Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Welcome to Day 35

The appraisal guy, hereafter known as the Fucking Fuckity Fucker, just sat on the appraisal for a full seven calendar days, making it impossible to get everything done even for a June 30 closing. So, so much for moving on July 2. We re-booked the movers, and rescheduled the furniture delivery and the HOA move-in appointment for a week later. Which worked out fine for all those people; they all had the spots available in their schedules, but we still didn’t even know if the Fucking Fuckity Fucker would hold us up even longer to make even THAT moving date unworkable. Oh, and did I mention we were also waiting for biopsy results? So yeah, a nice stress-free week.

But finally, the Fucking Fuckity Fucker delivered the report, and the Best Mortgage Broker in the World hauled ass and got the loan approved and finalized the very same day. And she got a mobile notary to come to our house last night at 8 PM, and we signed every piece of paper in the universe, essentially sealing the deal, if not closing escrow quite yet. Which yes, means all this happened on the exact same day we got the biopsy result. So you think YOU had a big day? Ha Ha. It is to laugh.

We wired the money for closing this morning and now we wait for the process to play itself out. We should be owners on Tuesday. And NOW it feels close. And NOW it feels real.

Failure of the Day: Not Even About Escrow

The surgery went well and easy: no pain and less memory—I recall maybe a total of four minutes of all of Friday. That Ativan is serious business.

The doctor was good to his word and showed me the mass he removed—that part I remember. It was the size and shape of a button on a very fancy little girl’s winter coat. More importantly, it is not malignant; the doc called the following Wednesday to tell me about PASH (pseudoangiomatous stromal hyperplasia), which is a lot of syllables to say fibrous lump that grows for reason we don’t understand. So yay! Another weird and rare disease that is NOT cancer, and 2 more inches of surgical scar to add to my collection. That’s 31 inches total on my torso, for those of you playing at home.

It was an interesting intellectual exercise for me, though. I would not have been sad to see my breasts ectomied clean off, and that’s a complicated thought process: is wishing for breastlessness the same as wishing for a cancer diagnosis? It took me several long days to sift out my serious desire to NOT have cancer from how tired I am of having boobs. But once I had found the distinction, I was surprised by how strong my desire for it not to be cancer was, and then I was surprised by my surprise. So I suppose we’re right back where we started: a weird girl, a weird body, and way too much thinking about both. But a happy ending, at least.

Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Week 4

There came to be some doubt over the closing date—our lender suddenly demanded a THIRD appraisal, and after some doing, it wound up happening on the 23rd, too late to make it for a closing on the 26th. We’ll now close on the 30th if all goes well. A woman I work with started her escrow a week before us and she’s now a week past her original closing date with no papers to sign yet, because her lender is making additional appraisal demands as well—it seems to be in lending zeitgeist.

But there’s a bit of lucky planning: we allowed almost a full week between the original scheduled closing date and moving day, so we can absorb some delay. Not a lot, but some. Chris did an astonishing job packing this weekend—we’re more than half packed a full 9 days until the movers are scheduled to arrive. Honestly, the amount of work he’s capable of is a little staggering.

The upcoming surgery has given me a nice bit of perspective—I don’t feel particularly nervous about the condo at all any more. We’ve received approval for literally every single other aspect of our application, and we have every single other form and piece of paperwork filed and approved and ready. It seems, I think, knock wood, that we can be delayed—but I don’t think we can be stopped from actually purchasing this condo. I think.

Failure of the Day: Escrow, Interrupted

Because if you’re going to one huge life thing, you might as well do EVERY huge life thing at the exact same time. Welcome back to the tit monster, scourge of the xray, enemy to the needle. The 6-month follow-up mammogram was suspicious: Shifty eyes, bulging pockets, loitering outside of 7-11.

So even though the Christmas biopsy was negative, the mass in my left breast is larger and more defined now, and the doctors are not happy. So next up is a surgical biopsy, a minor procedure in which they will remove most if not all of the mass. They are doing the procedure on the day that escrow is scheduled to close. Because why not? It’s not like we have to plan a whole move and the largest financial transaction of our life right then or anything.

But the tit monster waits for no mortgage. So I am back to practicing my flat chest cancer routines, settling on a suitably disrespectful demeanor, and absently looking at wigs online. Never mind that no one seems particularly convinced that it’s cancer, only concerned that they don’t know what it is at all, and so, abundance of caution, etc.

Chris is a brave little toaster, glued to my side at the surgical consult and creating for us a charming visual narrative of the stalwart and extravagantly devoted husband with his caustic and loudmouth wife, all the better to win over the surgeon, who will hopefully now be less inclined to come to work drunk or suddenly dyslexic on operation day. I liked the surgeon, oddly; he winced when he crossed his legs and it reminded me of Dr House. Also he spent an HOUR with us—can you imagine? Just going over our general and local anesthesia options.

I suppose I’m as comfortable with the whole thing as possible—I’m not thrilled with the idea of the surgery, sure, but that didn’t stop me from choosing the local anesthesia because the doctor promised to show me the mass after he digs it out. And with some luck, that will be the last we hear of the tit monster.

Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Week 3

We’ve booked the movers and given notice to our now very sad landlord. We’re good, tidy tenants and no doubt in this economy he’s not going to get the rent we were paying. He’s a great landlord and it’s a great place; email me if you’re apartment hunting. I watch the Home and Garden network obsessively now because the Blooomberg channel gives me a really bad stomachache. But an otherwise very quiet week.

Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Week 2

This is the week we learned that we had missed out on the low, low interest rates that we had heard so much about. Six days before Erin submitted all our info to the lender, mortgage rates jumped by one-half to one full percentage point in a single day. Erin advised us not to lock in a rate and float a rate, betting that the markets would correct in the next several weeks.

And would you listen to me spouting off about the rates market like Michael freaking Bloomberg! And that’s because I’ve been watching the Bloomberg financial channel obsessively. I’ve never watched financial news shows before (duh) and I barely understand half of the vocabulary, but even I can tell that not a soul on the TV has any idea what’s happening or what any of us should do. They should all totally be wearing silk scarves around their heads, and we should have to slip a quarter in a slot to get them to print out their advice on little cards they spit out.

My problem is there’s nothing to DO anymore. When we got 35 emails a day keeping us appraised of our various in-progress documents, I felt busy and engaged and actively participating. Now it’s all out of hands and we can only wait. And there are a LOT of shows on the Bloomberg channel. Our condo-to-be passed both appraisals, and the loan application was submitted and we should get our approval in 7 days knock wood.

Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Week 1

So, we found a place. It’s spectacular and affordable and in the exact neighborhood where we want to be. We made an offer on Sunday and it was accepted on Monday and we opened escrow on Tuesday. That brief transaction involved more paperwork that you can possibly imagine. And it was but a small fraction of what was to come.

We spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday getting and sending emails about all manner of legal and financial minutia, and then we met with our realtor on Thursday night to sign even more documents. Later that night, we got the good faith estimate of our closing costs. Which prompted an immediate sobbing, teeth-gnashing freakout. Did you know that the line on the estimate that is called “Cash the Buyer MUST Have to Close” has absolutely nothing to do with the actual amount of cash the buyer must have to close? Yeah, me neither. Luckily, Erin, the world’s nicest mortgage broker, called us back at 9 PM (!) to talk us (me) down. All better now.

On Saturday we had a more-detailed visual inspection of the property with our realtor and the seller’s realtor. That’s when I noticed the window treatments. They are moiré silk taffeta in a dark olive green with a thin stripe of iridescent burgundy along one edge. Hanging in both the bedroom and the living room, they are exquisite. The seller’s agent told us they were custom made in Italy, and the contract we signed specified that they are included with the condo. And that’s when all the enthusiasm I’d been tempering with caution just burst right through. It’s essentially over for me. I can hold myself back quite a bit, I really can, but at this point I’m done. I am a helpless puddle in this condo’s palm. I am a gape of my own want.

On Monday we emailed and faxed one thousand financial documents to Erin, who now knows more about me than any person to whom I am related by blood. I understand that there are plenty of things that can still trip us up—the FHA is stern mistress—but everything that we can do, we have done. It’s out of our hands. It’s June 1; we are scheduled to close on June 26.

Failure of the Day: Too Much Brain on My Hands

Thank god for benadryl—I’m finally getting something like enough sleep, chemically induced though it may be. And it occurs to me: I don’t handle stress well. I mean, I handle it—I don’t fall apart or go on a tri-state killing spree or eat four whole chickens at every meal. I get my work done and I continue to groom myself properly, but my emotions are not gentle really under any circumstances, any of them, and stress is a bit of an accelerant to my already emphatic predisposition.

And you know how people really need to take a vacation from their same old thoughts because distraction is the cure for obsession and depression and worry and kind of everything? Yeah, that’s not going so well for me. For example, I might actually, oddly, be on the David Letterman show at some point in the coming months. (It’s a long story; I’ll explain more if it pans out.) Ordinarily, that would be a world-class distraction, wouldn’t you think? What will I wear? How will I keep from making more of a buffoon of myself than is strictly necessary? How will I keep Chris from weeping with joy the whole time, etc. Just worrying about how fat I’ll look on TV should be enough to distract me clear through July.

But it’s not. Instead I spend all my time worried that the economic downturn isn’t affecting SOMA real estate prices as much as we need it to, and they won’t accept our lowball offers. We don’t have the answer to any of our questions yet, mostly because we haven’t found just the right realtor yet, so instead of fixating on how to make sure my hair is perfect for Dave, I obsess over new home sales data by zip code. And it’s just me, asking the same question over and over into the sacred space between my face and the monitor screen, and I don’t have any new information since the last time I asked. There’s no new answer. There’s no answer at all yet, because I have to wait. I. Have. To. Wait.

This is the second week.

Failure of the Day: Enter Sandman

I have seriously never had this many people interested in discussing my needs in my entire life. People are appearing out of thin air and asking if we can discuss my needs. I get emails and phone calls daily now from people who want only to know what my needs are. I have a neurologist, a dermatologist, a gynecologist, a dentist, and an internist, and not a single one of them is 1% as interested in my needs as any given real estate agent in San Francisco.

Let me tell you what I need: Sleep.

I haven’t slept through the night since last Saturday. I thought I saw a big black bird swooping through my office two times yesterday. This is the condition in which I am supposed to make a decision that will affect the next 30 years of my life.

Thing is, I don’t feel stressed. I’m exhausted and I have what I’m pretty sure is hysterical diarrhea, but I don’t feel scared or on edge or tense. I feel like I’m thinking clearly, making fine decisions, and performing perfectly fine acts of deductive reasoning. So yeah, real estate agents, I would like to discuss my needs in more detail with the whole lot of you. But I’m not hiring any of you yet, not until I know I have to, and not until one of you strikes me in just the right way.

But seriously, did no one else see that bird? It’s gone now but it was just there.

Failure of the Day: High-Stakes Education

I learned what a mortgage broker was when the lady on the phone identified herself as one. Which was just before she pre-approved us for a sum roughly 50% more than our budget. It was a science fiction sum. Isaac Asimov wrote that sum.

That was when my stomach stopped hurting for the first time in 2 days. Approval is nice. We had the stamp of productive and responsible adulthood on our foreheads. Our income and credit scores are acceptable. Now we get to shop for real.

Now I need to learn what a realtor is, and if we need one. And if it’s different than a buyer’s agent. And what short sales are and why people seem wary of TICs. On the plus side, I know what a TIC is.

I’m also having my own personal episode of Spock’s Brain—all of a sudden I forget everything the Money Grown-Up explained to us and I can’t figure out how we can afford this. My understanding just wears off and I need to get re-hooked up to the Teacher helmet. It’s something about taxes I know, but after that? Pfffft.

It wasn’t long before my stomach started hurting again. That’s the second day.

Failure of the Day: We’re Sorry, My Nerves Are Experiencing Unexpectedly High Call Volume; Please Hold

After putting it off for literally years, Chris and I saw a financial advisor on Saturday. We call him the Money Grown-Up. He told us that in fact we could afford to buy a condo, pretty much now. He explained all the various details and tax implications and mortgage options and millions of other details about numbers that hopefully Chris paid attention to because really, I was mostly spending all my energy trying to keep a reasonable expression on my face. Owning our own place is kind of a big deal to me, is the thing. On Sunday we started shopping.

The first thing you learn is that you are unforgivable wealthy. A half million dollars! That’s what these things cost, and you just bat the concept around like a kitten with a yarn ball. A half million dollars. To start.

The second thing you learn is that you are a deadbeat. You look at places that are priced higher than you can afford and know that you’re going to haggle them down to what you want. But in the early stages, the whole time you’re talking to the agents, you’re keeping the terrible secret that you can’t pay the asking price. Because you’re a deadbeat. Your shoes cost $11 from a store that was going out of business, and they can totally tell.

Meanwhile you’re a lost little lamb. The nice Money Grown-Up says you don’t need a realtor to buy a condo, any moron can negotiate a good deal in this market, so you walk into the places alone with your pants around your ankles and your wallet open, and the people showing the properties start talking REALLY FAST.

On Sunday night I sit straight up in bed covered in sweat just like they do in movies. “We have to get rid of all our books!” I shout to Chris, who is happily killing digital zombies. “We’ll never get enough square footage for all our bookcases!” Chris lets the zombies run free for a while and comes to soothe my frantic head. “It’s just shopping,” he says. “It’s fun. It exciting. And we like our books.”

I take a fistful of benadryl and manage to get to sleep. That’s the first day.

Failure of the Day: The Unbearable Light(ness) of Tanning

My skin? Still hates me. The psoriasis is throwing the mother of all tantrums (which really should be the toddler of all tantrums but whatever) and let’s call it flaring. And I’ve had it. I’ve been rubbing goop on it for 25 years and none of it works for shit. What works is UV radiation, particularly UVB, but I don’t have the time to go all the way to Kaiser to use their light boxes three times a week. But I do have time to go to the tanning salon on 4th and King on my way home from work.

Tanning beds mostly deliver UVA light, so it doesn’t work quite as well, but I have it on good authority that it does work some, and that’s more than I can say for the goop. That’s the plus side. On the minus side, I’ve spent my entire adult life scrupulously avoiding ever getting even a hint of a tan. There’s a reason I don’t have any wrinkles into my 40s.

Tonight, in the tanning salon, I had what in truth was a very pleasant conversation with the 20-year-old receptionist’s hard candy shell. I had to stop myself from knocking on it—the gloss was so high I could almost see myself in it. But I found it oddly endearing, too, the effort he put into the show of being so nice and helpful. When I was a 20 year old receptionist, you couldn’t have gotten me to fake 10% of that friendliness with a gun to my head. What is it with kids today? No irony, no disdain, and not a loner in the whole fucking generation. I tell you, it’s eerie.

But in the end, what do I care that he started every sentence with an enthusiastic “Absolutely!”? Because, really, a simulation of friendliness and helpfulness is still friendly and helpful, and I needed someone to tell me how to get in the weird machine without setting myself on fire. I toasted for a brief 5 minutes (my whole face swaddled in towels) and none of my marshmallow bits seem to be burnt, so you can bet I’ll be back to continue the great Fuck the Goop experiment of 09. But first I need to moisturize. Seriously.

NON-Failure of the Day: Black Sabbath's Master of Reality by John Darnielle

I absolutely cop to being heavily biased in favor of Darnielle long before starting this book, and I further acknowledge that my opinions tend to the extreme and dramatic. However, even given all that, I have to say that to my eyes, this book marks the invention of a new kind of music journalism.

Instead of the studied music expert deconstructing the minutiae of the songsmithing and performance from a lofty and removed perspective, what Darnielle gives us is the idealized audience for the material at hand, expertly rendered with autobiographical precision. Who else but a 16-year-old kid thrown into a lockdown psych ward to explain the greatness of Black Sabbath? And who else but arguably the finest songwriter working in America today, not coincidentally also an RN who worked in a psychiatric lockdown facility for adolescent boys, to merge the story of the record with the story of the boy?

This new journalistic genre—criticism literature, let’s call it—provides not just an opinion of the music, but context, an experiential framework in which to hear it as it was intended by the audience it was intended for. It does what you want literature to do, that is, transport you into another person’s existence, and once you’re there, it plays the songs for you such that you hear them through the character’s ears, and through his or her lifetime of experience.

I don’t know; maybe other people are doing this and it is old news but this is the first I’ve seen of it, and I found it to be exhilarating and wrenching and ultimately transformative way of communicating in the single-dimensional world of words what it feels like to hear the multi-dimensional world of music. I’m awestruck by the achievement.

Failure of the Day: The Most Time-Consuming Clock

Time passes however it damn well chooses. There are weeks that are over before you can finish your Coke, and weeks that you don’t notice and that don’t notice you—time is a stranger; not even eye contact as you pass each other on the sidewalk.

Then there are weeks like this, Wednesday to Wednesday, Chris working long hours, and no on else knows what I’m waiting for. You don’t invite other people into this kind of time—at least I don’t. Maybe that’s a social misunderstanding on my part but it seems discourteous at best to drag people into your drama before you even know for sure if it exists. I limit the causalities.

One thing I’ve decided: if it’s cancer, I have to re-write my book as a memoir—the story wouldn’t be believable as fiction anymore. It’s too much. And I find myself getting comfortable with cancer—I’m warming right up to it. In a way it’s relaxing; to return to being the sick girl is just so easy, so familiar. It’s alluring. I still haven’t quite figured out who I am if I’m not the sick girl, so being her again would solve that problem at least.

But a week is a long time to spend on an identity cusp. I don’t actually expect it to be cancer; the odds as I understand them are in my favor. In my 20s of course, no matter how the odds were split, it was inevitable that I would find myself in the smaller wedge of pie. I was pretty unlikely. But a decade of outright healthfulness like the one I’ve just had makes one feel a good bit more insulated. “Anything can happen—but it probably won’t” sums up the uneasy peace I made with my catastrophic history and what it means for my remarkably still not catastrophic present.

Still, though, a long week. And a long day; they are supposed to call today but it’s 3 PM and so far, nothing.

6 PM UPDATE: *AH-OOOO-GAH* Doctor just called and sounded the all-clear. Looks like I'm still more likely than not.

Failure of the Day: Meet the New Boss

I had to have my left breast biopsied today. The doctor emphasized that the dense area of tissue they see on my mammogram and ultrasound is not the kind of thing that usually turns out to be cancer, which I appreciated and am forcing myself to stay focused on.

