You always take the weather with you

You know what's weird? Denver has had a crazy winter of seemingly ceaseless snow so far, and yet when I was there, it was pleasant and sunny and most of the remaining snowcover disappeared.

But now? I'm back in California and guess where the freak snow is falling?! Oy.

It's been sort of a fucked up winter all the way around, hasn't it? Oh global climate change, you silly joker.

Tangentially, that's one thing I've just never gotten used to about California, especially coming down out of the Sierra into Sacramento. Snow and palm trees just don't mix in my mind. And yet, here they are.

I'm back. Honest.

So, I'm back from vacation. And it was lovely. Really!

I always have such a complex mix of feelings when I go "home" to visit my family and when I leave again to come back here-home. I mean, I love my family, of course, so I can't help but confront the question of why I live so far from them, what I'm doing with my life, and all the crazy muck that dredges up.

And maybe because of that, there's usually a little bit of relief when I throw myself down on my own couch again, because I don't have to face these questions and feelings again for a while. Out of site, out of mind.

So it's a crazy carnitas platter of emotion, spiced with some salsa of regret, topped with the guacamole of love, a side of refried comfort, covered in melted relief and wrapped in a tortilla of guilt.

At any rate, upon arrival in snow-covered Denver, Mom picked me up at the airport and we headed straight to the mountains after a brief pause to repack and load the truck. Sunday on the slopes was crazy -- avalanche control had closed I-70 for much of Saturday, which meant everyone came up on Sunday to ski, and I had never seen such lines at the lifts.

But the weather cooperated, the crowds eased on Monday, and Caden tore up the slopes with us the 2nd day while Grant hung out in the village and lodge with the, uh... stepsisters. Which is the right term, but just feels so strange to use. Anyway, we all had a terrific time.

And the rest of the week went by too quickly, with some time at the zoo, Denver Art Museum, the planetarium and Imax, school auction setup, and all the miscellanious activities that fill up a family's busy routine. So unlike my own routine, which is hollow in comparison and doesn't seem to be filled up by any amount of metaphorical Mexican food.

I'm not dead

(3/16/2007)

I didn't hit a tree.
I'll update soon.

We never change do we no, no

And by we, I mostly mean me, being totally strung out before taking time off.

I'm leaving Saturday (at 6am) for a week with the fam back home-ish in Colorado. It's going to be fun, I've been looking forward to it for months, I'm taking my snowboard gear and we're heading straight for the slopes when I get in at noon. So that's all the good and the yay and the yippee and the can't wait.

But the flip side of that is, of course, that I'm coming down to the wire, again, at work, trying to get stuff done and prepare everyone for my being out. It's true, I may not be that adept at time management, but I've been working really hard to get this stuff dealt with. But between Jury Duty, dental hell, and all the usual day-to-day whackiness, I'm not left much time for things like documentation, requirements feedback, training, etc. And of course, again, I'll be out just as new stuff is rolling out, leaving people who are less, um, familiar with stuff, to handle things on their own.

And I haven't even begun to get my stuff together for the actual trip. The stress! The lack of sleep! No wonder I have no problem sleeping on airplanes -- it'll be such a relief once I've made it that far.

So anyway, I'll be out of touch for a week or so. If anyone cares. I'm just sayin'.

More Happy

I don't drink Pepsi. In fact, I hardly drink soda much at all anymore, but when I do, it's Coke. However, you may recall me mentioning a Pepsi commercial filming that I walked into the middle of a while back. Well I just saw the end result on TV and it's all San Francisco shots. In fact, a good chunk of it takes place on my street. Watch carefully as he rolls down the straight tree-lined stretch of Lombard below Coit Tower and you can see my apartment building very briefly. So that's cool. Watch the ad (but drink the Coke).

The Saga Continues

Well, boys and girls, I still have my tooth, such as it is. It may be hollowed out, filled with gutta percha, built up with some magic fake tooth material, and covered in a temporary crown, but it's still embedded in my upper jaw bone. So that's something.

