Self-Evaluation

I've been in the office since 8am, and it looks as if I'll be here until 10pm. I may as well blog some more.

2008's almost over, and I'm going to the Midwest next week, so now is as good a time as any to look back at my new year's resolutions and how well I failed at them.


(1) Clean my room. I cleaned it eventually, but now it's a mess again.
(2) Start a savings account. Success! And it's 25 dollars strong.
(3) Don't get in any serious bike accidents. Well done there.
(4) Change party affiliation so I can vote in Democratic primary. Yes. I'm now an independent, or whatever we're called here. "Decline to State" or something.
(5) Dental appointment. Sadly, no. It involves picking up the phone.
(6) See optometrist. See item (5)
(7) Sign up for more math classes. No. Still finishing up the old one.
(8) Go on one or more camping trips. Yes, two! One was a disaster, but the other was not.
(9) Get into graduate school. Bastards.
(10) Blog at least once a week. Ha!
(11) Drink less. Amazingly, I have! But mostly because I'm too poor to afford drinks.
(12) Save enough money to travel to Iceland this summer. Perhaps Rome. Alas. See items (2) and (11).

Not so bad. Now: back to sitting in my office for the 14th hour straight. Until next year, reader(s?).

The View from My Recession

We found a new flatmate. He's our thirteenth in three years. Or maybe the fourteenth or fifteenth; I can't keep track anymore. He seems to have two girlfriends. They spend alternating nights at our place, and my first thought was that I must be truly awful at recognizing faces. An ex-addict, current law student, barkeep, and apparently manslut, he does seem interesting, maybe a little too interesting, which is why he wasn't our first choice to begin with. But then, our first choices do keep on disappearing on us--

It's that time of year again; time to apply to yet another masters program that I may as well have picked out of a hat; time to beg profs who don't remember me for letters of recommendation; time to make up a coherent narrative in which I travel smoothly from point A through point B all the way to point C when the true story is much more Lynch than Hollywood; time to ask my boss for money; time for all this merriment, and ah, could it be a more wondrous economic clime?

At least I have a job. A full-time job, with so many people underemployed. I really should not be complaining. My own personal recession could be a lot worse.

I'm late to work all the time now, almost every day. But today I biked to the train at sunrise with brain and body in full revolt, and it was kind of nice. Arriving at the station I felt warm and awake in my windbreaker while everyone else yawned and shivered in their coats. Maybe that's what success feels like.

Screw narrative. This isn't narrative. I don't remember narrative. I don't read novels or stories anymore, I just click through blogs, follow links across the Internet, skim the Economist, apply to three radically different programs in three consecutive years; maybe the lack of narrative is narrative enough. I'm just confusing myself with words now and I think I need another tea. I'll be back again sometime.

Dispatch from Unreal America

Flux? Glacial, for the most part. I hate writing the kinds of posts where I list what I've been doing, get lost in anecdotes, save a file, return to it days later when it looks like old news, and dispose of it accordingly. So I won't even try this time.

I've never seen anything like the streets of San Francisco on the night of November 4. When I left the election-watching bbq at around 11pm there was a wild street party in front of every open liquor store. I tried to get home but instead ran into almost everyone I know. Old roommates, M.'s friends, the skinny hippie who works at the pie shop where we do our math homework. Someone uncorked a bottle of champagne from a nearby roof and showered us with bubbles. Hundreds of godless liberal unwashed unreal Americans hugged strangers, waved American flags, set off fireworks, and chanted "USA, USA." It was truly bizarre, but it was hard to avoid being swept up in the moment.

Well, it was hard for me anyway. M. was off his meds again and more than willing to temper the celebrations with realism. "That drum circle is annoying." Yes, true. "This street party is lame." Yeah, I suppose it could be better... "All these people are going to hate Obama as soon as he's in office and has to make compromises." True as well, but we can think about that tomorrow.

Another reason for celebration: M. and I were broke by the day of the election, I mean counting-quarters-for-coffee broke. But we had bet actual money on an Obama win on Intrade a while back, at the height of McCain's Palin-Convention bounce, the one time this year when his odds were just shy of 50/50. I don't care if all these SF kids hate him by January 20; we made 500 bucks! Now that's change I can believe in.

Frying Pan --> Fire?

Everything's in flux. Will report back when it all settles down, most likely to a whole new equilibrium.

