S n a r k A t t a c k

Cool as Kim Deal

I was kind of dreading the run in Griffith Park, and not because of the actual run.  I was dreading the inevitable: my getting horribly lost in Griffith Park.  I am cursed with a good sense of direction and can usually pinpoint where the car is parked or where China is.  Unfortunately, this skill is coupled with the regrettable optimism that led the Donner Party astray:  I believe that I can find a brilliant shortcut. 

I never do. 

And yet:

As municipal parks go, Griffith Park is spectacular:  huge, sprawling and conveniently located, so much so that you can usually count on seeing film crews up there, using a shockingly tiny copse of pine trees as a double for whatever forest happens to be near the lead character's house (paging Meredith Grey).  It's just a few blocks from us here, which explains why we so often see scrawny coyotes blithely trotting across Los Feliz Blvd in the early evening, coming down out of the park to dine on housecats. 

This is a different sort of park from what I'm used to - the fog-fed leafiness of the Presidio, quiet and smelling of wet earth and eucalyptus, or the more urban Golden Gate Park, where every path seems to let out onto a knot of tourists, a homeless encampment or the Pacific.  These are smaller, more manageable parks.  Griffith Park is enormous.  I didn't know where to begin.  So, I drove aimlessly (a bad sign) up the hill, past the Greek Theater, thinking I would find a major trailhead or something and then could just find a trailmap and start running. 

There are no trailmaps.  There are no signs, but one, which I followed, to something called Dante's View.  Should you find yourself in the LA area with some outdoorsy type who you just can't manage to ditch, and they insist on going to this thing called Dante's View in Griffith Park, fake a torn Achilles or something.  It's ridiculous - a strange bit of gardening in the middle of scrub brush and chapparral with... BENCHES!  Apparently it affords some amazing view of LA but all I could see was an amazing view of smog.  In theory, I suppose, the ocean was thataways and downtown was thisaways but all's I could see was gray.  I had a long talk with my lungs and we three decided to ignore the particulates in the air and keep running.  So I ambled over an increasingly slippery trail - the rocks are constantly breaking down into tiny pebbles which have the nasty effect of sliding underfoot, providing a lovely Flintstonian moment whenever you suddenly try to accelerate while going uphill.  Oh, Wilma.

Eventually the trail became a horse bridge.  I thought, wait a minute.  I've SEEN this bridge, but from below, once when the pup and I had a bit of a detour.  Now, how to get down there?

There are those who might make like a mountain goat and nimbly alight from rock to rock while descending the steepest of trails.  I, however, have no need to be a hero and prefer to keep my expensive orthodonture safe.  In my mouth.  I took the more reliable and time-tested approach down.

After sliding on my ass for sixty feet, I found myself exhilarated and dirty - and on that road below.  Awesome.  We are making progress, people. I know my way around.  Maps are for pussies!

So, flat semi-paved road, wending about on the east side of the mountain.  It occurs to me that I have no idea how many miles it will be until I get back to the car.  I don't have  water, a watch or any form of identification, except, ha ha, my teeth.  So.

I run.  And run and run.  Actually, it feels awesome to be running after all the bullshit hiking and falling on my ass.  I am Zola Budd!  I am Mary Decker!  I really need to update my female runner references!

After running for about twenty or thirty mniutes, I wonder... If only there were a way to get up over the mountain.  I bet that would put me right where I need to be.  So I run while scrutinizing the mountainside to my left.  Trail, trail, trail, no sign of a trail.  In the meantime, I'm alone.  Strange to be in the middle of 10 million people, none of whom wants to join me on the east side of this mountain, with a smoggy but unobstructed view of beautiful downtown Burbank.  There is the occasional bicyclist and once, a runner.   Without an MP3 player, I'm left to my own thoughts of blazing a trail and of being raped and murdered by Christopher Penn.  I imagine a variety of scenarios:  Christopher Penn will appear and I will wave a cheeseburger and a coke spoon in front of him.  He will have a massive heart attack and I will make my getaway.  Of course, seeing as how he's already dead, I had to rework the scenario:  generic man approaches and I find a rock and tell him I know Krav-Maga.   Various versions include me bashing him with the rock and getting away, bashing him in the head with the rock and then saying something incredibly sassy, and then getting away, or, in one particularly gruesome episode, having to incapacitate him by shoving my thumbs in his eyes which is so incredibly oogy that I had to re-imagine a scenario in which I had a motorcycle and a digicam (the former for getting away and the latter for evidence).

But what if he calls my bluff?  It's then I realize that if you ever really wanted to attack some chick, there are much better places to do it than this part of Griffith Park, where you can only get here by biking or running and that seems like way too much commitment for a felon who are notoriously unfocused as a people.  Satisfied with my new odds, I ran much more easily.  And continued to think about shortcuts.  Suddenly, to my left, I saw a strange ladder-type staircase through the brush.  The brush at this point was still green and it was inviting, as the sun was beginning to beat down.  (I congratulated myself on the decision to go with the 45 SPF that day.) 