After undoing all of the original work from a few years ago, the dentist seemed pretty confident that the root wasn't cracked anywhere, which is what would have forced a complete extraction. He said there's still a chance this one won't work, in which case he'll still have to take the tooth, but he's optimistic. Of course, he also said that the best we can hope for is that this one will only last about ten years, and then the tooth will probably have to come out anyway. Which, jeesh. I was tempted to say let's just get it over with. But upon further reflection, I'm happy to put off the additional pain, both physical and fiscal, until the semi-remote future.

But let's talk about pain for a moment anyway, shall we? So, I know people who've had root canals and claimed it wasn't so bad. I, however, distinctly remember, as I've mentioned, the feeling of my nerves being plucked like guitar strings. The dentist claimed this time around wouldn't be so bad because the tooth was already dead and all. Ha. I learned several things during my 2 hours in the dental chair on Friday.

1) Dentists lie. I already knew this, of course, but continue to be duped repeatedly because they seem so nice, I give people the benefit of the doubt, and I'm stupid like stone.
2) I metabolize novocaine (or lidocaine or xylocaine or whatever the hell local anesthetic they use) faster than the ordinary person. Basically he'd get about twenty minutes of work done before I'd jump, white-knuckled and wide-eyed, at some jolt of pain mumbling "Mpphh-hmmmm" when he'd pointlessly ask "you feel a little something there?" So he'd shoot me up again and off we'd go. At one point, he just gave up and would warn me about certain things, saying "You'll probably feel this a little, sorry about that." No wonder people would just die of dental infections before anesthetics were discovered.
3) Apparently the jaw bone is highly ennervated, which more than makes up for the lack of living nerve inside my molar.
4) One of the levels of Hell without a doubt involves laying on your head in a dental chair, blinding light in your eyes, a rubber block propping open your jaw, trying to breath through your nose but feeling some errant sinus drainage blocking that route while a stretched rubber sheet is effectively smothering your attempt to breathe through your open mouth where the saliva is accumulating anyway, being asked to open up even wider though your jaw is so fatigued you start to shake, then being told to not move a muscle while three different implements and two hands are wedged between your jaws lest the whole procedure has to start again while your swallow reflex meanwhile suddenly becomes uncontrollable and your tongue starts flailing about impertinently. Oh Sisyphus cakewalked into eternity by comparison.

Bad to the bone

Ok, I should explain that usually I'm really a glass-half-full type. I know my posts lately have been a little manic, and so have I. But this is the exception, I swear. Unless I've turned that corner onto the one-way road to bitterness and despair. Which, seriously folks, is a possibility.

Anyway, on the good news side, my jury service is complete! Both prosecution and defence rested their cases on Monday, and we heard closing statements yesterday. After sitting through the juror instructions and a tutorial on the applicable laws, I was released yesterday afternoon and just got word this evening that the jury reached a verdict: the guy is guilty on both counts. Which is pretty much what I thought, but it still would have been interesting to get to debate that with 11 other people and arrive at the conclusion together. But whatever. Always a bridesmaid. At least it didn't carry over into my upcoming vacation or anything.

What may actually carry over into my time off, however, is the latest in the woe-is-me saga. Remember my unexplained mystery health issue of a few months ago? Well, everyone finally agrees that it's most likely a tooth issue. And not just any tooth, but the very one that had the root canal. The root canal that I never wanted to experience anything remotely resembling ever again.

My dentist told me today that it's probably leaking (!!) and so I'm going back tomorrow to experience something not just resembling the root canal, but in fact that very root canal all over again. See how the lightning strikes over and over from my own personal dark cloud? But wait, there's more! If the old root canal is leaking because the tooth's root is cracked, which is a distinct possibility and one that can't be ascertained until the dentist is rooting around inside my head, then -- get this -- he'll have to extract the tooth!!

Sweet merciful mother of crap. I knew this is the sort of thing that happens when you get old, but I'm only thirty-three! That's too young to be toothless. And? If it comes out, I should get an implant, an actual metal screw anchored into my skull. Which insurance will hardly cover. So I'm about to feel some serious pain in both my palate and my wallet.

No one mentioned the option of just letting it go on leaking, but that sounds pretty ok by me.
I think I'm going to go cry now.

**No pictures with this post. I just did a Google image search for tooth implants and nearly fell out of my chair in horror.

