Rogues' Gallery

Do You Ever Do This?

Sometimes when I am really bored, I employ one of two mind games to distract me. Both involve looking at people and imagining things about them, and both result in me getting completely creeped out. In one mind exercise, I look at people and imagine that they are on drugs. In the other mind exercise, I look at people and imagine that they are the opposite gender than the one they obviously present. Specifically, I look at men and imagine that they are women, and look at women, imagining them to be men. This largely results in me thinking, "That is a really pretty man" or "That woman is super masculine". In the other exercise, I just get creeped out/impressed by how many zombie-junkies there are that manage to get through the grocery store without freaking out.

The problem with this active imagination stuff is that it can be hard to stop doing once you start. Also, when you blog about it, your friends think you are really wierd.

Miscellany

I don't recommend this to my mother or mother-in-law. Wire fans, have at it.



This, on the other hand, should be right up the grandmothers' alley:



This was the hairstyle he had to have.

The Last Generation

I'm not given to wistful, generational hairsplitting, but after that Veterans' Day post, I've been trying to think of other things particular to "my generation" (in my mind, that means people born in 1974). Aside from not serving in armed conflict, what else is particular to us?

We are the last generation to follow the Grateful Dead. And there are probably precious few younger than us that religiously followed a jam band.* I never followed the GD or a jam band, and in fact openly ridiculed others who did, but still, at least it stopped with us.

We are the last generation to be born without a computer keyboard at our fingertips and the first generation to know what to do with one if we see it.

Okay, that's as far as I can get. Can you think of any others?

* For more on my views about jam bands, read this post.

The Things You Do For Love

Some time before college, probably around Christmas 1991, but possibly a year or two later, I got a pair of red plaid flannel pajama pants from my stepfather. These pants were very cozy, but so ugly that they were probably a contributing factor in why Mr. Scobie did not ever bust a move despite being my roommate for three years of our early adulthood. This summer, I finally threw them away, after many false starts (I actually rescued them from the trash and the fabric-for-quilts pile more than once). I got rid of them because they ripped, although that wasn't the deciding factor. I think I finally realized that I wanted Mr. Scobie to stick around longer than the pants, and was tired of hearing him ask that they be thrown away.

Well, Regret, thy name is the red plaid flannel pajama bottoms, because it is freakin' cold up in here.

My 801st Blog Post

Last night, I swear I was gonna blog but I fell asleep at 9:30. I should have done it when I got up at 4:40 am. I can't believe I am still awake right now.

A few months ago, I reported that I was starting a "boot camp" exercise class and that I would update you about that. I haven't - not because I haven't gone, but because I've taken it seriously enough that I don't have anything wry or facetious to say about it. In fact, I had boot camp tonight and it kicked my ass.

Probably not as much as real boot camp would kick my ass though. Reflecting on Veterans' Day today, I struggled to name even a handful of my friends and peers who have served in the military. Mine must be the first generation in history to claim that. We might be the last generation to claim it, too, given the number of people younger than I am who have enlisted and served during two wars in the past 8 years.

Part of me wants to go on a ramble here about Ehrenreich's Blood Rites (a really good book). But in honor of Veterans' Day, I'll just leave it at this. I am grateful to the men and women who serve in the military so that the rest of us don't have to, and for their sacrifices, which I doubt I can match off the battle field in any way.

Forget What I Said About Politics Fatigue

So there's one political race that has me interested these days, and not just for personal reasons. My father's race for Illinois state assembly became unexpectedly exciting today (well, at least to the incumbent). Turns out the incumbent might not have minded her Ps & Qs when she filed her election petition a few weeks ago. One of the funnier things about that link is that "blagojavich" is right there in the url. Even at its most technical and off-hand, the Sun-Times, and most other people, link Deb Mell to her more famous brother-in-law. That was Joe's first suspicion that she might be vulnerable. Being too careless to register to vote may turn out to be the bigger reason she goes home at the end of her term, though.

Trying to Explain a Couple of Things

My previous post inspired as much commenting as I typically get around here, and it seemed to be focussed on "why Twitter?" I thought I'd take a whack at explaining it. As Beth noted, blogging is like long-form Facebook - a regular status update for your far-flung friends and family. In other words, Nana, Facebook is short-form blogging, where you can follow the musings of your far-flung friends and family. I agree that if you don't really care what your sophomore year chem lab partner thinks about the weather/healthcare reform/her asthma, Facebook might not really be your bag. My answer to that is, unfriend her; I find the format to be easier to navigate than jumping around to people's blogs.