I began to climb.  This is genius, I thought.  You run and run and you are rewarded with an actual trail, and not something that makes you think of Romancing the Stone.  Soon the ladder turned into nothing but a large pipe and a smaller pipe, the latter meant as some sort of handrail.  The trail was so steep at this point that I was basically pulling myself up, hand over hand.  Up and up I went, wondering why it is I have never learned to identify poison oak.  Is that it?  What about that?  That one has three leaves or do you just not count the little leaf in the middle?  Wait - is that pot?   

Convinced that I would spend the next couple of weeks covered in calamine lotion, I held my breath and crawled/pulled through a particularly dense bit of 'trail' which is when I heard it: the unmistakable rattle of a rattlesnake.  Alarmingly close.  Within three feet, close.  Behind me and to my right.  Close.  I hied myself up and finally reached a clearing and freaked out.  And then freaked out again when I realized the trail was no short cut but merely led to the power tower that I was standing under, abuzz with high voltage goodness.   Desperate, I looked around for ANY other way down.  There was nothing.  Nothing but the way I'd come up.

Deep breath.  You are alone.  You have no water.  You, my friend, are an idiot of the first class.  I found a stick - you got fangs and some poisonous venom?  Oh, yeah?  Well, I got a stick.  Okay, so I need more than a stick.  Let's think.  The rattle was to warn me, right?  I mean, he doesn't want to bite me any more than I want to get bitten, so let's all let each other know where we stand, so to speak. What I need is an early warning device, something to let Mr. Snake down there that I'm a-comin'.  Keys.  I have keys.  And the aforementioned stick.

Which is how I found myself literally beating the bushes as I made my descent, rattling my keys and yelling out, "Hey, buddy, I'm coming down now!  You might want to get a move-on! Yoo-hoo!"  About halfway down it occurred to me that a) that may not be the only snake out there, b) of COURSE that's not the only snake out there, you idiot, c) even if it were the only snake out there, what's to say he couldn't have slithered across the trail after I'd come up? and d) that I should start beating the hell out of the bushes on the other side of the trail for good measure.  All this while rattling my keys before me like some deranged shaman.  Not my finest hour.

Suffice to say, I made it back to the road in one un-perforated piece.  Eventually, I found my way back - running for another hour or so towards the Observatory, on a road so flat, so benign, so snake-free, that I actually closed my eyes a bit as I jogged away.

Until I thought about bears.

Halley's Waitress

I was talking to a friend the other night about you can tell so much about a person by how they deal with waitstaff.  It's similar to a conversation I'd had years earlier when a good friend was talking about her future husband and how she loved the way he talked to the toll taker for the Bay Bridge - he was kind.  The sort of baseline of kindness that you hope exists in every one of your friends and family but which occasionally gets obliterated when they are needlessly mean to someone who's just doing their job.

Since I've been up to my eyeballs in finances lately, let me express how lovely he was - and how we should all be - mathematically:

> Merely Acknowledging Service Industry Employee's Existence
< Smarmy/Icky/Handsy

Incidentally, that whole greater than/less than business was some hard concept for me when I was a kid.  That and moles in chemistry.  I'm like, no really, what is it called?  "A mole."  Come on.  You can tell me.  "No, it's called a mole."  I have to go ask someone else right now because clearly you think you can trick me into not blowing the lid of the curve, yo, by talking about small woodland creatures.  Sightless creatures.  Bleh. 

The role of the dodgy high school classmate was played in the preceding paragraph by a lanky red-headed boy I knew since I was in seventh grade, who was my main academic competitor in high school and who later went to West Point.  I met him once after college, when I was living in D.C. and he'd just moved to Florida and found Jesus.   Jesus told him to marry a small Philippino woman and have many children, but really, it was no great loss for me:  I remember thinking this is not a overly good person when I saw how terribly mean he was to his mother.  Apparently Jesus is okay with yelling at your mother to bring snacks to him and all his friends and then embarrassing her when they were not Just So.  Jesus is confusing that way.  He (my friend, not Jesus) did introduce me to Yngwie Malmsteen and Rush, however.  It's kind of a wash.   Greater or equal to okay.

So he was mean to his mom and I just knew that something wasn't quite right, and it's the same calculation that I make now, observing how people are with waitstaff, with toll takers, with telemarketers, with the foursome trying to play through or the Russian woman who is violently readjusting your boobs to fit into their new, not-at-all gulag-like brassieres.  Anyone can be nice, but it's how you behave with people in the service industry that is the real test, which is why I was so jazzed to see this bit on Sarah's blog about the Waiter Rule.  (I am currently trying to get my head around Sarah carrying trays of hot food to defenseless patrons, but that's a topic for another post.)

Hey, look - it's a puppy! 