I watched them do the biopsy on the monitor; I saw the needle clip off each of the six tissue samples they took from the sort of white-ish blobby thing on the digital screen, which of course was not on the digital screen at all but very near my left armpit. And I thought: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I know about white blobby things on high-tech x-ray; I first saw the one in my brain coming up on 18 years ago--now it's almost old enough to vote. And it sure as shit was the boss of me for most of those 18 years, though much less so lately.

It was an emotional day; I was more worked up than I thought was warranted but there wasn't anything I could do about that. I called in sick to work and waited to call Chris until I could say the word "biopsy" out loud without choking up. And it's frustrating because I'm not frightened and I wasn't frightened for a moment during the procedure or after it, but I was behaving as though I were, and I don't really know why. I recognized the feeling of dread in the fist of my stomach, it came and went as I wandered around downtown for five straight hours, trying to make myself exhausted and distracted. But I never did get around to feeling afraid.

It was also a bit liberating; I'm pretty responsible these days what with the big corporate job, husband, nice apartment, low cholesterol counts, and such. Today I didn't have to do anything at all; my only task was to keep myself entertained. That really was the best and right thing for me to do, so I dawdled in Macy's, bought tights at Forever 21, looked in vain for a palatable movie to see, and ate a very salty and wonderful soft pretzel. Not a bad day, considering.

I'm 42; 10 years younger than my grandmother was when she got breast cancer. I'm still not scared, or really even worried right now. I have a big white blob in the middle of my field of vision though, and it might turn out to be a long road of bullshit medical ordeals, or it might just be pretzel dough. I know what to do with both. I get the results in 7 days.

Failure of the Day: Futbal? I Hardly Know Her!

Once upon a time I considered everyone who watched football a cretin. I was young and judgmental and as annoying as we all are at 23. And 33. Mostly I just didn’t know anything about it and hadn’t watched even a single game, so I had no idea how it was played, or what the rules are, or anything. That changed when Chris got sucked into fantasy football league during our last year in Seattle, and suddenly the living room TV was all booked up on Sundays with that strange white noise of crowd sounds and instantly orgasmic announcers.

I like sitting on the couch with Chris (he’s toasty!), so eventually, I picked up on the basics and could watch a game with something approaching appreciation, if not pleasure. It’s something to see 300-pound men hurl themselves at the ground with no regard for their own physical well-being. Bodily fearlessness is as anti-Nancy as it gets, and anti-Nancy is my favorite, of course, so the next thing you know, I have my own fantasy team and am having perfectly reasonable conversations about Peyton Manning.

Yesterday we watched in person as Chris’s beloved Seahawks eviscerated the poor, defenseless (no, really) 49ers. I was again impressed by how easy and convenient MUNI makes it to get to the ballpark. I was likewise impressed by how many Italian sausages and ice cream bars I can eat in a single afternoon. But what really struck me was how many of the fans were absolute cretins. Rude, sunflower seed–spitting, homophobic epithet–shouting, drunk morons.

But it’s not football’s fault. Any crowd will bring out the worst in those with a predisposition to assholery. There was no shortage of drunk morons at the various Litquake events we went to earlier this month, too. And really, I’ll take a drunk football fan over a drunk poet any day—the drunk football fan won’t get all sad at the end and make you read some godawful thing they wrote. So, you know, go Hawks.

Failure of the Day: High

Having now successfully completed about 30 percent of my year end dental extravaganza, I am now chin deep in love with nitrous oxide. Even though I just heard from a friend who managed to use so much of it that she permanently damaged her liver (and really, how do people get ahold of black market gasses? And in large enough doses to cause irreparable organ damage? Jesus, I need to get out more.) and now requires monthly B-12 shots.

But in the happy and controlled doses offered by the dental girls, I am free to meditate on the nature of whatever it is that got stuck in my head that afternoon without fear of Hep C or any of the other low-impulse-control crowd’s bugaboos. For this week’s appointment, I was focused on the word pulp. The crisis on tooth 15 involved removing some old fillings that were, I was told, perilously close to the tooth’s pulp, whatever fucking horrifying thing that is, and if they got too close, I would need a full-blown root canal.

So pulp it was as they strapped the nosegear on me. But as my arm and legs dissolved into that fantastic electric throb, it seemed to me that books get turned to pulp too, and that I was writing a book about pulp: the soft, vulnerable mush that acts as the stuffing for our bodies, and before too long it was all really cosmic and profound. I was sure I had uncovered a Larger Theme in my novel that I need to remember and incorporate into my writing.

It wasn’t, and I hadn’t, and I didn’t, of course; I was just high. But it was nice way to pass an afternoon, which is pretty impressive considering how many fingers and pointed sticks were in my mouth. I ended up not needing the root canal, and can go back and get another regular old crown in couple of weeks. I’ll get the nitrous for that appointment too.

Failure of the Day: Mouth

You know the 22 Fillmore? That crazy people mobility machine, that homeless guy motel, that bad smell factory?

On the 22 Fillmore this afternoon, it was all I could do to manage my straight-up euphoria. It spouted in plumes from my head; the Okkervil River songs on my new birthday iPod that I have heard a million times sounded so triumphant I nearly wept. On the 22 Fillmore.

What I know for sure is that whatever medical, physical doom is still flying around out there for me is headed right for my mouth. In my jaw are planted the seeds of my ultimate destruction. I can feel it. I feel airplanes crashing into it; I feel exploding shards of bone every time the train takes a fast corner. Death is a missile aimed at the base of my tongue.

So when the dentist told me that I needed two crowns and not the NINE plus a root canal that my last dentist tried to sell me, and also that I had no new cavities and that my gums are healthy, and that yes, she understands completely that I have an obligation to act as my own pain management advocate and that I am not drug-seeking but on the day after she’s been rooting around in my mouth with pointed sticks I get to have a vicodin or two, I thought yes. Yes, this is how we run a perfectly serviceable adulthood.

I am keeping my distance from doom. My mouth is closed to it and I feel invincible.

Failure of the Day: Easy. Ass.

And it’s just that easy. I remember now why I blogged… for those times when it’s slow during the day and both my novel and my current poem smell like ass, it’s nice to do something EASY.

Some of my thoughts for the day:

The free maxi-thins at work are neither maxi nor thin, but they are free, and as such, totally sufficient.

Kaiser are persistent buggers: After establishing care with the new internist and getting my annual check-up taken care of last week (during which the Doctor congratulated me on my weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol—that’s how healthy I am) the dermatology, neurology, and mammography people have been calling me more than daily to get me in for my referrals.

Now, except for the mammogram, which I submit to begrudgingly because I recognize the necessity of that uncomfortable glass and boob sandwich, I have no use for these specialists. Neurologists have never been more than the notetakers of my disease, dutifully marking up my chart and then sending me home empty handed 100% of the time for oh, the last 17 years.

Dermatologists, on the other hand, are another class of villain entirely. Over the years, they’ve cured my psoriasis a few times now, albeit temporarily, either with anonymous drugs in clinical trials that I’ve never been able to get ahold of again, with delivery systems of common drugs that have “fallen out of favor” and so are not available any longer, or with UV light treatments that they wont prescribe anymore because some dumbass once burned themselves with the home light wand and sued over it.

Oh, but they call. Wont I please make an appointment? Sure. You bet. At my earliest convenience. I’m thinking early 2009.

Failure of the Day: Four Hours

Sweet and slender tendrils of vacation smell are wafting up from… you know I don’t know if that's what that smell actually is, but let’s just for the sake of argument say it’s sweet and vacation-y and of somewhat mysterious origin, and O, I want it.

The last day of work before 12 uninterrupted days off. Chris is running around like a crazy person tying up loose ends and making sure everything at his job is taken care of, whereas I am watching time just full-on cease to advance at all, at all. Time hates me. Time is the little old lady I will eventually be trying to cross the street and giving me the finger for honking at her to speed it the fuck up already, granny!

Not. Even. Lunch. Time. Yet.

Failure of the Day: Week, Interrupted

I’m in full vacation mode. Our trip isn’t until later this month but it’s a holiday week and most everyone at work took the whole week off, so it’s slow and hot no one is in the mood to do much of anything. I’m also just completely relieved to be done with the DeLillo novel. I don’t mean to dismiss it as heavy, but I literally weighed more while I was reading it. I’ve lost 2 pounds since I finished it, no lie. And OK, it’s very good and it reads like what trauma actually feels like, the sense of disconnectedness, the repetition, the deadening boredom of feeling the same terrible thing every minute of the day for weeks on end, and that’s no small accomplishment of literature. But holy shit is it a drag to read.

San Jose is doing a thing for the holiday—who knows how they pulled it off but They Might Be Giants and Fountains of Wayne are playing in Discovery Meadows on Tuesday night. Which, in true sort-of-crap-town spirit, is technically the third and not the fourth, but I’m not complaining because it’s walking distance from our apartment and tickets are a whopping $10. It couldn’t be easier for us to see this concert if the drum kit were on my lap.

To rev up I’ve been re-listening to the new Fountains of Wayne CD, which sort of rubbed me the wrong way the first couple of times through. I’m warming up to it though. The music is at times nakedly exuberant even as the words bop along in their self-conscious pop cultural name dropping. I read a review that called them the best bet for impeccably produced, beach-ready power-pop, and you know, I’m so in the mood!

Failure of the Day: Sold!

If I had to pick a word to describe the concert the Police put on last night, it would be “enterprise-class.” (That’s what comes from a year and a half in software marketing.) The show was sleek and big and impersonal, and to my blunt ears, musically flawless. If the guitar was out of tune for two bars during Walking on the Moon or whatever; Chris would have noticed, but me, I’m all ohh, shiny!

Now, the 60-something suburban divorcées who sat in front of us rocking out and toking up were a whole other matter. It was disturbing on a very deep level—sort of like being at the stoner park across the street from school and having your teachers show up with the bong. On the other hand, it left me feeling nicely optimistic about the future of marijuana laws.

I am also currently in the thick of planning our summer vacation trip to Chicago. It’ll be the biggest trip Chris and I have taken together, and I’m having a superfun time navigating through and developing some expertise with the various online travel sites. I’ve always been good at getting good prices on our trips, but I lately I’ve been deep into the arcane rules and strategies of using Priceline and Hotwire and have, I think, seriously outdone myself.

So by now the trip is almost completely booked! and I am moving on to the activities research. I discovered that Milwaukee is a mere 90-minute drive from Chicago, and I thought: SOLD! Milwaukee! I can’t imagine there will be anything there to see but I don’t care. In my mind, Milwaukee is as different as a thing can be from a Jewish poet who hates both beer and nature. It’s the geographic equivalent of the polar opposite of me! I love it already. Chris is always up for weird "roadside America" adventure, but even if he weren't, he's putty in my hands since I told him about the Bob Newhart statue on Navy pier.

Failure of the Day: Rung

In his new book (which is just supernaturally good), Michael Chabon says doom is a thick ribbon that marbles all Jewish life. Which goes a fair distance toward explaining why, when I finished the third draft of my own novel week before last, adding more than 30,000 much-needed words and 70 fleshed-out pages to the second draft, I was overcome with one of the most profound feelings of disappointment I’ve ever felt in my life.

It’s not just that it’s not very good—hell, it’s never been very good; it’s a first novel by a confessional poet for chrissakes—it’s that it’s poorly written. Of all things to be wrong with it, that really was the last thing I expected. I spent the whole week in pitiful mourning; weeping for the thing as though I had buried rather than written it.

When I land on my ass in a big stinky pile of doom, it usually only takes me a minute to look up and find the Home Sweet Home sign I nailed there round about 1992. Doom is my natural habitat—all this dreadful suburban luxury and emotional comfort and financial well-offedness that surround me 15 years later is a temporary ruse, a tablecloth that will be yanked out from under the placesettings not by a skilled magician but by a dog who gets startled and makes a run for it with a corner of the linen caught in his teeth.

I have been presented with a fair number of Last Place certificates in my life—they are all from the children’s bowling league I was marched off to on Saturday mornings, and all have a picture of a ladder and the slogan Watch Us Climb Up Next Year going up the rungs on them. I think a lot of my life has been based on those certificates, that cheerful spin on bottoming out. Truth is, I don’t mind it here. There’s safety in doom, and a sense of perspective. Two weeks in, for example, I figured out that the work that remains on my novel is actually the fun part, the making beautiful now that the mundane and grueling storytelling part is so much more defined. I also figured out that the lump in the center of my thoughts a big glut of neglected poetry that needs badly to be let out. So this homey doom, it is not so bad. There's plenty to muck around with down here, and as ever, nowhere to go but up.

Failure of the Day: There and Back

We spent a good chunk of last week in Seattle. It was my first actual business trip: Big Software Co. sent me to an all-day copyediting workshop. Chris came up with me and when I wasn’t happily discussing the finer points of punctuating adverbial clauses, we visited our old neighborhood and saw friends and enjoyed the city. It was a really great trip. Chris took a lot of photos, but most of them are of the R2D2 mailboxes.





And then we came back. To San Jose. Which we really have made our peace with; it’s not a bad little city, it just needs a little love, as Linus says. But comparison does it no favors, and a two hour flight is nowhere near enough time to recalibrate my sufficiency meters. It was a difficult re-entry.

As a result, I spent much of this week looking at SF condo listings on Craigslist. And I couldn’t help it, I got sucked in. For a brief period, $550,000 actually started seeming like a reasonable price for 900 square feet, and I even convinced myself that we could swing it on our income. I was able to do that because I don’t know a single thing about mortgages or down payments or closing costs or homeowners insurance or property taxes or HOA dues or really, anything.

Suffice to say, after some fairly simple long division, it’s clear we’ll have to make due with the ridiculous level of luxury in our rented south bay townhouse. I don’t guess we’re going anywhere any time soon. It’s an interesting excursion, though, into that most grown-up of financial leaps. Like every thing else, I’m ten years late, but I’ve finally internalized the idea that it’s time to keep one eye on interest rates and housing stats and our down payment savings. For now, we’re content to just line our toes up against the edge of the ravine that must be spanned and wait a spell before we’re ready to cross it.

Failure of the Day: Putting Things in Cans

Thanks to Chris’s Great Big Brain, we spent the weekend in Monterey. Our hotel was swank—we could lie in bed and watch the ocean lap the shore, and so we did, we did. The Nature, she is nice, especially when confined to the other side of the glass. And especially especially when the hotel people bring bagels and hard-boiled eggs and tea right to your bed. Thanks big brain!

We went to the aquarium and saw the otters and the fish and a bunch of totally dud penguins that just stood there with their backs to us. I may have convinced two 8-year-old boys that one of the most spectacularly odd-looking fish, which was the approximate size and shape of a twin mattress, was actually made of paper-maché. I would have believed me at 8.

I also fully embraced the cliché, thanks to our friend Katrina who, the night before we left, read the first paragraph of Cannery Row into our answering machine. Being the Western canon imbecile that I am, I had no idea how good that first paragraph is. And how embarrassing, considering that it is everywhere in Monterey. That paragraph is inescapable—it is quoted on cocktail napkins and big street sign flags and on the sides of buildings, and yet I had, up till now, escaped it.

Chris brought along his copy for me to read in the hotel, and I’ll tell you what, it’s a damn sight better than The Raw Shark Texts, which is terrible but I was sticking with it because I thought it would be a good thematic match for the weekend. But then I went and got all literal, and why not? Really, why not?

Failure of the Day: No Damn Cat. No Damn Cradle.

In The World According to Garp, Garp says of his mother’s death, “I’ll be mourning her privately for the rest of my life. But right now I want to be surrounded by as many people as possible who miss her as much as I do.”
Me, too. Me, too.

*

LA Times
NY Times
AP
CNN
MetaFilter
SF Gate
Huffington Post
Google
Aint It Cool News
Salon

Failure of the Day: May’s Might

As though all that new music weren’t enough, this spring is also blooming with new books that are just quivering with promise.

The latest Sherman Alexie book, Flight, is a young adult novel that is, in part, an homage to Slaughterhouse 5, as if I needed more reasons to love Sherman Alexie. It’s terrifically moving and should be required reading for every 15-year-old boy in America, only it won’t be because Alexie for some reason chose to sprinkle the text liberally with fucks and motherfuckers, so it can’t be taught in schools. I get that that’s how the character would actually speak, but it's a terrible shame nevertheless, I think, that it is relegated to being the book your cool uncle gives you rather than something more readily available.

I didn’t keep up with Michael Chabon’s foray into genre fiction, so he hasn’t put out anything new for me since Summerland, which was good, but no Kavalier & Clay. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (out May 1) seems to be skating on the genre fiction/literature divide, but I’m willing to chance it.

And god bless America, shockingly soon after Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, which already was right on the heels of the wonderful Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami’s latest, After Dark, comes out May 8. So! Excited! Of the May releases, this is totally the one I’ll read first. No idea what it’s about, except that there will be a missing woman and probably, some sheep.

And finally, the new Don DeLillo novel, Falling Man, is due May 15. DeLillo intimidates me, big genius and all that, and I haven’t read his back catalogue except for White Noise and The Body Artist, both of which I liked very much and probably didn’t really understand. But it’s not like we have such a surplus of contemporary American literary genius that I can afford to ignore more than the ones I am already ignoring, to my great and lasting shame.

Failure of the Day: Art + Change = ??

YAY! Time for new music!

I am the latest of late birds on the Modest Mouse bandwagon, I realize. When Good News for People Who Like Bad News came out some years ago, I heard bits of it and hated it—it was too deliberate and angular and it just rubbed me all kinds of the wrong way. Which was weird, because everything about it, except how it actually sounded, seemed like it would be right up my alley. But then a few months ago something switched over in my head, and I thought: Modest Mouse! And I downloaded the songs and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t right up my alley. So deliberate! So angular! I loved it!

Their latest, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, is very, very good, even if it sounds quite a lot like the last two records they put out. I myself think growth can be overrated, especially when you are doing something that is already really interesting and cool and good.

The new Arcade Fire is a little bit tougher for me because it drifts into that Springsteenish sound and aesthetic that I find one-dimensional and dull. Other parts of it are rousing and lovely though. It’s hard to tell whether this is one of those times when a band changed in a way that I didn’t care for, or if they just made one brilliant record in the middle of an otherwise uninteresting career. I didn’t like their first EP, but Funeral is so good it makes my teeth hurt. Neon Bible is pretty good despite the over-earnest, gruff-voiced obviousness, but for a record that closes with a track called “My Body Is a Cage,” it seems to me that they had to work really hard to make me not swoon for it.

