All hepped up and nowhere to go

Last night at dinner with some friends, one of whom is a little older, the chocolate dessert option "for the table" was rejected due to the caffeine content of chocolate. Having very low sensitivity to caffeine myself it never would have occurred to me that this would be an issue, but I will now add this to my list of fears I have about aging: that I have to start eating all my chocolate cake in the morning so that it doesn't keep me up at night.

For the record**:
8 oz Coca Cola: 23 mg
8 oz brewed green tea: 30-35 mg*
Half cup Haagen Dazs coffee ice cream: 30 mg
1.5 oz dark chocolate: 31 mg
8 oz Mountain Dew: 36 mg
8 oz brewed black tea: 47-50 mg*
Shot of espresso: 64 mg
8 oz Monster energy drink: 80 mg
8 oz brewed coffee: 95 mg
2 tablets Excedrin, extra strength: 130 mg
8 oz Starbucks coffee: 165-250 mg*
1 tablet NoDoz maximum strength: 200 mg

So to put this in perspective: you get the same amount of caffeine from 8 oz of Coke that you get from smelling the breath of a person who just drank a Starbucks coffee.


*Depends on brewing
**These values varied quite a bit from source to source but I think they are, as we would say in the consulting world when we had no idea about something, "directionally correct"

You can't handle the funny

Eric and I are big risk-takers. We took several big risks this past weekend, chief among them: going to a BYOBooze/BYOFood $12 stand-up comedy showcase. We were hoping (against the odds) that it was not also BYOFunny.

We found the building but then hit an apparent dead end in the information- and sign-less lobby. As we were standing there looking confused, a woman came in, pressed the elevator UP button and then turned to us and said the comedy show was on the 5th floor, which was very helpful and compelled me to continue talking to her all the way up in the remarkably slow elevator.

"So you've seen this show before?" I ask. I'm so friendly.

"Yeah, my husband is one of the comics," she responds with a shy smile.

"That's neat!" I offer. "Is he any good?"

She kind of shrugs.

The comic who turned out to be her husband was one of those people who appears to have been put together from spare parts of other people. His face seemed inaccurately placed on his head and he had these freakishly long skinny fingers that could get a stemless maraschino cherry out of the bottom of a tall drink without even wetting the second knuckle.

He was awful. The whole show was awful. Horrendous. It made me want to weep for humanity. Let me put it in perspective: the absolute highlight of the show was a small squat black woman wearing a mini-backpack shouting the Jack Nicholson "You can't handle the truth" speech from A Few Good Men, but adapted for comics instead of soldiers. I'm dead serious.

After the show, they had a special offer where you get a free ticket to a future show if you tell a joke on camera. Since we had enjoyed the show so much Eric and I eagerly lined up to tell jokes and get free tickets.

Eric went first: "What's the best part about sex with 29 year olds?"
Pause.
"There's 20 of them."

"Whoa, you are one creepy dude," the host of the show, who was video-taping, concluded.

I followed: "Did you hear about the new pirate movie that's coming out? It's rated Arrrrgh!"

The host comic wearily handed us free tickets.

After that we went to a lesbian bar because the live band sounded pretty good.

The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

Yesterday was one of those days.

I didn't wake up with gum in my hair or lose my yo-yo, but I did take a nasty spill on my bike. (Yes, day 3. Stop laughing!) The blessed Muni tracks sucked my tire right down into the little groove and sent me sliding. Man! It was quite the yard sale. Yoga mat one way, backpack the other, the chain came off, and I ended up in a twisted heap right in front of where all the homeless fellows play chess on the sidewalk. Crowding around and "helping" me was far more interesting than pretending to play chess. A few passing bikers stopped as well to make sure everything was OK. I'm not at all sure how I am not more injured but, bruised thigh and pride aside, I seem to be fine.

There were also some low points at work that are not worth rehashing here. Also not worth mentioning is a particularly bad parallel parking job that almost resulted in me needing to leave a note for damage to another car. Almost.

Eric also had a bad day. Sick lab mice, incompetent shuttle bus driver, late train, sunglasses ruined, and experiencing the horror of my parallel parking. And he had to wear his railroad train pajamas. (He hates his railroad train pajamas.)

The teacher of the yoga class I went to shared with us that Mercury is in retrograde right now, which typically causes breakdowns in communication as well as just generally screwing things up. Damn it, Mercury. Come back!

"Interview"

Last night, after my first yoga class in far too long (and that is a whoooooole different story), which went no fewer than 25 minutes late, I raced to the Intercontinential Hotel bar to interview a Director of Sales candidate for my firm.

