That boy ain't right

countries/states I've been to

Countries:

create your own visited countries map

States:

create your own visited states map

In one of our last days here, on a Friday, we went to the deYoung. We got seduced there, just like we had at other spots in time that give you passionate kisses in memory: Garin Park at sunset. Bay to Breakers in a horrible rain. Geekhaus parties and drives along 280. That fog that rolls in over 101 in September. Friends who make you laugh until you have a hard time breathing. And the deYoung on a sunny day in late March.

The place was all modernist angles, and made us feel somewhat fashionable just by being there, gawking at all the religious artifacts lifted from island cultures. That someone took weeks and even years to slowly chip away at bone to make something of such significance, just to trade it away to visiting dignitaries -- the feeling of having no room for error wasn't lost on us, even in a city so forgiving of one's quirks and faults.

However, in sunlit rooms and windowed spaces, at least for only that day, we felt free of the world and able to give the city its last due. It was also tinged with some regret -- how could it not be, when we discover a place of this shining brilliance only to fly away -- but this was the day we wanted: to see the light in everything.

We followed it up with a Will Ferrell movie at my favorite movie house, mainly because she didn't want tragedy and neither of us wanted computer-animated right wing gore; no matter. There, in the dark, we laughed in those old seats, held hands, and silently thought to ourselves about the change that was coming. Afterwards, I snuck in one of the other theatres and snapped the flash right when one eerily ironic frame from a preview was showing.

I used to think that San Francisco was a city of possibility -- and, to a great extent, I think it still is. People can reinvent themselves and change the world in this place. However, I've realized that possibility exists in my son's deep blue eyes, when he looks far up in the sky without saying anything, and lets that slight knowing smile play over his face and disappear. I want to see that happen again, as much as possible.

And so it's time to take flight, back to the Old World. But I'm still buying a bear flag and hanging it out on September 9th.

things i want to do before i leave CA for good

...in no particular order:

1. Visit the beach in Cayucos one last time
2. Go to the arty coffeehouse on Lincoln and 9th Ave. and have their Spanish hot chocolate
3. Visit Alcatraz
4. LA museum trip: LACMA and MOCA
5. Death Valley?
6. Seafood dinner in the Sunset
7. Game party(ies), some time after our house goes up for sale
8. Go to the Muir Woods
9. See a movie in the Grand Lake's Egyptian room (Didn't get to see one in the Egyptian room per se, but at least I got to go... and I got some postcards and illicit pics as a result.)
10. See a movie in the Crest, Westwood
11. Go to the new DeYoung
12. Have a goddamn Mission burrito -- because i will not have its like ever again -- preferably at El Castillito at Mission and 17th, the greasiest of greasy spoons in the Mission
13. Go to the Exploratorium
14. Take part in the greatest acting gig ever, which will be broadcast on YouTube, and may be submitted to Consumerist, bOINGbOING, etc

More items as I think of them...

some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed

Because I had an appointment at 8 with a recruiter in the city, I had to get up extra early this morning. However, clearly, the gods don't want me going to work at all, or even venturing out of the house, as the following timeline will indicate:

1. It's 7:45 as I reach the toll plaza of the Bay Bridge. I call the recruiter's office to tell them i'm going to be about 15 min late. I'm not really worried anyway since i'd checked email the night before, and he can't meet with me -- either wanted to reschedule or have me meet with one of his partners.


2. BOTH "check engine" light AND the "engine temp" light come on at once and beep angrily at me, right as I'm in a huge long line of cars in front of the bay bridge toll plaza, stretching all the way back to the rise in the overpass.


3. I think maybe if I can still make the interview and take it to the shop afterwards, I'll be OK, but the car starts steaming from under the hood. Not good. Right on cue, I hear the "you have angered the clown gods" music as my cell goes dead.


4. More steam and concerned looks from drivers next to me. I pull the car over to an island in the middle of the freaking toll plaza. The water is BOILING in the radiator.


5. I wait until it stops boiling in the radiator, and hope that I can at least make it to Treasure Island, where hopefully there's a shop. And hopefully I and the car will survive today. Pop down the hood, start the car, and immediately it starts beeping at me again. I pay the toll -- no return now. It's either have it go dead on the bridge, or make it to Treasure Island. Go for broke time.


6. The car is now leaving a HUGE CLOUD of steam/smoke behind me as I'm nearly weeping from the stress. People are honking at me everywhere. However, I do make it off the bridge and onto Treasure Island -- although I'm leaving a wide plume of smoke behind me down the hill.


7. I manage to park in front of the naval base, and poke my head in a cafe where I ask if there's a car shop somewhere on the island. "No car shop -- there's nothing here on the island." Only one of a series of disappointments for today, lady.


8. So I prevail upon the guard at the base to let me use his phone, where I call AAA.


9. The tow truck driver arrives fairly quickly, where he proceeds to try to sell me hippie crystals -- "ordalite" or some shit.


10. He drops me off at the shop on Van Ness, right across from Enterprise. Oh joy!


11. Enterprise has NO CARS. The agony of defeat!


12. Looks like I'm BARTing it to work. I break off in a run towards the 8th and Market station.


13. I get off at San Bruno, since I remember there being a shuttle that goes to WM from one of these stations. The San Bruno kiosk guy says: "No, you want the south city station, one station up." Fine.


14. At the South San Francisco station, the information guys clearly think I'm speaking Greek when I ask about any shuttles to Brisbane. Just the flavor of my morning, I guess.


15. With the intention of hailing a cab, I break off in a run towards a nearby strip mall with the hopes of scoring some cash. Praise be to Trader Joe's! Some chocolates and some Jacksons later, I show up back at the BART stop and I have to beg the information guy for some quarters for the phone with which to call a cab. I've been reduced to begging for quarters.


16. One uneventful cab ride later, I'm at WM -- and it's 11:30.


17. I call the recruiter's office and leave a couple of really pathetic messages on the machine. Way to make a great first impression, shithead.


18. My manager says: "What happened to you? I called your cell phone..." I just shove the estimate from the shop in his face.


19. The shop calls: it's going to be around $300 included, which is very cheap considering how bad it could've been. Apparently one of the plastic parts going to one of the engine heads failed (rather than the head itself, which could've been REALLY bad). He says it's common with these Beetles.


20. I contemplate how it isn't even lunchtime yet and I'm already screwed six ways from Sunday.

update to books list

Another book I want to read: Re/Search's Pranks 2. Anything that has interviews with The Yes Men, Margaret Cho, John Waters, Jello Biafra and of course, Survival Research Laboratories, has got to be worth reading.

via BB

...and then there was even more tagging

1. A book that changed my life:
   1984. It sounds a bit cheesy to say it, but this staple of high school English classes, more so than any other work of fiction, informs a lot of my thinking about culture and politics. It's a bit didactic -- I've since come around to my dad's way of thinking on it, about how its characters are fairly weak and it's prone to lengthy sloganeering near the end -- but oh, what Orwell does with language. Only Anthony Burgess or possibly Irvine Welsh could do better things with language and dialect.
2. A book I've read more than once:
   Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's a weirdly accurate snapshot in time, of the late 60s/early 70s. It's a drug-fueled descent into the subconscious. It's a mirror against the American Dream. It's an immature larger-than-life character. It's a work of fiction. It's factual history. It's flat-out hilarious. It's disturbing as hell. It's had a miserable effect on journalism since -- everyone's gonzo now. It's decadent and depraved. It's bad craziness. (Avoid the bats.)

   The movie versions never seem to get it completely right: Where the Buffalo Roam gets many of the funny touches right, but the whole movie has more of the flavor of Animal House crossed with a series of sketches about the late 60s. Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing certainly gets the general mood and imagery of the book completely right (including the darker, crueler sections), but he's missing a lot of the humor and wit that runs throughout all of the writing. It's a drug trip without the savage humor.