Twitter is like that, on speed. With a 140-character limit on posts, you really get bare minimum updates. Which is why Twitter isn't really for updates. At least not of the sort it was originally intended for. "Having coffee with no sugar this morning." "My hip implant is itchy!" and "ayn Rand R cool!" don't tell you much. Twitter is interesting as an exchange of ideas and the rapid fire news update. I learned about Michael Jackson's death, the Fort Hood shooting and the passage of healthcare reform faster on Twitter than from any other news outlet. In that regard, it's only useful if you follow the right number of people. Too many and you really can't follow what people are thinking. Too few and you don't get the "cloud" effect of everyone expressing themselves simultaneously. So what is the "right" number?

I have 325+ friends on Facebook, and only 35 followers on Twitter. I follow 99 people on Twitter. I estimate that only about 40 people regularly read my blog. That might be generous. In any case, I had to blog tonight and thought I would speak in defense of social networking for some reason. Mr. Scobie thinks that all these things are akin to being in the Matrix by the way (he encouraged me to "take the blue pill" today) but I think they just are what they are.

Blogging: Harder Than I Remembered

Ugh! Here it is November 6 and I've already failed to blog 2 days out of 6. And unless I blather on about my kids or how annoying I think phone conferences are, I don't have much to say. Other things you don't need to hear me say include:

• The shooting at Fort Hood is terribly tragic.
• Tuesday's election probably doesn't mean anything about Obama.
• It sure is getting chilly now that it's raining.
• Typing on the iPod is inferior to the Blackberry QWERTY keys, but its browser and apps are more functional.
• One shouldn't wait until 2:30 in the afternoon to eat lunch.
  
• The "point" of Twitter and Facebook continues to be lost on a lot of people, including my contemporaries, who are not the old farts they'd have us believe that they are.

Wow, the list of things I shouldn't blog about is almost endless. What should I blog about?

Carcetti's In Trouble

This Politic Wire headline O'Malley Could Face Trouble in Reelection made me chuckle. For you non-"Wire fans", the character Tommy Carcetti is widely believed to be modeled after Martin O'Malley, the governor of Maryland. That may be putting it too subtly. Other than getting a chuckle from that, I didn't have much response to this year's election. I just felt a deep, deep sense of exhaustion about this year's races, mainly because none of them concerned me directly. I didn't ignore them entirely, but my interest this year was a mere fraction of what it was last year. We have off-years for a reason.

The one race I am watching closely is the Illinois Assembly race for the 40th District. I've got my money on the dark horse. That's right, Joe Laiacona for Illinois' 40th Assembly District. Check him out, home slices.

The Birthday Boy

Liam turns 6 today. A lot of times when kids have birthdays, their parents say, "It seems like only yesterday (sigh) . . ." I don't fee like that. I feel like I've had this kid for a long time, and can't believe he's only been around for six years. I don't know why that is. It certainly isn't because he acts older than six. Maybe it's hormonal. Like at this point, having forgotten what he was like as a baby, I would be biologically conned into having another one. Well, that ain't gonna happen. Anyway, photo of the birthday boy to follow.

What I Blog About When I Blog About Blogging

Apparently, November is National Blog Posting Month. In order to counter my extreme inertia w/r/t the Internets, I thought I would informally participate. Not sure why. But it means I will try posting at least once a day through the month of November.

The title of this post doesn't mean anything, by the way. It's a riff on What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, which I just finished reading. That title is itself a riff on What We Talk about When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Chandler, which I haven't read, and probably won't, since they are short stories and I don't read short stories. But anyway, the Murakami book was pretty good. I don't really like him as a novelist but he's very approachable and likable as a memoirist, and I am trying to turn myself into a runner so I liked the sustenance it provided in that regard.

And so why am I doing that?, you are probably wondering. Or actually, you are probably thinking, Why are YOU doing that? And I don't think I have any particularly novel reasons. I wanted an efficient exercise option, and I got myself strong enough to do it, so in August, I just started. And I like it, and it feels good, and I want to keep doing it. And in order to take it from just an exercise to something that I keep doing, I feel the need to give myself the new identity of runner. Because if you call yourself that, you have to do it. If you call yourself a runner and don't run, then you are really just an a-hole, and lying.