"I'm having a hard time imagining what kind of interview you'll be doing at a hotel bar at 9pm at night," confessed Eric as I was getting ready to leave the apartment.

It was a fair question. And knowing that even daytime interviewees have been inspired to take their shirts off mid-interview, this evening/hotel/bar arrangement seemed fraught with opportunities for unprofessional behavior.

"At least he's not actually staying at the hotel," I offered.

I found Michael in a big chair in the hotel lobby.

"Is it weird that I suggested we meet at a hotel bar?" I asked him.

"There's a cool-looking Irish dive bar a block over. We could go there instead."

Not really my point.

"It's probably quieter here. I think this is better."

The interview, such as it was, proceeded without incident. I was so relieved.

Then as we were walking out, he to his car and me heading home, we were making small talk and he asked about my boyfriend, what's his name, what he does and so on. I gave him the scoop, then asked if he was married or had a girlfriend. He shook his head no.

"But I have a lover," he said.

Right.

And yes, we will be hiring him.

POTK is coming!

Some time in early 1987, my third grade teacher Miss Haynes had a vision: 25 third graders would dress up and lip sync hit songs on the Beye Elementary School stage.

In an additional flash of brilliance she decided to keep the show a secret right up until performance day! But we did want people to start getting excited about it so we hand-made and then stealthily hung posters all over the school.

"POTK IS COMING!!" the posters proclaimed.*

We succeeded in creating quite a buzz around school. Questions and rumors were flying! "What is this POTK?" "When is it coming?" "What does this mean for manufacturing sector jobs in the US?" Yes, quite a buzz.

The show was a big hit, due mainly to the fact that it was mandatory and got our classmates out of class to listen to pop music. I particularly remember that Courtney V. did a stirring rendition of Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All." There's something peculiarly poignant about having an 8 year old sing "I believe the children are our future...."

For my part, I was the Friend portion of "Cyndi Lauper and Friend" in the Iko Iko act. My classmate Katy (Cyndi) wore all pink and I dressed all in blue and stood directly behind her. I was wearing a big blue bow on my head the size of another head and would pop out to the side on alternating "hey now!"s. There might have been more choreography than that but it is also possible that there wasn't.

Perhaps my clearest memory of that special day, however, was being in gym class after the performance. We had a substitute and he wasn't so good with names.

"Hey! Bow-head!" he yelled to get my attention at one point.

Is it a coincidence that I no longer wear head-sized bows on my head? Possible. But not likely.


*I think some of them were made with stenciled letters. Very fancy business in those days. Almost guaranteed to get people extra excited.

It's not about the bike

I got my new bike yesterday! She's a hybrid bike good for commuting around the city but will also be good for some light road biking, which there is an approximately 4% chance of me ever doing. I bought her on Sunday but she had to be assembled from her component parts. The bike store dude said he couldn't promise it any sooner than 48 hours but I asked if he could pretty please write a little note to the assembly people and put a smiley face on it to see if I could get it sooner. He obliged*.

And lo and behold...I got a call yesterday afternoon saying she was ready to be picked up!

I took her out for a spin just to see how she felt (the idea had originally been to go to a yoga class but the picking up process turned out to be lengthier than I had allowed for). It has been a while since I have biked around San Francisco and I had forgotten that all automotorists are maniacs who would like to bring about my bloody, mangled not to mention untimely death. Well, they are.

As I was biking around, I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window and involuntarily started humming the Wicked-Witch-of-the-West tune to myself. This is not good, I said to myself upon realizing what I was doing.

Then again this morning, I'm cruising to work** and before I know it I'm humming that manic little tune again. Not. Good.


So I think I need a new theme song to hum to myself as I bike around. Any ideas?

*The note said "Elizabeth would enjoy riding her new bike on Monday. :)"
**It's a long block, OK?
***Note that the Wicked Witch is also riding a hybrid - but hers is the bike/broomstick combo instead.

Qualified? Who cares?

I've received several concerned emails from friends and family regarding a PBS poll that asks if Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President of the United States (of America).

The current tally on the poll is 47% No, 53% Yes, 0% Not Sure.

I think the answer choice missing here is "Qualifications are irrelevant" because clearly it is not her qualifications that are inspiring people to support her - nor is her shocking lack of them impeding them from doing so.

What a fascinating time to be an American.

Bad week for people-train relations

Eric called me from the Caltrain at 6:30pm last night.

"We're stopped. They're saying it could be anything from 30 min to 4 hours."