3. A book I'd want on a desert island:
   Much Ado About Nothing, quite possibly my favorite work of literature. The original romantic comedy, before Hollywood ruined them. I also especially like its hook of communicating love through the most wonderful insults possible. It's a book I find oddly comforting, even though it peripherally involves soldiers coming back from a distant war that nobody cares about, promises of murder, and a cartoony villain.
4. A book that made me giddy:
   One of the ones that comes to mind is The Demonic Comedy, by Paul William Roberts. Again, it's a bit of gonzo journalism, but the hook is irresistible: it's about a reporter's personal observations on Iraqi culture, life and politics before, during, and after the first Gulf War. The Amazon blurb is fairly accurate: he "writes as if he were Outside magazine's British correspondent, filtering extravagant irony through a bottle of Scotch." This might seem like a fairly morbid and horrifying book to make me giddy (especially because, as expected, there are many sections in the book that are unbelievably tragic), but there are particular sections of this book that so perfectly capture the surreal absurdity of life under a Stalinist dictatorship -- for example, how the feared secret police aren't so secret because they all have identical Saddam mustaches, thus inspiring the general male population to grow similar facial hair -- the reason I bring this up is because I read the book on a return flight from M's parents' place. There's one section, near the end, on how the regime puts on an international cultural festival during the height of sanctions, where a popular myth is set to stage, and a ballet dancer (as the hero of the myth) is also meant to look like Saddam -- and some stage pyrotechnics go horribly, horribly wrong. The writing for this passage was so funny that I had the entire cabin of the plane turning around to wonder what the hell was going on in 32B that somebody could be laughing so loud about it. I reread the passage over and over again just to bother myself into laughing hysterically yet again.
5. A book that you wish had been written:
   Like M, this suggests to me something of novelization or scriptwriting (mostly scriptwriting) ideas that I have kicking around in my head. The most prominent one so far is a Silicon Valley noir, where initially the crime seems something mundane such as your average white-collar crime, but ends up being something much more basic in the end: jealousy, passion, rage.
6. A book that wracked you with sobs:
   It's been a while since that happened -- I've been known to cry at movies much more often, since movies are a whole lot more immediate -- but the one that comes to mind is one that I read for my thesis: Unaccustomed Mercy. In it, there's this piece of poetry -- although if you have kids, or even if you don't, I probably think you shouldn't read it -- but you probably will. Suffice it to say it's about an American marine's guilt and humanity as he visits a little Vietnamese girl, burned horribly by the napalm he'd ordered dropped, in the children's hospital.

   I kept coming back to this one, and it still makes me tear up even now.

   And nothing's changed, except that the weapons used today are even worse: white phosphorus and cluster bombs.

7. A book you wish had never been written:
   In my darker, more confrontational moments, my book would be the same as M's. And then my cynicism takes over and says that human beings would find something else to wage genocides over, hate entire classes of people for no good reason at all, and hold their children's education hostage over a refusal to look reality square in the face. See? I just got all dark and confrontational again! (And then, once you get rid of one book, why stop?)
8. A book I'm currently reading:
   I say, "I'm currently reading", but what I really mean is "I've been way to caught up with work, childcare, laziness, and general exhaustion to continue reading this even when I really want to, and besides, I've looked everywhere in the house and I can't find it." It's The Thirteen-Gun Salute, and my constant refrain is that it's like reading what Jane Austen would've written had she served as an officer in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic wars. The characterizations are as rich and detailed and quirky as I've found anywhere, and even M was taken with the wit and humor of the few paragraphs I forced her to read one night. Considering how many wives have forced these books on their husbands, I'd definitely say this isn't a "guy" series of books, even though the narratives are very gory in places with swashbuckling battles.
9. A book I've been meaning to read:
   Better, books:
   The Origin of Species
   The Omnivore's Dilemma
   Freakonomics
   Bleak House
   The Dark Knight Returns series
   The Koran
   the collected Little Nemo in Slumberland (where there truly is a world of dreams)
   Posted by brian at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)

we bring you this message

...to tell you that it is hotter than:

• A Laredo parking lot
• the eyes of Hell
• the Devil's anvil
• a Times Square Rolex

...and my personal favorite,

• Satan's bunghole

At least it's better than being in NYC, DC or Florida. In the last two places I think I would just live all day in the Atlantic. In the first I would get the hell out.
Honestly, I want to beat the living shit out of the next person who thinks climate change is a myth.

That is all.

summer gluttony

Thought I'd post this, mainly because I seem to have stumbled on something truly wonderful:

Sin on a Plate

1. For each person, take one banana and separate into sections.
2. Put these sections onto skewers, and separate the sections on skewers with mint leaves, one or two leaves in between each banana section. This step is non-negotiable and very important. Fresh mint leaves are better -- yay weed control!
3. Grill the banana/mint leaf skewers until the banana sections are gooey. This will usually mean the top portion of the grill, farthest away from the flame. This also usually means careful checking of the bananas to make sure they don't burn. The banana sections are reminiscent of toasted marshmallows when done.
4. Once the skewers are done, serve on a plate, skewers and all, drizzled with chocolate sauce.
5. Vanilla ice cream is optional -- I'm undecided as to whether the ice cream makes a mere banana split out of what should be sensuous, sinful pleasure.

Enjoy with a glass of shiraz and some sort of 4-player board game.

spring planting

Recently, as M will attest to, I've been going nuts with planting a vegetable garden. (I gotta have something to do after peak oil hits, after all.)

For the longest time after we got the backyard (in all reality a 15X40 postage stamp) landscaped, we sectioned off a small portion of it for use as a garden, but it only grew weeds and clover. All this with a nice soaker hose system at the ready.

All that's changed, now, and I've been following in Suzanne's giant footsteps with some planting of my own. We'll see how things turn out, but for right now the soil around here is amazing for planting things. Either that or the array of chemical supplies I've been using on these plants has created bioengineered monsters.

I'll try to go completely organic when I try to plant again, but for right now the main problem seems to be pest control. We get snails around here that grow to monstrous size, book along, and eat everything in sight; that seems to be the main pest problem. (I found this out, to my chagrin, after my lettuce plants had been ravaged in a single night.) So I dutifully put down snail pellets and pesticide powder... and kiss all hope of an organic garden -- at least this season -- goodbye.

I did a little googling and found some interesting things, in addition to a lot of -- I'll be honest -- hippie crap. One of the more interesting solutions seems to be spreading coffee around. So it's either that or get some traps baited with beer the next time I plant.

And here's what I'm planting:

Front Courtyard
Yellow squash, doing really well
Regular tomato, once on hard times but now doing much better
Assorted veggies: sweet basil, just bought and doing well; eggplant, once doing well but now looking a bit wilted; cilantro, needing water; artichoke, in big pot (not pictured), still going strong; climbing cherry tomato, once good but now looking anemic

The Back 40
Lettuce, eaten to death by snails; jalapeno, doing OK
Strawberries, just starting to bloom
Yellow onions, doing amazingly well; bell pepper plant, also partially eaten by snails
Russian potatoes, doing well but I mistook one for a weed and pulled it up
Spinach, just bought and (so far) protected by an amazing array of chemicals; leeks, which seem to be doing all right; cucumber (not pictured), doing well.

We'll see what kind of crop comes out of this and whether I've really just been wasting my time. I'm most excited about the peaches we might have this year (the introductory picture to this entry). When we first bought this place, the peach tree was in full swing and dropping large peaches everywhere, most of which we criminally let rot on the dirt. What peaches we did eventually try were juicy, sweet, and everything we could've asked out of a backyard fruit tree. A year later, after a year of criminal neglect and no regular watering to speak of, our peach tree repaid us by delivering a lot of sour, tiny peaches. That's changed now -- there's a sprinkler system back there, a nice lawn without a lot of clover (finally!), and I put in fruit tree plant food stakes around its root system a long time ago.

the trap of negative thinking

Very interesting "news you can use" article, courtesy of Drinknerd.

More than once, I've seen that the human mind remembers and calls up bizarre images, so it's an interesting brain hack you can apply yourself to remember things (as I'm a forgetful sort) or apply more positive thinking in your life.

I know because I read it all in Dianetics/the Bible/I Ching/a fortune cookie once.

tagged again

The taggers are getting bolder around here. Gonna have to ask for ID when somebody wants spray paint.