What Good Is Staying Alone in Your Room?

I love being back in Tahoe.  My parents were here for a few days while my dad was working last week, but for the most part my mother was content to do her sudoku puzzles and leave me to go to the library all day.    I would go hours without talking to anyone except maybe the librarian - who was weirdly pleased that I checked out a couple of graphic novels - and it was heaven.   

You see, I am an introvert.  Of course, people often don't believe me because I do the best impression by an introvert of an extrovert. Exhibit A: I KILL at parties.  I am a delight!   I can also talk to practically anyone.  I can do that small talk thing and ask questions and remember tiny details about a person that surprises them the NEXT time we see each other.  Yes, my sister's name IS Penelope!  Stuff like that.  It's a party trick, literally.  I pretty much act like I'm interviewing the person, since most people - most extroverts, anyway - like to talk about themselves, while I find it enervating to talk about myself to a total stranger.   A win-win.   Since I moved to LA, there's been a tremendous amount of networking which has steadily eroded my tolerance for other people. 

Don't get me wrong - this is not because the people aren't nice or fun or even occasionally awesome.  I am telling you now:  you are all lovely and awesome.  I just need some time away from you right now. Back before I knew myself so well, I acted like I could just hang around folks and be out there for hours, days, weeks on end, and that it'd all be fine.  Instead, after about five days of constant contact with people, I would turn into Evil Moira.  My head would spin around, I'd get snappish and generally turn into a raging bitch.  It was an out-of-body experience.  I remember thinking, "There is no reason to be this upset."  And yet the more people tried to talk to me, the more my skin actually tingled with annoyance. 

But then a family friend pointed out after a party that she could see me getting tired throughout the event.  You're an introvert, she said.  Of course it sounds like an insult and I took it as such, for years in fact, and can you blame me?  Introvert sounds like a hermit, like someone whose literary hero is not Scout, but Boo Radley.  Not Rosalind Russell but Greta Garbo.  More Mark Chapman than John Lennon.

There's something that seems so damaged about being introverted, more now than ever, I think, when extroverts rule the world and no thought, however inane, can go unspoken or worse, untelevised. 

The thing about introversion is that your friends, most of whom are doubtless extroverts, will not understand your need to be alone and recharge.  Exciting things are going to happen, they say, involving a bar, some monkeys, a flaming torch and a Mel Torme impersonator. Everyone is going!   Instead, you demur, preferring the solitude of your room to a barful of people who you like very much but who, right now, you may verbally rip into shreds if they continue talking to you when every word is chipping away at your very existence. 

You see, introverts need to be alone for your sake as well as our own.  But extroverts usually don't get this.  Instead, they take it personally.  Your partner, for one, will take it very personally and assume that when you say you want to be alone, being alone means being alone with THEM.  The problem is that they don't understand that they are technically 'people.' 

As in, "I feel like I need not to be around other people right now." 

What the extrovert often hears instead is "I want to be alone. With YOU!"   I say, "no, really.  I need to be alone right now.  I feel like I've been out too much and I need sometime to regroup."  What they hear is "I really hope you stay with me this weekend and make sure I don't get lonely."  I say, "I just want to go for a long quiet walk during which I can silently process the events of the last month," and the extrovert hears, "I really hope you'll hover over me all weekend and ask me a million questions about absolutely nothing."  This is when you have a fight or silently wonder if you really should be seeing this person. 

Perhaps what the world needs is more awareness of introverts. Introvert Pride, as it were.  Of course, after the parade we'd all need a day or two to recover, but it would be totally worth it.   And lest you think I'm making all this up, I highly recommend this article, Caring for Your Introvert.   We are not alone!  Usually!

I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter

The daily mail is always so sad - a mix of bills, bank statements, real estate flyers and the occasional magazine.  Everything is folded into a chalupa of coupons for things I do not want at places where I don't shop.  I don't even look at the coupons but as I shove them into the recycling, I glimpse words like 'Valu' and 'EZ.'  The recycling is full of these things, causing me to worry, briefly, about the depletion of our world's forests followed by wonderment that the flyers make business sense.  This naturally leads me to imagine moms, nanas and single fathers sitting at kitchen tables across the country, studying these coupons and saying to themselves, 'twenty cents off of Lava.  Huh. (clip clip).' 

Then I think, why doesn't anyone ever write me a letter?

I used to write letters.  Letters home when I was in camp, filled with giant looping script that was trendy in the early '80s - it took an entire line to say 'Hi, Mom and Dad.'  Letters home when I was in working in Alaska during a summer off from college, the handwriting evolved to a spiky illegibility fed by fatigue and caffeine.  Airmail letters from Europe, carefully self-censored to reflect scholarship and tourism, and not getting home at 6am and attempting to smoke. 