There is also the new Fountains of Wayne CD, Traffic and Weather, which we will pick up tomorrow. I think they are top-of-the-line pop songwriters despite what the meanest of the ugly kids from high school over at Pitchfork Media have to say about it. Plus, nothing is ever nearly as bad as they say it is.

I have just not been able to get into the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record Some Loud Thunder. I loved loved loved their debut, but the new record actually made me MAD. They added a layer of fuzz and distortion over the opening track that struck me as a giant “We’re Artists, so fuck you, listener” statement, and another track consists of the same three words repeated over and over again for what seemed like seven minutes. Even if some other tracks are good, I don’t really care.

Finally, in the course of composing this, I discovered that Nick Cave, who I have long since washed my hands of, grew a moustache and put out something that sounds interesting to me for the first time since Murder Ballads. Reviews of Grinderman describe punk dirges with fuzzy guitars and a song called “No Pussy Blues,” so I'm sticking a cautious toe back in those murky waters. Expectations aren’t high, exactly, but I’ll buy it, which is more than I can say for his last several.

Failure of the Day: Digestion, Money, Sociopath: Discuss

We saw Zodiac this weekend and enjoyed every minute of it. It occurs to me that watching a sociopath do some fine, fine work maybe should not be so much fun, but serial killers are the pet rocks of our generation: we love them so long as they entail no actual interaction other than passive appreciation. The movie is also a fantastic re-creation of my bay area childhood, omitting none of commercial jingles, old-timey vending machines, and sense of hovering doom that I recall so well.

When we got home, I read an interview with the Zodiac book author, and he said he still meets with the lead detective on the case all the time at the Copper Penny, a stunningly terrible diner in my old neighborhood. Chris used to badger me to go there—he likes Old Man bars and restaurants—but I ate there once, and seriously, life’s too short. But there’ll be no getting out of it now: The chance to see the world’s foremost authorities on the Zodiac reminiscing about old times over runny key lime pie is too tantalizing, for him or me.

We also did our taxes this weekend and discovered that we are a good bit stupider than we had ever even dreamed. I’m telling you, this whole “being an adult” thing is exhausting. Honestly, sometimes it is a full-time job just keeping my own digestive system on track and more or less reliable—and I am also supposed to somehow intuit that being married doesn’t entail having my deductions taken out at the Married level? And if the Married level of deduction always screws you over, why is that little box there on the W4, just begging you to check it?

So, we’ll pay. We have no property or children to deduct and an AGI at the 28% bracket—and we’re democrats. Which is not to say that Chris’s flash of brilliance that if we put money in our 401ks, it is like having it deducted except we still get to keep it will go unacted-upon. But my god, why doesn’t anyone just tell you these things? Does it have to be a secret? It’s almost as bad as how hard it is to figure out that fiber doesn’t work without proper hydration.

Failure of the Day: Asswipe, Texas

The stars at night might well be big and bright, but I wouldn’t know. Here in San Antonio, at night the sky is too full of screeching bats to see much of anything. Christ, everyplace other than what I’m used to is weird.

We’re here in glorious Someplace Or Other, Texas for a tradeshow that Chris is being forced to attend and that I was allowed to accompany him to. I’m telecommuting during the day and then spending the evenings trying to figure out when things are on TV in fucking Central Time. No big deal… it’s only the last episode ever of The O.C. tonight. GAH!

I tried some sightseeing last night and walked along a bit of the RiverWalk—it’s sort of a cross between the It’s a Small World ride and a really nice open sewer. They say there are bars and restaurants on the RiverWalk, but that could turn out to be one of those urban legends like the one about how birds don’t fly at night. On my way back I was swarmed by some kind of flying creatures that make a squawking sound. The bartender said they were birds but Chris says they had to have been bats.

My goals for this trip are to eat a lot of quesadillas and not see the Alamo. I am doing very well on both so far. My theory is that if I am to wander about Texas being as conspicuously Semitic as I am, I might as well bloat myself well into next week and mutter “Davy Crockett? FUCK Davy Crockett!” to all passersby.

Later tonight while Chris is enduring more salespeople telling him that the “secret” is to sell the thing for more than you bought it for, I will take a boat to San Antonio’s B-list mall and try to pass some time. Yes, we take boats to malls here. They call it the river taxi, which sounds more like a euphemism than a nickname, but I’m feeling bored and generous, so river taxi it is.

Wish me luck; we have 2 more days to go.

Failure of the Day: The Annual Running of the Millionaires

I love TV. People at work are always surprised by that because I am all literary and arty and junk, but I get all PoMo on their asses and tell them that a distinction between high culture and low culture is bullshit, man, and I’m not down with it. Really though, it’s that I like crap as much as I like art, and I like watching America’s Next Top Model as much as I like watching Sports Night. It’s not that I don’t know that one is objectively better, it’s that I don’t care.

Anyhoo, consuming the culture as I do, it strikes me that February as the month when we all pass the time by racing our rich people. We start the month with The Running of the Big Millionaires, and we end it with The Running of the Little Millionaires.

I like the Running of the Big Millionaires because watching enormous men hurl themselves with complete abandon at the earth and each other pleases me. And I have a taste for spectacle anyway—communal nonreligious events of a certain magnitude draw my attention and actually manage to hold it, even when I don’t give a shit about the event or the outcome. Plus I totally dominated my post-season fantasy league, which consisted of Chris and me. But still, I TOTALLY DOMINATED it.

The Running of the Little Millionaires is more entertaining to me because they all wear itty bitty outfits that really show off how little they are, and everyone is all excited about the outfits. And even though you can’t really shake the feeling that everyone has just vomited, the whole thing is still very shiny and diaphanous. Watching it reminds me of the old Haunted Mansion ride in Disneyland, when you go past the mirrors that show ghosts sitting right next to you. There’s not anything right next to you, but it really really looks like there is, and if you can see it, it has to be at least a little bit true. And I don’t care who wins these races either, but I’ll watch them run because it’s cold outside and February for christ sake, and what the hell else is there to do?

Failure of the Day: 107

In case you missed it a few entries back, “the year’s Monday” is how I think of January, and this January didn’t much disappoint. Work was stressful and demanding, I was consistently hungrier than I have been in the year since I changed my eating habits, which made me a little grumpy, and there was plenty of insomnia for good measure. The first 3 weeks of 2007 were no picnic.

The clouds parted on the 20th, though, the day after the first of what will be another long string of major and majorly expensive dental procedures. Apparently nitrous oxide is out of fashion among dentists, and in its stead they offer—they insist on really—valium. 10mg a half hour before the appointment, followed by a day and a half on vicodin. Now don’t get carried away; they gave me an Rx for 10 tablets of each in July and I’m not through them all yet, so I’m not exactly headed for Betty Ford, but that’s not to say that I don’t enjoy them mightily when my fucked up mouth requires that I take them.

And on the 20th, my fucked up mouth required that I take one just before going to see David Lynch read from his very pretty and terrifically trite book on, of all things, transcendental meditation at some random San Jose mall’s Barnes and Noble. DL didn’t have anything remotely interesting to say but it was nice watching him say it. He’s completely mild and yet the air of weirdness around him is almost visible. Maybe it was just that he is a chain smoker and those 45 smoke-free minutes in the store were clearly unpleasant for him. Chris got a book and I stood with him while he got it signed, and so spent an enjoyable five seconds doing a poor job of imagining the little white-haired man having sex with Isabella Rossellini.

And a mere five days later I was listening to a distressingly pink Martin Amis read to me without moving his lips even a millimeter. During the Q&A I asked him whether he writes his prose and his plot in separate passes, and he said he did, which pleased me, because I sort of do too. I also noted again that he is an optical illusion: he actually looks larger the farther away from him you are. He brushed past me once after a reading and I had no trouble seeing the bald spot on the top of his head, and I am 5’3”. Behind a podium though, he is at least 5’7”.

January’s about done now. During my last bout of insomnia I solved the final narrative problem of draft 3 of my novel and I’ll likely finish it this spring. How about that. We built a bridge to Tuesday.

Failure of the Day: Doompa De Do

I finished The Road on Monday morning, and the thing just absolutely disassembled me. The ending surprised me but it was not unwelcome, and the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated it. McCarthy is too good a writer to make the post-apocalypse into a contest of terribleness one-upsmanship. You got the pain you signed up for and no more, which to me felt like a gesture of respect toward the reader.

Still though, after finishing it, I was fucked-up the whole rest of the day. Chris, wiping my tears from his drenched collarbone, suggests that my next book be a romp. As it happens, my next book is a post-apocalyptic story set in a children’s hospital, but it’s from McSweeneys, so I don’t expect much beyond cleverness and good packaging.

My real treat though is that next week my beloved Martin Amis will read to me from his new book, finally out in the U.S., at what is as near as I can figure the only decent bookstore on the entire peninsula. Conveniently located one block from a Caltrain station, bless their hearts. Lucky Menlo Park, one of only five cities on MA’s wee book tour.

I liked House of Meetings just fine; for a book set in an Arctic Circle gulag it was surprisingly easy going, though that might be because I only read the sentences and not so much the story. Or it might be because the book is kind of not-so-good, at least according pretty much every single review. Whatever. Sentences = pretty!

I will be very fancy getting my U.K. first edition besignatured in my precious moment with the wee Orange, Cube-Headed One, but all I really want to know from him is whether he managed to finally quit smoking. My money’s on Yes—why else would a guy who writes the bitterest, most elegant and acidic prose in the world suddenly turn to describing a life of extreme deprivation and misery? When I quit, spending a few hundred pages in Stalin’s frozen pigpen might have seemed about right to me, too.

Failure of the Day: The Three Stigmata of Eldridge Plush

Just before new years, we made our trifecta of old stuff replacement.

Chris bought our former bed early in the 90s. It was a good bed but its time had come. I began doing research into the arcane world of mattresses and discovered that it is nothing less than a scam on par with scientology. Identical mattresses are sold under different names in different stores to make direct price comparison impossible. They tell you that firm mattresses are better for you and then charge you more for “pillow toppers” to make your firm mattress feel softer. They tell you that mattresses are “engineered” to work with box springs but can’t explain exactly how or what that means. It’s absurd.

We also wanted a headboard because they’re pretty (me) and they keep the wall from becoming discolored from the pillows (Chris). After earning my mattress studies degree, I concluded that our best bet was a platform bed because they cost less than a box spring but serve the same mattress support function and include the nice looking headboard and footboard.

The best advice I read online about mattress shopping was to ignore everything the salesperson tells you and buy the one in your price range that feels the best. We went to three stores, and true to mattress logic, the store with “Discounter” in the name was the most expensive—by a lot. In the end, the moment I lay down on the Simmons BeautyRest Eldridge Plush, I knew it was the mattress for me. A platform bed from Ikea completed the picture, and both were delivered last Saturday.

Chris assembled everything lickety split and by Saturday night we were tucked in and happy, which was lucky because I’d just begun reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and it truly is as grim and compelling as all the reviews say. The main characters spend every moment of the book being vividly uncomfortable and terrified and just shy of freezing to actual death, which I was and am only too pleased to respond to by scooting down deeper under the covers, surrounded on all sides by relentless softness and warmth and comfort. So that's my 2007 so far: the coziest post apocalypse ever!

Failure of the Day: Fnord

RAW RIP.

Failure of the Day: Eschatology Taxonomy

I've seen many many Web pages. This is the best one. Don't miss the comments, either, especially the one from Your Obedient Serpent.

See also this, and this. Via.

I celebrated the new year by buying a 2 person, 3-day disaster emergency survival kit. But there's already two of us so when the world ends don't come asking to borrow our solar flashlight radio or dust masks, 'cause we need them!

Failure of the Day: The Year’s Monday

Sorry… whose idea was it to begin this whole long ordeal we call “a new year” by drinking vodka tonic after vodka tonic* and wandering the streets of North Beach, and then waking up with Holiday Inn sheets plastered somehow to the roof of my mouth? Oh, right. Mine.

The Patton Oswalt/Dana Gould NYE midnight show did not disappoint.** Aside from his being one of the sharpest writers around, what I like best about Dana Gould is that he has followed a personal trajectory that I deeply relate to, going from seriously damaged emotional fuckwit to someone who has at last begun to get his psychological shit together. His closing bit about what would have happened if he had spent his life giving angry anonymous blowjobs just to spite a homophobic comment his father once made about his decision to move to San Francisco was both hilarious, and, I thought, very powerful.***

And then commenced all the aforementioned wandering, notable only for our complete failure to find a bar to go into—in North Beach, on New Years Eve—and for the fact that literally every person we passed on the sidewalk was stumbling drunk. Chris, who drank more than I’d ever seen him drink and yet appeared suspiciously sober, very sweetly announced each and every curb we approached. I told him that even in the worst of times, I never tripped over a curb—it was really the flat sidewalk that gave me the most trouble.****

We were tucked neatly in bed by 2, and other than a brief, unfortunate incident involving a motherfucking asshole cocksucker who pulled the fire alarm and the entire hotel being evacuated at 4am, it was a spectacular NYE.

*That’s no exaggeration: I had two entire cocktails on NYE, tying a personal best.
**Not counting the horrible host, who didn’t so much tell jokes as describe them, and the opening act, who more or less just reprised my old phone sex operator script, but without the friendliness.
***Have I even begun to do this bit justice? Not even close.
**** In the end, he declined to announce every square of sidewalk, but I believe he considered it.

Failure of the Day: It

Chris was a little slow to come to boil this year, but he’s rapidly bubbling now. We zip from place to place in our Vince Guaraldi-mobile and I’m 100% certain that he would be wearing one of those ties with blinking lights on it if he ever had occasion to wear a tie.

We went with his parents to see the Nutcracker earlier in the month, which I must have seen at some point before in my life, but I’ll be damned if I remembered even a single thing about it. I seriously did not even recall that it is a ballet… about a girl who gets a gift so dull that she immediately falls asleep and then is attacked by mice. Which seems like something I would have remembered, but who can say? I did enjoy that the lone adult male dancer in the company wore a pair of tights so utterly transparent that there could be no doubt that wasn’t Jewish. (Get it? A foreskin joke! God bless us, every one!) But I suppose that’s been my complaint about xmas all along... it’s so darn gentile!

There’s also been a parade of holiday events at work, which, while not quite parties, all included free food and booze, and I for the life of me can’t find anything to complain about there. In addition, at large companies, the holidays mean lots and lots of gift baskets from clients and partners and such, so I am up to my eyeballs in mini cheese wheels and a whole array of oddly flavored bread loaves.

And so, our shopping is done and our pressies are wrapped and our cards are mailed and our family-sized turkey is ordered—in 6 days we will turn our oven on for the first time since—no lie—last xmas. This weekend Chris will read me Holidays on Ice as per our tradition, and I will yet again try to explain the funny bits in The Hebrew Hammer and then we’ll cook and eat and roll around on the floor rubbing our bellies, and that will be that: 2006 in more or less a nutshell. Happy it.

Failure of the Day: Vacationlandia

The miracle of Las Vegas is that it very nearly pulls off the most sought after vacation of all—the vacation from yourself. It’s a sort of electricity hypnosis: Your senses are overwhelmed by the onslaught of the dazzle, and everything you see and feel and hear tells you that you are not in your usual matte world of responsibility. And all of a sudden, spending $50 for a giant cocktail exploding with plumes of dry ice smoke seems like a great idea. And the amazing thing is that it actually is a great idea.

Chris, god love him, loves him some pirates. We stayed at Treasure Island and our room overlooked their Buccaneer Bay pirate show (four times a night—5:30, 7, 8:30, and 10—ask me why I still know that by heart; go ahead, ask me), which had been tarted up considerably since we last visited, and it now includes a whole ship full of pole dancers. Thus, the Thanksgiving tone was set: it was one of those old-fashioned strippers and blowing shit up holidays.

Which is not to say there were no moments of pure loveliness; Chris and I renewed our wedding vows the day after Thanksgiving. Did I mention that the ceremony was on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise at the Star Trek Experience? It was. Are we the coolest people you know? We are.





When Lindsay asked the borg "Can I take your picture?" the borg replied, "That will depend on your abilities." Yes! The borg are grammar nazis!




James and Rachel wore Spock ears for our ceremony, Alex had "gentleman" races with Chris to see who could get to the doors first to open them for us, and Lindsay ran to the gift shop and bought me a pair of sequined gold slippers when my Bandolinos with the 4-inch heels ceased being any kind of good idea. I won $94.75 on a quarter machine that I was only sitting at because it was 7:05 and I was waiting for Chris, who was… well, see the second paragraph above and take a guess where Chris was.

Pirates, boobies, love, all the shrimp you can eat and all the borg you can flee... I'm not sure there's any more one can ask of a vacation.

Failure of the Day: Consumption

It’s been a very good year for books. New releases from Martin Amis, Haruki Murakami, and David Mitchell were the highlights, but I’ve only just dug into the next three of Canongate’s myth-retelling series, so it’s still a wide-open field.

Mitchell’s Black Swan Green was the book of the year for me. I also really enjoyed Amis’s House of Meetings (which won’t even be released in the U.S. until January; my subtle and nuanced hints to Chris—and product links to Amazon.UK—as my birthday approached were not in vain) although it made me realize that, to my surprise, I am not very good reader. You’d think I’d be a good reader, I do it for a living, but it turns out that I kind of suck at it.

My problem, and it is especially severe with Martin Amis, is that when the writing is that good on a sentence level, I simply stop paying attention to everything else about the book. Amis is my second-favorite novelist of all time, and I realized last month that I don’t know what most of his books are about. I read them, I enjoyed them, some of them I savored, but I don’t know—or at least I certainly didn’t retain any information about—what actually happens in them.

I have the same problem with Aaron Sorkin. I am given to understand that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is not a very good show—that’s what most everyone on Television Without Pity says, anyway. Yet every time I read a critique of the show I am just dumbstruck. What do they mean, a storyline was ridiculous or a plot hole was big enough to drive a truck through? Didn’t they hear the sentences? Didn’t they hear the economy of language, the precision and concision? Who the fuck cares about the story? Just shut up and listen to the people walk down hallways and talk!