4 jobs I've had:

• Quality Assurance engineer at the internet arm of a certain retailer in Arkansas
• Quality Assurance engineer at a restaurant reservation website that severely mistreated its employees
• Burger jockey
• Mailroom clerk at the Bakersfield Gun Rights Association (my very first job, not taken for political principles in the least, and extremely scary)

4 movies I can watch over and over:

• Blade Runner (director's cut only)
• Chinatown
• Cyrano de Bergerac
• Delicatessen

(What can I say: I like movies about doomed heroes.)

4 places I've lived:

• Freiburg, Germany
• Chicago, IL
• Sunnyvale, CA
• Redwood City, CA

4 TV shows I love:

• Mystery Science Theater 3000
• The Daily Show with John Stewart
• The Office (UK or American version)
• Coupling (UK version)

4 places I've vacationed:

• Vietnam
• Greece
• England
• China

4 of my favorite dishes:

• Chicago style pizza (preferably Edwardo's)
• BBQ beef ribs (preferably St. Louis style)
• Pho
• Pad Thai

4 places I would rather be right now:

• Home
• On a warm sunny beach showing LM how to make a sandcastle
• At a boardgame party
• At the movies

I done been tagged!

What am I listening to right now?

Shuffle play, of course. And boy howdy, my musical tastes are weird:

1. There They Go Go Go (a complete Road Runner) - Carl Stalling and the Warner Brothers Studio Orchestra
2. Flamenco Sketches (Alternate Take) - Miles Davis
3. Fuad Ramses - Tipsy
4. Diamond Dogs - David Bowie
5. Acquired Dreams - Nitin Sawhney
6. Gutenmorgenduft - Dzihan & Kamien
7. El Yoyo - Tito Puente and the Machito Kings of Mambo

There you go -- cartoon violence, soulful jazz, weird electronica, and loungey mambo! Rather fitting for yours truly...

conflicted subversion

Periodically, as everyone working in technology knows, there will be utterly meaningless all-hands meetings that one is required to go to, generally to listen to someone go on and on about rah-rah this or that. Sometimes, these meetings are held at local community centers or even at a local hotel, if your company is big enough. Today was one of those times, and I wasn't expecting a whole lot other than to see a little voiceover work I'd done be shown in front of the entire company. I like the anonymity in having my voice (obnoxiously British-accented) do goofy things in front of people in the company, and almost no one knows it's me -- although my manager gets a kick out of it. (What I don't like is that the company is taking advantage of me -- I'm doing this essentially for free. I got asked to do it because I answered the call for talent, hoping that it would get me in good with another recording studio that would eventually use me for paying work. Little did I know that it would turn into a "for the good of the company" series of gigs. At least it gets me out of work for a half day, but it still rankles, for good reason.)

But I digress.

There was lots of grumbling about this meeting -- the fact that it started at 9:30 AM, the fact that it was at the airport Marriott, the fact that it was likely going to be the same old crap we had to hear over and over again, you name it. One thing was that the HR people said there would be goody bags, that we would have to present our badges for. My manager and I, since we share the same nasty sense of humor as well as a birthday, immediately started saying that our goody bags would contain pink slips (a la Oprah and her car stunt).

Oh sure, there was much droning, and much sanitized humor that fell absolutely flat. But the whole reason everyone REALLY wanted to make this meeting became apparent: to conclude the meeting, the CEO gave us the day off (this, at 11AM), and our goody bags contained a $40 certificate to Fandango plus $100 in Amex gift check money. Holy crap.

No, I'm not going to go spend it on games -- I've already done that. No, this money showed up exactly at the right time so that we could get a lavish seafood dinner in Monterey. The wreckage of crab shells will be piled mighty high, my friends. What I most appreciated, though, was the time. I had time to go to Gator Games and fondle 80% of their inventory without buying anything. I ran some errands for LM. I had time to go up to the city and audition for a voiceover gig. I didn't even mind that most of the time I was sitting there driving on highways around the Bay Area -- it was a really nice day out, I had a black & white and a chocolate milk from Molly Stone's, the radio was playing baroque music, and life was good.

Of course, this makes me a bit conflicted, and I started wondering how cheap a whore I was, that I was this grateful for a chunk of change and a day off, from one of the largest corporations in the world, that is known worldwide for shoddy business practices, being largely responsible for the US trade deficit, the outsourcing of labor, and the continued destruction of unions.

But damn, just for one day, we got treated right. We got recognition for the work we've done. I went up to a director of PMs afterwards, shook his hand and said I appreciated all that he'd done for me (he'd come down hard on some PMs that were giving me a lot of trouble and insinuating a lot of crap behind my back). His response? "My job's easy: it's you guys that do all the work. It's true."

To be sure, there are a whole lot of workplace aggravations that I face every day, even in this drastically improved environment over my last job. I always try to act like a bit of a weirdo wherever I work -- nothing to get fired over, mind you, but healthily subversive.

For example, the picture above is from my old Clockwork Orange outfit I put together this last Halloween. Yes, unoriginal, and yes, it's just like every other college student's costume everywhere. But in the heart of one of the most conservative corporations on the planet -- ah, deliciousness. I printed out tons of frightening movie stills (no nudity, though) and put them in my cube. A like-minded coworker took all sorts of pictures of me in various threatening poses, right outside the breakroom. Once Halloween passed, the costume went away but the badge stayed, and other employees who didn't know me that well -- or hadn't seen any Kubrick movies -- started calling me Alex, which was a bit weird. The ones who were acquainted with my so-called sense of humor asked if I could truly get away with having a fake badge to wear around. The answer is yes, if you just cover up your real badge.

Since I had to show my real badge to get the swag, Alex is going away.

Since I'm grateful for today, I'll probably go in on Monday and put in a full day's work.

To be sure, this too shall pass and I'll fill myself up with petty resentments, bitchiness, and seething ineptitude, just like every work environment should be. I'll need a replacement subversive identity for when that happens.

Any suggestions or submissions? Samuel Gompers, maybe? (I don't think Lenin would go over with the sizable Russian engineering contingent.) Thorstein Veblen? I need help, people...

profiles in domestic cleverness

(via BB)

Video of a T-shirt folding machine, made out of cardboard. Considering the sheer avalanche of T-shirts we have around the house at any given time, this sounds like a godsend.

amused

The barista manning the little coffee bar in the lobby of our building has a lip ring as well as a Stanford sweatshirt, and is usually experimenting with different hairstyles from one day to the next. Today is cornrow day. She is also usually found doing homework on a laptop. Either that or surfing, as I usually do at work.

I'd guess she's around 19 or 20. She has a smoker's voice, and usually calls people "darlin'". Snork.

might as well make it an epidemic

In keeping with the virus of depression that seems to be sweeping over everyone I know, I might as well add my name to the list too.

I tend to get seasonal depression, and this year is no exception:

1) It's dark out a lot of the time. (One reason I've always liked living in CA is that the dark seasons are a little shorter.)
2) Work is unexciting and promises to get crappy. I count my blessings here, however. At this point in time with my former employer, I would've been crying in a bottle about now. I take solace in the fact that my manager and my peers seem to feel this way too.
3) I'm either coming down with something or the natural crappiness of early December is screwing me up royally. I woke up this morning feeling exhausted, as if I hadn't gotten any sleep at all, with a cough and a foul mood to boot. I trudged off to work, where my fatigue, my cough, and my mood didn't improve at all. I don't know how smart it was of me -- because I've been malingering before and my manager has been very generous at excusing "work from home" days -- but I'm a good enough actor that I sowed the seeds for staying home sick, or "sick", tomorrow. I think I may do this, as my mood is only going to get more foul.
4) The natural bitterness of life that everyone gets. I wish I was more successful. I wish all of us, friends included, somehow lived in some European country where 8 weeks of vacation is standard, mass transit is viable, and the work week ends at 40 hours. I wish I'd applied myself more in college. I wish I'd applied to Julliard. And, just to show that I commiserate with my wife's recent spate of worrying, I wish my son was developing more. (Then again, I'm greedy.) I wish I had playmates, ready to show at a moment's notice, to fulfill my nerdy need to learn and play board games at all hours. (Then again, I'm greedy.)

Needless to say, I bought a lottery ticket when I left work today -- the tax on people who are bad at math, or vaguely dissatisfied, or desperate -- as I often do when things sometimes get the better of me.