As everyone knows, however, the internet changed everything.  Suddenly everyone had an email address.  Once critical mass was achieved and everyone you wanted to email also had an email account, letters all but ceased.  Articles were written exclaiming the virtues of email, not for killing off letters, but for REVIVING the epistolary form altogether.  Everyone is writing!  The importance of a well-formed phrase has never been greater!

This lasted for a week.  It was August, 1997.

After that, it seemed that the world had found itself subscribed to various listservs.  Whether it was the anonymity or the face-lessness of the exchanges, the tone deteriorated.  Add to that, the ubiquity of email for business and the messages became perfunctory.  Practical.  Efficient.  Texting has added to the problem, converting conversations into the pidgin language of license plates and stroke victims. 

It's impossible to go back, of course, in any significant way.  Emailing and texting are simply too easy, too fast.  But the medium is the message.  Whatever you do with your font - I write in Sylfaen, navy, 11pt - it can't compete with the feel of a letter written on college-ruled paper, violently ripped from a notebook, or creamy stock from Crane, or anything adorned with Ziggy.  (I was ten.  Do not judge.)  It certainly cannot compete with something that you took time to write out, put in an envelope, address, stamp and then mail, and which will take three days to reach its intended.  It is measured and considered, and for those reasons the personal letter will be the communication equivalent of slow food.

It's the rare extravagance, meant to be savored and remembered.

Now where's my pen?

Newsflash: the dogs do not love you like that

The cousin and EB have a crazy dogwalker whose existence on the planet I am beginning to resent.

She is crazy, of course, in the way you want your dogwalker to be crazy: she used to be a vet technician, she believes that dogs are just little furry people with furry little souls and she has an enormous vehicle for transporting your beloved pets all over the greater Los Angeles area in comfort and style. She also loves the dogs so you know they're in good hands.  The problem is that she may love them more than you do.  Or at least she thinks she does.

Since I'm the one who's home when she comes to get the dogs, I endure her strange small talk every day.  At first I was all saintly about it - she's lonely, being with all those dogs all day.  What's a few charitable moments out of my day?  It's like karmic flossing.  But then I began to dread the talks, mostly because she wasn't just talking to me.   She would talk to the dogs.  More precisely, she would talk THROUGH them.   

Now I've owned the pup for nearly 9 years and I'm very clear on things - I own her.  She is indisputably my property.  I am not her mother.  I did not give birth to her (shudder!) and I do not like it when people talk to her and refer to me as her mommy.  In fact, it creeps me out.  But that said, I talk to her.  I've talked to every pet I've ever had, including a few animals that weren't, strictly speaking, pets.

However, I've never imagined for a moment that aside for a handful of words - 'park,' 'ball' and that most genius please-poop-now phrase, 'do your thing' - that the dog ever understood what I was saying.  I also never imagined that if she were to communicate with me, that she would do it through a crazy dog lady and that her messages to me would be the bitchiest, most passive-aggressive things ever uttered at  80,000 kHz. 

Every day the dogwalker picks up the cousin and EB's two dogs.  My dog stays home with me doing what she loves best:  sleeping on the couch and occasionally farting in my direction.  Every day the dogwalker does a variation on "your dog is telling me that she wants to come with us!."   This would then be followed by a discussion of how the pup is smiling at her or how her coat is so shiny and then interrogate me on the food I feed her (Trader Joe's kibble, eighteen bucks for a twenty pound bag), which was followed by a discussion on how she learned in vet school (one year!) how to read a dog food label and how the leading ingredient should never be 'meal.'  Then, channelling my dog, she would talk about how my dog would love to have food that doesn't have lamb meal as the first ingredient. 

First of all, lady, I don't know what 'vet school' you went to but if all you learned was how to read a freaking dog food label, I have one word for you:  refund.   Secondly, it's dog food, not a meal at Manresa. 

Besides, the pup's had every kind of spectacularly priced dog food in the world, including a brief spell eating bizarre protein-carbohydrate combinations.  Kangaroo and sweet potato anyone?  Yet she's never been healthier since she started eating some TJ's dog food which is probably 90% rat anuses.  Give us a kiss!   

I dread the dogwalker's afternoon appearances and have occasionally hidden on the patio or upstairs, ignoring her "hello?" when she comes in.  A couple of weeks ago I was relieved when she went out of town and I didn't have to hide out every day.  Instead, that opened up another dimension of crazy.   

EB's sister GM filled in for the week, spending several days discovering how the dogwalker had given her the wrong keys to the wrong houses or told her the wrong thing about certain dogs.  It was a nightmare.  Worse, the dogwalker had lied to GM about how much money people pay her for each dog and then tried to stiff her.   

GM still hasn't been paid by the crazy dogwalker and what the dogwalker says she's going to pay her seems to shrink along with my tolerance for her and her canine ventriloquism.  It's been over a week and rent was due, groceries need buying and the money for services rendered might be nice.  Talking through my dog to annoy me is one thing; stiffing GM is quite another.