Bum-pee road to work

When I was young and naive and my urban experiences were limited to driving through Denver to visit my grandma in Littleton, I thought living in a city must be grand and exciting. Of course, now that I have spent the last 14 years enjoying all the wonderful joys of the urban existence, I can say with some authority that it ain't all glitz and glamour. Oh no, it requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude just to go about your day.

As I've mentioned before, I walk to and from the office everyday with my co-worker/neighbor/friend Janet. It's a 1.5-mile 30-minute walk from North Beach through the Financial District to South of Market on Second at Harrison. All perfectly pleasant neighborhoods filled with coffee shops, restaurants, people in suits, shops, tourists and so on. And yet, this walk demands vigilance.

What I mean is that rarely a day goes by that we're not walking past some fresh horror: trying to avoid the mystery splatter of chunky ick in the middle of the sidewalk, holding our breath past the steaming sewer grate, stepping over the running puddles of bum pee, desperately dodging the tubercular coughs of the toothless woman with smeared lipstick ruddying her gaunt cheeks, avoiding eye contact with the crusty young psychotic who punctuates his constant mumbling with epithetic outbursts and wild gesticulations, staring straight ahead pretending not to see the pantsless person squatting between parked cars to the left while skirting the fresh pile of excrement to the right. It's sad, but it's become second nature to not even acknowledge these things, discussing instead butterflies and puppies and rainbows and mountain springs. Blinders are necessary else we'd be forever clutching each other in gagging repugnant depression.

I did wish I'd had my camera today, though. Not to poke fun at the less fortunate or anything like that, but simply to capture the moment. One of the old homeless guys who hangs around near the office had on a Monster.com hat and I couldn't help but smile at the wry incongruity.

Yes, life in the big city is so much more than I ever expected.

Voir dire of inevitability

I should have known. I really should have. It's just the way my luck runs. And yet I never seem to take the lesson to heart; instead I continue to test the fates, hoping the winds will blow differently to shift the raincloud out from over my fortune, drowned as it is in absurdities and mixed metaphors.

They say lightning never strikes twice, but I sometimes feel that it continues to zap me repeatedly, figuratively defying the odds in singling me out and leaving me stunned and bewildered but missing any marks as proof that something strange and ridiculous and hellishly divine may have just occurred to me alone, just as it quite literally did nine years ago while I was out for a solitary stroll along the empty shoreline with a borrowed umbrella for a lightning rod.

Anyway, this week was nothing nearly that improbable. Instead, rather than postpone to a future and, quite possibly, equally bad time, I answered my call to Jury Duty in the hope that, as a purely numbers game, I would walk away unselected. And that was clearly my first mistake.

Naturally my number came up Monday, so I reported to the Jury Room at the Hall of Justice on Tuesday at 1pm, still hoping for a reprieve. Of the several hundred people sitting around bored, reading, napping, and trying to conduct business in absentia, surely the majority of us would walk away without getting called into a courtroom. And my confidence grew as first one, then two, then three courts were filled or canceled without me. Several hours passed and the end of the day drew near and one court remained, and obviously my confidence was mistake number two.

Of course, among the 75 or so people ultimately assigned to courtroom 17, I was still sure that I would walk away. And in fact, all afternoon on Wednesday, I sat in the back of the room, uncalled, as the jury box seats were filled and reshuffled. 24 people whittled down to 12. Come back Thursday at 1:30. Seats 13-23 are refilled with the computer's random selections - a wave of relief washes over me as it becomes clear that they can't let all those people go. Even when I was called to fill that very last seat, #24, I still thought I would get to go home at the end of the day. I'd seen who they let go, I knew how to answer the questions to be excused: Guns are bad, that hypothetical question is pointless, it's difficult to set aside emotion to consider just the facts.

And yet, one by one, the seats in front of me emptied and I was left to occupy seat 13. And despite going through the motions with another 11 people, the counsel finally had no objections and I was sworn in as Alternate Juror #1. Seriously?! Seriously! Not only do I have to sit through the whole trial, but I likely won't even get to deliberate! I know this because it's precisely what happened the last time I was called to Jury Duty three years ago.
Oh the suckage.

This is why I don't gamble with money.

