starbucks in the morning again, despite my vow to save money by making my coffee and breakfast. I in fact have some nice Jamaican coffee and perfectly edible homemade scones at home but am I consuming those? NO. Oh, you reduced fat cinnamon swirl coffee cake of gooey goodness, I cannot resist your wiles.

Seriously, until I come up with something equally as delicious I can make at home that is not 900 million calories, I’m afraid I will not be able to stop myself. At least I’m still bringing my lunch?

Bah.

Anyway, Starbucks has the added benefit of alternatively cheering and saddening me about the fate of mankind. To wit, this morning, I observed:

1. A man stealing about 50 napkins. Why, man, why?
2. This woman and her teenage daughter who I encounter semi-regularly, and who joke around with one another and the baristas. It made me remember when, I guess maybe around 16, I seemed to subconsciously realize my parents were not my wardens, I would be going to college, and that maybe I should stop being an asshole to my mom. After that, we only got in one more fight, maybe the last fight we’ve ever been in, when I was 17 and my mom wouldn’t let me wear combat boots to The Holiday Party even though I was totally pairing them with a long velvet dress and that look was totally in right then. No impassioned argument could convince her that being fashion-forward trumped propriety and I ended up not going because I refused to ruin a perfectly good look by wearing heels. Anyway, I was thinking about that watching this mom and her daughter and felt happy for them that they’d reached the point where their primary form of interaction wasn’t World War III.

My mom is coming to visit me this weekend in fact, and I can’t wait. Maybe we will go get coffee together one morning, that might be nice.

Sunday Morning Creeping In

Fred & Ethel’s bottomless bellies have made it impossible to stay in bed past 6:30, even on the weekends. They wake me up at 5:45 every morning, my wake-up time for my earliest pilates class, no matter what class I’m taking or whether I’m even taking one and no matter what time I went to bed. Which is why this morning I was downstairs making coffee at 6:45 on a Sunday and wondering what the hell I was going to do for the next few hours until, you know, THE GROCERY STORE OPENS.

Some days I don’t mind — yesterday I’d done three loads of laundry, gone to Target and ran before 10:30 a.m. Which let me enjoy the rest of my day without stress for the chores waiting for me at home. But today, when I don’t have any definite plans and my apartment is already clean, I was at a loss.

And then I remembered! Holy crap, I’m BLOGGING AGAIN! So here goes.

This has been one of those magical L.A. weekends where even though it’s (cannot believe it’s here already!) March I managed to get a sunburn, wear open-toed shoes all weekend long and watch some lovely children (the man I’m seeing has an eight-year-old and I experienced my first play date with her little friends this weekend) work the SLIP-N-SLIDE! I’m so happy they still make those.

It made me forget, albeit temporarily, the stress I think we’re all feeling about the economy, the will my job still be there tomorrow I guess I’ll forego buying those new spring flats just in case it isn’t stress, the nagging doubt that eats away at you slowly at makes your heart skip a beat any time the managing partner walks by your office.

Other things helping me forget:

1. Some of my coworkers and I signed on for another Mud Run. And, inspired by someone else’s Facebook Note, I coerced my teammates into going to Wikipedia’s Random Article generator to find our team name, may the best Random Article name win. So far we’ve got Chad Dukes (BORING. Also, mine. Bummer.), Rasovice (badass in its obscurity), and the Order of the Resplendent Banner (badass in its resplendentness; has my vote (so far)). One more teammate has to do it tomorrow and for some reason I just have This Feeling she is going to get Martin Landau. Really, I’m not joking and will probably even be a little sad tomorrow when it turns out she got Georgina Willis or the Lincoln-Sunset Historical District. Probably I am crazy.

2. The Beatles, the inspiration for the title of this post, actually (the song: Lady Madonna). I hadn’t listened to them much since high school, but after a recent encounter with Birdhouse in Your Soul by They Might Be Giants and the realization I still know every single line 15 years since the last time I sang it out loud, I wondered how my knowledge of other old favorites might be and now they have been my morning drive music for the last week.

3. And that’s all I got. Sunday sun is calling.