She doesn't owe me money but I've been so annoyed with her behavior that I vote for firing her.  That sort of behavior's unacceptable, the proverbial straw and whatnot. 

The pup's on the couch next to me and she totally agrees. 

Who's my good girl?  You are!

The Best Part of Waking Up

I guess if someone put Folger's in my cup, I wouldn't be terribly pleased and would likely go back to bed unless I was, por ejemplo, stuck on some fishing boat off the coast of Alaska, it was bitterly cold and my wool knit cap, bought ostensibly for warmth but secretly because I thought I looked awesome in it, was itching the bejeebus out of my scalp, and the first mate, disappointingly not named Gilligan and who, it turns out, does not like being called Gilligan even in jest, arrives before me to say that this is the only coffee on board so it's that or suffer the wrath of the caffeine-withdrawal headache in which case, I would agree that the best part of waking up is indeed Folger's in my cup. 

As it is, I've been making due with coffee that I bought at the Coffee Bean down on Hillhurst.  I say the one on Hillhurst because there are thousands of them here in LA and I want you to get a good sense of this one which is in the Albertson's parking lot and has all the ambience its location would suggest.  It is also a short walk from my new home.  I bought the coffee in a moment of weakness as I've been wary of the Coffee Bean ever since they opened one in my neighborhood in SF, across Sacramento from my beloved Peets and across Fillmore from Voldemort, er, Starbucks.

Opening a coffee franchise at the same intersection where Peets and Starbucks already dominated seemed like a bone-headed move to me.  I assumed they would fail immediately but instead the Coffee Bean is flourishing.  They have a market.  While Starbucks at least pretends to cater to people who say they like coffee but secretly hate it, Coffee Bean embraces the faux-coffee-lovers with both arms.  Coffee Bean is the coffee place for people who don't want any coffee in their coffee drinks. 

You can confirm this by visiting any Coffee Bean, Starbucks and, to a lesser extent, Peets:  customers using more than four adjectives to describe their 'coffee' drink, which then arrives furnished with a straw.  For the record, if you're drinking coffee through a straw, you do not like coffee. 

Listen, I get the whole doctoring-up-your-coffee-until-it-doesn't-taste-like-coffee thing.  I have been there.  I was once like you, my friends.  Let me set the scene for you:  I was four.

A few weeks ago, I went to the Grove to see a movie with a friend and afterwards we got a quick bite.  I was jonesing for some java.  In fact, I may have actually said that: 

"I am jonesing for java."

On second thought, that is something that I just can't hear myself saying but suffice to say that I made my wishes known and discovered something interesting about the Grove.  Everything there is designed to have a singular purpose, as though each merchant had agreed never to compete with any other merchant.  Therefore, there was no getting coffee in the bookstore, no coffee at the ice cream shop (or shoppe, if you must), at the donut stand or at the sushi bar.  If you want X, you must go to the X store.  Which is why we had to stand in a very long, very slow-moving line at the Coffee Bean just so I could get a cup of coffee.

I'm used to Peets with its espresso drink line and its everyone else line, designed so that coffee drinkers wouldn't be slowed down by latte drinkers.  Coffee Bean had one line where people could order mugs, hats, Coffee Bean limited edition Subarus and the like, which meant that people like me who simply wanted that iconic cup of coffee had to wait an eternity.  As it turned out, people like me was just me.

Which is probably why, when I got to the head of the line and asked the dude behind the counter for a plain old cup of coffee, his shoulders collapsed with relief.  He smiled, whispered something about how great it was to meet someone who actually liked coffee and got me my coffee.  For free.

That week I found It's a Grind, which is the coffee favored by Mary-Louise Parker's character on Weeds.  I thought it was fictional until my neighbor in SF told me he was considering opening a franchise.  He told me that the coffee was better than Peets, which I took as being rather harsh and unnecessary, like sticking your finger in someone else's nose, but he said it and I'm just reporting back to you what he told me.  Anyway, I couldn't find a Peets and I was curious about this place so when I passed one on Vermont Avenue, I stopped in.    

It must have been a brand-new franchise, the slighly sour odor of freshly laid carpet mixing with the faint smell of desperation and hope.  The denizens appeared to be the sorts who wouldn't make it in any established coffee shop, which is to say they looked unfriendly, antisocial and not a little paranoid, the sorts who would make Harvey Pekar look positively Ryan Seacrest-esque. 

But the coffee:  it was excellent.  I got a cup of their House Blend which was nice, a little bright but hitting all the right notes.  I decided to get a pound and this was when I began to worry about the survival of this place.  I ordered a pound of the Tanzanian Peaberry ground for a cone drip.  If you buy coffee often enough where they grind it for you, you know that this should be a #4 or 5 grind. Of course, if you work at a coffee shop that sells and then grinds beans, you should probably also know that too.  And this guy didn't.  He then also told me that no one's ever ordered that kind of coffee before and he didn't know what it was like.  When you come back, please tell me what it's like, he said.  Again, I worry for the place. 