Cheeky monkey

This has probably been around for ages, but I just discovered it and it absolutely kills me. What do you get when you cross two young tigers with an agile gibbon? Hilarity, I tell you.

I'm 33 for a moment

Welp, there you have it. Another birthday has come and gone, sweeping past like a commuter train, knocking me aside with its gusty bluster and leaving me unbalanced by the tracks in its turbulent wake while the litter swirls and settles, strewn about hopelessly.

How did I get here? Why didn't the train slow down? Will I still find myself bewildered trackside when the next one comes? Is it possible to have a one-third-life crisis?

Aren't you glad it floats for all your zestfully clean as a whistle parts

So here's something strange:
I was running some errands at lunch today and wandered into the giant Walgreen's up on Market St, past the huge Old Navy. I only really needed one thing here and that was some soap, as my current bar in the shower is down to an impossibly thin sliver that will break in half any morning now. Anyway, I wandered the aisles of candy bars, snow globes, cheap toys, plastic cablecars, hair dye and feminine hygiene products and finally found the soap aisle. But, all the bar soap was inexplicably shelved behind locked plexiglas doors.

What the...? I mean, a few aisles over were the unprotected razors, and in the other direction all the cough syrups and unregulated dietary supplements were free to be plucked from the shelves. But here in front of me, the Dove and Ivory and Irish Spring were impossible to reach without the daunting task of first finding a store clerk.

I recognize that this store is questionable-neighborhood adjacent. It's basically in the liver of the shopping district though, and visited by thousands of regular shoppers in addition to the local homeless population. And should the store really be upset if their biggest problem is shop-lifted bar soaps? I mean, shouldn't we all be encouraging the personal hygiene of the unfortunate souls who can't afford to bathe in weeks or months?

What's doubley strange is that in the Walgreen's a block and a half away, at the overlap of the shopping district's duodenum and the bladder of the Financial District, the bar soap was out in plain site, free for the nicking. That store doesn't seem to have a similar problem; like maybe stealing soap for a bath in the fountain isn't worth an extra block's walk.

I, however, was more than happy to cross the street to pay for my Lever 2000 without having to find someone to unlock a cabinet. But I'm still not entirely sure I understand what's going on here.

Goodbye Blue Sky

Somewhere along the line I became a TV junkie. I'm not sure exactly when it happened in the latest incarnation, though I definitely experienced a surge immediately after college, due in part to the complete lack of TV I watched for 4 years.

But between then and now, I feel like I had a life - I went to bars, I finished my weekly Economist and monthly Discover magazines, I went dancing, I met with friends, I went to movies, I went hiking, I made pottery, I got on my bike several times a week.

So when did all these things stop? I still want to do many of these things, so it's not like sitting in front of the TV is just a filler activity for lack of anything better to do. I sort of blame my TiVo, though that's not entirely fair just because it's made it easier for me to watch all the things I wanted to watch anyway. Some of it is the sheer explosion of good (or entertaining, if not quality) hour-long programs across the cable spectrum. It's shocking to me that I can watch a couple hours of TV every evening before bed (spreading the load out across the week) as it is, not even counting all the TV to be caught up on via the glory of DVDs.

The beauty of the DVD (and here, briefly, my life and blogspace again parallels Ebony's) is that you can watch an entire season in one red-eyed Ben&Jerry's-fueled pajama-wearing weekend of commercial-free numbitude. Which is what I have basically just done. Yes, the last thing I needed was yet another TV show to watch, but Netflix, in all its nefarious fabulosity, delivered unto me the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica. The modern, one, if I must specify.

And it is gripping, I tell you. I can't pull myself away -- and not just because of Jamie Bamber's biceps. We'll see where it leads, but this is how sci-fi should be done. Of course there are cheesy bits, and I'm totally a sucker for good civilization-ending epic disaster dramas, especially ones focussed on the human element told through well-fleshed out characters (à la The Forge of God [no, I haven't completely forgotten how to read, and thank you Joy for letting me lighten your move from LA by absconding with those books]). But they've also managed to throw in fascinating political and philosophical elements against this sci-fi backdrop.

Hopefully I can push through the entire series (so far) within the next couple weeks before Lost returns. And don't even talk to me about the movie situation - guess the remaining 469 items in my Netflix queue are going to have to wait till summer when TV is in reruns, perfect weather be damned. I've lived in California long enough to stop feeling guilty about staying inside on a glorious day; there will be more.