About once every month or two, and almost exclusively on Friday evenings, someone pulls an Anna Karenina on the Caltrain route between SF and Palo Alto. While it is obviously a sad event, the reaction it typically elicits from the train commuters is indignant rage. (Overheard comments include things like "Can't these people just go kill themselves quietly and not ruin everyone's Friday night" and "I hope it was an investment banker.")

As I drove down to Hillsdale to collect Eric, I chatted with my father on the phone and mentioned how the Caltrain had been stopped indefinitely not far from Palo Alto.

"You know," he said, "they found out that the conductor who caused the crash in LA this week was using the text messaging and that's why he missed the signal."

We took advantage of the train having stopped opposite a mall to get a few remaining items to close out Nesting Week. One highlight was getting an oil diffuser at Restoration Hardware. We got the light green flavor which in this case is called "Honeydew Quince." Incidentally I think would be a charming name for a character in a children's book. Probably a Possum (Opossum?).

As we left the mall two hours later, we could see the Caltrain was still there where it had been stopped, no doubt with many stranded commuters still sitting on it, furious that someone else's inconsolable despair had caused them to miss happy hour.

Nesting week

Eric and I met at the airport this past Sunday evening to share a cab home. He was coming from a week in Paris for work, I from 5 days in Olympic National Park. Arriving home, we took in the card table, air mattress and two borrowed plates that constituted the whole of our material lives, noted that the pod would be arriving from DC on Thursday, and wondered what life might feel like if we really, you know, lived somewhere.

"I declare this week Nesting Week," declared Eric.

Nesting week had three phases:

Phase I: Talking about Nesting Week but not actually tackling any Nesting To-Dos such as taking items we know we don't want in the apartment down to the storage, making extra copies of keys or deciding where things might go.

Phase II: Whirlwind of Nesting Activities! Air mattress is deflated, pod is delivered, pod is unloaded, DMV is visited and licenses and registration are switched to CA, enormous mess is created. Passive voice is overused.

Phase III : Getting a little drunk and eating a whole pizza.*

The apartment is such a disaster scene right now that when the power went out in my office for 3 hours today I sat here in the dark and worked off my laptop battery rather than go home and work there.

They say it is always darkest before dawn. Well, I can't wait to see what the apartment looks like in the morning light!


*According to Eric, this is in fact required by law following any sort of household move.

A year's supply of canned goods and lots of seeds

I'm not saying I'm worried about the near-apocalyptic conditions in the financial markets, I'm just saying I now know what I want for all upcoming major and minor holidays: a year's supply of water and canned goods, some plastic sheeting and duct tape, a shotgun, a warm coat and a lots and lots of seeds.

A deck of Uno cards probably isn't a bad idea either. Or maybe Chinese Checkers.

Tell me what else it isn't

Here's a helpful sign I found posted poolside at the Sol Duc Hot Springs in Olympic National Park.



Just to be clear, the "gossamer" material floating in the water is also not dried mayonnaise, shreds of skin-colored tutus or semen.

Relax and enjoy!

To serve and protect

My aunt Barbara was like a bonus parent for me for the first 10 or so years of my life (and beyond, though no longer from just a few blocks away) and occasionally she will see fit to share a story about me as a child.

She told one today that I had not heard before but which reveals plenty about my young person's understanding of how the world works.

Me (about 5 years old): Barbara, why don't you have any kids of your own?

Barbara: Well you see, Ellie, in order to have kids you need both a mom and a dad, and I didn't have a dad to have children with.

Me: Couldn't you ask a policeman to help?

Don't tell me I wasn't a born problem solver.

What a wonderful world

Being in Olympic National Park, which is a place of extraordinary natural beauty, combined with spending enough time in the car that we ran out of other things to talk about, resulted yesterday in a heated family debate about the Seven Wonders of the World.

The debate raged unchecked until we drove back into an area with cell phone coverage and were able to ask the Google to resolve, once and for all, who was right and who was an idiot.

Well, it turns out it isn't quite so clear-cut. Depending on who you ask, and what type of "wonder" you have in mind, the list can get pretty long pretty quickly.

I was intrigued to discover the origin of the first list: it was included in a guidebook used by Hellenic sight-seers exploring the Mediterranean rim. Given the ancient Greek focus, it is not surprising that the seven featured there were: Great Pyramid of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus, Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

However, since then a number of other lists have been made, and people have been less displined about keeping their list to seven or even restricting their list-making to worthy topics.