The coffee was surprisingly delicious but the experience of getting it was too stressful, and besides, the Coffee Bean is closer to home - and therein lies to path to ruin.

If you buy a pound of coffee from the Coffee Bean, you must not assume that the coffee was roasted anytime in the last month, nor that it will taste anything like the description.  You are after all getting coffee from a place that caters to the non-coffee coffee drink lover, which is as much a red flag as eating at a burrito place (again, me and the burritos) where if you order a carne asada burrito they ask you, "Yeah, but what kinda meat you want?"  (This is a true story which fills me with rage every time I think of it.)  So it can't be a surprise that the coffee was Not Good.  What was a surprise is that with every pound of Not Good Coffee they give you a packet of coffee filters.  Weird.  Like that makes up for it. 

Instead, I am glad to be finally through the pound of the Coffee Bean's crap beans. 

I have learned my lesson and will search for Peets and for my beloved Major Dickason's Blend.  Failing that, there's always Folgers.

Better than a Ski Jump

Anyone who's driven or walked up the City's steepest hills inevitably thinks of Worst Case Scenarios involving various hill-related mishaps, such as an ill-fated rollerblading outing or the tragedy of a nanny whose grip on a stroller fails at an inopportune moment. Occasionally I'll imagine that I'm wheelchair-bound and have rounded the corner, triumphant at my physical prowess at having rolled myself up such a terrifically steep hill, only to lose focus and sail down California, gaining speed until I'm faced with the terrible dilemma of throwing myself out of the chair immediately to stop my descent or to assume the position and just go for the front page death - "'She was a blur,' reported Greta Schfinkelhurst, of Bonn, Germany, on vacation with her husband and two children. 'We thought she would make it until her wheel caught in the cable car tracks,' said John Hauser, a lifelong City resident who specializes in caricatures of movie stars and who happened to catch her descent on video. 'It really was something.' He is considering memorializing Moira's flight down California with a series of caricatures featuring celebrities in wheelchairs, their hair flying in the wind."

Of course, recently the City allowed Jonny Mosely to install a ski jump on Fillmore Street which I wasn't a fan of - in part because it was impossible to get a good view (churlish, I know) but more because of the day and half of helicopters overhead. Helicopters, it turns out, are LOUD. And suddenly I have an urge to yell at kids to get off my lawn.

The ski jump aside, I missed another SF-hill-related event: the dumping of thousands and thousands of SuperBalls on Filbert, Leavenworth and Kearny. So what if it's for a commercial - the end result is sublime.

(Click on pic to see the full photoset on Flickr.)

And then check out the resulting commercial here and read all about the ball drop and the making of the ad here. (Via SFGate Culture Blog.)

Tomorrow: Why "Since U Been Gone" is the new "I Will Survive." (Does it go without saying that this is particularly for the gay and lesbian community? Do straights know all the words to "I Will Survive"? I think not. Get your talking points ready. Perhaps some of you might even care to de-lurk and if Gloria Gaynor in a bitch-fight with Kelly Clarkson doesn't get your little digits ready to tap out a Strongly Worded Comment, I don't know what will. I really don't. Seriously, you would have to be made of stone. This reminds me - let's all give Ted Leo another listen, shall we?)

...And there was light. Really tall light.

Let's just say the other night I did not lose my shirt at poker.

And it was a good night.

Poker is one of those things that favors the intuitive and the math-proficient. I am not the latter and just very barely the former. Why, just the other night I was at a party and having arrived late, still managed to divine - with alarming accuracy - exactly what had transpired before my arrival. I was like some tracker in the Old West, only without the chaps and the suspicious horse scent. I was the Searcher of dinner parties. So: intuition - check. And yet not so much with the math. Poker, game of odds, blah blah, but I think that I am very slowly getting better at it.

Let me share with you my secrets. Come, let's walk and talk, shall we?

1. Poker is like Spanish or pool. Sober, you will play like crap. Or your accent will be teeerible. (This, of course, depends on which analogy you choose. In this respect, this entry is like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games of your youth, unless you are currently a youth, in which case GO TO BED.) However, after a few drinks, you'll find yourself making that shot and being able to roll the R's in ferrocarril, and why you'd want to say 'railroad' in Spanish while playing pool is between you and your god. But then you will mysteriously get 'overserved' or, as my mom says, 'you will get some bad ice,' and you will unceremoniously fall out of the billiards groove you were in and perhaps off your chair, and your partner will say incredibly passive-aggressive things like "You know we're stripes, right?" You may also find it impossible to utter cerveza without sounding like someone who has been dropped on his tongue and then rolled in peanuts. (Did I mention that person would be allergic to peanuts? Because that would really paint a picture.)

