July 11, 2007 | Filed under: Is She Still Talking?

I’ve lost my mojo. And let’s face it, for me that means losing not my overwhelming sex appeal (nope, still got that, as confirmed by ALL SEVEN of the skeevy old guys at the bar I popped into last Friday for an after-work beer, one of whom actually whistled at me. Indoors.), but all motivation whatsoever. I’m not quite sure how I drifted off to this place of non-enthusiasm, but I am decidedly here, and appear to be quite stuck. I’ve got things to do and other things to write, but all of that would require oh, I don’t know, brain cells that function in conjunction with each other. Basically this preface is just trying to calibrate your expectations — down to, say, a 2 on a 10-point scale — and preview the fact that today is going to be random. You’ve been warned.

I’m still on my Mimi Smartypants kick, and I can’t help but notice that she has a unique narrative style. She strikes me as  the sort of person who Thinks Big Thoughts and Connects Seemingly Unrelated Items. I appreciate this about her, but, wow, that is so not me. My neurons fire in a 1-2-3 sort of manner. Kinda makes me want to partake of illicit substances to see what happens. Of course, I will not. Partake, that is. Initially my say-no-to-drugs stance came from (a) fear of being caught/killed by my parents or anyone else in a position of authority; (b) fear of doing something incredibly stupid under the influence, thereby increasing the chances of (a); and (c) a desire to someday run for President and not wanting to ruin my chances (because, of course, (a) includes being caught by the Po-lice, and Hello, permanent record!) , though these days it appears that having partaken is more of a qualification than a disqualifier. Damn it. Instead, I cling to (d) being able to look my children in the eye and tell them with a straight face that I never once got high. So there. I don’t care if all your friends are doing it.

Also, this line of thinking reminds me of a particular boyfriend, once upon a time, who was rather … disappointed, I guess, … by my lack of Thinking Big Thoughts and Connecting Seemingly Unrelated Items. One day, however, he was kvetching about how expensive gas was (nearly $3 a gallon!) and I, having just returned home from the grocery store, shot back that I paid $4 for a gallon of milk and it’s a hell of a lot easier to suck milk out of a cow than it is to pump oil out of the ground half a world away, so how do you explain THAT with economic theory? I remember very distinctly his reply that this was perhaps the most interesting thing I’d ever said. (Oh, how I wish I were kidding about that.) I also recall very distinctly that he did not concede the point. (Because isn’t that what a good relationship is all about? How many points each side scores in the verbal sparring? It’s like Debate Team every. damn. day. with me.) (I wish I were kidding about that, too.)

Other fun notes from the past few days: I can get a lovely buzz going off of two beers (by which I mean two bottles of Miller Lite, not two pints of something on tap, let’s not get crazy here), particularly if I haven’t eaten since lunch, and it makes the rest of my night glorious. My typed-up-and-saved-as-a-draft-e-mail notes from the evening say:

Drunkety-drunk. off 2 miller lites. awesome.

College Me looks skeptically at Present Me — Two? Two beers? – and calls her a pussy.

[Present Me wonders how she managed to survive an evening that featured roughly six times that amount of alcohol, but she may have the answer in that her body refused to function the following day, save for the default setting of Biting, Sarcastic Commentary First Thing in the Morning (hey, my debate team was woefully far behind and they were relying on me to make up a lot of points in a short timespan), followed by Total System Shutdown around 10 AM.]

[Also, Buzzed Me appears to eschew capital letters as bourgeois, or perhaps hitting the "Shift" key is too taxing for her poor little buzzed fingers.]

Another note from the 2-beer evening:

Lady, people aren’t chocolates. But you know what they are, mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.

Finally, I used the phrase “dead Irish writers” in an e-mail this weekend but couldn’t figure out why it sounded familiar. Was I misappropriating something? Should it have been dead Irish poets? Dead English writers? No death whatsoever? And as I was falling asleep that evening, my brain said, “West Wing. It’s from The West Wing.” I googled it the next day and there it was, in blue and white, confirmation that it’s the title of a WW episode. Now you know.

Well then. I think I’ve met my quotient for Seemingly Unrelated Items, though I certainly wouldn’t argue that I’ve manage to connect them in any way, shape or form. Remember, people: bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. It’s a good visual.

July 9, 2007 | Filed under: Is She Still Talking?

Oh, Sunday night. Beloved
Sunday night. The last few hours
of respite before another hectic workweek begins.
Your ways
are beguiling. I am tired,
winding down, headed to bed.
I settle into bed, tucked
beneath my downy comforter, awaiting your soothing voice
to carry me off to sleep.

But you, Sunday night, you have other plans.
You stir the pot.
You rile things up.
You turn on parts of my brain that have long been silenced.
The sleep for which I long,
you do not bring.
For two fricking hours.

I lie awake. You
turn the light on and bring me a book
to read. I oblige, hoping
that this will please you, while trying
not to think about how very few
minutes there are before the alarm will sound,
wondering how hard
I would have to hit my head against the wall to knock myself out.

Dearest Sunday night. How to express
the depths of my emotion for you?
I struggle to find the right
words, but let me try:
HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE

Ed. note: This is best recited at a coffehouse open mic night, clad entirely in black. Perhaps while wearing a beret.

July 4, 2007 | Filed under: I Run Therefore I Am, I'm a Dork, Is She Still Talking?

Things I did not do today:

1. Get myself out of bed in time for a run in the (relative) cold of the early morning.

2. Engage in any patriotic/celebratory/firework-y activity.

3. Eat lunch.

4. Clean the house, do laundry, work, or otherwise be domestically productive.

5. Go to the movies with Tracy.

Corresponding things I did do today:

1. Went for an hour-long run that turned into a half-assed thirty-minute run because who knew it was going to be sweltering already at 10 AM???