The list of the Seven Wonders of the Medieval World still manages to keep it together pretty well - Stonehenge, Colosseum, Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa, Great Wall of China, Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, Hagia Sophia and Leaning Tower of Pisa. Good list, right?

The Seven Wonders of the Natural World is also pretty strong: Grand Canyon, Great Barrier Reef, harbor of Rio de Janeiro, Mount Everest, Aurora, Paricutin volcano, and Victoria Falls. Very respectable.

Things start to get a little messy with the Seven Wonders of the Modern World
One list includes things like the Brooklyn Bridge (ok), Panama Canal (sure), Hoover Dam (I suppose...), Chunnel (not so sure), London sewerage system (um...), and the CN Tower (excuse me?).

Including the CN Tower on any list just makes me wonder who let the Canadians have any say in this whatsoever.

And in closing let me just say that the fact that Andre the Giant doesn't appear on any list strikes me as a glaring oversight.

We haven't seen Jodie Foster...yet

I'm on vacation! Every year around this time my aunt Jane and uncle Bill and I, and additional family members by invitation only, convene in a national park for hiking and just general good clean fun.

One theme that has been totally consistent since the inaugural trip is the cluelessness of the staff at these national park lodges. Not once in eight years of doing this have we not had the reservation get screwed up somehow, and this year was no exception. As we went to check in, it became clear that they had misunderstood some aspect of the reservation and were short a room. Both of the girls working the front desk looked to be about 14 and as it became clear that it was their mistake, they started to kind of freak out.

"I guess we could give them the panic room," the one said to the other.

"Yeah! The panic room!" the other cried out with an odd mix of desperation and relief.

So they gave us the "panic room." We all agreed it would be best for my uncle Bill to stay in there just in case.

I don't care what he says about the "bad dreams" or the "feeling of hands around his neck as he was sleeping," it's worth it to wake up here:

Office space

My current employer is technically based in DC, which makes it an enormous inconvenience and not a little awkward for me to have decided to move to San Francisco. Amazingly, said employer has been very generous about setting me up with a workspace here so that I don't completely lose my mind trying to work from home.

Eric spends over an hour each way to get from home to work and back, and that's when he gets the fast train. In contrast, my commute is a block and a half. Would it be bad sportsmanship for me to admit that some days that extra half block really gets to me? I guess that would depend on whether or not you consider commuting to be a sport.

Even if you won't lament my commute, perhaps I can earn just a crumb of sympathy for the much appreciated but almost microscopic space in which I now spend my days. Recently I calculated the square footage by standing up and stretching out my arms. In one direction, the fingertips that weren't touching the wall left a gap of about 4 inches, so we'll call that 6 feet. In the other direction, the gap was a little bigger, which I'll round up to 7 feet. The one by the other gives you a glorious 42 square feet of office space.

OK, half a crumb. Please? Look what I'm working with here!

Does it hurt or help my case when I tell you the yoga studio where I did my teacher training -- but which I now hate -- is on the block I walk on to get from home to office? Isn't that awful?

It's getting hot in here

In my role as the SF office for my teeny startup firm, I met last Friday with a young gentleman we are considering hiring to talk more about the firm and the role that he could play in it.

It has been H-O-T HOT in San Francisco this past week and upon meeting me and shaking my hand, he immediately apologized for not having factored in cool-down time after the bike ride to our offices to meet me for lunch. And he was kinda sweaty.

We walked in the hot hot heat to a local fancy-pants sandwich shop ('wich craft) for lunch and took the last table available, which happened to be in the sun. It was extremely warm.

We tried our very best to have a deep and insightful conversation about environmental sustainability research, and I thought we were going to make it through lunch without incident, I really did.

And then: my heavily perspiring interviewee stopped halfway through a sentence about research methodology and said, I'm really sorry but I'm going to have to take off my shirt.

I started to laugh, thinking he was making a hilarious joke about how uncomfortably warm we both were when I saw his fingers move toward his top button.

I choked on my laugh and my grilled cheese in horror and disbelief.

Good thing I'm wearing a tank top, he offered as consolation as his fingers made quick work of his shirt buttons.

Good thing, I thought, as I promised myself I would keep my eyes strictly above the neck for the rest of the conversation which, luckily, we did get through without further disrobing.

Perhaps my favorite part of this whole episode, though, has been the reactions I have gotten from people I told afterwards. Eric, for example, moved pretty quickly from disbelief to, dare I say, admiration.

"The guy was hot. Good for him to just do what he needed to do. I respect that."

My brother, too, was supportive of the interviewee's choice to remove his shirt during a job interview. "I think that's awesome," he concluded.