I'm starting to cling to my Completely Brilliant Idea (Board Game Hooky Day, natch) as one of the few things on the horizon that may restore some inkling of sanity to these winter months. Sha told me once that my idea was totally decadent. I'm just pissed off enough these days that I don't think it's decadent at all -- I think of it as rightfully reclaiming time that should've been mine to begin with anyway.

At least Christmas is coming, right?

I'm baaaaaaaaaack....

Many thanks to Doug for putting up with my nagging and getting around to upgrading my Movable Type version -- hopefully those bastard spammers will finally be gone this time -- and getting me back on track.

After many months, I'm back.

Be afraid. Much dorkiness to come. I may even teach myself a little Flash while I'm at it.

late-night blogging from Seattle

So far, it's mildly depressing -- the loneliness of it all.

I took my anonymous flight out of SFO, and ended up in my anonymous Ford Taurus, driving to my anonymous hotel room on an anonymous stretch of highway.

However, from what little I've seen, Seattle looks greener...

...but I suppose it doesn't help that I'm eating alone.
...and it also doesn't help that I've just seen "Lord of War" -- which was decent, but not great.
...and it also doesn't help that I'm reduced to watching HBO late at night, watching "Curb Your Enthusiasm", which is surprisingly not that funny.

Another thing that pisses me off is that I'm going to be stuck in class basically the entire time I'm here, only getting out at 4:30 every day. While I'm extremely grateful, not to mention extremely happy, to be seeing some old college friends I've been terrible at keeping up with, they're only seeing me for one evening. And getting out at 4:30 every day means I won't be able to do much -- I was hoping to get to see the Science Fiction Museum, but it'll be closed.

Thank God for the Seattle Art Museum -- they stay open until 9 on Thursdays, and they're even having a show of my favorite sculptor's work.

I guess I'll just have to find a game store and a book store to get lost in, but needless to say I've got a lot of time on my hands.

Which leaves me ample time to go crazy missing Mer and L.
Argh!

die spammers die!

My ongoing war with comment spam has been an exercise in despair.

Log IP address, delete comment spam.
Repeat a billion times.
Go on vacation or get really lazy, come back to parasitic spam fuckers all over the comments.

I originally found a helpful document here, documenting the problem and the state of efforts to eradicate or control it.

Through this article, I found MT-Blacklist, an ingenious piece of code that shifts the burden onto the spammer to find ways around the system by registering more domains. To paraphrase the author: what takes me seconds to add the linked spam sites to the blacklist means extra time and money for the spammer to register more domains to get around the system.

And that makes me very happy indeed.

There are problems with any blacklist, especially if one of my 3 semi-regular readers really really wants to link to penis enlargement or online poker. I figure that's a bridge I'll cross when I get to it.

Seems the software has already caught a spammer. Highly, highly satisfying.

(I'll probably check the blog tomorrow and find a spammer's electronic turd right on this post. But right now I'm basking in the glow of victory, however, temporary.)

Thanks to Doug for installing everything in the right locations.

One giant leap into domesticity

It literally is in the middle of our street.

We bought a house in a nice section of Hayward, right on the border with Union City, on a street that will invite unfortunate Tone Loc references for the foreseeable future.

It sits right up against the green belt.

Oh sure, there are a few issues with the place. We were there on our inspection walkthrough this afternoon -- there is a lot of subterranean termite and fungus damage in the garage, some termite damage in the rafters, and some more termite damage in the exterior of the house where the previous owners put in a planter box directly abutting the bedroom. (This is all "section 1" damage that the sellers will either pay for themselves or knock off the price of the house.) There's a weird gate that leads directly to the main drag on the other side of the fence -- perfect for kids! The entry to the crawlspace is in a closet, which happens to be the owners' kids' closet -- perfect for kids! (Since I find opportunities in everything, I look at it as a way to discipline future recalcitrant children.)

It was built in 1956, and one slightly creepy detail is that it has the original goddamn furnace that came with the house. And the damn thing still works perfectly, apparently. But we're still getting a HVAC inspector, pronto.

I am now going to be really offensive: apparently Jesus likes to watch people fuck. He also keeps tabs on every room in the house. (We briefly thought of signing our kiss-ass letter "Yours in Christ", but decided that the real estate process had stripped away too much of our dignity already.)

In fact, one possible worrying thing about the neighborhood, in spite of its almost David Lynchian tree-lined suburban wholesomeness, is that the neighborhood seems to be solidly religious in little ways (a "TRUST JESUS" sign here, a lawn Virgin Mary there, and a disconcerting "I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS" sign in one window). Maybe the big CATHOLIC CHURCH on the corner would have something to do with that.

I have nasty visions of us having the only Kerry sign on our block come November.

I also figure Mer can put up any mezzuzahs or any other Judaica she damn well wants.

But it's got hardwood floors, big windows, a huge courtyard perfect for nice barbecues, ample space for an office, a guest bedroom that will be made into a baby room sometime, 2 decent bathrooms (although the master is kinda tiny), a nice kitchen, a huge garage with a worktable, an actual worktable, a worktable for building the intricate stained glass windows my mother taught me to make. Or building actual MST3K robots (or puppets thereof).

Or maybe something actually constructive along the lines of home repair or automotive maintenance.

I also have grandiose plans (as if first-time homebuyers don't get grandiose plans) of building a small arbor over the courtyard. Or maybe a xeriscape rock garden where the nondescript backyard is now.

In any case, my parents and their green thumbs have been happily drafted into the cause. They're going to go nuts when they see this.

The whole enormity of the thing hasn't really sunk in yet, I think.

But it's ours soon, and it's really nice. (And thank God we can still afford mortgage payments on 1 income for a while, if necessary.)

BBQ at our place in July?

Vegas odds

Sorry about the mini-blackout. I've recently constructed a new Frankenstein machine from parts of my old Dell and discarded parts from one of Kevin's demented projects. Anyway, my machine now is twice as fast as it was. Yay me! And thank you to Kevin.

However: there are work stories to talk about.

Yes, it's review time again, and the date of my humiliation has been set for tomorrow, Thursday, 10AM. I'm a betting man, so I'll put it this way:

Odds of trying to scare me straight, bloviate about how I'm not following the myriad protocols that waste testers' time, bring up the surfing I do sometimes, minimize my successes, feign concern while I get slightly combative and meekly bring up my hard work and willingness to go the extra mile, and ending up giving me a 3 (and no raise, even after 3 years) with the tacit assumption that I'm just lucky to have a job, so I should quit the whole bad attitude thing and suck it up to get a product out the door, so I can get ready for the next crisis that hits, and the crisis after that, but they need me, they need me because I know where things are, I know how to do things, and I know things it takes too long to document, and they know I know in all this sick whirlwind of paranoia:

2 to 1.

Odds of my being fired outright, in which it is asked whether I enjoy this stuff at all, and I respond with a near lie about how I've disliked it -- at times, mind you -- because even now I feel I'm set up to fail, how all of us are set up to fail, about how we've fit into this convenient narrative where all of us are simply disgruntled and nothing more, born disgruntled, cast out from the Garden of Eden in our disgruntled surliness, when it could all be so easy if we just did the work that was in front of us, the work that seems to multiply as the hoops we jump through seem to waste our time, the weekends gone, the hooky days we (or maybe just I) have just to know our loved ones again and replace the neurons and axons lost with worrying and obsessing, replace them with lying back in the sun in Half Moon Bay with a seafood lunch and 12-year-old humor about a place called Barbara's Fishtrap, but then this answer is too socialist-sounding, too angry, too complaining-whining-this-guy-can't-hack-it-"maybe he isn't a good fit for this company" kind of answer, and I'm let go since the Sneaky Manipulative VP has had designs on being an employment agency for his entire former company anyway:

8 to 1.

Odds of my getting a raise, since by some miracle the powers that be take a break from the private jokes, or the unfunny public jokes about work that reveal more about empty lives than anything else, the closed-door meetings where the workplace caste system is fully designed and sometimes enforced, the salad and yogurt lunches in brown bags, the staying late not out of a desire to see the company succeed, not out of a genuine love of the work, but to show everyone else that you're more hard core, since you have to show the upper castes that you're willing to give up more, to work hard and play hard in a vast striving that is automatic now, where you become part of the machine, but my part in all this is recognized, the three years there without raises and without occasional weekends atoned for, the incompetent, evil boss before atoned for, my piece of the greed, my guilt, my guilty recognition that many other people spend nights away in the orange office just as angry as me, just as alienated and just as slapped in the face when the CEO says that "the salary freeze has melted" to give himself and the boys the cover story they need:

10 to 1.