It also feels good to get to age 35 and find that you have new things inside of you that you can be. I want to keep finding new things inside of me. It makes me feel young, which strangely I have been feeling a lot of lately. I thought that I went through "so much" as a kid, and thought I was "so mature", but now that I have rounded the bend of this decade and see 40 on the distant horizon, I feel like I've had a pretty great life and not experienced much at all. At least not many bad things. And in order to keep having new experiences, you have to keep yourself open to being a new person, or at least having new parts of yourself. All of this dawned on me this weekend because I finished Murakami's book, and its sort of about that, and also because a friend tricked me into running 4.5 miles on Saturday, and it wasn't that hard, and it felt great, and it almost felt like I had run through a wall (3 miles) that I didn't know I had put up for myself. Which means there are other walls that I can run through, if I just let myself.

Nelson Marans, Back in the Game

Once a master, always a master. Nelson Marans has a letter in the New York Times Fucking Magazine today. No, I'm not kidding. And possibly for the first time, I agree with him. I tip my hat to you, Mr. Marans. (But I'm too lazy to dig up a link, so if you aren't a subscriber, tough.)

A Problem I Have

The other day I blogged about how I thought the Internet was dwindling in popularity and strongly suggested that I would start talking on the phone again. Truthfully, that isn't going to happen. I have found that I don't particularly like talking on the phone. This made me think that I would revert to older forms of communication: letters, telegraph, etc. Maybe get a party line just to phone Doc or the constable if the kids get ague or a donkey goes missing.

There's something I dislike even more than talking on the phone though, and that's listening to voice mail messages. I have a real aversion to them. At home, I go weeks without checking the voicemail box (voice mailbox?) and get really wound up about checking the messages on my two work phones. I have to psyche myself into it. On my cellphone, I delete them without listening to them as often as possible (when I called the person back while they were leaving the message, for example). It makes me very anxious. I had this problem when I was a lawyer too, but I would just whip myself into dealing with them 99% of the time, because the number one thing that clients hate is not getting called back. Now that malpractice isn't hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles, I can barely deal with them.

Someone I know suggested that I get Google Voice. You get one phone number and it rings to all of your phones, or none of them. The salient feature, for this discussion, is the voicemail transcription, which allows you to never listen to voicemails, and instead get them as emails. Along with its other features, it goes in the absolute other direction from Morse Code that I was dreaming about. But does anyone have any better ideas?

Cutest Scary Ghost Clown Ever?

The Internet Is Over

My blogging laziness is not particular to me. Admit it, you check fewer websites since the election, and your friends' who once consistently blogged are really sluggish, if they still blog at all. Most of your email is junk mail, and you aren't even as swamped at work as you once were. Everyone who accidentally Replied All with, "YES! L is a totally f----ing nightmare!" has gotten their emailing under control and have returned to face-to-face gossip. Okay, so maybe Facebook and Twitter are siphoning off a lot of the traffic but they have lost much of their novelty and are already facing stagnating membership numbers.

I think we are all headed back to the phones -- the land lines even! Or better yet, our desire to communicate, which was spurned by Bell's invention, is finally finding satiety, and we can all go back to something simpler and less communicative. Like gathering around the fire with our banjos and fiddles. Or turning in early. Or reading almanacs. I can't wait! You read it here first!

Jazz Prodigy

My older son has recently become obsessed with playing the saxophone. We cannot figure out the origin of this interest. When asked, he says it's because the saxophone is "beautiful and shiny, like pirate's treasure." He can imitate a sax closely enough that I vaguely worry that he'll be an Ed Begley/Bobby McPherrin-type. I've asked a few music teachers what they think about him learning the sax, and the consensus is that his hands are probably too small. This has no disuasive effect on him. So on Friday, I brought him to Best Music and, with the purchase of a reed, they let him play an alto sax. He also tried a keyless sax (no holes), a trumpet and trombone. The whole store basically gathered around for the show. One guy yelled, "I feel like I'm at Point Reyes!" (foghorn sound), but mainly everyone laughed hysterically and clapped for him. A Japanese couple asked him how long he'd been playing (the trombone). I thought he had died and gone to heaven. The problem is, now he wants to take sax lessons. He's like a dog with a bone. Anyone have any experience with this, with a FIVE year old??