Awkward Lodgings

I followed M. to a conference in Oregon and we made something of a poor man's vacation out of it. Everything was pleasantly green, and the locals were friendly, and the food was cheap (and in Portland, also good), and the weather was warm even through the night. But years from now, I won't remember this trip for being pleasant; I'll remember it for being awkward.

Imagine that you and your boyfriend are staying with your boyfriend's friend Ray in a city that's totally foreign to you. You meet Ray at the restaurant where he works, and as he's driving you back to his house, he lets you know that things aren't going so well at home. In fact, they're downright ugly: he and his live-in girlfriend are constantly fighting. They can't stand each other anymore. Ray has privately decided to flee back to the Midwest, never to see her again. What's more, he had planned to break up with her a week earlier, only to be foiled by your vacation plans. Oops.

"So when are you telling her?" you ask.

"Oh, as soon as you leave," he says.


So you get to his house--in fact, his girlfriend's house, filled with his girlfriend's things--and meet Ray's soon-to-be ex. You get the voyeuristic sense of being witness to something that ought to be private. There's also the discomfiting feeling of walking in the presence of some kind of animated corpse. (And one, I might add, that the girlfriend doesn't realize is dead.) All four of us go out to drinks at a depressing, smoky dive. The resentment between them is palpable, the conversation duly awkward.


To make things slightly better, it was clear that Ray was making the right choice. His girlfriend was abusive, negative, and whiny. She wasn't attractive in any way, physical or otherwise. She lived in a dingy gray house in a dingy gray suburb many miles away from the city center. The house was termite-infested and smelled of rot; its cluttered interior lacked natural light, and the yard was overgrown and filled with trash. Living like this seems mighty depressing. In Ray's place, I would have gone back to the Midwest in a heartbeat.

Being amid the wreckage of a bad relationship made me doubly happy about mine. We bicker sometimes, but we rarely fight. We enjoy being around each other nearly always. We share the same tastes. After almost four years of close proximity, we aren't sick of one another. That has got to count for something.

Meeting Notes

I suppose I am lucky that I have to attend only one meeting a week. As you can imagine though, I take each meeting very seriously. I always make sure to take detailed notes.







On the topic of work, it was evidently not enough that my boyfriend and I shared an apartment, a daily commute, a checking account, and a boss. So now, M. is moving into an office directly across the hall from me! It is a coincidence, but one that fits nicely with the general process of nauseating attached-at-the-hip-dom. Tune in for next episode, in which M. and I buy a tandem bike and matching outfits. Jeezy.

Adventures with Mace

The dog has been spared, for now: her health had deteriorated rapidly, but then it improved just as rapidly. Here's to her living to see her 18th birthday.

A few weeks ago, M. threw two parties back-to-back. It was an exhausting weekend. The second party was an underground affair--twice as exhausting, a zillion times as risky, and, it turned out, maybe half as successful as the legal one. The main act canceled at the last second, claiming that it was all M.'s fault for something-or-other. For an hour and a half I "worked" behind the bar selling drink tickets. Having never worked in any sort of retail, I was absolutely useless at making change, and the veteran bartenders happily let go of me once it started getting busy.

The night ended abruptly at perhaps five-thirty. First the smoke machine set off the fire alarm. Then there was a brawl. A nice nerdy hipster kid from Minneapolis was socked in the face, and someone, we don't know who, sprayed his assailant with Mace. Being a warehouse with no ventilation, the place was soon rendered a box of wheezy fiery pain; the partygoers fled, leaving us there with lungs full of spice and boxes and boxes of booze to bring home to our garage. Heed this advice: underground dance parties are NOT worth the bother, and this one lost money, too.

As long as I'm talking about staying up 'til dawn, here are a few of the heat-wave circa-solstice sunrise pictures mentioned in this post:

Notes From a Future Cat Lady

It's always a little dispiriting to look at the calendar and take note that the solstice has passed; the days are getting shorter again. Already. Neither do I like the way that time, or the way I perceive it, compresses with age. Have three years passed already since graduation, and have I really not moved an inch? I tend toward inertia something awful. If I don't get going I'll still be in this seat twenty years hence, squinting through borrowed contact lenses at, I don't know, Excel spreadsheet holograms, living on the same salary ill-adjusted for inflation, collecting cats and Fassbinder memorabilia in a hovel I wouldn't be able to afford if not for rent control. And that would be capital-L Lame.

The air is thick with smoke from faraway fires. The sky has a bizarre washed-out quality to it; the sun appears filtered through cheesecloth. Setting yesterday it was a dim crimson, like a red dwarf.