And, the ultimate Vegas rule: the house always wins.

(It's not as bad as that. But I need to get it down.)

I swear I'm not making this shit up

-- Scene 3 --

The setting: The same boring office conference room.
The scene: Picking over "cuisine types" for a new piece of website functionality. ("Functionality" isn't even a frickin' word, and I use it all the time now. Kill me.)

Dramatis Personae
Sneaky Manipulative VP
Nice Product Person
Nice but Cocky Product VP
Chris the Bitter Engineer
Smiling Assassin QA Manager
Yours Truly

Yours Truly: "Hey, L***** -- I just have one or two niggly little QA things to talk to you about these cuisine types before we start."

Nice Product Person: "Shoot."

YT: "OK, well you have 'Low Country' listed here in 'Southern/Cajun'..."

NPP: "That's not Southern?"

YT: "No... the Low Countries are the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium. Probably some sort of 'European' food. Take a look at the restaurants in the group and see what kinds of things they serve."

NPP: "Great!"

YT: "There was another thing... 'Tea Service' sounds like it belongs in the 'Asian' category rather than 'European'..."

NPP: "Actually, it is European -- it's more of an English tea breakfast and some of the hotels around here include it in their menus."

YT: "Oh, sorry -- I was thinking like a Japanese tea ceremony..."

NPP (laughing): "No, no geishas."

Sneaky Manipulative VP (with a sudden, weird interruption): "No, not that kind of tea service. Although I was hosted by geishas one time. It was quite nice."

A stunned silence washes over the room.

Yours Truly, to NPP: "Oh, you mean the Las Vegas Tea Service."

Boisterous laughter from everyone in the room, although Yours Truly breathes a sigh of relief at opening his wiseass mouth and not suffering consequences for it. Yet.

Sometimes I have the goddamnedest job in the universe.

THE MADNESS! THE MADNESS!

Yes, I'm in love. And she's not my wife.

Ours is a love that dare not speak its name. Oh, sure, some of you will be disgusted. Some will be ashamed. Some will disown me altogether and reevaluate everything they know about me. I don't care.

You see, I'm in love with a person in Marketing.

Yes, I know. I didn't think it would happen to me. But maybe I should set the stage so the world might understand:

*sigh*.

-- SCENE 1 --

The setting: boring office conference room.
The scene: meeting about what website items are to go live that evening.

Dramatis Personae
Sneaky Manipulative VP
Nice Product Person
Nice but Cocky Product VP
Chris the Bitter Engineer
Extremely Nice & Flighty Marketing Person
Yours Truly

Negative behavioral conditioning has caused me to prepare for these meetings by shoving paper into people's hands. Ostensibly these pieces of paper are abstracts of test cases that I've run on the QA site and will run again once the site is pushed live.

Sneaky Manipulative VP, in his sneaky manipulative way, starts making sneaky cryptic notes in the margins of what I've handed out while everyone else approves.

The meeting lasts around a half hour, and then something wonderful and magical happens.

Nice & Flighty Marketing Person: "Before we leave, I just want to say that Brian has been doing an amazing job on the website. He's been catching all sorts of heinosity that we've put in there and he's just been great."

Sneaky Manipulative VP is shocked by this. He looks up from the notes he's been making, and his voice betrays no emotion at all, but it's too late. The damage is done. Two things betray him: 1) his sudden look up, slightly too sudden to feign being unconcerned; 2) the content of what he says, even if the way he said it was artfully practiced.

SMVP: "Really?"

Marketing Person: "Yes! And I just wanted to say -- thank you, Brian."

Yours Truly (with extreme gratitude and barely-suppressed amusement): "You're very welcome."

Chris the Bitter Engineer suppresses his poorly-contained snark at another corner of the table.

-- SCENE 2, BRIAN'S WALTER MITTY FANTASY --

SMVP: "Really?"

Yours Truly (jumping on the conference room table, flipping SMVP the bird with both hands)
"YES, REALLY, FUCKFACE!
In... your... FACE!
INYOURMOTHERFUCKINGFACE!
(under his breath, with thinly veiled contempt) Jerkoff."

Finis

Soon afterwards, SMVP pulls my mgr (who was not at this meeting) aside and into the same conference room. Now, I'm not egotistical enough to think that Marketing Person's thanks caused them to think again about me and maybe made their lives just a little more difficult, hence the quick closed-door session.

But wouldn't it be great if it did?

(I briefly thought of giving Nice Marketing Person a bottle of wine with a nice note. Although she gave both me and Bitter Chris chocolate Easter bunnies out of gratitude for putting up a promotion she had going at the last minute, I reconsidered giving the wine becuase it would just be bribery at that point. Or at least look like bribery. The nice note, however, will definitely be sent.)

I'll leave you with these lovely pieces of bile: how wrong is it when someone from another *department* has to tell me how good of a job I'm doing? How stupid is it that we are led by people who simply don't get it? Why is simply thanking someone so amazingly difficult, while taking them for granted and treating people like children comes so ridiculously easy?

I think my Elizabethan choler and melancholy are at a fever pitch these days. Still, I'm definitely not as melancholy as the good Renaissance doctor quoted in the paper defines the term:

The melancholike man... is out of heart... fearfull and trembling... he is afraid of everything... a terror unto himselfe... he would runne away and cannot goe, he goeth always fighting, troubled with... an unseperable sadnesse which turneth into dispayre... disquieted in both body and spirit... subject ot watchfullness, which doth consume him... dreadful dreams... he is become as a savadge creature haunting the shadowed places, suspicious, solitarie, enemie to the sunne, and one whom nothing can please, but only discontentment, which forgeth unto inselfe a thouand false and vain imaginations.

Cures would usually include lots of bloodletting and enemas. Yes, you *can* be too rich or too thin.

A plague on their houses, indeed.

interesting exchange

A while back we had one of those company rah-rah meetings (mandatory of course) where everybody applauds repeatedly like it's the State of the Union address or something.

Nevertheless, it's an hour or so I don't have to work, so I plunk my butt down in a chair and wait for the inane glory to begin.

My DBA buddy sits next to me, and I write in tiny letters on my pad: "PLEASE SOMEONE SAY WE'RE ALL LAID OFF". He laughs.

My mgr sits next to me on the other side. She makes small talk: "So, Brian, are you in any more plays?"
"No, I took April off from stage acting in general. Last month was crazy enough for me, where I was also in a play, so I think it was a good decision. I can't think what would've happened to me if I was in a play this month *and* I had to work weekends getting 4.5 out. No, these days I'm just going out on auditions the agency sends me to. I'll be going on an audition near the end of the month, though."

She shakes her head in a "why do you do that to yourself" way, and then says:
"How do you do it? I get home at 8:30 every day, and we just have time for dinner and then bed."

Yeesh.

Without even getting to the question of what I do to myself, how does she do *that* to herself? This is what work reduces us to -- being treated like children over an hour or two less of work a day, or an hour to simply decompress once you get home? What sort of life is that for me or for anyone?

I don't think she has much of an excuse anyway. When she was first interviewing with Fucker Boss for her present position, what gave me hope was that she was a former musician of some sort, someone who had played various scenes in LA and had actually done music for a commercial or two.

Someone who knows what it is to follow creative urges.

The reality, however, is different. I guess she gave up on all that.

She's giving everybody in QA their reviews this week.
Recently purchased item from Hot Topic: Simpsons T-shirt with Ralph Wiggum on it saying "I Dress Myself". I'm thinking of wearing it to my review.

Quip from software developer: "That's a nice looking piece of hardware there. We'll see how my review goes. Oh, you think I'm kidding..."

dubious resurrection

Yeah, so, I'm back and stuff.

Thanks to Badger and Veeera of the Mountains for urging me to write more. We'll see how long this lasts -- if life gets a little too busy again, say I'm in another play for example, off the grid I'll go again, and for good reason. I'll write what I can (sometimes), and I promise I'll bring a camera when Mer and I go to Boston near the end of May.