Mild Bitch Session

I recognize that in the scope of world events and history, etc etc, my problems are minor, but I just need to vent for a minute. For six years, I have taken for granted that having a job and kids is a "challenge" - largely logistical. Each twist adds a new layer: One kid to two kids, baby to toddler to boy, to work, to babysitter, to preschool. Teeth, sickness, transition, dinosaurs, airplanes, mushrooms, tantrums, head banging, biting - all this is standard issue. Right now, I feel like we are getting all of it at once, and while I keep telling people that everything's fine, I really think it's hard. Again, its all logistical. Like, thank God, my kindergartner just needs more food in his lunch and not that I can't send anything for lunch at all.

In fact, I won't go down that list-road. Every "logistical difficulty" is a gift. My kids have great schools and teachers and babysitters; we have jobs and all the resources we need to give them what kids deserve. But like when there are too many Christmas gifts to properly enjoy them all, I am feeling a overwhelmed and cranky and want to put some of them in the basement until we are ready to enjoy them.

I am going to take my attempts to get perspective off-line but any words of advice are welcome. I'll be over here trying to put this puzzle together.

Bored?

If you are bored right now, you can play Cheese or Font, which is wicked hard.

If you are bored in the future, I recommend Paladar Temescal. For the moment, it will only take up time on October 24, but it's a lot better than being bored.

What's Up With Me, vol 2.2

This is an Oakland post. I just wanted to report out on a very wierd, topsy-turvy thing that's happening here in Oakland, so that you can enjoy it yourself and maybe even help explain it. But first I want to back up to 2000, which is when I moved here. In 2000, Northern California was going through a recession. The dot-com bust was underway, and Oakland had never really recovered from the earthquake (1989), fire (1991), and recession of the early 1990s. There weren't too many places to eat or see music; folks mainly ventured into Berkeley or San Francisco to do fancy stuff. Mayor "Moonbeam" Jerry Brown had this crazy-ass "10k in Downtown" plan that was widely derided by hipsters and their ilk (i.e. me). He thought if you built middle-income condo-style housing right in downtown Oakland, the city might start to bounce a little, even just downtown.

Okay, well, hat tip to Governor Moonbeam, because now, amidst all this tacky, "loft-style/lifestyle" new construction, there is a booming nightlife in downtown Oakland. A few weeks ago, I went to see a band play at the Fox Theater, which took about 200 years to re-open, but was totally worth it. The building is gorgeous, and the place was packed but comfortable. Good bands are getting booked. The Den at the Fox was packed, as was The Uptown, a bar across the street. We couldn't get reservations at Flora, and there were young people ("kids") just swarming around.

The next night, Mr. Scobie and I had dinner at Ozumo, a huge sushi bar/restaurant with a really wierd scene. And by wierd, I mean, it was totally different from the other crowd the night before. It was mostly young black professionals (which is not wierd), but also people who looked like drag queens and some who looked like professional athletes. The sushi was great but the prices suggested that they didn't know this was Oakland. We then walked over to Mimosa, a new place near the Y (!) which was nice enough, but didn't serve hard alcohol, so I don't know how long they'll limp along with that. Right on the same stretch are Pican, a new upscale soul restaurant and the newly old Luka's. Luka's seems old school now, but in 2000, it was Sam's Hofbrau, where mice would run along the pool table, and you could chip your tooth on the meatloaf (true story).

And since I work downtown now, I also get to experience the boom in lunch spots too. Flora is probably the best, and its usually crowded with Oakland-style celebrities (e.g. Jerry Brown), but the other day I met someone at Cafe Madrid, which is a coffee spot with a really nice little Spanish lunch menu. What the . . .? I thought I would be running the gauntlet of Oaksterdam "students" and instead I can get a decent meal? Color me baffled.

So for those of you who get out of the house in the Bay Area more often then I do, I encourage you to check out Oakland. I didn't even touch on the rest of the insane food scene. There's like 50 (okay, exaggeration) really great restaurants that are nationally acclaimed in Oakland. Step out, and let me know how it is. And big ups to Jerry Brown. This doesn't mean that I'm endorsing him for governor again, by the way, unless he can fast forward 10 years past his administration to a point where California is as nice as the new Oaktown.