The new Joanna Newsom CD came out this week to frankly the best reviews I’ve ever seen a record get, topping off quite a good music year as well. I’ve not yet picked it up because I’m a moron and I've only just now remembered that I can get it on iTunes and I don’t need to wait until the weekend trip to Streetlight.

The new Mountain Goats record still doesn’t quite pinch me in the spot, but it gets the Gold for Best Couplet:
And then I think I hear angels in my ears
Like marbles being thrown against a mirror
Which is even more remarkable when you hear it sung and realize that it’s a perfectly legitimate end-rhyme.

I have to give the Silver to the very good new Robyn Hitchcock CD, his best since Jewels for Sophia. Ole Tarantula features a psychedelic little number that includes the pair:
Fuck me, baby
I’m a trolleybus
Which tickles me for reasons I can’t quite enunciate.

Finally, this is also the very first year in which Chris and I will take two, count ’em, two! vacations. We’re off to Las Vegas with several friends for Thanksgiving and to cap off anniversary season. Wish us well, we'll be back just in time for my mood to sour at the prospect of a whole month of christmas music.

Failure of the Day: I am 40, Hear Me

Y'know, like, roar. or something.
















overall place: 222 out of 421
division place: 10 out of 29
gender place: 129 out of 271
guntime: 39:27

Failure of the Day: Conspiracy

I clicked on this story last week on whim, and the name of the guy it is about kind of jumped out at me. I did a little digging it turns out that he is the guy I used to date around 1990 (he was cuter then, and less dogmatic); in fact, one of the best poems I ever wrote is about him.

Apparently he’s a fairly well-known 9/11 conspiracy theorist these days, which I guess is not all that surprising—he’s the guy who introduced me to Philip K. Dick after all, and he was writing his thesis on the VALIS trilogy when I knew him. I also recall that he pursued me aggressively and was terrifically charming, but I was never all that into him, despite the breathlessness of my poem.

Back then I was seriously into conspiracy theory myself, but I’m not at all interested in it any more. I have no earthly idea if it was actually a missile that hit the pentagon or if the WTC was actually a controlled demolition. Maybe it was. But I don’t think the idea that the official story is mostly true is laughably naive, either. I don’t know, and I don’t know if it is possible to know. The only thing I do know is that I don’t ever want to believe something just because it makes me feel better than believing some other thing.

That’s pretty much the reason I could never be in any way religious, too. I think being devoutly and relentlessly and unforgivingly rational is about the only appropriate response to a culture that thinks Because I Said So constitutes incontrovertible proof. And even if that entails abandoning some of the theories that make me the happiest, I’ll do it. The world is slightly duller for it, but I choose a matte reality over a dazzling lie any day. I’ll say it: Maybe Metallica didn’t cause my remission. Maybe there wasn’t some terrible mix up and I am not really Mrs. Dr. Buckaroo Banzai.

Failure of the Day: End Times

And so I find myself in these, the last days of my 30s, not feeling particularly jarred by the specter of 40, but not entirely untouched by occasional visions of an alternate present, born of choices I might have made differently. At the very, very top of that list—no lie—is the ghost of how I might have looked if I had not self-medicated with a peanut M&Ms binge of staggering proportions during the first year of my illness. My body, recovered almost completely now from the years of paralysis, has never recovered from the year of candy.

I also have the odd vision of what might have happened had I not so badly botched that 1998 job interview with Launch.com—I might now have a career in writing marketing copy instead of editing it—but I’m not sure that would be any sort of step up. Overall, I am happy with my choices; there’s very little I’d revise. Really, it’s just the damn M&Ms.

This fall, no fewer than 3 of my co-workers have turned or will turn 40, and I’ve enjoyed seeing how each reacted to it. One woman began competing in triathlons. Another guy threw a massive party for himself complete with, no kidding, synchronized swimmers and baton twirlers. I’m not a big party thrower—even when I lived in the city my neighborhood was too geographically unappealing to attract many guests—but Chris got us tickets to see a band we like at the Warfield on Friday. And a couple of weeks after that, I’ll run the 5k portion of the Silicon Valley Marathon.

October is also the 10-year anniversary of my remission, which I suspect has more to do with how many miles I find myself running each week than my brave new decade. I find myself the proud owner of a truly great jogging bra and a pair of high-tech wonder shoes that look for all the world like puffy robot bumblebees, so now, with the four barriers to my running career, if not removed then at least strapped down and braced for impact, I run. I don’t exactly enjoy it, but I like it much more than I ever thought I would, and I love how much of a badass it makes me feel like.

As a compulsive autobiographer, it occurs to me that my 20s were spent surviving what was happening, and my 30s were spent coming to terms with what happened, so my 40s, I hope, will be spent getting on with it already. I’m getting up and going into work on my birthday, because I’m big on really obvious metaphors. I’m ready to go. I just wish someone would tell me what terrible thing is about to happen to my neck, because seriously, it’s freaking me out.

Failure of the Day: Effort

I've spent the last four years writing the first 30 years of my life as a story. Thanks to this tool, I just summed it up in three panels.

Failure of the Day: Big Ass TV

Our year of replacing 10-year-old stuff continues. Chris has been very patient; an eagle-eyed A/V club nerd, he’s been witnessing the slow decline of our TV for years. Me, I couldn’t tell you if it were black and white or color, but Chris, if one pixel dies, he knows about it and, oh yes, he mourns. It was getting to the point where we were having pixel funerals every week. And also? Those LCD flat screens? They’re really cool. (I have it on good authority that plasma screens are for suckers.) I thought it would be nice if this year for xmas, we just got ourselves a new TV instead of a million smaller things. A lovely idea if I do say so myself.

Chris, bless him, is all about doing the research. He spent weeks on the internet, looking at close-up photographs of the backs of TVs. It’s electronics porn, really—full gynecological detail of all those shiny ports and input jacks. Turns out the back of the TV is the business end; who knew? In our living room there’s not a single visible chord or wire—Chris is meticulous—but don’t be fooled. Between the speakers and subwoofer and receiver and DVD player and DVR/cable box and stereo connections, there’s about 75 miles of cleverly hidden wires. Oh, it’s all about the ports.

After he was all learned up on the current state of the TV art, we began our negotiations. In these, I am the bad guy. I am the Ruiner. I don’t want a 50-inch TV. I don’t even want a 42-inch TV. Our living room is not a vast expanse, and our couch is a little too close to the TV for a screen that large. We reached a compromise.

Now, Chris has many, many good qualities. In every important way, he is a prince among men, no lie. But he is not very good at waiting any period of time at all to get something that he wants really badly. And we are both just coming off of a few very busy and stressful work weeks (school just started at SJSU, and I worked two 11-hour days over Labor Day weekend in advance of the Big Event). We had made a few preliminary trips to various stores to compare prices and see how the things looked in person. A fat coupon from Circuit City landed miraculously, serendipitously in our mailbox a few days ago. We were in the mood to reward ourselves.

Let me be the first to say that ambilight is not as goofy as I thought it would be. Although it must be the worst imaginable idea if one is epileptic. It’s a quite an impressive machine, though, and at some point I might even find out what things other than Star Wars look like on it. Merry xmas to all, and to all a good night.

Failure of the Day: Poison

Remember Friday morning? Those were the days, eh? The whole weekend looming before you like an expanse of pure pleasure, the promise of sleeping in, of catching up on the DVR backlog, of eating solid food…

On the plus side, I’ve lost two and a half pounds since Friday morning. On the minus side, I can’t even think the word “chicken.”

There was what we call an all-day “marketing all-hands” meeting on Friday. It was probably very interesting and informative for people whose job it is to do things like “craft messaging” and “differentiate by pain points,” but since my job is about telling people that the first word in a sentence needs to capitalized, it was long, long day. Oh, but they gave us breakfast and lunch!

It was an innocent-enough looking chicken breast in ginger sauce over steamed rice. Inviting, even. But that little chicken was the devil. I’d never had food poisoning before, so all I can say is: I had no idea. I was terrifically ill all Friday night, still dehydrated and sore and exhausted on Saturday, and I didn’t eat a thing until late Saturday night when I braved a slice of bread. Today I’ve managed a cereal bar and a diet coke, and I’m optimistic about there being a sandwich in my not-too-distant future. But oh me, oh my, some weekend.

Failure of the Day: Señor las Cabras

Seeing a performer in person for the first time is really risky. When the first Harvey Danger record came out in ’98, I was in a full-blown swoon. And I still consider it to be one the finest records of the 90s, but when we went to see them play at Slim’s, they were beyond dreadful—they were insulting. They came across as smug and aloof and so utterly phoney that I was inexorably put off by them. Their next couple of records were OK, they were fine, but the passion I had initially felt for them was dead.

I was a little worried about seeing John Darnielle (aka The Mountain Goats) play live, because he looks just like someone—and maddeningly, I can’t recall exactly who—but he looks just like a person I used to know. The feeling is so strong it’s practically déjà vu. The person he reminds me of was someone who I tolerated to be courteous, but disrespected intensely. I might have actually hated him. And I still feel this way when I see his face, whoever's face it is I see when I look at John Darnielle. All of which is to say, I was worried that his face would ruin his songs. I am as shallow as a saucer.

In fact, seeing The Mountain Goats in person is like traveling to the molten core of just how much he Means It. You think you know how much he means it, listening to his records, but you don’t. You don’t have any idea how much. From my vantage point, I saw his face become deformed by passion. His mouth buckled violently to pass his songs through it. I needn’t have worried. His face is not his face when he sings. His face is the barrier through which the songs strain, and eventually, finally, break.

He didn’t do a single one of my favorite songs (The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton, Going to Georgia, or the sublime Orange Ball of Hate), and I felt overly employed and awkwardly carnivorous in the hipster crowd, but I didn’t care, didn’t care, didn’t care. It was awesome.

Failure of the Day: Mr. The Goats

We are dizzy with love! We cannot breathe! The Mountain Goats new CD, Get Lonely, will be released this Tuesday, 8/22. He/They are playing a free show that day at Amoeba, apparently as the inaugural session of YouTube’s “Sessions at Amoeba,” which I have never heard of but that sounds pretty cool.

The 6 PM show means that I will have to leave work by 4, take the train up to the city, take a bus across town, watch the show, take a bus back across town, and take a slooooooooooooooow train back home, getting in just after 10. That’s six hours of work for one hour of music. Why do it? Because I heard one song off the new record, and in it, he describes angels’ voices as sounding like marbles being thrown at a mirror. That’s why.

Failure of the Day: Power

Hey, you know what’s nice? Coming home from vacation and having electricity. At least that’s what I hear. I myself wouldn’t know.

Vacation was swell—although I was seasick for a good bit of it. I somehow managed to forget my one miserable night as a Sea Scout: After about three hours of my first boat trip (a godforsaken overnighter to boot), my body informed me in no uncertain terms that I was in no way seaworthy and there would be no cessation of the vomiting until my legs were back on dry land. Thus endeth my scouting career. Cruise ships are very big boats though, presumably ensuring a much smoother ride. Right? WRONG. Being the delicate orchid I am, I still had to gobble chewable Dramamine in shaky fistfuls.

Much of the trip is a blur of scorching heat and steaks with béarnaise sauce, with a generous sprinkling of slot machines, pedicures, and chocolate cake for good measure. Our night in LA was much the same: Canter’s Deli chopped liver never disappoints, and the Craigslister we met up with came through on the tickets to opening night of Clerks 2 with a Q&A with Kevin Smith afterward. All forms of transportation and connections—buses, trains, ships, taxis, and shuttles—were effortless and almost 100% on time.

And then we got home.

It was 106 in San Jose when we returned, so we cranked up the A/C as soon as we got in, late Saturday afternoon. It lasted for 15 minutes and then was gone, and it would not be fully restored until Tuesday night. We spent the next several days and nights as modern nomads, driving in an air-conditioned car to various restaurants, malls, movie theatres, and hotels—anyplace, really, where it was cool. It was an odd sort of limbo; we wanted only to be home but could barely stand to be there for the few minutes each day it took to throw out all our perishable (perished, really) food and pick up a new pair of underwear.

Whatever went wrong at PG&E also fried our air conditioning system, which had to be replaced completely on Tuesday, and oddly, our telephone/ answering machine thingie. The other two phones in the house still work fine; but the one in the bedroom is dead dead dead.

Have I mentioned that Tuesday was my beloved Chris’s one and only 40th birthday? T’was, and quite a doozy, eh? We made the best of it with a spectacular meal and a remote control Superman that, I'm told (quite frequently in fact), can "soar up to 300 feet."

My legs, for those wondering, are still smooth from the all-but-painless waxing a full 12 days ago. I will almost certainly begin waxing everything under the sun from now on, so pleased am I with Tiffany at La Dolce Vita Day Spa.

We're back home now and most of our junk works again. We bask in the normalcy. We relish the routine. How are we? Happy as motherfucking clams, you betcha.

Failure of the Day: Summer Literature Round-Up

In case anyone is interested, Jpod might be the worst novel ever written. Coupland has never been a great writer; he was mostly only cloyingly clever and had a finger/pulse thing going on a with a specific area of culture, but even that’s completed obliterated with this terrible book. He should have called it The Book of Failed Gambits. He should have called it Culture Has Passed Me By and I’m Pretending. He should have called it Look! Microserfs Again! Or Let’s All Stay in 1995!

Everyman was OK. Roth distilled himself nicely into a 6 ounce glass of everclear—too intense to actually drink, and so strong and flammable you can die from it in a myriad of ways. Not pleasant but gets the job done. Should have been called Death of a Penis.

Black Swan Green, to no one’s surprise, left me breathless and starry. Mitchell rockets up to number three on my all-time favorite authors list, behind only Vonnegut and Amis.

I never got more than a couple of pages into King Dork. I may try again—I read those couple pages at 3 AM in the midst of severe insomnia and had to switch to another book because it was annoying me.

On the other hand, I am very much looking forward to Winkie, which I just ordered and which should arrive in time for the vacation. If it’s half as good as its Publishers Weekly review, it’ll be the book of the summer.

Failure of the Day: High Summer

Ahh, that rarest of all things, the paid day off. I lounge. I recreate. I shop for things I need for the cruise.

Yes, the cruise. That other rarest of all things, the paid vacation. Employment is grand. We’re taking the week of the 17th off and going on a 4-night cruise to Mexico (although I doubt very seriously whether we will leave the boat even once) and then spending 21–22 in LA. So I am in a frenzy of preparation that began two weeks ago when I realized that neither of us owns so much as a single suitcase. Luckily, I found these on my very first “lime green luggage” google search.

Preparations continued with a marathon dental appointment on Friday (it sucked, but dude kicked down some nice pain meds), and this weekend, I colored my hair and bought a little black dress (don’t even think I spent that much—it was half-off at the AK outlet store) for the fancy night I’m told they always have on the floating geriatric boogaloo.

Most of what I have left to do is in the realm of, well, personal grooming. To put too fine a point on it, I have hair on my legs, and I want it to go away and stay away the whole time I am on vacation. That doesn't seem like so much to ask, does it? I began exploring my options, and I have to say I am not happy with any of them. After some research, here’s what I discovered:

shaving = time-consuming + frequent
waxing = time-consuming + expensive + painful
epilating = time-consuming + not effective + painful
electrolysis = time-consuming + expensive + painful + kind of freaky

So I am at a bit of an impasse. I had my eyebrows waxed once, during Girlification Weekend ’98, but otherwise, I’ve never waxed anything. The epilator gave me a rash. Electrolysis seemed like a good idea until I read a description of it, and then… nope. Not gonna happen. The math alone shows that shaving is the lesser of the evils, but I’m not sure a slick, wet bathtub is the best place to be playing with knives.

So I think waxing is emerging as the winner by merit of the fact that I’ve never tried it anywhere big before, and I don’t really know what I’m in for. If anyone out there has any waxing horror stories, please let me know by the 15th. I've made my decision based on not knowing better, so keep a kind thought for my legs.

Failure of the Day: Going Perm

I’ve kept mum about this until the paperwork was signed and delivered. What you’ve got here is one full-time permanent employee of Big Ass Software, Inc. That’s salary and benefits, baby. No more hourly wage, no more contracting. In corporate parlance, I’ve been “Converted to Employee”; saved, as it were, from the heathen freelance life.

I am feeling about what you’d expect—equal parts triumphant and suspicious. The news is so unabashedly, spectacularly, and exceptionlessly good that something equally horrific must be just on the horizon. I am fairly certain that I will suffer traumatic amputation at any moment now.

The weekend after I heard I had been approved for hire but before receiving and signing the offer letter, I had three dreams in a row that involved workplaces and celebrities. In the first dream, Henry Rollins and I were working the closing shift at BestBuy. In my waking life, I feel a huge desire to find Henry Rollins appealing, equaled only by how utterly repellant I actually find him. In my dream, I felt the exact same way.

In the second dream, I was working at a sandwich shop, I think a Quizno’s, that was located below a large glass balcony. Bill O’Reilly and his wife were standing on the balcony. He shouted his order down to me but had a great deal of trouble settling on the right bread/sauce combination. I was exceedingly polite and patient with him, and once he had made his decision and I set to work putting his sandwich together, he turned to his wife and said softly something like “This little girl thinks she can…” and I couldn’t hear the rest of it. I was furious with him and yelled up to the balcony how rude he was.

In the final dream, Chris and I were at a café where Peter Dinklage worked. I ordered tea and when he brought it to my table he pressed his hand on the top of my thigh, which frankly thrilled me—I totally crush on Peter Dinklage. Nothing else happened; it was just a quick, private moment. (Except now Chris wants to beat up Peter Dinklage.)

Such are the images that populate my professional subconscious. They seem largely positive to me, and in an odd way, realistic. I feel more myself at work these days than I ever have. Working life is a balance of what you will put up with and what kinds of satisfaction you require for putting up with it. The pleasures of one’s work are largely private and unsharable. And I think about celebrities a lot.

Failure of the Day: Looking ‘Till You Find It

Those of you who visit certain other blogs may have noticed the steady and steadily increasing drumbeat of Chris whipping himself into a full-blown frenzy, which somehow he will sustain for another full month, and that will increase until I am genuinely worried about his blood pressure. (I am familiar with this process; I remember the month before Episode I. And Episode II. And, you know, Episode III.)