But what I really want to do it bitch about the state of my life. It wouldn't be my blog without it, I guess.

Now, my feelings about being gainfully employed these days are well-known, and for a quick seminar about how I generally feel most days at work, check out minnie's blog. She's actually honest enough with herself to freak out sometimes at work, whereas I sublimate and sublimate and bury and sublimate some more and unload it all on my patient wife and a bottle or two of beer.

My DBA friend at work and I had this exchange when we were working our second Saturday in a row:

"Man, Brian, when I get out of here, I'm gonna -- "
"Drink?"
"Exactly. And what's more, I'm probably going to do it in bed."
"Hmmmm..."
"Yeah, drinking in bed. Just the sort of thing to let you know that life's just going great."

For those who've followed my work situation, the Fucker Boss is no more. We, as a group, decided we'd had enough. He dug his own grave with people watching, he moved to Seattle, and he's going to be out of the company, period, at the end of the month. As my DBA friend put it: "How badly do you have to fuck up for them to turn off your email?"

But then, the Fucker Boss had far-ranging effects on my life. The immediate ones were easy to spot: the nervous breakdowns, the paranoia, the seething hatred, the creeping alcoholism...

...but he also hired my present manager. I think he originally hired her because she'd be easy to control and bully. Now that he's gone, and the general consensus of our QA group is that our manager, while competent and decent in some ways (we are no longer yelled at, for example) doesn't know her ass from a hole in the ground, and the new VP of Engineering hired to replace the Fucker Boss is a manipulative sneaky bastard, and now they have lunch meetings together and no doubt share private jokes about what lousy fuckup incompetents we are. The main complaints among us seem to be that she triples our work by requiring fully-documented test cases while critical work pressures are ongoing. Without any sort of automated system.

Another exchange with my DBA friend on the fateful Saturday:

"Hey, B****** -- sometimes I feel like we've cut the head off the Hydra."
"Yeah. Exactly. No more explanation necessary, Brian."

It's still like Stalin's Russia in there. We send net sends to each other all the time; subtle eye signals tell more than an email.

Of course, all of this has the secondary effect of much navel-gazing. Where did I go wrong? How did I end up here?

If I had only studied more in college instead of doing things like performing "Like a Virgin" on a kazoo, half-naked, in a driving Chicago blizzard.
If I had only applied myself more vigorously in law school instead of showing up to class in rollerblades or showing up to Torts dressed as Hamlet on Halloween.
If I had only applied to Julliard. CalArts. Journalism school along with my sister.
If I could only whine less in a semi-public internet forum.

Oh, it's OK. To regret is human, and I kinda like my pleasant memories of semi-coasting through college on some dubious smarts and wit. And this series of chaotic events is what eventually led me to the Divine Miss M. But I do have that aimless Renaissance curse (and I should really write less while I have a beer in me on an empty stomach). Here I am -- overeducated, whiny, aimless -- bitching about work and in a hell of a funk as to what the fuck I'm going to do with myself. How I'm going to provide my half of the bargain, especially when kid(s) enter the picture. And we're even thinking of buying a house!

So yes, I hate America. I said it. Or at least I hate what it is now.
Thinking about work, and life, and the pleasures of real estate in the Bay Area quite naturally gets me to thinking about this country's great need to chase after the Almighty Dollar. Or maybe it's less superficial than that. By way of example:

A couple months ago I went to an on-camera audition in the city for a videogame. I slunk away from work, walked the couple blocks to the casting office, and waited around the couple minutes or so until they opened.

As I waited, headshot and resume in hand, people started to collect in a line outside the office -- to be expected, usually, but I was pretty much the only thirtysomething male in line. Everybody else was a stage mom, talking to their unconcerned children about what and what not to do. The woman next to me, in her tracksuit that said "JUICY" across the ass, overly-made-up dyed-blonde look, zippered pullover showing off leathered fake cleavage, was talking to her pride and joy: her boy of about 8 or 9, dressed in black bomber jacket tailored to his size, spiked black hair, and earring.

I think one reason I didn't get this gig, beyond the obvious ones, is that I got too weirded out.

Stage mom after stage mom in the office gets insistent and huffy when the assistant tells her her child is too young by law to appear in the film, which turns out to be a Richard Gere vehicle filming in Marin, and this is the very last day of casting eligibility for minors, for whatever reason.

Nothing like acting to get you intimately acquainted with how people get almost feral with human need. The surface reason is money, and how willing people are to step all over each other to get it, but I think the more subtle reason is success.

Unfortunately, this is how I'm not much different from these people.
I'm guessing that I've been on 30 or so auditions now with the agency, and I haven't booked any work yet. This has caused an unending amount of neurotic behavior in our household, as M can attest to -- and it's a bit of slight pain to hear a radio commercial that you auditioned for just days before but didn't get -- and I suppose I'll get something eventually, but I want. And want. AND WANT, more than anything, to be able to support myself and us doing the very thing that I love most, the only thing I've discovered that I'm any good at professionally.

I suppose this needing is probably subconsciously coming off in other auditions as well.

I also suppose that I should probably think more realistically.

I suppose all of the foregoing is a very long-winded, circuitous way of saying that I got busted for surfing at work today.

Fuckers.

deep in the heart

If sneakyfrog will handle it, I'll be keeping a sort of travel diary again when I go off to Austin for a week. I'll be geeking out with a wifi laptop and a digital camera. Sweet -- like ninjas.

At least it's the sane part of Texas. You know, the Slacker part. The part the rest of Texas regards as Sodom and Gomorrah.

Not looking forward to waking up at 5 to drive to SJ.

Extremely looking forward to blogging by the pool. Poking around in college town stores.

The extremely Atkins-friendly Salt Lick. (I tried to be vegetarian once. Really. I couldn't, mainly because BBQ -- real, St. Louis or Texas BBQ -- is flatly irresistible to me. No ifs, ands or buts. And yes, I read Fast Food Nation, and I know about all the evils of beef farming. BBQ is still irresistible.) Must be those hick boy genes again.

Z Tejas. (If you haven't noticed yet, I'm a slave to various pleasures, especially food.)

Movies at the Alamo Drafthouse, where you sit on couches and order decent food... and it's brought to you.

And the fucking greatest thing ever. Click on the link. You'll be glad you did.

work naked

I'm working from home today.

I know there are some people who get easily distracted or don't end up working effectively from home, but not me. This is the Holy Grail of work -- and it's a very civilized way to live.

back from the dead

I haven't updated the blog in a while. This is mainly due to the following reasons:

1. Waiting for ISP to switch service over.
2. Counterintuitive method of setting up devices to talk to ISP.
3. Sheer hell of setting up wireless network on correct frequency, encryption, etc.
4. Greater hell of adding wireless adapter to desktop computer; required special setting on router/access point. By this point I wanted to kill myself at 2 in the morning.

Obviously, cooler heads, dogged persistence and random stupidity prevailed and I'm writing all 2 of you now on our nice little wireless network.

More geeky fun: our TiVo is also patched into the wireless network as well, for the not-at-all-geeky fun of playing mp3 files over the TV. Pictures too -- finally, a forum for endless travel pictures of Southeast Asia that's even more boring than our photo albums. However, to my credit, many of the pictures look stunning on the TV. Good enough to blow one up to small poster size.

blog taxonomy

Yeah, sure -- you can have your meditations on life and art, your Buddhist sense of grace and oneness, your literary confessional, or even a documentary slice of life.

Or, as exemplified by today's entry in particular, you could get the blog equivalent of a fart joke.

affluenza

It occurs to me (actually, to both of us and quite often) that we have quite a lot of shit. Piles and mounds and utter dunghills of it. It's sickening how much stuff we collect.

It makes me think of our trip to SE Asia last year and how unbelievably privileged we felt, seeing other human beings eke by with a subsistence diet of fish paste, rice and some veggies. In addition to making some donations to a children's hospital in the area, we resolved to make do with less where we could. Fighting consumer culture and clutter is always a losing battle with us, however.