Because it means the molecules aren't moving

I didn't have a single good reason to move to California, but there are many reasons I've stayed. One of them is that I'm in control of the weather. I mean, in the heart of summer, if I want to experience staggering sweltering heat, I can head a few miles inland; or if I want biting chill and gloom, I can head over to the beach. In the fall, if I want rustling autumn-colored leaves, I head up north a little ways; but if I feel like bougainvillea blossoms and palm trees, I head a little south. When I long for ear-tingling cold air and snow, I drive up into the mountains. But I can always return to my weather-neutral city where it's perpetually 68 degrees. Or so it seems.

So that reason's been blown all to hell lately. Not to be a whiner, but California is not supposed to get this cold. Seriously. It's been in the low 30's overnight for a week now in the City. Hello? We don't have insulation. It's not like the plumbing's freezing, but I turned my thermostat down all the way while I was gone this past weekend and when I came home the heat was still on just trying to maintain the minimum temp. And during the day? Oooh, it got up to whopping 45 the other day. That's ludicrous. Even I, who usually make fun of the parka-clad wusses, have been wearing my winter coat.

It's a very strange thing to be bundled up in a coat and gloves, shivering as you wait for the car to warm up, while driving past rows of towering palm trees.

And in Tahoe this weekend? Jebus. It reminded me of Wyoming. Snowboarding was great fun despite the concrete snow and occasional stump hazards, but it was fucking cold. It was like 2 degrees overnight in Tahoe. The lake never freezes over, but it was sure contemplating it, let me tell you. And I gotta say I don't really miss the nose-hair freezing feeling of frigid air inhalation, the chill-induced finger-bending slowmo, or the prickly heat tingles of defrosting.

Enjoy your oranges, tangerines, strawberries and avacados now, because you might not be able to afford them for the next two years. *sigh*

Oh well. Thanks, Universe, for the reminder that my sense of control was really just an illusion anyway.

And I went down to the demonstration, To get my fair share of abuse

Because I'm well aware that I'm the one to blame for this mess, I try to make it a point not to complain about work or my job -- beyond the usual wouldn't-it-be-great-to-win-the-lottery-and-never-work-again talk (and anyone who says they'd keep working because they'd get bored or wouldn't want to disrupt their lives clearly doesn't deserve the lottery money). But tonight, as I sit at my desk at 8:07 pm eating a dinner of Cheetos and Famous Amos cookies from the vending machine, I'm really tempted to do some serious bitching.

This is my own fault too, of course. I'm the one who said yesterday, "I'm going to head home a little early today so I can get some stuff done in preparation for the weekend." When last night got blown all to hell and I was at work late, like an idiot I put it out there again today. "Today I'm definitely heading home by 5 so I can get everything done I wasn't able to do yesterday." Clearly this is just the bait fate likes to lunge for, clamp down on with its chitinous jaws, and yank away in the opposite direction.

And tomorrow will surely be no different. Because tomorrow I must leave at a reasonable hour. I don't really have a choice. I have to pick up a rental car before the place closes, and I have to throw all my snowboarding gear and weekend wear (unwashed as it will be since I obviously haven't made it to the laundromat before closing this week) into said rental car and drive to The Sac where I will be spending the night before proceeding to Tahoe for a weekend of winter. Obviously that means I will be late, unprepared, hit traffic and get no sleep.

But yay! Snowboarding!

Green Disease

So, it being the start of a new year and all, I did a very adult thing and decided to drop a lump sum into my Roth IRA rather than make regular deposits throughout the year (the better to earn interest, my dear). This, then, got me to thinking about my 401k.

Since they stopped sending paper statements, I've paid little to no attention to this account, which, it turns out is probably a good thing. Now, I'm far from a financially responsible person, believe me, but I have been funneling a certain percentage of every paycheck away since I was eligible to do so, and I just pretend that money does not exist.

Well, I dug up my login info and had a little look-see, and suddenly wished I hadn't. The problem is, of course, that this is retirement money and that I can't actually do anything with it now, unless I wanted to take a loan against it, which I'll only do when I decide to buy a house and/or have a steady secure income doing the thing I foresee me doing for a while so I can pay it back.