So, I like Superman just fine, OK? Even the version drawn by that one guy who makes his head is just WAY to small for his massive body and it sort of looks like his neck is blowing a little bubble. (A bubble of pure goodness, though!) I found a toehold into him thanks to Michael Chabon, and I’ve been gripping like a champ ever since. But I’ll admit that the Big Blue Boy Scout is not so much a natural fit for me.

I am even less comfortable with Neil Gaimen, although I’ve never read anything he’s written—I base my discomfort purely on his fans, nearly all of whom badly need haircuts and new shoes, because dude? Uggs are for girls. And you should never, never tuck your jeans into them. Dear god, is this your first time out of the group home?

Anyhoo, so imagine my surprise when I found this article, with this choice graph:

"What’s important, though, is how Superman uses these powers. Compared to most A-list comic characters, he has almost no memorable villains. Think of Batman, locked in eternal combat with nocturnal freaks like the Joker—or Spider-Man, battling megalomaniacal weirdos like Dr. Octopus. For Superman, there’s pretty much only bitter, bald Lex Luthor, forever being reinvented by writers and artists in an effort to make him a worthy foe. Superman’s true enemies are disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, jet planes tumbling from the sky, enormous meteors that would crush cities. Superman stands between humanity and a capricious universe."

Ah, see now we’re talking. This is what I have always needed—A hero who fights nature. Fuck those morons with deathray guns and world domination plots; none of them have ever lost me a moment’s sleep. But stuff that just happens, acts of god, no-fault disasters, and c’mon now, disease? Fate, shitty luck, bad parents, lousy coordination? For this, I need a man in tights. Oh yeah. Tights. And preferably wrapped around Brandon Routh’s thighs, too.

For reals, though I’m on board. I wasn’t ever really resisting, but my last bit of “But I like books without pictures” snobbyness is smashed to smithereens. Nature is really big, and it can fuck you up; I know it as well as anyone. And I'll tell you what, I didn't do that great fighting it on my own, so I'll take all the help I can get. Superman, I'm yours.

Failure of the Day: Proximity to Exhausted Greatness

The cavalcade of south bay literary adventures continued this week when I found myself at a cocktail party with Gore Vidal on Wednesday night. Now, when I say “found myself at” you understand of course that I mean “went incredibly out of my way to go to the party where I knew Gore Vidal would be.”

SJSU sponsored an event with GV, and Chris’s store runs the literary concession at university literary events. Chris worked the event and I tagged along to see the lecture and then go to the reception. The evening was GV “in conversation” with a humanities prof, and I confess to being somewhat meh about the show. GV is witty and charming and encyclopedic and just what you expect, but the audience was just too easy and eager. Uproarious laughter at the slightest hint of cleverness, thunderous ovations for every obvious political critique—as though showing off their own cleverness by elaborately demonstrating their ability to appreciate him.

Afterward, he signed books at the table next to where we were selling them, so I had ample time to observe the man up close and at length. He’s moved beyond old and now completely embodies “elderly.” He is—or at least was for all of Wednesday night—confined to a wheelchair. He might have spoken five words during the hour he spent signing. He moved his pen so lightly across the book pages that I was surprised any ink got onto them at all—his hand was much surer with the tumbler of whiskey that never left his grip. I got a few books signed for the bookstore to sell; I met his eye and thanked him as sweetly as I could and then left him the hell alone.

At the author party, I was delighted by the petits fours and coconut shrimp. If there are ever fancy author receptions for me, though, instead of wine and cheese, I want miniature soft serve ice cream cones. GV endured a constant stream of admirers who literally knelt in front of him all night, but it was too late: the part of him that put on The Gore Vidal Show earlier in the evening had been turned off for the night. He weathered the fawning by looking alternately bored, aggravated, and actually asleep.

I can’t say I’m disappointed in the evening. I’ve never read any of his work so I really only know him from his pithy quips on Larry King. So there’s that. Oh, and also that I’m as shallow as an oil stain in a parking lot and wanted only to be able to say I’d been to a cocktail party with Gore Vidal. Which, by the way, I have been.

Failure of the Day: Glorp

At just about the last possible moment Sunday afternoon, I discovered that David Mitchell was going to be reading at the Book Shop Santa Cruz on Sunday evening. I’d missed his Cloud Atlas tour to my great dismay, so I was desperate to catch him this time around. We drove down there—a mere half hour away!—and had a nice dinner before strolling through their cool little downtown to the bookstore. Santa Cruz…who knew?

I’m only about 100 pages into Black Swan Green and it’s taken some getting used to. I’d even written the first half of a blog entry detailing my failure to be dazzled by it. (To be fair, I determined the failure to be mine and not his.) It’s much more traditional and straightforward than his first three books—it’s the story of a 13-year-old boy with a stammer. 1,001 Mortifications he called it, with his own stammer in ever so slight evidence. And then he proceeded to read sections from it that made me float away on an ocean of my own sighs. In fact I was struck so utterly dumb by it that I could not even manage to glorp my adoration onto him while he complimented my hair and drew lovely curlicues all over my title page.

Hot on the heels of my Mitchell swoon, I’ve been reading reviews of the new Philip Roth novel, due out early next month. I was initially nervous that Everyman might be a little too much of a medical biography; which is to say, a little too close for comfort (because really, the last thing I need at this point is arguably the greatest living American novelist stealing what little thunder I may have), but the more I read about it, the clearer it becomes that he focuses on the fatal types of anatomical adventures, rather than the merely serious and ugly-making types that seem to be my genre.

Nevertheless, I am pretty excited about a whole book full of his hospital descriptions and ruminations on the frailty of the flesh. Nothing says Hello Spring! to me like a long bitter treatise on the brutality of physical decrepitude and inevitable death. It occurs to me that under certain circumstances, I have just enough awfulness in me that I could BE Philip Roth if in addition to my body obsession I also had literary genius and a ruthless, insatiable cock. I count myself at least a little bit lucky that I have neither, I think. A good book season, anyway.

Failure of the Day: Off

I have to say, I’ve just about had it with people who kill themselves with my commute. This morning was number five for the year and it’s only April. Technically, I think only four of them were purposeful suicides…the one before last was just someone who had wandered into the path of an oncoming locomotive by virtue of apparently having no central nervous system whatsoever. I can’t comprehend the level of difficulty involved in being hit by a train by accident. They are deafeningly loud and so large that their approach shakes the ground hard enough to make rocks the size of my fists bounce like jumping beans.

I have no issue with folks who want to kill themselves—hey, knock yourselves out—but if you really need to throw yourself in front of a train, could you not do it at rush hour? There are trains at noon, too, you know, and they go just as fast between stops as the bullet does.

On the plus side, not being able to go into work today meant that our plan of finding a way to work from home occasionally would be put to its first test. So far, it’s working out nicely, although I would much rather have gone into the office today. Chris is in Reno at a conference until Saturday, and being cooped up alone all day was what drove me out of full-time telecommuting to begin with. Good thing I have dinner plans tonight or I’d be back to the full-scale psychosis that comes from a complete lack of human interaction.

In the meantime, tell your friends and neighbors: suicide between noon and 3 only, please. I'm sorry you hate your life, but ruining my commute won't solve anything.

Failure of the Day: HB 1215

Best thing I've heard in ages. Maybe ever.

Get out your checkbooks.

Failure of the Day: Former Life Tourism

I had my first experience with Kaiser today, and I have to say, I am well pleased. The facility is nice and the internist I chose was a real trooper. She managed to keep the smile on her face even as it began to dawn on her what she was in for with me. The look of wild panic that most doctors get in their eyes at around two-thirds of the way through taking my medical history was nicely disguised, and she helped me schedule all the other appointments I would need for my various annual checkups.

I was sadly unable to continue the tradition of only seeing doctors whose first name is James—Kaiser doesn’t have quite so large a list of practitioners as some of the other insurance companies I’ve had, and anyway, it was never that great an idea, especially vis-à-vis gynos. Instead I’m insisting that each doctor see me on a day that I specify, according to my convenience and per my schedule. I had three today and I’ll have four more on May 4. Oh yes, I line them up like Rockettes.

After the GP, I saw my new dentist, a nice enough guy who I chose because of all the choices offered by my dental plan, he had the nicest Web site. As with every other dentist I’ve ever had, he told me that my mouth is a black hole of death, and it’ll take $1,000 of work just to get it ready for the real work I need to have done. On the plus side, one can watch TV during one’s dental procedure at this place thanks to large monitors hovering over each chair. Oh well, as I always say: It’s the little things…especially when your mouth is full of blood.

Finally, I spent the remainder of my afternoon in the very pit of hell itself, the social security office. They insisted that I had some remaining business with them, and they’ve been pestering me about it for the last five years or so. I am happy to report that I finally was able to resolve it to our mutual satisfaction. Seeing as how even if the social security administration still exists in 25 years, I will certainly never retire, so I look forward to never having to deal with that loathsome, soul-annihilating place ever again.

Thus concluded my visit to the sights, sounds, and sensations of my life circa 1995. And not a moment too soon.

Failure of the Day: Me, Again

Where I went wrong, probably, was in trying to write a love poem about the trains. It’s clear from the winners that what they were really after was a love poem more or less near the trains.

And I don’t suppose it helped that my poem was pretty sexual in its about-a-train-ness. Or that I thought it would be fun to write the world’s only train sex poem that didn’t use any phallic imagery at all. No, I don’t guess any of those things helped.

Here’s my poem:

Waiting

It’s coming:
The press of air that raises my flesh,
That rushing throat,
The sound that swallows all sound.

It comes in the shudder that passes
From the wet ground to my ready
Skin, pressed hard against the pavement,
Strong enough to worry my balance

Big enough to fill its roiling path
With the culmination of its presence;
I am held in the mouth of that power
Hastening, trying to catch it.

I press the penny of my heart to the rail
And wait.

And OK, it’s bit stunted (there was a 100-word limit) and it slips into sentimentalism, to say nothing of a strange fastness/slowness thing at the end, but overall, it’s an OK poem I thought. But then again, I also thought there couldn’t possibly be more than a dozen entries—who reads the Caltrain Web site anyway?—and there were over 300, mostly, I understand, from schoolchildren. Which I don’t guess helped my poem seem any less like a sex-with-a-train poem. Oh well. No free dinner on a boat for us.

Anyway, the winners.

Failure of the Day: Time

I spend a lot of my workday rushing. I have things to do and places to be, and there is almost always a deadline. This is a fairly new phenomenon in my life; for most of the last 40 years, I’ve had more time than things to do, or at least that’s how it seemed. Now that I have a fancy job and commute, though, my Monday – Friday is more like everyone else’s, and I am actually quite happy about that. It turns out that I like being busy and productive. Who knew?

As a result of this realization, I am finding myself less and less interested in frittering away the weekends not doing anything. I still want some frittering of course, but I don’t want to fritter them away completely. It was with this in mind that I said to Chris on Sunday morning, “Do you know what we need?” He looked at me, petrified, and rightly so—who knows what kind of shit I’ll throw at him at any given moment?

We spend most weekends in bed until well after noon, and then we do a little shopping or go to a movie, and this is a perfectly lovely time. But sometimes, there aren’t any movies we want to see, and we’re in the south bay after all, so how much time can a person really spend in a mall watching people coo over gaspingly tacky moving-waterfall pictures? It seemed to me that we need a thing that we do on weekends besides those things, a standard fall-back activity. “We need a hobby,” I said.

I began pitching ideas. Do we ski? Do we square dance? Do we make pottery? Do we go to classic car shows? Do we make amateur porn? Do we travel from city to city solving crimes? What exactly do we do?

After some discussion we decided that seeing as how we have a brand new car and everything, what we do is explore. We drive to things we’ve heard about and we look at them. The Mystery Spot. The Charles Shultz Museum. The Jelly Belly factory. All are within a few hours of here and all are kind of interesting. Nothing too nature-y—I’m sure the ancient redwoods are awesome and everything, but standing in dirt and looking at trees is not really my kind of thing. But if you know of other kinds of interesting Bay Area things—roadside attractions, weird people building things in their yards, what have you—leave a comment or send me an e-mail. And I'll report back on our exploits at a later date.

Failure of the Day: My So-Called Silicon Valley

The first thing you notice is how suburban it is. Having grown up within 10 miles of just about any spot where one can now find a tech company’s corporate “campus,” I can say without hesitation that then, as now, the manicured lawns aren’t fooling anybody. No one here thinks they work in a pastoral paradise. Sprawl is sprawl, whether it’s an enormous parking lot or lump that someone unrolled some sod over.

Then there are the geese. You never really see it discussed anywhere, but there are geese everywhere. I first saw them when I worked in Redmond, and being so far north, the fact that they were Canada Geese made sense. (That they were not “Canadian” geese made less sense, but I’m willing to let that go.) There weren’t any in Seattle, though—only in Redmond. Now I’m in Redwood Shores, and again, Canada Geese sheet the sidewalks. There aren’t any in San Jose or San Francisco. They are huge brown birds, and I have it on good authority that they make an interesting noise when you hit them accidentally with a golf ball. However, I no longer believe they came from Canada. I now believe that geese are somehow a byproduct of the software industry. I think geese are the natural result of the love between socially stunted men and high-paying math jobs.

Fountains are very popular. On my shuttle route from Caltrain to my building, we make stops at Macromedia, Electronic Arts, and several other big firms. All the buildings have fountains and ponds in front of their main entrances. Most of the ponds are about 10 feet in diameter and have several 18-inch-tall bubbling fountains in the middle of them. They are all pretty, in that makes-you-have-to-pee kind of way. And then you curve around to the end of the street and see Lake Larry and it’s 20-foot geyser. I don’t know if it’s the same body of water where Shamu used to hurl himself at the pool’s surface and drench all the squealing, sticky children, but I get the very same sense of bigness from looking at it—a slightly frightened and hyper anticipation.

The San Mateo County airport is across the street from here. It’s a rinky-dink couple of landing strips and a sort of parking lot for airplanes that are slightly smaller than most of the neighborhood SUVs, but the approaches and the descents to it come to within about a foot and half of our roof. Which adds a fair bit of, y’know, spice to the day.

In a personal and specific way, I relate to Silicon Valley. Although I pass for reasonably responsible and together professional woman, very often, I’m actually a nutbag with barely the wherewithal to navigate the murky waters of my own emotional weather. But the point, as near as I can figure, of adulthood is to effectively hide your own fuckwittedness from the other grups as much and as well as possible. And it turns out that I am pretty damn good at it.

Likewise, the South Bay and Peninsula is an acne of bad restaurants, hidden poverty, and an almost pathological sense of entitlement lightly dusted by a sheen of money to be made and innovation. The suburban Bay Area is a pretty fucked up place, and I should know—I was born here. But I don’t hate it here anymore, which surprises no one more than me. And I think it’s because "Silicon Valley" is the show people put on here to hide their fuckwittedness. Like me, Silicon Valley passes for something much more together than it is.

Failure of the Day: Love’s Labors

The Überbowl is still several hours away, so of course I have no idea who will win. Most of the pundits say the Seahawks don’t have a chance, but they’ve been saying that for damn near every game in their 13 and 3 season. And still nobody thinks they have a chance. But as Mr. Lloyd Dobbler says: That’s the beginning of every great success story.

Let us now turn our attention to the web log of one randomly selected Seahawks fan, found here. Note the five long and detailed and meticulously linked entries. Those of you who use blogger know how long it takes to embed links, let alone links with additional text formatting. This plucky young fellow embedded about 100 of them. And I happen to know that he embedded them during the hours of 2 and 4 AM, and that he was drunk at the time. Yes. His face was very pink, he often chuckled secretly to himself, and he adorably stuck the wee tip of his tongue out when he concentrated particularly hard.

One can’t help but be impressed by this—one has tried, and found that one truly cannot help but. It is my belief that true love is not measured in passion alone, but also in enduring devotion. This hard-working and earnest fan, like the nervous fliers who believe that they will arrive safely only if they keep a clear picture of the airborne plane in their minds for the duration of the flight, as though holding it up by the power of their will alone, has certainly done his part.

Again; I don’t know if the beloved ’Hawks will win, but if they don’t, I do know that it won’t be for lack of will.

Failure of the Day: What’s Behind Door Number 3?

C’mon, everyone knows what’s behind door #3…it’s a new car!

I did not find the car buying experience to be as arduous as I’d heard it could be, and even Chris was pleasantly surprised. He spent most of the last week prepping me for The Hard Sell ("Oh I see you've got the moon roof...you'd be CRAZY not to get the bat guard, then!") But by and large, I think we did really well. It only took as long as it did because it turns out that they don’t let you lease a car if you’ve never purchased one before. Who knew? Two months of researching car leases and not one web site mentions that detail. So we spent the first hour setting up a lease and then had to change courses midstream and start the whole process over. And still, the whole deal was over in 3 hours.

So meet the 2006 4-door Honda Civic EX in Nighthawk Black Pearl. It does just about every fucking thing under the sun for you (Chris spent most of the day playing with the stereo—from the controls on the steering wheel). Yet it is still practical as the day is long: ultra low emissions, gas mileage that rivals a hybrid, and so many airbags you could practically use the thing as a floatation device. We are very happy with our car. Her name is Marguerite.

I myself am in about the state you’d imagine—alternately thrilled and convinced that I've brought doom onto us by brazenly assuming that things will be OK for long enough to pay the thing off. Of course, I’m still petrified to drive, but, as I shout gleefully at the TV whenever that commercial comes on that says” On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers”: I’m a passenger!