My mom is responsible for maybe 30 or 40% of the junk we have; with her, food is love and showering presents on loved ones is love. Therefore Mer and I are overfed on visits when we're dieting; we get things we really don't want, such as the Goddamn Ebay China...

Ranty Interlude
OK, so the story of the Goddamn Ebay China is this: Mer and I are visiting in Bakersfield. As is par for the course in Bako, it's something like 103 outside -- Mer, being an East Coast chick unused to the whole car-seat-vinyl-sticking-to-your-legs climate, is trapped inside my mom's house reading a book. My mom, having recently discovered Internet shopping as well as web design, has caught the Ebay virus and is busy looking at china. Because, well, you simply cannot be a married couple and not have fine china. You just can't -- because who knows when you're going to have Jacques Chirac and the entire French diplomatic corps over for aperitifs and a 6-course meal, after all.

So, mom's on a mission to remedy this situation as fast she can, on Ebay.

Between my mom and myself, the conversation goes something like this:

"Brian, come here for a second. I found some WONDERFUL things on Ebay. Would you like to look at them?" (My mom has a tendency to stress superlatives.)
"Is this about the china again? I told you -- Meredith and I don't really use china that much. We just have our plates and bowls from Crate and Barrel and that's all we really need."
"Look at this here, Brian. Isn't this AMAZING? It's a full set!"
"Yes, it's nice, but we don't need it. We won't ever use these."
"Now THIS set is really nice. It's so inexpensive. Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?"
"The plates look like big bloodshot eyeballs."
"Another full set! How about this one?"
"No, Mom" -- my voice gets a slight tinge of frost now -- "we won't use them. They're just going to get packed in a box because we already have what we need."
"Click on that one, Brian. These are simply WONDROUS."
I let out an exasperated sigh. Meredith is starting to silently laugh at this over her book. My dad, who has unwisely come into the kitchen for a drink from the fridge, starts shaking his head in amusement. The argument with the wind continues:
"You've got to have this one, Brian. You've got to have china."
"Mom... no. We.. don't.. need it! It'll get packed away and we'll forget about it."
"Oh, look at THIS one!"
Resignation:
"No, that set looks like it was stolen from the Liberace Museum."
"Over to the next page... quickly, Brian. Someone might buy these."
"I can't think who, except for my mom."
"That one's just LOVELY."
"No. That's Miss Havisham's china."
"Oh, click on THIS one!"
"That's not so bad, I suppose. Hon??"

So now we have a full set of 70s-looking china, with some modern-art brushwork of a tree on them. Or three trees -- I can't remember, since we packed them away.

End Ranty Interlude

So yes -- some of our chazerai comes from Mom -- jewelry for Mer and clothes that she'll never wear (my mom's taste in giving clothes tends toward the dowdy circa 1985). A lot of it, however, is meaningless crap that we've accumulated: old shoes we've worn a couple times and then forgot about; toys we got for someone's engagement party and then shoved in a closet; old videos, including forgotten documentaries from the film festival; papers on absolutely everything; junk from old companies we worked for; dishes and mugs we brought with us when we moved in together and then promptly forgot about.

Somehow we're going to have to get the message through to both sets of parents that we will only accept gift certificates as presents from now on. Or books. Just give us books and nothing else.

Maybe this time there's hope. But I doubt it. I love my mom to death -- it's just that this is one of the ways she expresses how she dotes on me and Mer. Dotes isn't perhaps the right word. Idolizes is more like it. Like Mer has told people many a time, I could go on a multistate killing spree, high on PCP and crystal meth, and my mom would wax eloquent about how wonderful my killing techniques were at my trial, or she would disparage prosecution witnesses. (She keeps telling me how LUCKY I am to have Meredith -- again with the superlatives -- so a lot of the doting has been transferred over to my wife.)

At the time, we briefly thought of putting our Ebay china back on Ebay in hopes of selling it away. My mom would just find it again and buy it for us, thinking she'd missed a piece or two or that it'd be useful if we had two sets. We'd go around in endless circles of Ebay buying and selling, like some Divine Comedy punishment for the greedy.

Maybe Ebay sells classes on compulsive shopping.

cars suck

So last week I got out of work a bit early on Thursday to go to the play.
I'm going southbound on 101 where it hits the 280 interchange, where everybody typically drives aggressively, and there's a forced exit for 280 but the line for it stretches all the way back into the city.

This is not the time to be driving a little tin can. Granted, the Honda was a great car to be driving in SF, since I could park it absolutely anywhere, but with no AC and no power steering, it was murder either on hot days or up in the Noe Valley hills. The radio kinda sucked too, but as long as it got NPR I was pretty cool with it.

You'll notice that I'm speaking about this car in the past tense.
Yes, I'm truly old enough now that I can tack on expletives to the word "kids" -- this guy two car lengths ahead of me slams on his brakes, enough to cause a cloud of smoke, which causes the lady in front of me to slam on her brakes and swerve to the left, which causes me to slam on my brakes and also swerve left.

My brakes lock; the old cliche of time slowing down to a crawl while you're on adrenaline is certainly true. My braking distance while I'm skidding seems like 50 feet. I'm praying that somebody in the left lane doesn't clip me going 80.

As it is, my right front fender catches her left rear bumper, and that's about it -- but the guy two car lengths ahead takes off in another cloud from his tires.

With the sure knowledge that this little economy car we have, and its great gas mileage, are going to be written off as totaled, and we're going to have to get new insurance (both of us aren't the best drivers in the world), and this accident will probably be my fault (no witnesses and I was the only one who hit anybody) even though it really wasn't, I'm a little pissed off.

There were no injuries, and I eventually made the performance, but this incident has had some implications:

1) Yes, we'll have to get new insurance next year. Sucky upon sucky.
2) The car wasn't totaled; however, we've decided to fix it through insurance and then sell it, in favor of buying a friend's 1999 New Beetle.
3) For some reason, although we've never been too into naming our vehicles, we've had our vehicles named for us by other people. A friend a while back came up with Ella for my Nissan Maxima after Ms. Fitzgerald -- a bit rough and worn on the outside, a bit of a grande dame, but very elegant and powerful, and a voice that was a pure pleasure to listen to. You'd never tell her to her face that she had a big ass -- let's put it that way. You'd even think badly of yourself for thinking of such things.

Then again, soon after Mer and I started dating, both of us started calling it The Gold Love Machine.

So, now that we'll have a New Beetle soon, it got me thinking: it's white, it's zippy and small where the other car is gold and powerful, and it has the character of some hip SF raver chick, in stark contrast to the smokiness of Ella. (Probably because I was idly listening to Madonna's "Ray of Light" in the car as I was thinking.)

What better name than Inara?
Arabic, which literally means "ray of light".

I might've felt better with a nice Jewish name for this car -- VW has yet to account for some ugly things in its past -- but if Mer can tool around in a Beetle, so can I. None of the Hebrew names, with the exception of Naomi, sounded too zippy.

We'll never get a BMW or a Mercedes, though. First of all, they're yuppie status cars. Second, there are still ghosts of the past that both companies have yet to fully account for beyond the token financial gesture.

what is sadder?

The fact that my life these days is this uninteresting, that two separate people have accused me of having a broken page, or that people want to read about how uninteresting my life is?

Pipe down, you doomed souls. You'll get your oddly vituperative ramblings sometime later tonight, after Queer Eye comes on.

(Maybe it's the moving exhaustion, the fact that I've had a low-level headache for most of today, or that I'm really not looking forward to more packing fun that's making me so catankerous. My own wife had to listen to me make grumpy old man noises throughout most of the morning, capped off with my resolution to be in a crabby bad mood for most of the day today. So far it's worked just fine. My bad mood will be ruined, however, with the ride home where I'll get to sleep on the train, and then plop down in front of the TV with a beer and wonderful reality television. Yes, Mer and I are part of the problem.)

movin' on up

After many weeks of searching, and after about the 13th place we looked at, Mer and I are moving. We picked a nice townhouse in San Carlos -- great neighborhood, across from the public library and the police station.