2. Listened intently as various NPR celebrities read the Declaration of Independence. The whole darn thing, not just the preamble. Good stuff.
2a. Unintentionally wore red, white and blue. (It was a red and white tie-dyed shirt with jean shorts. No, I’m not sure why I own a tie-dyed shirt either.)
2b. Watched several episodes of Law & Order, thanks to TNT’s 24-hour marathon.

3. Munched on some snacks from Harry & David while watching Law & Order. Hey, making lunch would have interfered with their ability to carry out justice!

4. Took Adele in for an oil change and tire rotation.
4a. Killed time in Heaven Barnes & Noble.
4b. Read a month’s worth of Mimi Smartypants archives.
4c. Started a new book, bringing the total number of unread items on my shelf to a number somewhere in the 4-digits.

5. Got take-out and watched five episodes of Scrubs with Tracy. Waaaay better than any of the movies currently playing.

And now I shall tell you what to do:

1. Read Mimi Smartypants. Try it, you’ll like it. If you’re not patient enough to read all the old entries, just start today and keep reading.

2. Get thee a copy of this book. (Okay, clearly Amazon would like to make this difficult for you. Maybe try a different retailer.) I don’t read nearly as much as I should, but I like a lot of books and happily pass them along/recommend them to others unless they totally suck. (Examples of suckitude: One Hundred Years of Solitude — felt like it took 100 years to read; Anna Karenina — by the end, I wanted to throw myself off the train platform, too; We Were the Mulvaneys — your fucked up family beats my fucked up family, hands down, but there’s not even a nice little moral lesson to learn here. After WWtM, I swore off all Oprah Book Club selections, but in doing the links here I see that she selected those other two books at some point, though after I’d already read them. I rest my case.)

Ahem, sorry. Responsible Men came highly recommended …

[Me, upon learning the title: So, it's a work of fiction, then?

Him: Actually, I thought the title was redundant.

Me: You clearly don't know enough men.]

… by someone who knows the author. So far, though, it is wonderful. I’m not sure that it’s going to be A Book That Changes My Life, but it’s at least as engaging as the fluffy chick lit I read at the gym, and definitely a little deeper. The author manages to be insightful, but avoids getting too too heavy with the navel-gazing/psychoanalytical stuff, so there’s no need to save this for your next dark and stormy period of self-absorption.

My favorite passage thus far:

Not the future Caleb dreamed of, not the future he deserved. But who gets the future they deserve?

That’s going to rattle around in my brain for days.

Pick up a copy. Let us know what you think. Or leave suggestions of things you’ve read recently and liked. Forget Oprah, we can start our own book club here!

July 2, 2007 | Filed under: It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It., People I Like Even More Than My Job, The California Adventure

Pop quiz: One of us left the mall Saturday with four new pairs of shoes. Was it me? Keep reading for the answer.

This weekend marked a milestone in my excursions to San Francisco. (Yes, I went to San Francisco. Again. For the second time in three days. Good thing my friends are worth it!) Even more noteworthy than my spending entirely too much money on a dress — a dress for work, no less, not even a dress for fun — was that this was The Time I Finally Figured Out How to Get Around the City.

Previously, I’d gotten directions, arrived at a specific place and then did whatever I was there to do — attend a meeting in X building, stay in Y hotel, meet people at Z location — but I had very little sense of how points X, Y and Z related to each other. This weekend, though, was the breakthrough. I get it now! I know (roughly) which neighborhood is which and how to navigate among them for like eight whole neighborhoods. I know this leaves much more of the city to be explored, but I’m just happy to finally figure out which way is north. (Hint: it is not the direction of the Bay Bridge, where you came from.)

The world of public transportation though…well, I’m going to stick with either (a) walking or (b) blindly following someone else. That’s not entirely true. I managed to successfully navigate my cable car trip, and I think I can handle the bus. Sort of. But the actual Muni? Definitely employing the sheep methodology. To all you baseball fans attending the All-Star Game/festivities this week, I say: Good luck. And please don’t ask me for directions.

We pause now for some rampant consumerism before I continue with the story-telling.

The dress, um, is apparently not available anywhere on the Internet. It is like this dress, only black and has pockets on the hips and khaki detail stitching around just about everything (collar, cuffs, belt, pockets, vertically along the column of buttons). I love it, but it makes me cringe a little because once upon a time, two dress sizes ago, I owned a very similar dress from Ann Taylor Loft. Which probably cost a third of what this dress does. And I may very well have choked on that price. Sigh. (I miss the dress, but not the dress size.)

(Clickety-click for larger pictures.) I am not 100% sold on the above dress, because the detail stitching, while making the dress interesting, also makes it very memorable and limits its functionality. I may trade it in for this (more boring versatile) one instead.

Feel free to weigh in. Nordstrom will be happy to process my return/exchange.

That concludes today’s commercial message. We return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Day One: Shopping extravaganza. If you guessed that I was the one with all of those new shoes, bzzzzzzzzz. Not this time.

Day Two: Giants vs. Diamondbacks, followed by the Fillmore Jazz Festival. Photographic evidence:

Willie Mays, Giants legend.
Please ignore the disembodied heads at the bottom of the frame. After all, that’s what I did.

Spanking of the D-backs. Please note that the score is 8-0 in the top of the 6th.

I didn’t think it could be worse than the beatdown the A’s delivered to the Yankees earlier in the day,
but the Giants won this one 13-0.

Jazz. Kinda loses something in photographic form.

So that was San Francisco, where the sun shines every once in a while but it never gets above 70. I’m getting the hard sell about coming back for the Fourth, but I don’t know if I can stomach the thought of wearing long sleeves to the beach. In July.

What are your plans for tomorrow?