Failure of the Day: Head = Explode

Such a week I’ve had. On day 11 of my 12, count ‘em TWELVE working days in a row to get the documentation ready for a big “Larry event” at City Hall last week (yeah but no pressure or anything. If the richest guy in the world finds a typo I’m fired, but whatever), my department underwent some “restructuring” (Worst. Word. Ever.) and my position got somewhat altered. It’s looking like it will shake out to be a net plus for me, but for one 24-hour period, during which the definition of the new proofing department was somewhat nebulous, I had some of the...let’s call them “jitters.” Took Friday off though and am feeling much better now.
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I’ve always been a little insecure about my dreadful lack of knowledge (or, let’s face it, interest) in the classics of the Western canon. You would be appalled to know how many of those big towering literary figures I’ve never read. Hemmingway, Austen, Proust—not a word. Japanese fiction, sure, and contemporary authors of course, I’ve read a ton of those, but I’m not sure I’m ever going to fill that big ole hole in my literary knowledge. But then a lovely UK press called Canongate started putting out retellings of myths as novellas by contemporary writers. I’ve already read Weight, Jeanette Winterson’s version of the Atlas and Heracles story, and I’m working my way through The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood, told from the point of view of the 12 hanged maids. Both books are just incredible... beautifully written and completely fascinating. The publisher promises many more to come. A godsend for us literary types and our various blindspots...
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I’ve said it before, but I’m saying it again: Battlestar motherfucking Galactica, people. I’m torn here because I know some of you don’t have cable and are watching only after the DVDs come out and I don’t want to ruin how great this is with a spoiler, but hybrid cylon blood cures cancer. OK? Cylon motherfucking blood cures cancer. Can you beat that? You can’t. You can’t beat that. Ka-blooey goes my head.
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The Seahawks! The Uberbowl! No one who reads this blog cares (OK, one person does) but we former Seattleites are beside ourselves. It's easier to enjoy 700 miles away from the beered up lugheads smearing green facepaint onto the jackets of passersby, of course, but enjoy it we do! Man! That was some kinda weekend!

Failure of the Day: The Momentous Shopping

2006 is the year. February is the month. I am many, many years late and significantly behind the curve. I genuinely expected to reach 40 without ever having done this. I genuinely expected that I would never do this. (Oh for chrissake, not that.)

I’m buying a car. A new car, and my first ever. And I'm not even 39 and a half yet.

Chris’s beloved 11-year-old Jetta is just about ready to go to the farm and frolic with the other Jettas that can’t live with their families anymore. It served us well over the years; it never even held a grudge against him for making it wear that horrible Grateful Dead sticker on its back window, although it would have been well within its rights.

Having determined it was time for new car, I began the shopping. I’m good at shopping; it’s one of those suburban Jewish girl things that no amount of subcultural lifestyle ever really rids one of. Chris loathes the car shopping and buying process, experienced as he is in the terribleness of the salesmen and The Little Room. But he hates talking to strangers under the best of circumstances, let alone when it’s someone whom you are fairly certain is picking your pocket every time you turn your head.

I am convinced it can’t be That Bad. What I’ve seen of it so far, which is mostly playing with “add options and price your vehicle” functions on the various manufacturers’ web sites, has been pretty cool. I am disappointed, though, that one cannot shop for cars by color, because that really would save me a lot of time. I have learned that not very many cars come in green, and of the ones that do, none are emphatically green. I can’t imagine why that is.

I'm petrified to drive of course. We're getting an automatic transmission so I can drive it if need be—the manual transmission in the Jetta requires WAY more coordination than I can muster. But that’s the thing: it dawned on me this month that one of the reasons I’ve driven a car 3 times in the last 15 years (and 2 of those times were in an empty parking lot with Chris screaming CLUTCH! CLUTCH!) is that driving is something that one does with one’s arm and legs, and I don’t trust my arms and legs for shit.

When we finally pick the one we want, and go get it and take it home, I will almost certainly be beside myself with excitement and joy, as I am in general about the gobsmackingly surprising turn my life has taken over these last few months and years. But for everyone's sake, be very glad that I'm only in charge of the shopping and Chris does the driving.

Failure of the Day: At Last

For those of you aching to know just what Chris got me for xmas, ache no more:

The self portrait is one of an edition of 13 lithographs, signed by Mr. Vonnegut. This isn't the exact one I got--mine is on letterhead from a Cape Cod SAAB dealership that says at the top: Kurt Vonnegut, Manager. Turn to page 136 in A Man Without a Country to view the stationary.

Try to imagine the enormity of my pure elation and delight...go on, try. You'll be way, way off. It's much bigger than that.

Failure of the Day: Do It Now

For your end-of-year, tax-deductible consideration:

The Feminist Majority Foundation: Supporting the last remaining clinic in the entire state of Mississippi that provides abortion services. Totalitarian Christians are drowning the clinic in harassment regulations in an effort to ensure that if they can't yet make it illegal, they will make it physically impossible to exercise your right to disagree with their various theological opinions.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Yeah, like I really need to tell any of you about them. You like the funny books (or, you know, the ability to write whatever you want in those books we all keep churning out)? Fork over some cash.

Failure of the Day: Holiday Round-Up

No complaints this year. Chris and I cooked for his family on Sunday and everything went off without a hitch. The food was good, the company was pleasant, and everybody seemed to like their gifts…not least of which Chris, who really liked his Vader ’77 football jersey. I scored much bigger, and although it was delayed in the mail and hasn’t actually arrived yet (so I can’t say too much more lest the jinx reach its icy fingers into our mailbox), I’ve known what it was and that it was coming for awhile and have thoroughly enjoyed anticipating it. I’ll post more when it arrives.

At work I happily managed to navigate what for me were some fairly dicey holiday social situations. First was a holiday lunch with my boss and the proofing team, which ordinarily would have been no cause for alarm except they decided to go to a French restaurant. Being as difficult to feed as I am, that necessitated literally days of research, and thank god the place had its menu online because if they hadn’t I very well might have popped from sheer anxiety.

My first thought upon being told of where we would be going was, “Oh dear god, don’t let them serve effie legs.” I vividly imagined someone ordering that and me having to say, “Please. I beg you….as a personal favor to me…for the love of God, order something else!” And the plain fact of the matter is, I may well have had to do that if anyone at a table anywhere near me had ordered it. And having only worked there for six weeks and love love loving it, I’d just as soon put off letting them know what a complete social lunatic I am for as long as possible.

And that was just the above and beyond weirdness. There is also the fact that I don’t eat fruits or vegetables and am in addition as prosaic as the day is long about the small number of foods I will eat. I almost wept for joy when I saw that the lunch menu included “Hamburger Américain avec pommes frites.” Better still, I wasn’t the only one of the four us who went to a fancy French restaurant and ordered the cheeseburger, so I didn’t even feel like a totally uncultured idiot.

The next day there was a party for our building; an informal affair but it was catered and had live music. And although it was at 2 in the afternoon and it was fairly well understood that afterward we would all go back to work, the beer and wine flowed freely. (I’ve found there to be a surprising amount of accepted afternoon alcohol consumption at my office, but that’s a whole other story.) As most readers of this blog know, I am cold death on a stick at parties, being entirely incapable as I am at making smalltalk, but again being the new girl in full-blown Like ME! mode at work, I was determined to make an appearance and be demonstrably friendly and full of team spirit.

To my surprise I had a nice time and chatted comfortably with my co-workers. I was feeling downright adroit. I hadn’t fallen down or spilled anything on myself or anyone else, and no one noticed that I stepped on a cherry tomato and ground it into the carpet. And then in the middle of one conversation, a co-workers with whom I have a moderate amount of interaction, said to me, apropos of nothing at all, “So what’s with the hair?”

I get a fair number of comments about my hair on a given day, but I don’t know if I’ve had someone not understand it before, and then blurt out a question in what I think is fair to describe as a pretty rude verbal construction. The guy is Mission hipster-type and a poet to boot, so it’s not like I can blame it on some sort of cultural or generational disconnect. I blinked at him and said, “It’s…curly?” in the hopes that might clear some things up for him.

I thought about it a bit on the way home that night, and at first I thought he was just being snarky, or maybe he’s just an outright dick. But then it occurred to me…maybe he’s actually more socially awkward than me. Maybe stupid shit comes out of his mouth at inopportune times, too. I don’t know what the reason might be. What I do know is that I’m not the one who said something stupid to a co-worker this year, and that’s about as close to an xmas miracle as I’ve ever experienced.

Failure of the Day: Sickday!

I can’t remember the last time I had a cold. That might be only real perk of telecommuting for me—complete lack of human interaction keeps a person pretty well germ free. Only a month into the office Petri dish and I caught a doozy. I milked it to the best of my—let’s face it—ample ability, coughing and sneezing and whimpering ever so softly, looking up at Chris through runny eyes and saying “Doesn’t seeing me like this just break your heart?” until he brought me some soup and Reese’s peanut butter trees.

So today I’m home, swaddled in my fuzzy green bathrobe and leaving a trail of balled up Kleenexes in my wake. Bored, slightly sleepy, a bit grumpy and smelly. Nothing better to do than write a blog.

Lately, I’ve been listening to all the music on my iPod in alphabetical order by song title. I tell you, it’s the best mix tape I’ve ever heard. The letter I is a particular favorite; not so surprising, I guess. You may notice that the playlist is a little Mountain Goats–heavy. That’s because I now have a full seven albums of theirs loaded on there. I think every letter begins and ends with a Mountain Goats song. You should be so lucky.

I Corinthians 13: 8-10—Mountain Goats
I Don’t Know—The Replacements
I Don’t See You—Camper Van Beethoven
I Feel Beautiful—Robyn Hitchcock
I Wanna Be Loved—Elvis Costello
I Want to Vanish—Elvis Costello
I Want You—Elvis Costello
I Will Dare—The Replacements
I Will Follow You into the Dark—Death Cab for Cutie
I Will Grab You by the Ears—Mountain Goats
I.O.U.—The Replacements
Idylls of the King—Mountain Goats
If You Were a Priest—Robyn Hitchcock
In Bloom—Nirvana
In the Backseat—Arcade Fire
In the Garage—Weezer
Inflammatory Writ—Joanna Newsom
Insurance Fraud #2—Mountain Goats
Interlude—Muse
International Small Arms Traffic Blues—Mountain Goats
Intro—Muse
Invisible Kid—Metallica
Is This It?—The Strokes
Island Garden Song—Mountain Goats
It Froze Me—Mountain Goats

Failure of the Day: Words

Yeah, so it turns out it’s hard to find time to write with the whole commute to work in another town thing. Time management lessons in progress; bear with me.

As I’ve said before, I like talking about comic books, but I don’t much like reading them. I find it irritating to have to stop looking at those endlessly fascinating and beloved things, words, to look at a drawing of something.

I am nevertheless thoroughly enjoying Black Hole. It would be hard to imagine a story more suited to my particular perversions. Still though, the drawings…I find myself longing for the novel version of the story, something in which the guy didn’t rely on a drawing of a character’s reaction and had to actually describe it. And let’s face it OK? I am almost certainly going to find myself divorced and friendless for this, but it’s not like they’re even very good drawings. I mean, the drawings are interesting and fine for what they are, but c’mon. A drawing in a comic of a face showing an emotion just doesn’t compare to the paragraph that, say, Sherman Alexie could write about that emotion. Or am I just completely lost to verbal chauvinism?

During my train rides though, because I don’t feel like toting around a thick hardback, I’m reading The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. I’ve been interested in him for a while; he comes up often enough on ALDaily—he really gets those humanities profs in a tizzy. I was a little intimidated at first; I expected it to be tougher going than it is. But the translation is surprisingly readable, and when all is said in done, it’s just garden variety misanthropy and nihilism. It's pretty easy to make the profs all frothy, it turns out.

Lord knows, I love me some misanthropy and nihilism, but this isn’t the fun Martin Amis kind, with show-offy linguistic pyrotechnics and some genuine if fleeting sweetness. It’s the grueling, relentless, depressing kind in which a small burst of contempt serves as a page’s only bright spot.

You'd think after finishing the graphic novel about teenagers becoming disfigured from a hideous plague and the literary novel about how life is an endless succession of humiliation and disappointment, I'd want to read something cheerful. Last time I tried that though, it didn’t work out so well…I read the title story in Me Talk Pretty One Day on a bus coming home from work in Seattle, got into a laughing fit, and made a complete spectacle of myself. So I’m sticking with the depressing books—at least they don’t make me look like a lunatic in public.

Failure of the Day: The Sights

And so it begins. Chris is upstairs watching Miracle on 34th Street, putting up our fiber optic tree, and decorating the living room. I can’t really hate xmas anymore…I mean, I can, but I’m trying not to. It just makes him so dang happy, it’s hard to completely…Ok, maybe it’s still too soon for any declarations of xmas tolerance from me just yet. Since Thanksgiving now exists solely to get people in the mood for xmas, I’m getting there though.

It was a lovely Thanksgiving; Marcel came down from Seattle and we dazzled him with everything San Jose has to offer. Which is to say, we took him to the Winchester Mystery House. Turns out it is just a fine example of what happens when faith and money trump knowledge and know how. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything for anyone here, but it’s just a house built by a looney lady with 20 million and no one to tell her that it’s a pretty bad idea to pretend to be an architect.

I suppose it is a triumph of marketing. Although the séance room and her fetish for the number 13 don’t do much to dissuade the gullible, there really couldn’t be less mystery about that rickety old house. If I had unlimited resources and a headful of superstitious gobbledygook, the house I would design by sketching blueprints as they occurred to me on cocktail napkins would probably come out about the same.

We saw the Johnny Cash movie, and it was good; Joaquin Phoenix did a fine job, but I missed Johnny voice. I finished The Year of Magical Thinking, and I found it over-thought, under-wrought, and entirely dull. We saw the Sandow Birk Divine Comedy exhibit at the SJ Art Museum—the images were great and really frightening, but his “contemporary re-translation” is pretty weird. I’m not sure anybody should be “checking out” the sights of Hell.

Nice holiday.

Failure of the Day: Free Soda and Tampons

After five days and no fewer than ten meetings, I have to say, my new job is going pretty well, I think. I haven’t yet tripped and fallen down in front of anybody, and I haven’t yet blurted out anything inordinately stupid, and that’s pretty much the best I could have dared hope for. It’s only a matter of time before I do both of those things, but for the time being, I’m enjoying all this assumed dignity.

The commute is pleasant enough on the train, although the evening connection from the shuttle to the train is maddening. The shuttle arrives 5:21 but the train leaves at 5:18. Two of the five days this week, though, the train was late, so I caught it, but not without some ungainly running on my part. Apologies to all witnesses of that unfortunate spectacle. It couldn’t be helped; the next train isn’t until 5:52. I suppose it won’t matter once I get my laptop—I can write for that extra half hour on a sticky bench in San Carlos as easily as I can in my lovely green office at home.

The company is excellent on first blush—I enjoy Diet Dr. Pepper, and if you think I am above hoarding tampons, you are sadly, sorely mistaken. My co-workers are all quite nice if a bit ahem snoopy (so hey, y’all, belated welcome to my blog). I am likewise delighted with my first cubicle—I have a window!—and say what you will about Cubeland, it beats the crap out of “open” office spaces.

Today we went to the Great Mall in search of lime green post it notes and returned instead with a lime green bathrobe. Some might call this a mistake. The robe though is obscenely soft, and despite the 70 degree Thanksgiving we’re about to have, it’s bound to get cold eventually. What I mean to say is: Thanks to everyone who sent congratulations and defended my initiative, but I still doubt the causal universe.

Failure of the Day: Human to Human Communications Engineer

I love my work. It’s engaging and satisfying and rewarding. I look forward to continuing to work as an editor/proofreader for the rest of my life.

There’s just one thing: the authors. Oh, dear god, the puffed up, self-important, rude, and almost without exception, vastly unskilled authors. I don’t mean to suggest that these are ignorant men (and let’s face it, except for Tarin, they pretty much are all men). No, they are clearly the go-to guys when you need to learn the various things one can do in Visual Basic or upgrade the operation systems of 1000 computers simultaneously. What they are not good at though, is explaining how to perform those tasks in anything like standard English.

I understand that developers like to read books written by other developers who have all that much-touted “real-world” experience (although I’ve yet to meet anyone with fake-world experience, but again, I nit-pick). I further understand that developers have to focus on learning the machine’s language instead of their human language. What I don’t understand is how or why those guys think that not only is it perfectly acceptable to write books without bothering to so much as brush up on grammar and punctuation, it is perfectly acceptable to turn in manuscripts without even running spell check.

I was recently chastised for “over editing” a ms; I was editing out the author voice, he said. This from a guy who places a semicolon after almost every clause. He includes only random other punctuation marks…a comma here, every once in a great while a period, but colons and semicolons everywhere. I have to do a separate pass on his documents just to make sure I’ve deleted them all. One of the chapters in this book was so poorly written that it had had to be returned to the dev editor for a complete re-write—and that never happens. And he’s worried about author voice?

(Hey buddy? If it weren’t for the editors that you rage at in rude and condescending comments, your book would be published sounding like it was written by a learning-disabled 13 year old. That’s your author voice.)

Recently, a different author wanted to speak with me on the phone to explain how he wanted a set of documents edited. I asked him to just send the stylesheet and any other guidelines to me in an email, which is the standard way of doing business. He told me he’d prefer to do it on the phone because he wasn’t sure he could explain it in an email. Now, maybe it’s just me, but one wonders how a guy who feels himself incapable of clearly expressing himself in writing was contracted and agreed to, y’know…write a book.

Like I say, I love my work. I might just love other people’s work a little less.

Failure of the Day: Me + Other People

A busier than usual weekend. We seem to have had a party on Friday, which is not something we really do (we mostly default to misanthropy), but it turns out that Chris’s co-workers are both fun and not prone to spilling things, and we find those to be very pleasing traits, so we took the opportunity to tweak Chris’s fear of carpet stains and not having enough potato chips.

I was in the mood to celebrate my newly acquired taste for vodka tonics, the richly deserved plate of steaming shit on which the powers that be had just begun chowing down, and oh that’s right, my kick ass new job. It was a swell party, although I’m still not particularly at ease with the whole “The Boss’s Wife” thing. Of course as usual, it’s the phrase and not the reality that is troublesome; I just picture someone in a pearl choker with a tray of hors d'oeuvres talking to…I don’t know, Larry Tate or something. In fact, the role entailed little more than parking myself by the M&Ms and arguing that moral hesitance or not, Superman would kick Batman’s ass.

On Saturday we had dinner with Jeff and Edi, in town for Jeff’s birthday weekend. A completely wonderful evening there too, except we stymied our plan of ensuring more visits by addicting them to gourmet marshmallows. We dawdled too long over the dinner table and the cute-as-a-button organic local market was closed by the time we dragged them there. You know, best laid plains and all.

Apropos of nothing except, I guess, Halloween: My favorite is One Death, Two Death, Red Death, Blue Death.

Failure of the Day: Lucky

Well, here’s a turn of events. Last week I was looking through the job postings on Craigslist just because I like to keep an eye on the market for my skill set, as they say, and I saw a cool ad that had cleverly hidden a couple dozen nitpicky proofreading and copyediting errors in it. It looked like fun to fix the errors in the ad (Wooo! So don’t ever let it be said that I don’t know how to have a good time!), and so I replied with a resume and a corrected version of their ad.