Anyway, so here I was, staring at my screen, salivating and calculating and gnashing my teeth. Don't get me wrong, it's not a mint vault or anything. But it's certainly a fistful of dollars more than I have currently available with which to, you know, buy a new iPhone (Mmmm, sexy Apple gadget.... alalglgllgghghgh....).

And I was overcome with this terrible greedy impatience. I actually started doing math. Math! for crying out loud. And here's what I learned: at the current rate of return, if I quit my job and ceased making payments, it'll take 25 years before I'm a millionaire. And that seems too far away and like still not enough.

What's happened to me?

Sick boys, naa na na naa

I've really got nothing much to talk about, but I'm trying not to let too much time pass between posts. That should be one thing I can do this year. Especially since I'm not exactly accomplishing much of anything else lately. I had grand visions of going snowboarding, or sorting through the mail pile, or accomplishing the heap of non-essential laundry, but sadly none of these things happened this weekend. It was a lovely weekend weather-wise, too, but rather than go for a hike or a bikeride, here I sit inside having gone through almost an entire tissue box and trying very hard not to cough up a lung. Again. Dammit.

Holiday quiet on these streets

Well, the holidays are over, the new year's begun, and things are slowly returning to normal. The office was still relatively depopulated, but all the crazy amounts of snacks and fudge and cookies and gift-basket food that was lining the cubicle rows has been cleared away, the grey and curled disaster-waiting-to-happen conflagration tree in the building lobby has been removed and its needles swept up, and talk has already turned to Presidents' Day in February.

Jen visited me this weekend (she'll have to write about her travels, though, because wow) and we went out to a comedy show across the street for NYE. It was a a great show and a good way to spend the evening. Yay! But now that she's back in LA and the roommates are back home and not working, the next thing I've got to look forward to is snowboarding with the family in Denver. Which is going to be blast, but just seems so far away.

It's funny, I rarely get wrapped up in the holidays (har har), but still there's a little post-holiday depression. I'm sick for the second time inside a month, the worst of the rainy season lies ahead, there's no day off for a month and a half, and I already know I'll be breaking my resolutions. And the discarded remains of the season are piling up curbside quite literally on every corner, in a sad display of wasted resources (though arguably getting chipped into mulch isn't so bad).

But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit, sin’ auld lang syne

New Haven. Spring 1995. Room 123 in the Kline Geology Lab. Reknowned professor Elisabeth Vrba lectures on Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory. I doze fitfully near the back of the darkened hall.

I trudged dutifully across campus for nearly every lecture, I listened, fascinated, scribbling notes with frantic intent. Yet inevitably within 15 minutes my eyelids would sag, my writing would become unintelligible as my pen left a series of parallel marks trailing off from half-formed words. I would shift in my seat and struggle to pay attention, fighting with all my willpower to remain aware and focussed, pinching my cheeks, tapping my foot, leaning forward. I'd guiltily calculate the tuition dollars that were uselessly dissolving away with my glazing vision and shot at an A. But it was hopeless.

The lecture would melt into the elaborate and ridiculous dreams from the grey area at the edge of oblivion, where tusked antelope roamed across my subconscious with herds of 3-toed horses who'd tell me of the wrinkled peas plucked by the titanothere which awaited me in Gould's rose garden while Mendel wrestled Lamarck amidst the precambrian muds. And in what seemed like mere moments, the lights would brighten, the reading assignments were being handed out, and I would close my notebook, rubbing my eyes and wondering what had just happened.

And so it was with 2006. I have just emerged from a dreamworld wormhole where the many things that have happened seem as though they may have not occured at all but for within the torporific haze of daydream. The lights are raised, people are collecting their things, 2007 has arrived, and my 2006 is littering the alley, scattering before the breeze.

So, here's to being enrolled in a new year. May the best of last year be the worst of the new; may it capture our attention, engage our imagination, thrill us, teach us; may it proceed at a comfortable pace; and may it be memorable beyond compare.

Oh, and...

Happy Birthday, Ms. Adams, Proph Prof Broc Doc!
Welcome to your early mid-thirties!