I don't remember what I was meaning to blog about but it wasn't this. I blame the lack of sleep. I'm too exhausted even to find myself tea. I don't think I've done a spot of work all day.

Dog

I stumbled upon this link at Andrew Sullivan's website yesterday and it sounds a little too familiar:

There are two general signs that a blog is heading toward extinction. The first is a declining frequency of posting, and the second is a proportional rise in the number of posts about the blog itself. These two don’t always go hand-in-hand; sometimes it’s just one or the other, sometimes you don’t get either warning sign. But when either of the two is spotted it’s reasonable to begin wondering how long that curious internet publication will continue to be updated...

It always seems to be that journals — and blogs — begun with the urgent intensity of someone confident that the simple act of putting their thoughts on paper will clarify or improve them, you soon find that a personal conversation is hard. And whether it’s because you find yourself a poor conversationalist, a slow writer, or an incoherent blabberer the realization generally comes that the results are a little less than magical. The realization dawns that what you’re writing is not really in need of urgent preservation.

So you walk away. You give up. You’ve expelled whatever it was that caused you to create a blog or buy a journal. You’re done with the superfluous recording of everything.

Well, I've been aware for some time that my writing is in no urgent need of preservation. I am not the kind of person to let things die, though. First I let them fade toward a mediocre end so that by the time they're really gone, no one really notices. Not with a bang but a whimper, and so on.

On that note, they're putting down my childhood dog soon. She's nearly eighteen years old now, so she's been with my family for the vast majority of my conscious life. Nearly all of it, in fact--or all, if a third grader is not considered conscious. But I remember the day I brought her home as a puppy. It was January of 1991 and she sat in my lap as we drove her from my grandma's friend's house in the back of the red Nissan pickup truck. My little brother, in Kindergarten at the time, wanted to name her Sally. But she was mine--I'd been heartsick for a dog for years by then--so I named her after a magical cat in a book I'd read recently. Little did I know that I was also naming her after a well-known brand of cat food. Well, we got home and introduced the puppy to my dad, who was lying on the floor reading a newspaper. She promptly peed on his socks. Nevertheless, she was always a great dog.

Here she is in happier times.



And here, a few years ago.


The weather has alternated between furnace and windswept tundra. My life has alternated between dull and frustrating. One night it is too hot to sleep inside, our apartment a greenhouse sweltering even with all the fans turned on. M. is out with the Englishman, phone-less and late enough to worry me all the way to crazytown; I sit out on the roof as the sun comes up, read a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, sip a beer and feel sorry for myself. Granted, I do take some decent pictures. (Not pictured.) Maybe it's the sun's rays that knock some sense into me. By the time M. gets back, I'm not terribly angry, mostly tired. And the next night it's freezing inside. We flick on on the electric yuppie fireplace. I am working on my math homework, making pasta, watching The Wire. I used to watch no television at all, but ever since my bizarre discovery that I can actually get more work done while watching something, I just haven't stopped. Right now it's Arrested Development at work and The Wire at home. But there's also been Dexter, Weeds, Firefly, Heroes, and anything else available online on Netflix or Hulu. I'm worried that I'm becoming too passive a consumer of entertainment.

I'm worried that I'm overcompensating for my lack of posting by writing a novel. A bad novel. Postmodern with a swirl o' vomit. Gbye then.

Old Maui Photos, Part 4

Old Maui Photos, Part 3

Old Maui Photos, Part 2

Old Maui Photos, Part 1

25

I've been miserable at posting. But I'm a quarter-century old tomorrow, and I've never failed to wish myself a happy birthday on my blog. So hello, let me re-introduce myself.

This is Penitent speaking. I'm just about 25 years old. I'm a shit blogger. What's worse, I've become only shittier with time, but I probably don't have to tell you that.

For my birthday I would like:

(1) A year's supply of provigil
(2) Another vacation with M. (Death Valley in April was sublime and I don't know when I'll be able to do something like that again.)
(3) To get into grad school, ha-ha.
(4) A new job
(5) Someone to pay off my credit-card debt accumulated over almost a year of M. being in graduate school and the both of us being addicted to food and drink
(6) Less partying like I'm 19 on weeknights, waking up late, sitting through the day in hangover-induced idiocy, because the whole routine has worn out its welcome. (Or will the provigil fix this, too?)