Long story short, I’m the new Lead Proofreader here. At more than (*cough*) double my current pay. Holy shit. Just…holy shit.

It’s still a contractor position, but it’s full-time, long-term, and on-site at the Redwood Shores HQ, although not in the cool Emerald City buildings…they only let engineers in there, I think.

In the 8th grade, I went on a Junior High graduation field trip to Marine World. In the last 5 minutes of our day there, with my last two quarters burning a hole in my pocket, I spent 50 cents on a single softball that I threw effortlessly into a milk jug and won an enormous stuffed dolphin that I creatively named Lucky.

I don’t know if I believe in luck. I’m on the fence about it; Penn Jillette makes an awfully good case against it. I know I’m very, very good at finding parallels between seemingly unrelated events, though.

Failure of the Day: Happy Birthday to

Me.

Failure of the Day: 13 x 3

It’s my birthday on Tuesday. The Discovery Health Network celebrated this weekend by debuting the excellent documentary “Born with Two Heads.” They sure know the way to my heart...and they show it through the laparoscope! Thank you! I’ll be here all week!

I’m anticipating a low-key birthday; 39 seems like little more than the year before 40 and not much to get excited about. Next year is the to-do; this year I’m content just to go out for a nice dinner. Which is not to say there is no celebrating—we went to a pirate-themed party this weekend for someone else’s birthday. (I am not much of a costume person so I just wore all green and told everyone I was a parrot. “Dude, it’s the funniest thing but I really really want a cracker…”)

Also this weekend, Chris’s and my fantasy football teams battled each other to the sorry end. My team (the San Jose Synecdoche; I had to retire the San Francisco Snatch) has been doing very well so far this year knock wood. I’m either in first or second place overall in the league, depending on how you read the stats. As of right now, in our match-up Chris leads 91/77, but 91 is his final score and I've still got a player left in Monday night's game. Try to imagine the position that puts him in on the night before my birthday. Hello Rock? Meet the Hard Place...

All in all though, I expect that being 39 will consist largely of sleepiness interrupted by brief periods of crabbiness and cravings for the gourmet marshmallows I've recently discovered. Which will make it largely indistinguishable from being 38. And happy 2 year non-smoking anniversary to one and all.

Failure of the Day: Where’s the Camp? Where’s the Bell?

We are continuing to explore this strange and sprawling hill-less valley one wee town at a time. This weekend’s adventure: Campbell!

For some reason, both of the area’s two “independent” record stores (Rasputin and Streetlight) are located in Campbell, some nine blocks apart on the same street. Neither had the new Harvey Danger CD (I only just this moment learned that the only record store in northern California carrying it is in Cotati, for reasons that I cannot begin to comprehend) and yes, we know we can download it for free. But being as firmly entrenched in the middle class as we find ourselves these days I think entails a certain type of retail responsibility. Plus there’s more stuff on the version they released in the stores.

Harvey Danger’s first album was a big deal to me, but I was sorely, sorely disappointed with their live show, and their second album was mediocre at best, but it’s been 5 years and they DO write quite a lot about curly haired girls so OK, I gave them another shot. Or I will, if the damn thing is ever for sale within 50 miles of me.

I did get a couple more CDs from the Mountain Goats. I have no idea how many CDs there actually are—Mr. The Goats seems to have recorded and released every song he ever whistled in the shower, and I haven’t found a stinky one yet, the fucker.

Campbell was OK. Nicer than the edge of San Jose it rubs up against and anyplace with a Target is a friend to me, but strange. We had been warned that the record store clerks were snooty and there was plenty of inexplicable attitude being hurled—dude, you work in a chain store in the suburbs; seriously, how hardcore could you be?—but the waitresses in the place where we had dinner were straight out of 1965 Central Casting: enormous bouffant hair, glittering eye shadow globs and all. And there are no prunes in the Pruneyard either, but I knew that already because what am I, stupid?

Failure of the Day: Media Consumption Update

I seem to be getting worse and worse at updating here. I've finally begun having normal workdays again and can walk away from my computer after 8 hours or so, and after the last month, there’s very little I want to do more than walk away from my computer. But that tends to put the kibosh on things like blogging, novelling, and emailing, all of which I have been neglecting because my wrists are all like…wow. Ouch. So instead of creating, I consume.

TV: There’s a terrifying backlog on the DVR right now. NUMB3RS, Invasion, the mermaid baby documentary on Discovery Health…we just haven’t had time for any of them yet. But you better believe we made time for the season finale of Battlestar Galactica. The second season lost not a single molecule off its edge from the first season, and the finale was harrowing. There’s not much else on TV that gets all up in your face about things like the definition of humanity and whether all creatures—human or not, your potential murderer or not—are entitled to certain standards of decency. Battlestar Galactica kicked my ass this season because while I am no stranger to philosophical musings, it’s one thing to think about those things and quite another to have to look at it. FYI: season 1 just came out on DVD. We got ours; go get yours.

Movies: We’ve seen only one movie since coming down south, and that was The Constant Gardener. I liked it—it’s hard to displease me when the villain is the pharmaceutical industry—and between that and Ralph Fiennes remarkable bone structure, I was quite rapt.

Music: Sorry, it’s still only the Mountain Goats that are doing it for me. I lost my entire Itunes folder in the move and had to re-buy all the music that I didn’t have on disk, but I couldn’t do it until after the aforementioned Net+30 period, and that meant no Mountain Goats for weeks and weeks. When I finally re-bought the CDs and put them on in the car on the way home from Tower, I burst into tears at the first note. That’s how much.

Books: The Cripple and His Talismans is a nancyland dream come true. Deeply lyrical, relentlessly beautiful, and about a man who loses his arm and goes looking for it. I’m siphoning off almost every other sentence and infusing it directly into my own anemic prose.

Performance: The Haunting of Winchester was, uh, lets just say it failed to overcome the limitations of the form. It was bad. It might have been less bad if it weren’t required to sacrifice dialogue for hackneyed end rhymes set to the same music I hear in every other musical (and I mean the very same; Chris, whose ear for these things is impeccable, pointed put that two of the songs were so noticeably similar to numbers from South Pacific and West Side Story that they are in danger of a copyright lawsuit). But even if they hadn’t sang everything, the love story between Sarah Winchester and one of the ghosts would still have been very, very ill-advised. The oxygen-tank crowd loved it; we ran for the exits and expressed our opinion appropriately enough in song...from the John Merrick musical Elephant!: "Somewhere/ Up in Heaven/ There's an Angel/ With Big/ Eaaaaars!"

Failure of the Day: The Good, the Bad, the More or Less Recent

Ho-lee Majoley, what a nutty couple of weeks. You know, when I signed two freelancing contracts, I knew that the possibility existed that there would be times when both clients needed 40 hours of work done in a given week. Being a fundamentally lazy person by nature, though, I don’t think I really…conceptualized what an 80 hour work week was like.

It sucks.

It sucks more because due to that godforsaken convention of Net+ 30, I didn’t get a single paycheck during the whole month of August. We knew it would be like that and had prepared for it, and we made it through quite comfortably, but nothing feels quite as crappy as working like a motherfucker and then turning blue waiting for the check to come.

Now, the 30 days are finally up and I’m actually getting paid on a regular basis, but boy, am I pooped. I was almost too tired to buy a beeeeee-autiful new frock for Jeff and Edi's wedding...almost. But then, you know, not. Still, though Chris, who works harder than me and for longer hours, looked upon me piteously and surprised me with a copy of the new Vonnegut—I didn’t even know there was one coming out, so the halls are still echoing with my squeal.

And listen to me: Turn off the computer and go but this book right now. It has what you need. It's just great. I’ve not been overwhelmed with the last couple KV offerings—juvenilia and quirky essays, meh—but this is a whole other thing. This is a beautiful collection that smoothes over you like cream, solves nothing, and still manages to make you feel all better. Trust me. You want it.

Failure of the Day: Sad Story, in Hyperlinks

Not that I’m biased or anything, but Chris has the best blog on the Internet. He’s a blog savant. If you aren’t reading his daily updates, your life is empty and I pity you.

Monday's entry is a semi-linear semi-narrative; a story you have to piece together through a series of links. You can figure out the subject of the story only if you recognize the reference in first picture’s caption.

Now, you don’t have to recognize the caption and realize who the story is about—you can just assume it’s about someone. (Are you getting the idea about how fascinating and strange his fiction is? You might figure out who the main character is, or you might not. He doesn’t care, and it doesn’t really matter.) The story works either way.

There are four important elements in the story, outlined in the four links:
1. Car races in Sonoma
2. Golf Cart
3. Broken Leg
4. Crutches

The story goes like this: Someone goes to the races, gets hit by a golf cart, falls down and breaks their leg, and will be spending the next several months on crutches. Which is almost a funny story, but it’s not—because the caption under the first picture is a lyric from the song Tie Your Mother Down from the Queen album A Day at The Races. So my fellow writers, I dare you: you try to write someting where the emotional content is hidden in a song title that is never even mentioned.

Chris’s mom is OK, thankfully—she’s a trooper and one tough cookie. She was up and around on a walker fewer than 12 hours after the surgery to put the pins in to hold the bones in place of what all the x-ray techs agree is a very impressive tib-fib break. And she was pleased as all getout to tell me about her first ever ride in an ambulance. It’s Chris who puts on the brave face: his hypertrophied sense of personal responsibility the real casualty…he’s the one who gave his folks the tickets to the race.

Failure of the Day: Misc., Recent and Local

• We had our first moderately expensive dinner in SJ last Thursday, courtesy of an extremely friendly book distributor in town to help out with Chris’s store during the first week of school. The guy took six of us out to Original Joe’s, an old timey, waiters-in-tuxedos Italian restaurant down the street from our apartment. The food was terrific, but seriously, it’s a mafia hangout right? Does anybody know? It just has to be. Those people couldn’t look like that by accident, could they?



• Before my workload went batshit insane recently, I took an afternoon off and checked out the (always free, thank you very much) San Jose Museum of Art, also right down the street from our apartment. The museum could have been bigger I thought, but it was showing three of the Nancyest exhibits in the history of art. The first was called Brides of Frankenstein, and it featured representations of body parts by female artists. That some of the body parts were robotic was but one of the pleasures. The second exhibit was beautiful photographs of people in terrifying-looking hospital rooms. And the third was a 7 foot by 20 foot light wall of enormous MRI films…of pomegranates. I actually moaned with pleasure when I saw it.



• One of the treats in our welcome gift basket here was a certificate for 2 free tickets to the San Jose Repertory Theater, which like everything else, is, I swear, right down the street. It really is; we can see it from our dining room window. I am not a huge fan of live theater but free is free, so I started looking into their lineup for this season. First up: a musical about the Winchester Mystery House. No kidding. I can’t tell if that is genius or hilarious in a Waiting for Guffman kind of way, but I’m pretty sure we’re going to see it. God help me.
  

Failure of the Day: You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With

After over 7 years of coupledom and almost 4 years of marriage, Chris and I did something for the first time this weekend—we opened a joint checking account.

Up until now, we’ve been perfectly content keeping our finances entirely separate. It’s occasionally slightly more time consuming than it might otherwise be—each of us writing a check for half the rent, paying for groceries on two debit cards, etc.—but it strikes me that separate accounts is a nice vote for both financial independence and trust. He works hard for his money as I do mine; no one should tell him or me what we can or can’t do with it. Sometimes he wants a genuine replica light saber (or three); sometimes I want a spectacular pair of eyeglasses.

Given that we spend our cash as we see fit, separate accounts also entails a certain level of trust. He has no control over my account, so he needs to know that I’m not going to do something irresponsible or poorly thought out that would put him in some sort of financial jeopardy. We of course discuss all major (and almost all minor) purchases before making them, and I can’t imagine one us buying something that other was uncomfortable with, but nevertheless, only I have final say over what I do with my money and only he has final say over what he does with his.

And yet, we walked right into the bank today and opened a joint account. Not as a replacement to our individual accounts, but as an addition to them. We did it for several reasons, not least of which is that my accounts are based in San Francisco, his accounts are based in Seattle, and we live in neither of those places, so we thought it might be nice to have a local account. And also because it actually is kind of a hassle to write two rent checks. Now we’ll each just transfer money to the joint account each month and write a single check. I think that’s probably all we’ll use the account for.

Still, though, it feels like we’ve crossed some sort of final relationship threshold. We’ve shared everything for a good long while already; today we took a little step into co-mingling. I suspect this will be as far as it goes—and I’m damn sure he’ll never let my ragged, marked-up, used paperbacks on the same shelves with his pristine hardbacks.

Failure of the Day: The Various Air

Things about San Jose so far:

• Sleeping with the window open. I don’t think anyplace I lived in SF had screens on the windows, and I’m seriously insect phobic, so even on the one or two nights a year when it was warm enough to sleep with a window open, the bugs made it out of the question. The evenings here are cool and splendid, and the breeze makes the bed feel comfortable and luxurious.


• Ceilings. Have I mentioned that our apartment has 9-foot ceilings on both floors? It’s hard to explain it in a way that will make sense to you the way it feels to me, but it’s a bit like being at the bottom of a well. I know to most people, that is not only the last thing it actually feels like, but also the last thing they would want it to feel like, but to me, it’s the coziest feeling in the world.


• The view from both the window in my office (on the 3rd floor of the apartment complex) and the window in the living room (directly above my office, on the 4th floor) looks out into the sky above the buildings across the street. Lights zoom horizontally from left to right across the space, and my eye absent mindedly reads them as cars on a freeway overpass in the distance. They’re not; they are planes—low enough to see their company logos—coming in for a landing. It’s a startling realization every time, and it feels strangely reassuring and modern.


• Dusk. We have a big papasan chair on the patio, and I am getting into the habit of curling up in it with a book when it’s still light out but it’s late enough that there’s no direct sunshine. The heat during the day still feels a bit hostile toward me sometimes but I swear, the dusk makes it all worthwhile. And summer is my least favorite season—I can hardly wait for autumn.


• Despite all of this, I remain an blithering, neurotic pain in the ass as I continue to adapt poorly to even the most positive of changes. I'm working on it.

Failure of the Day: Boon

And here we are. The move itself was semi-disastrous—saved only by several of Chris’s big strapping men friends from work coming to our rescue. Suffice to say we could really have used a freight elevator. I am of course not anybody’s first choice when it comes to adventures in heavy lifting, but I pitched in as much as I could—and more than I should have—and as a result had to spend much of the next day in bed while Chris labored to start getting the place in order. An inauspicious start, but we are undeterred.

By now, we are just about unpacked and largely settled in. Boxes have been emptied and pictures have been hung. The new apartment is gaspingly beautiful and easily the nicest place either of us have ever lived. I spend a fair amount of time twirling in it, still not quite grasping the enormity of my good fortune. Still, though, I am not the world’s best (or really, even in the top, say, 100 million) at adapting to change, and the spikes in my anxiety level appear as plainly on Chris’s face as they do on mine (he frowns his concern; I bloom with whole constellations of pimples the likes of which I never saw in adolescence).

As I adapt to the south bay heat, it is a testimony to something or other in my fucked head that I calm myself before bed by reading the Inferno. (The Durling translation—David, is that the one you like?) It is my loss, I know, but I am having a very hard time taking it seriously. It reads like Naked Lunch to me; which is to say I just can’t glean any emotional content from it; it’s too over the top. I focus too heavily on the author, I suppose, and I can only picture the Genius getting off on it, dredging the murkiest corners of his brain for the craziest imaginable shit. It does the trick though; one canto before bed and my brain is purring like a kitty and ready for a peaceful night of rest. There’s something to be said about moving and relativity there. And so we are home.

Failure of the Day: Boom!

Chris and I were both relieved to see the shuttle take off without incident. Or much of an incident, at least. There’s a bit of precedent you see…

In January of 1986, I moved to Georgia for reasons that are best left unmentioned. When I arrived, I unloaded all my crap into my hotel room and decided to go to sleep. When I woke up on that first morning, I turned on the TV and saw the Challenger had exploded.

In February of 2003, we moved from Seattle to SF. After unloading all our crap into our new place, we decided to go to sleep. When I woke up on that first morning, I turned on the TV and saw that the Columbia had exploded.

This latest shuttle mission is the first since the Columbia, and it is occurring during a week when I am moving to another city. Crap.

I don’t actually give a shit about NASA…I think space travel as a priority should come only after all the Earth priorities have been taken care of, and I definitely think all that money could be better spent, but no one likes to see people get blown to smithereens. I am proudly and unapologetically anti-smithereens. (Including the band. God, they’re boring.)

This will be my last post until after we move. There are still people high above us pooping in baggies and losing muscle mass (which I think they could do just as well down here, but I suppose I’m overlooking the grandeur and scope of the adventure and whatnot), and they are supposed to come down well after we should be all settled into the new digs. So it’s full on not our fault if anything happens. For the record.

Failure of the Day: Boob

The Summer of Slurpees is a smashing, ongoing, just-extended success but the Summer of Pilates—not so much. Once we found our new place in San Jose, complete with gleaming, 24-hour, state-of-the-art, and completely free fitness center, it became clear that since I would be returning to full-time telecommuting, I would also be returning to my mid-day gym workouts.

Ah, the treadmill. Nothing says Fuck You to six years of paralysis like running. I have a plan for my 40th birthday—a scant 15 months away—that involves completing my novel and running a 5K, both of which are well within my sights and ability I think. This helps.

To that end, we trudged to Berkeley this afternoon to go to a store called Title 9 because I heard that they had something that I not only never imagined I’d ever be in the market for, but that I was all but certain did not exist: a really good jogging bra. In a 38DD. (Yeah, I know. They grew back. They get much bigger and I’ll chop ’em off again.)

You can’t tell by looking at it whether or not a bra will provide the kind of fit and support we full-figured gals demand. In fact, there is only one way to tell. You put the thing on, you stand in front of the mirror in your little dressing room, and you jump up and down. I felt like a jackass of course—nobody wants to watch themselves jump up and down in their underwear, not even in Berkeley—but then I heard the thump thump thumps coming from the dressing rooms on either side of me. I crouched down and saw other women’s feet bouncing up and down in the rooms to my left and to my right. It dawned on me: Everybody watches themselves jump! Who knew? We were all there in our small rooms, topless and watching our uniboobs (jogging bras are snug and not flattering), hopping from foot to foot, and trying to detect which bra allows the least amount of movement. A secret army of women with very still breasts!