So the take-home for point #1 is Pace Yourself. Unless, of course, point #2 applies.

2. Poker is a game of chance! Sometimes you just get crappy cards. Sometimes you get crappy cards all night and you keep buying in and everyone goes "tee hee" while refilling your wine glass and suddenly you get home and your wallet's lighter. But it's okay because you're only out ten bucks but you drank thirty bucks of your friends' syrah collection. And if you think I'm a delight sober, you should hear the stories I'll tell after a few glasses of syrah.

People, I put the rack in raconteuse.

Hey, this reminds me of a thing that happened the other night at the Posies concert. While enjoying the fifteen minutes of relative quiet between the two opening acts, my friends and I were catching up on who have you seen, how are they doing, who's pregnant (because we're apparently at that age), who looks pregnant (because we're catty bitches), and so forth. Amidst this gossipy froth, my friend mentions that she saw this mutual friend of ours a few weeks earlier. Let's refer to her at the MF.

So, the MF is also an attorney and is someone I used to work with once upon a time when I was making the big bucks and wondering exactly how many billable hours it would take for me to off myself. As I don't own a gun and was in an office that lacked the red reflector that signalled that the window could be kicked out in case of an emergency/suicidal impulse, I discovered it would take at least .2 hrs. I would enter it right below the entry for "Admin: Compose suicide note on Outlook - .5 hrs."

The MF and I were technically in the same practice group but we never worked together. We ran in the same circles, however, and saw each other often at various high-falutin' social engagements over the years. And last week I described her as a desk lamp of a woman, forever looming over people at cocktail parties. She was one of those people with absolutely no respect for your personal space which is why, when talking with her, I would stand leaning back on one leg with the other leg jutting out in front, thus creating a safety circle. With a glass of wine in one hand and a wrinkly cocktail napkin in the other, I looked like I was about to steal second. This isn't to say she wasn't delightful, because she was, and if I were that tall and skinny maybe I would literally lord it over the hot Latina by the cheese tray too. But T. said that calling someone a desk lamp is kind of mean but I thought no, what would be mean is describing her as one of those battery-powered Moon Pie-sized lights that my parents have strewn randomly about the house, apparently assuming that if there's a black out and you fall down that your odds of lighting the way are - well, how should I know? Math never was my strong suit.

Incidentally, the MF is NOT Allison Janney.

Ring of Ire

Remember that Christopher Guest/Billy Crystal bit from SNL where they're competitive sadomasochists comparing particularly painful moments? "One time? I got this knitting needle lodged in my belly button, and I just twisted and twisted and twisted it... Ooh, I really hate that."

Except for the getting off on the pain part, the bit resonated with me because as I child I was the Queen of the Worst Case Scenario. Scenarios spanned the range from mundane, old lady worries - "Don't ride your bike without shoes or your toes will get caught in the spokes and where will you be? TOELESS!" - to the Wildly Implausible and thus more bizarre: riding in the backseat of my parents' car, I'd gaze out the window and think, "Wouldn't it be awful if, while escaping a gang of crazed lunatics armed with machetes and lemon juice, you had to jump on top of a semi? And then you're barely hanging on to the top of the truck because it's all swerving because the driver heard the thunk and looked in his side mirror only to see a bunch of lunatics hurling machetes and lemons at his rig and finally when he's driven off and the coast is clear, you pull yourself up over the top of the truck in order to get a look around and AT THAT VERY MOMENT you go under a too-low overpass and you get decapitated. That would suck."

You can humor me now and assure me that I'm not the only one who has this anxiety porn. (Did I say 'has'? I mean, ha ha, 'had.' Past tense. Oh, putting away childish things now, etc., etc.) I'm convinced that I'm in good company in worrying too much about, oh, dropping my cell phone in a PortaPotty, or having my keys slip from my grasp and careening into a sewer grate. I am also certain that I'm not the only one who's ever hesitated when stepping into an elevator, wondering how much it would suck to drop something into the crack between elevator and floor.

Which brings me to Monday night.

See BRP 2005 v. 4.2. With improved fitness comes a surprising side effect: my fingers - never what anyone would consider pudgy - have nonetheless slimmed down further. All that time playing air guitar has really paid off; the phalanges are mere shadows of their former selves. That or the low sodium soy sauce is no joke because the digits are svelte.

Late Monday night I arrived home to find my parents about to go to bed. The underfootedness of my parents is the topic for another post (or a book or, more likely, years and years of therapy) but suffice to say they re-arrange the furniture when they get here, use every glass in the house and leave bottles of various 'meds' on every inch of counter space. They are, in other words, getting back at me for the brief period in my teenage years when I might have been characterized as being less than delightful. I also suspect the months I spent howling along to Total Eclipse of the Heart into the stereo speakers every night may come into play. (I figured, wrongly, tragically, that if Bonnie's voice and mine were united practically at the source that no one would realize that it was me - me! - singing along. Forever's gonna start tonight!)