It's ninety-fucking-thousand degrees outside. Tomorrow my age will be a perfect square. I ate lunch at 4:30pm today while watching Netflix on my work computer, after having arrived here at 12:30-- I am a horrendous employee and a worse blogger and an even worse-er writer.

Hap-pee birth-day tooo meeeee....

I was going to link to last year's birthday post but I must have deleted it.

Instead, a San Francisco sunrise.


And Werner Herzog.

2008: Not My Year

Rejected from grad school #2. I don't know what to do next.

2008 isn't M.'s year either. He's already failed two classes and is on track for failing another.

Revised New Year's resolution: QUIT BEING LOSERS.

I am nursing fantasies of disappearing for the month of August, biking from SF to Vancouver to Denver for the Democratic Convention, but let's see if any of that happens or whether all such fantasies be leveled by penury (as I can only extrapolate they shall).


---

Unrelated photo from last summer:

Speak, Raspberry Ale

I happened upon the blog of a girl who graduated from my college my year. I never met her, though I knew people who knew her, and I was kind of horrified to read how similar her blog was to mine. She wrote about biking to work, close calls with reckless drivers. She posted not-terribly-remarkable photos of things around her. A few days after New Year's, she lazily jotted down a few resolutions--"getting into grad school" was one--and mentioned that she should blog more often because her writing style is deteriorating: she noted, self-consciously, that she was forsaking structure. She then proceeded to blog sporadically. Just how many of us are there, anyway?

I have things to write about, but perhaps too many. It's 1:25AM and past my (wholly theoretic at this point) bedtime. I should go to bed, but I still have some of this raspberry-flavored beer to drink--a dubious purchase, at best--

M. left at 12:45. He's putting on a show Friday, so there are posters to be stapled to the telephone poles outside bars, flyers to be fanned out on tables inside them. I wonder when he'll be back and whether I'll be able to get to sleep in the meantime.

I know I don't blog often, but I still ought to introduce a few people to my unofficial cast of characters. At least one, for now: Nigel, the Englishman. We didn't even know this guy until 2007, but these days he and M. are inseparable. He rides with us on the train. He meets us for lunch sometimes. We go out together. We have dinner with him more than one night a week, usually just the three of us, but sometimes he brings one of his girlfriends. I think there are three now, or perhaps he's even down to two, but he's never had one at a time. I have heard there is a good explanation for this, but I have not heard the explanation myself.

Nigel is also throwing parties with M., and as I type they're flyering together. I envision M. getting home at an ungodly hour because Nigel is with him, and Nigel is slow.

This is not what I mean about having a lot to write about. It was M.'s birthday on Saturday, and Friday night was one of the wildest nights I can remember. And back to Nigel, I could easily write a book with all the mad, mad stories he's told us, and now that I've introduced him I may decide to spice up this blog with them.

The raspberry beer is gone now, so good-night.

(Addendum) Drinking Close to a Gallon of Sake on a Weeknight: Lesson in Japanese Cuisine or Totally Fucking Stupid?

Both, actually. It was excellent sake that is evidently hard to find outside of Japan. But mostly I was totally fucking stupid. I took a sick day last Friday not because I didn't "feel like" going to work but because I literally could not lift myself out of bed until 2pm. Upon which I crawled around the room on hands and knees for another hour, nauseated and with a painful headache behind my eyes. When I went back to sleep around 2:30am I still felt like hell. It was an experience I'd rather not repeat.

Backtracking a bit, the Industry couple invited us out to a sushi spot where they are friends with the owner. He brought us food he wanted us to try: sashimi flown in from Japan; delicate salads; fried fish heads and collars. (I ate an eye.) Once the place closed down, he sat with us, going back to the kitchen periodically to bring us rarer and rarer bottles of sake.

It was a great experience up until about midnight, at which point it took a turn toward the majestically stupid.

Craigslist: Lesson in Sociology, or Heart of Darkness?

I know you are slavering in anticipation of my latest catch-up novella. Here it is; you're welcome!

Sam--bartender flatmate--decided to move out with his girlfriend, causing M. to stop speaking with him for weeks. The Frenchy flatmates can't stand living with us anymore, so they're going back to France early March. To "practice their art" or something. Have I mentioned that the Frenchies and the Sam/girlfriend axis couldn't stand one another either? I can't say I'm devastated to see this particular arrangement reach its end.

Apparently we have no friends left--or none interested in living with us, anyway--because it became clear after a month or so that we would have to resort to Craigslist for the 3rd time. Perhaps we truly are as loathsome as our current housemates would have you think. Anyhow, M. was busy, so the secretarial task of coordinating Craigslist meetings fell to me.