I bought a cute little wireless number with a big label on it that reads INTENSE ACTIVITY MOTION CONTROL. On the Title 9 rating system, it got 4 barbells out of a possible 5 for strength of support. What a great store.

Failure of the Day: The 14-Day Xmas

Chris says quitting your job is like Christmas. ‘Course, he also says “Look out for leprous pirates!” whenever it’s foggy so sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge to separate the words of wisdom from the just, y’know, words.

It took some doing but thanks to fine bit of insomnia last night I was able to dredge up the fact that the last time I gave notice and actually quit a job, it was in early 1989, and from the Wherehouse records store on 9th and Irving. (It’s a Jamba Juice now, and I dreamed about it once.) All the jobs I’ve had since then I was either fired, laid off, became too crippled to work, or just completed the contract.

I gave my two-week notice yesterday at Software R Us. Which is not to say that my notice has actually been received yet—both my boss and my boss’s boss were out of the office so I had to do it via an email that was cheerfully greeted with Out-Of-Office Autoreplies. It’s hard to quit, it turns out.

Things at Software R Us are a little unsettled these days—as usually follows an explicitly stated corporate promise of No Merger! No Layoffs!, we recently underwent a merger with some layoffs, so everyone there has a kind of maniacal fear laughter thing going on. There has been quite a rash of conversations, all of which can be distilled into: “Do you think they’ll keep you?” and I deemed it unnecessary to keep the fact of immanent departure much of a secret. I spoke about it with the fine folks in my department last week and some other people as well.

I have to say, everyone at work has been especially nice to me ever since. That is likely because I have been less my usual asocial self and a good bit chattier than I have ever been before. But I suspect what Chris says is also true—like during xmas, people are just a little bit kinder, a little bit more thoughtful when they know they will probably never see you again before too long. Can’t complain about that, really.

Failure of the Day: So Long, and Thanks For All the La Pat Dok

Yep, it’s for reals—we’re bailing on this town. Gave notice yesterday, finalized the new apartment the day before. We’re headed to the unexplored wilds of San Jose; downtown to be precise. A very swank building and a very beautiful townhouse with amenities and comforts coming out its well-appointed arse, and all within 2 blocks of an excellent burrito place and 137 other restaurants. Chris’s round trip daily commute to work next month will be roughly 5 blocks…whereas at the moment it is 100 miles, so you do the math in saved time and money and freeway hell.

And sure, there’s some sadness about leaving the only place I ever dreamed of living, but I’ve lived in the City for 20 years give or take, and for my lifestyle and tastes these days, it’s really just coasting by on cachet anymore. Well, cachet and really good food. People are impressed when you say you live here, and for a while that was enough. But do you know what’s even better than impressing strangers with where you live when you are out of town? A landlord who paints the walls and cleans the carpets before you move in. A washer and dryer in your kitchen. An apartment pre-wired for a T1 line in every room and an entire downtown area that is a WiFi hotspot. A neighborhood full of places to walk to. All of which is to say: a higher standard of living at a lower cost of living.

San Francisco is beautiful and we will miss it, I’m sure. But the bloom is off the rose. We’re headed South, to the newly minted 10th largest city in the US, where not everyone will agree with us politically (imagine! actually arguing with people who don’t share your views!), and where we will seriously consider going into the Mission to see live music on a Friday night and then not go, same as living in the Richmond.

Count on us to visit with some frequency as well…unless we find a really good Burmese restaurant in San Jose. Then we might really be gone for good.

Failure of the Day: Funny, The Things You Notice

This occurred to me tonight. Charlie Bucket grew up to be Paul Westerberg.

Failure of the Day: 220

It should come as no surprise that the best part of the bajillion cable channels streaming digitally into our apartment is the astonishing level of specialization that the sheer number of channels entails. And as the poster girl for the varieties of pathology, it should be even less of a surprise that my favorite channel is 220: The Discovery Health Network.

Over the months, I have watched shows called Face-Eating Tumor and 160 Pound Tumor and I Am My Own Twin and the refusing-to-be-outdone 200 Pound Tumor. I flirted with the notion of being slightly ashamed at how much I enjoyed these shows but fell back on my trusty ole, my all purpose rationalization: I am not a tourist in these people’s pain. I am not a freak gawker; oh, no. These are my people—I am we and you are me and we are all together. When you have five incurable diseases, you watch who you are calling a freak, sister.

That’s a lie of course, and fairly heinous one—I walk easily through the world, unstared at save my hair these days. I pass. I have the great luxury of being largely anonymous in my infirmities. I am the boy/ who can enjoy/ invisibility. 160 pound tumor lady? Not so much. But in my own pathetic defense, I am most at ease in the presence of the super-ill. I am Tom Cruise in a Keanu Reeves movie: I look so frickin’ good in comparison! Who’s the healthiest person in the room? ME!

Plus the shows really are completely fascinating. I mean, c’mon…a woman who has TWO sets of DNA and who gave birth to children who do not match their mother’s DNA but are a genetic combination of their father and their mother’s brother? Who could resist that? No one! It’s irresistible!

Maybe there’ll be a show about me someday called The Girl With Everything Wrong With Her and the little circle of exploitation will be complete.

Failure of the Day: Studies in Mediocrity

On Saturday for my regular Dawn Movie Ritual I watched Collateral on OnDemand cable. It was OK: predictable, but a reasonable passing of 2 hours. Jamie Foxx may or may not be a good actor—it’s hard to tell from just one movie—but he is riveting. It’s hard to stop looking at him. I don’t know why that is, I only know that when he’s onscreen, I’m looking at him and not at anything else. Charisma is kind of a wondrous thing.

Tom Cruise is also mesmerizing, but for completely different reasons. I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it for some time now. Separate and apart from the spectacular train wreck he seems to be in his personal life, in his movies, he has, as near as I can figure, some sort of depth threshold that he just cannot cross. His acting is OK, it’ll do. He is occasionally pretty darn good, and I have enjoyed him in a few of his films, especially those in which he is expressly not heroic, but I think he is prime evidence of just how far you can go on good looks, training, and ambition. Which is to say; how far you can go with everything except talent. Turns out it’s pretty damn far.

I’m making a distinction here between mediocre and bad, by the way. I don’t think TC is a bad actor. One of the lessons of Tom Cruise is that a lack of talent doesn't necessarily make you a bad actor. But you do need to make some kind of effort, as became clear on Sunday morning when I watched Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate. That’s a crap movie from the word Go but it has to make TC weep with gratitude for the miracle of relativity.

But there’s that damn line. And I swear, I can see it when I am watching TC onscreen. The character he’s playing exists on the top layer of his skin and goes down an inch or two and then stops. You can still see the Tom Cruise underneath. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how much he studies his craft and develops his character, you can still see it. And that fascinates me.

I tell myself that I am suddenly so interested in this because I would like to avoid being mediocre myself, and so I am looking the enemy in the face, knowing it, learning to recognize it. Chris thinks it might be just that I like to watch dumb movies, though.

Failure of the Day: Who’s The Mark?

I’ve been crap lately at updating here; sorry. I’m a little distracted by things going on in my, y’know, life, and now that this draft of my novel is done, I’m taking the summer off from it and declared this the Summer! Of! Pilates!

I’m grooving on the pilates, by the way; I can’t believe it took so long for someone to invent an exercise that you can do lying down. It’s so obvious! I’m actually good at it too, since it’s all about strength and flexibility, which I have oodles of, but not about balance and grace, of which I am of course entirely bereft. Plus I really enjoy imagining the mean things I would say to the skinny white bitch in the leotard on the video who tells me that being overweight is just an outward sign that the mind and the body are out of balance. Really? I would say. “Out of balance” you say? Well that explains everything! I thought it was because of my INCURABLE NEUROLOGICAL DISEASE compounded by 6 years of paralysis and atrophy but if you say that’s not it…

Of course now that I am expressly not writing and especially not working on plugging the enormous holes in my novel’s narrative structure, my head is chock-a-block full of text, and not just things to make new age bitches cry, either. Between the novel I’m reading and my newly beloved Mountain Goats CDs, the valves are open and the lines are coming, no waiting. I jot them down longhand but do not open a Word doc, I do not open a Word doc, I do not open a Word doc. Because this is the Summer of Pilates, not the Summer of Starting Draft 3. And as long as I believe that it, seems clear that this little intellectual bait and switch will keep paying off.

From a Martin Amis interview: “I believe that everyone has a novel in them. The difference between the writer and the nonwriter is that the writer finishes the thing.”

Failure of the Day: Obligation

So, remember 1994? Yeah, me too. It sucked. I was fat, crippled, deeply impoverished, and very, very moody. I was also writing my head off, though, and some of those poems were pretty good.

And what do you know, an anthology just came out to commemorate those times. It’s called New Underground Writing or something like that, and yes, it is in fact so NEW that one of the book’s editors has been dead since the mid-90s (I would say that it’s so underground that one of the editors is dead but that would be tasteless), and it’s got poems of mine that are so old that there’s one even I don’t have a copy of anymore.

The book does include some awfully good writers though, and nice big samplings of each one, and I recall that when the weird guy who I had never met called me in the middle of the night to solicit my poems for it, I was pleased once I figured out that he wasn’t stalking me.

Now there’s a reading for it at a bookstore in (GlenGarry) Glen Park called Bird & Beckett this Saturday at 7 PM. I’ve never been to that store or even, I don’t think, to Glen Park so it will be an adventure. I wasn’t going to go…but then one of the still-living editors called me at my house to invite me, as opposed to the usual passive aggressive tactics, so it seemed like they must be serious about wanting me to show up. And then I remembered that that very same still-living editor had nominated me for a pushcart prize some years ago, and I still kinda owe her for that, so I’m going. If nothing else, it will be a reunion of a bunch of people who remember ourselves as being much cooler than we were. And what could be more fun than that? So if you miss the days when you could go to a poetry reading and hear me read tight little stanzas about brain tumors and fucking, come on down!

Failure of the Day: The Nature, As Usual

For the long weekend, we got a little inspired to go into it, my nemesis, the Great Not Indoors. Not far into it, mind you, and not for very long, but into it nevertheless. Mountain Lake park is about 10 blocks from our apartment, near 12th Avenue. I’ve been there a few times, but Chris had never seen it and it is pretty cool after all that there’s a secret lake right there, and it was a nice day and we were going to that area anyways to get Star Wars slurpees, so we figured we might as well go look at the Nature.

And it’s pretty, there’s no arguing with that. It’s not very convenient though. We found a nice bench overlooking the lake and settled in. Chris was a little put off that our bench didn’t have cup holders and I would have preferred that it was entirely encased in a nice sterile glass booth, but we made do.

We immediately spotted a very big orange carp, which I named Pete, and group of little brown ducks. Chris said that it is a well-known fact that carp eat ducks and so we were about to witness a bloodbath. But then a family of tourists came up and started staring at Pete and that warned the ducks away. That was disappointing—nothing spices up the Nature like some good ole survival-of-the-fittest action—and Chris got very annoyed that all those people were looking at OUR carp.

Then pigeons became an issue because a lady at the next bench broke out a bag of breadcrumbs, so we took our cue to move along. We walked along the shoreline—all 20 feet of it—but then some insane girl actually rolled her pants up and waded into the lake and we had to flee in revulsion. It’s one thing to get the Nature on your shoes…but to get it on your actual feet? Horrible! We scurried up to Clement Street and ate some pizza that was pretty lousy (I miss the Front Room!) but at least was not full of dirt and leaves and itty bitty gnats like the Nature was. Viva Civilization!

Failure of the Day: A Lot of Things but Mostly Croutons

I am pretty pleased these days with my teeny little corner of life on the Earth. At great personal risk of the JINX, which I believe in utterly and reflexively, I can say that I am spending a fair amount of time just hanging out in the company of my pleasure, and anticipating my own ghastly doom is more of a hobby than an emotional necessity anymore.

Partly it’s because my novel, while still being far from done, is congealing and becoming a solid, actual thing to me. There’s a little bead of something I can feel, somewhere in proximity of my sternum, that I have recently realized is pride, a new and lovely feeling. I’m not sure I’ve ever been proud of anything I’ve done before—I thought it was swell to have graduated college, to have quit smoking, and to have done so spectacularly well at choosing a partner, but those things struck me more as acts that one, rightly or wrongly, gets a sideways glance for NOT doing rather than something one is proud of having done. Writing a novel is different than that; no one thinks it’s odd if you haven’t written one.

Partly it’s because I have finally quit the fucking low-carb diet and am now all about high fiber. This is a silly thing but the realization that I could make my own croutons out of low-fat whole grain English muffins was a revelation to me. I am almost giddy about that, no lie. They’re delicious, by the way.

Partly it’s because my cool co-worker turned me on to The Mountain Goats by loaning me their new CD, The Sunset Tree. Holy moley, this is an outstanding record. It made me cry on the 22 Fillmore, where I am usually a cauldron of impatient, boiling rage at the screaming teenagers on their way to school.

Partly it’s because I’m enjoying my job. (Hellmouth has been on vacation or otherwise out of the office for most of the last 2 weeks.) I am shuffling between two departments, one of which gives me work that I love but that is frantic and must be done immediately, and the other of which gives me work that is mindless and so laid back as to be nearly non-existent, and each is the perfect complement to the other.

Partly it’s because between my novel, the new Eli book, and this crazy anthology with a bunch of my poems in it (that just came out despite that I sent the editor my poems 12 years ago), there are lots of things going on that help me get off my arse and out into the world of people and social interactions.

There’s more, too, but you get the picture. And have I mentioned the croutons?

Failure of the Day: 30/30

There you have it. In the evenings now I wander in the small circle I can make around the tiny lime green table in my room, my writing office, the one condition I laid out on which cohabitation was predicated. AKA our second bedroom, AKA Greenhaven. I walk there, in that small circle, in the evenings because what I usually spend that time doing is now done. Done.

The first draft took 30 days. The second draft took 30 months. I will ignore the exponential implications of how long the third draft will take. The manuscript is now before the eyes of a triumvirate of readers whose opinions I hold in the highest esteem but whom, when they call out the truckload of rookie mistakes I undoubtedly made, will not necessitate my instant death by mortification.

I’m not quite sure what to do with myself in the evenings just now. On Monday, my first evening without a novel to worry into pulp, I took a quiz (“What Country are You?”). In a mere 6 questions, I got a result that described me exactly and succinctly.

You're South Africa!

After almost endless suffering, you've finally freed yourself from the oppression that somehow held you back. Now your diamond in the rough is shining through, and the world can accept you for who you really are.
You were trying to show who you were to the world, but they weren't interested
in helping you become that until it was almost too late. Suddenly you're a very hopeful person, even if you still have some troubles.

Take the Country
Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

Failure of the Day: Book

This week at Modern Times Bookstore

Some Angels Wear Black: Selected Poems
An Eli Coppola Tribute Reading
Tuesday, May 17
7:30 PM

Readers include Michelle Tea, David West, Jandy Nelson, Mark Routhier, Silke Vom Bauer, Stephen Pelton, Skye Alexander, and me.

Eli was one of the finest poets I've ever known and I can only implore you to come to the reading and to buy the book. In the strongest possible terms. You may well kick yourself for missing it, but I will almost certainly kick you for not showing up.*

*Please note threat of violence is strictly metaphorical.

Failure of the Day: Trouble Breathing

Just got the new Weezer …what do I call it? It’s not a record anymore, and it’s not even a CD because I downloaded it as a group of files to my iPod. Things are suddenly very intangible. Anyway, I was very much looking forward to the new songs because I am all with the loving of Weezer, and I was well-pleased with the single, and so, YAY! it came out today.

I am an understanding person. I understood that the Green Album, that collection of catchy tunes with no emotional content whatsoever, was Rivers’ way of hiding from the disappointment he felt when Pinkerton was not hailed as brilliant , as it damn well should have been. I further understood that Maladroit was a baby step back toward emotional expressiveness hidden behind kick ass rock tunes. So I am not surprised that Make Believe is an unabashed return to Pinkerton levels of longing and insecurity. But I am very surprised that it is expressed in a language that just barely succeeds at reaching junior high levels of emotional complexity. To misappropriate a better line, it’s as though Hello Kitty puked, and that puke wrote these lyrics.

I will certainly listen to it several dozen more times and check my first impression because I am after all very often too quick to judge. And maybe I am losing my ability to discern subtler shades of popular culture. Is there a level of irony that I’m missing? Or is it just that this baby talk drek is what passes for heartfelt these days? I mean, of course it is, but from Weezer? Weezer, late of songs about tranny hookers and angsty lesbian crushes?

I’ll withhold final judgment until I’ve listened to the whole thing more than just once during rush hour on the 22 Fillmore. But unless my cultural dip stick is seriously out of whack—which I don’t deny is entirely possible—I think we’ll all just have to wait till the next album for Rivers to finish up with this foray into trite sentimentalism and get back to the yummy songs about being a psychosexual fuckwit.

Failure of the Day: Horsey!

Despite myself, and despite certain associations that I’d prefer not to have, I love horse races. We used to go to the races on Chris’s birthday when we lived in Washington, but in California we go on my birthday to avoid having to go to county fairs.

Years ago I used to go to the races with my pal, Deborah, who loved the races as much as I did but with a great deal more guilt—she was a vegetarian and although these were the days before PETA, she certainly would have been a member. (These were also the days before she got cancer and I got MS and so could afford to have opinions about things that only had a negative impact on “other people.” But I digress.)

I love the races without the tiniest bit of guilt, which should be a surprise to no one since I don’t have the tiniest bit of guilt about much of anything, because, really, what’s the point of that? I love the races because it’s all the good parts of nature (pretty!) without any of the bad parts (everything else!). Plus there are hot dogs.

This morning, Chris "explained" to me that a trifecta is when you pick three horses. “Any three horses?” I asked. “Yep.” he said. As an example, he said his three horses are Silver, Seattle Slew, and Miss Tilly from Gunsmoke. “What happens after you pick your three horses?” I asked. “Sometimes the man gives you money,” he said.

In case you're wondering, I say $5 on Bandini to win.