Usually if I get home on the late side, I'll chuck the dog out the patio for a last squeeze before we go to bed but as the furniture elves had been at work, the patio door was blocked by the coffee table. I decided to take the pup out to the street.

Like most things in her life, getting in or getting off the elevator are experiences that THRILL the pup. As we stepped into the elevator, she danced around me with such a fervor that I half expected the elevator to find a magical floor filled to the ceiling with rawhide, kibble and cat poo. Instead, as I turned to push the button for the lobby, I felt a sudden lightening of my right hand and before I could react I heard the heavy clunk of my ring hitting the elevator floor as the door began to close. And then I heard a somewhat subterranean rattle followed by the door closing over the gaping maw which had just digested my ring.

The dog, I'm happy to report, was unharmed.

Strangely, when I realized what happened, I felt exhilarated. At last, after all these years, my fears had been validated - you really can drop something down there and yes, it will suck. But all things considered, it wasn't so bad.

I mean, it beats losing your head to a low-lying freeway overpass.

Melty Goodness

Yesterday I got back from LA and my head's still all fuzzy from an Overload of Fabulous and so I do what? I plop down on the couch and respond to a few work-related emails. Why? Because I am not one to shirk my responsibilities. One of the several emails I did not reply to was one from someone who bragged that he was an ad for Blackberry because he was writing the email from a tropical beach. Let's just get our collective heads around that one, shall we? You're on the beach, having a lovely time, what with the sun, the beach, the chicks in bikinis, the neverending margaritas... and then, what ho? A pudge of a man rapidly turning barn red furiously stabbing at the mini-QWERTY which is getting smaller and smaller with every banana daiquiri guzzled, and then later that night in the hotel lobby, you overhear him dazzling the slower-moving vacationers, i.e. old people, with fascinating tales of "the best of both worlds!" and "never out of touch with work!" and "just somebody, please, won't you kick me in the head and put me out of my misery because without my job I have zero identity and no anecdotes to share with complete strangers?" Somehow, I doubt this is the ad that Blackberry imagined.

Then again, what do I know from marketing? I cry at dog food commercials.

As I was saying: Los Angeles. Lovely, smoggy, incredibly hot Los Angeles, with its car culture, In-and-Outs and fake boobies. Frankly, it's starting to appeal to me. But more on that later. Instead, let's chat about this trip, or:

What's Not to Love About Psychics?

The reason I was in LA was that La Reina Fabulosa, a/k/a my cuz-in-law EB was turning 30. Actually, she turns 30 today but who's gonna celebrate on a Wednesday? Exactly. So, her friends and my cousin, the hair model (it runs in the family), threw this lovely house party last Friday which featured, among other things, grilled cheese and a psychic. Of all the weaknesses that I have, and let's face it, I have many - the top 20 would include psychics and cheese. Perfect for a lactose-intolerant skeptic.

The psychic was named Lana and she read palms. She read palms using a cheap red flashlight (which did not instill confidence) and mumbled something about this being the life line, this being your fate line and then something about your non-dominant hand being the hand of the past. Wait - "Hand of the past?" I inquired. "Like past life?" "No," said Lana. "That is the hand of what might have been had you made different choices." I'm thinking that that really isn't so much past as a lovely example of what happens if Gwyneth gets on one elevator or the next, and it turns out that a smart bob is in one future and not in the other. (I just made that up, but then this was back when I actually watched Gwyneth flicks and before she got on my nerves as a pretentious twat with the eyes of a kicked puppy.)

The reading was charmingly off-point. "You love your job, your family is very financially well-off..." and I just let it wash over me and focused on her manicure and the phenomenon of psychics and boy, isn't that Patricia Arquette awesome, until she said that if I hired her for a more in-depth reading that she could help me discover what kind of man I would marry. I then got an image of me taking out a few twenty dollar bills and summarily lighting them on fire.

Eek! A Mouse

Yesterday as I caught up with a friend on the phone, I spied a little gray something running across my patio. "Where does a mouse end and a rat begin?" I asked my friend, who then went on about length of the tail, blah blah, which I quickly interpreted to mean that if you see it and you're all oogy, it's a rat. If you see it think, "eh, kind of cute," it's a mouse. This established, the mouse made himself comfy under my camellia tree. I ran - okay, walked - out and took decisive action by picking up an empty flower pot with which I intended either to brain him or capture him, depending on his reflexes and my aim. Yeah. Well. According to my right hand, I successfully captured him and then released him in the wild, after calling everyone I knew to brag about my lightning-quick reflexes. However, according to my left hand, I stood with the pot held aloft and watched as Not So Speedy Gonzales moseyed into a cluster of flower pots on my neighbor's patio. I just stood there dumbly for a minute or so, pondering what might have been, when my neighbor came out and we shared elaborately embellished tales of mouse-catching. Such is life in the big country.