Too bad I am a social disaster. I don't think I can adequately describe how much stress the whole ordeal caused me. I couldn't sleep. At work, I couldn't concentrate on my job. Possibly one hour's worth of work was done in those several days. Instead, I sent or received maybe a hundred emails last week. Then, after the interviews were over and it was time to start dishing out rejections, I began shunning email altogether. Every person we interviewed, save two, emailed me back telling us how great we were, how great the apartment was, how much they loved our cats, how well they sensed we got along with them, and of course, why we ought to choose them as our housemates. One guy attached a picture of his cat. A few offered to pay more in rent if we'd only accept them. How would I reject all these kind people who knew where we lived? What if we saw them around? Do we say we reject you because we find your voice grating, or because we just like someone else better? I couldn't make myself respond to these people. Merely skimming through their emails filled me with a measure of horror. When I did sleep, I had Craigslist nightmares. Finally I caved in and asked M. to respond to the emails for me. He thought I was nuts; he didn't see what the issue was, but he wrote the rejections in a matter of minutes, and lo!--I could sleep again.

Yes, I do have a problem.

Once I get past the feelings of dread, I can appreciate our Craigslist experience as a lesson on social groups. I don't know what it was about the cues we included in our ad--price? likes and dislikes? the way we described ourselves?--but the people we interviewed were a demographically homogenous bunch. All college grads: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford. All white, more or less. Mostly male. Most worked for tech companies or did research.

We interviewed two girls. One of them, it turns out, not only went to our alma mater but also graduated the same year as we did, and lived in my co-op while I was "studying"(ha) in Italy. We even have mutual friends.

As I said, two of the people we interviewed did not write us back begging to live with us. One of these happens to be a post-doc in the department where M.'s a ph.d. candidate. His parents are also faculty here, and he was a high-school classmate of M.'s good friend (the one who is also my boss's daughter).

In sum, I have learned that when you post an ad on Craigslist, the responses you get will be from a random sample of the local population. Further, when we go about picking roommates, how close they are to our social group has nothing to do with our decision.

Which two people do you think we picked?

Re-Resolution

I'm done applying. Again. For now.

Writing my statement of purpose was once again painful, a belabored reminder of both how much I hate selling myself on paper and how much my writing ability has deteriorated. I sat in a cafe, staring at my laptop screen with my hands limp over the keys, listlessly typing out the flattest sentences imaginable: I want to be in this program because... ugh, delete. I believe that this program would be the best environment for me because... no, delete. Also, I think that... ew, "also"? Delete, delete, delete.

For months and months now I've been writing material for the second grade, so it's no wonder I'm struggling with the adult stuff. And rather than taking classes requiring papers, I've been taking classes requiring problem sets. Then there's the issue of journals: I used to keep journals all the time, from the first grade onward. But ever since I started living with my boyfriend, I've found journal-writing to be nearly impossible. Hence the blogging, but I haven't been doing much of that, either.

I used to have a few friends I would email regularly--a few long emails a month, narratives really, unabridged stories that, if printed, would span five or six single-spaced pages. Whether or not that's desirable (probably not), at least it's writing practice. But I can't remember the last time I sent an email to one of these friends. A year ago, maybe?

I am anyhow awful at writing these days. Solution: blog more. Can I, will I? I think I will try.

Primary Scourge

I am blowing it with this particular resolution:

- Blog at least once a week.

Actually, now that I look back at it, I'm blowing the whole shebang except for these two:

- Don't get in any serious bike accidents.
- Change party affiliation so I can vote in Democratic primary.

Speaking of the primary, it's probably bad for my health. A few nights ago M. and I stayed up until 2:30am sipping cheap red wine and watching that mudfight of a debate on youtube, woke up late the next morning with a horrible hangover, showed up ostentatiously late to work and have been manically checking and re-checking TPM ever since.

Neither of us care much for Mme. Nixon and are hoping (against reason, perhaps) for an Obama win. I figured I'd do my part by voting, but M. wants to sign us up to make phone calls this weekend. I don't know, wouldn't you be annoyed if some 24-year-old called you up in the middle of dinner/lunch/feeding the dog and tried to get you to support any political cause whatsoever? Consider my extreme phone phobia as well, and I'm audaciously hoping that M. forgets about the whole thing.

Politics, pfft.

On the other hand, Hawaii wasn't so bad.