Those who've been to our present digs know several things:

it's in that "in transition" neighborhood that's incongruously got Ultimate Elegance (my favorite store for lacy and oh-so-sleazy underthings) next to, say, a hair salon or a dive bar next to a new age center;

it's cluttered with our accumulated shit over our four years of living there, such that it's a bit of a rabbit warren;

it's got sun on one side;

it's got a family of 5 living above us with a small child who is not much of a quiet angel. He's a holy terror who runs around, jumps around, shakes in his chair during dinner, screams, cries, yells in the stairwell, does laps around the apartment, has tantrums in the carport, and throws things, while the parents argue, fight and scream themselves;

we would like to entertain a bit more;

the building itself is from late 60s hell.

This place, hopefully, fixes all of this. It's only slightly more expensive than what we're paying now, the landlord immediately wants us in there -- we'll match all the other yuppies that live there now -- and we can easily unclutter to make the place our home. This is a big step up for us, in terms of living arrangements. Although we're still renting, we won't be thinking of this place as an apartment; it'll be our home (with a lot more wallspace for our various posters and artwork). That's incredibly important.

This is going to be great.

Life is absurd

(Warning: too much information will follow. You *have* been warned.)

Today is a good day. It is Friday, it's a beautiful day, the radio seems to be playing good things for once -- god bless college radio and the 70s soul/funk/disco/scratchin' they seem to play in spurts -- and for one day, all seems to be right with the world in this hermetic little Lotos-Eating bubble of San Francisco.

The rest of the world is completely bull-fuggered, but I'm not letting it get me down today. However, my appetite for the surreal hasn't let me down in the least, starting with my endless fascination for bullet points and lists:

1) At 10AM, I have a doctor visit (on our wonderful new company HMO plan, natch) to talk about two things: allergies and fertility.
What this basically means is that my doctor, after some cheerful conversation and interest about the play I'm in, and how it's totally cool to be using my asthma inhaler as a performance enhancer of sorts (I'm very surprised by this), we have several comedy moments over the subject of me masturbating into a cup, putting it in a paper bag, and rushing it down to Palo Alto by car in 30 min or less or my sperm die. There's a fairly good movie that deals with just this sort of weird emergency: the prospect of transporting time-sensitive jizz. The fact that the whole thing is transported in a cup in a paper bag is weird enough -- I'll feel like telling the staff at the Medical Foundation that it's not anybody's lunch delivery.

My doctor tries to prepare me for a shock by saying that she's never seen anyone's sperm test normal. There's always something wrong, no matter what. I tell her to look at me and tell me whether I'm exactly the most normal person she's seen come walking into her exam room. Panting, drooling abnormality is just another weekday with me.

2) A message on my work VM tells me that somebody saw my headshots in the Theatre Bay Area database and that they'd like me to come audition for the villain role in a play written for the SF Fringe Theatre Festival. Where they'd get this idea, I don't know,
but the director/playwright did admit to having a big concern: my look in my headshot was perfect, but he was deathly afraid that I'd be a midget. Anyway, I'm going to be a manipulative Italian count in a comedy (I think) set in the Dark Ages. Break a leg and all that.

3) In a fit of serendipitous behavior, my wife sends me a casting notice sent out to all Tivo employees: friends and family can appear in a testimonial video/commercial, enthusiastically extolling the virtues of their favorite piece of consumer electronics. Naturally I'm filling this thing out.

4) Work is hilarious. I care about it so little now that I'm sitting here writing all this. I'm routinely given things to test that are completely broken -- I think my last act here will be to start rowing to Sweden.

5) You buy one damn T-shirt in SE Asia, one you think looks cool. It's a red T-shirt with a large yellow star in the center; it's the Vietnamese flag, and I like to wear it with some nominally b-boy-lookin' cargo pants for a bit of lame, borrowed and ultimately manufactured hipster SF geek cachet. Extra cool bit: Sha called me a Sneetch once. It's one of the few good-looking styles I have -- or at least I think I look good, which is really what matters in my narcissistic evil head.

Then you come to work and your manufactured geek chic is dismantled by two separate people calling you Carl's Jr.

*existential sigh*.

Now they're talking about getting plastic fries for my cube and an appropriate hat for me. Fuckers.

However, today is a good day. It is Friday, it's a beautiful day, and the radio seems to be playing good things for once.

It's great! It's stupendous! In fact, it's mediocre!

So, D and MJ had a bet to settle.
The bet: which of two movies -- Daredevil or T3 -- would suck worse. The bet was apparently heated, because they were desperate enough to settle on me as impartial judge. Spoilers will follow; not that anybody cares.

The result: Daredevil sucks worse.

In fact, DD has very little, if anything, going for it. Demerits would include:

1) The presence of Ben Affleck, who is quickly becoming about as unwatchable as Kevin Costner. He's like the GWB of the acting world -- he gives you the urge to wipe that damn smirk off his face one way or another. However, this may only be half a demerit because my wife says he's easy on the eyes.
2) No action sequences that are remotely entertaining. In fact, one extended "God-I-want-to-have-sex-'cause-you're-violent-like-me" sequence in a playground had my wife expecting jazz hands and a Charleston dance at any second. They're that bad.
3) No humor that doesn't make you grind your teeth. This movie actually hates you enough to give you the love interest's Greek name -- Elektra Natchios -- and then call her Electric Nacho in some cheap joke in the very next scene.
4) Very forgettable villains. Even with Bullseye, who could've been a whole lot better but was instead just a lame-ass Jack Nicholson-y character with Colin Farrell's natural Irish brogue.
5) Bad CGI. Some fight scenes looked like a duel between Stretch Armstrongs.
6) Jennifer Garner is actually a replicant. They should've used her in T3 -- method acting.
7) The sight of Michael Clarke Duncan (the big baddie) on all fours, in a wifebeater, in a lot of water from overhead sprinklers, with Ben Affleck standing over him in the most suggestive of positions and camera angles. You got your prison rape in my superhero movie!

T3 has its bad crap too:

1) Making my wife feel inadequate by forcing us to look at Arnie's sagging DD's.
2) Occasionally groan-inducing dialogue and attempts at humor. Arnie's new catchphrase: "Talk to the hand." Jeeeesus.
3) Villain isn't as convincingly menacing as Robert Patrick.
4) No ass-kicking hottie Linda Hamilton.
5) The meticulously-manicured "stubble" of this John Connor, Nick Stahl.
6) Announcing foreshadowed (and incredibly, incredibly conveeeenient) plot points with big neon signs.
7) In the future, there are Terminators that can control what size their boobs are. I felt dirty just for watching this attempt at movie humor.
8) Hollywood still doesn't understand basic computing, and doesn't want to. "The FIREWALLS are in place, right?" Yeah. That sort of thing.

Nevertheless, there's gold in them thar half-baked action movies:

1) Great, great car chase early on with a crane truck and several emergency vehicles. I'd say it was even better than Reloaded's car chases, and this one was shorter. Unfortunately, D's right -- T3 sorta blows its robotic wad early on with this, but this sequence gets the golf clap. Good show. Even had my wife enjoying it, and she isn't immediately an action movie person.
2) The presence of cutie Claire Danes.
3) Nick Stahl's acting isn't half bad.
4) The movie actually has faith in its audience enough to dispense with happy action movie endings. Judgement Day isn't averted -- the final scenes show missiles being launched out of farms in Iowa, and the earth's surface erupting in nuclear explosions. The happy ending is that John Connor and his future wife's lives are saved, and that's it. Courageous, for a big Hollywood blockbuster, for being willing to jerk around an audience like that. Probably a blatant setup for another sequel, but credit's due for pulling the mood of an ending down that low. The damn thing ends with nuclear holocaust, and that's kinda cool.
5) Some actually funny bits, most of which are sort of in-jokes referencing Arnie's hamminess or his inability to act.

So why did I have more fun at Daredevil?
Probably because bad movies, for me, are like horrendous travel stories: the pleasure is in both the shared experience of the ridiculous and the retelling.

A highly-acclaimed movie came out a while back. I was more or less cajoled/bribed into seeing it, when all it was really about was a bored housewife having loud monkey sex in public hallways with a greasy Frenchman. It sucked ass, but the worse it got, the more we made fun of it, and the more we laughed. It got so bad something magical happened -- the audience decided it had had enough, and those of us that were left by now had the wonderful experience of eviscerating this steaming turd. My God, it was wonderful.