Have I inadvertently stumbled across some sort of universal male fantasy? Do all men secretly harbor this subversive desire to conduct business in their undershirts? Is this about stickin it to the man? Or are they just really sympathetic of this dude being hot?

And yes, we did offer him the job.

Only $3.33 per inning!

It has been absolutely balmy in SF recently so there was really no alternative Friday night but to go to the ballpark to see the Giants take on the Pirates.

Having lived a block from the ballpark for a while there, Eric and I had gotten accustomed to wandering over during the 3rd or 4th inning to get tickets from the dudes hanging out on the corners. On Friday, the game started at 7:15, and around 8:15, per usual, we left our place to get tickets and check out the game.

Though we still live reasonably close to the ballpark, it turns out it is about a 15 min walk, 20 min if you are ambling and enjoying the beautiful evening. We met up with our friend Tim and thought it was a little odd that there weren't more guys selling tickets, but unphased we soon came across a scalper and, perhaps hastily, secured three tickets to the game for the low low price of $30 total. Success! In we went.

The seventh inning was just getting underway.

Wow, said Tim. Three whole innings.

So we were a little later than we realized and apparently the Pirates defense had been making short work of the Giants. I admit, I was a little dispirited that we were so late and had paid a whopping $10 per ticket for so little baseball.

But because we are good sports, and because we didn't really have much choice, we enjoyed what we did see of the game, which was mostly the Pirates continuing to destroy the Giants, plus a few other special treats, including the 7th Inning Stretch as sung by past and present Olympians, which was quite possibly the most unfortunate public performance of Take Me Out To The Ballgame ever. There were also some drunk Cal kids in the bleachers who all looked to be about 14 and who were cheering the Bears.

Yeah, it was pretty fun.

By the bottom of the eighth inning I was ready to leave.

Long lines, long flight, long lashes...?

I flew home from DC to SF this morning on Jet Blue. I got up at the SF equivalent of 1am (after only 3 hours of sleep) in order to get to Dulles in time to return the rental car, check my bag and not even almost miss the 7am fight. By the time we landed at 10am SF time I had been up for 9 hours. Today is a long day.

So I thought perhaps I had fallen into a partial dream-state on the flight attempting to read "Salesforce.com for Dummies" cover to cover because the most bizarre thing seemed to be happening: the flight attendants were walking down the aisle handing out...mascara.

So let me get this straight: we've gotten to the point in modern air travel where you won't even give me so much as a single peanut on a six hour flight, but you will give me Maybelline Very Black Long Lash mascara?

Because if that is the way it's going to go down, I'd really prefer Dark Brown. Black mascara makes me look like a drag queen.

RIP Green Sofa Chair

I got a call yesterday from the building manager at my old apartment building in DC letting me know that the locust cloud of craigslist people who came to take away the furniture that we couldn't fit into the pod had taken everything except one of my two green sofa chairs. This, he informed me, was my problem and it needed to be resolved immediately.

Luckily, I was still in DC, having stayed a few extra days to work in person with my colleague who is based here. It was a long, productive day yesterday and I left the office a little after 11pm, getting back to my old neighborhood close to midnight. Just as I was about to park near my friend's house where I'm staying, I had that feeling that there was unfinished business. I aborted my parking mission and cruised over to Swann Street to see what was to be done about this unwanted free chair.

There it sat, looking forlorn in front of 1820 Swann. It had been sort of undressed, with the fabric peeled away from the frame in places, and had the disheveled, shamed look of a girl who had let her prom date go too far.

But I couldn't afford to dilly dally too long overpersonifying an uncomfortable chair which I'd never liked much to begin with, so I got to work on trying to figure out how to get it into the dumpster in the alley.

Dragging it around the block to the dumpster proved unworkable (and quite horribly loud). And it was too wide to fit into the trunk of my car, even precariously, to drive it around and dump it, but I could see from the exposed parts that though it looked like a substantial chair, it was in fact just a bit of foam around a flimsy particle-board frame.

So at midnight on a warm Tuesday in front of a building in which I no longer lived, I dragged my slutty chair into the middle of the street, stripped the rest of the fabric off, and smashed apart the frame until the remaining pieces fit in my trunk. Then I drove around the back, furtively chucked the remains in a dumpster and hurriedly fled the scene.

Let us never speak of it again.

The things they carried

Labor Day lived up to its name for me this year, at least in part. It had become clear my DC apartment wasn’t going to pack and move itself to SF no matter how nicely I asked, so Eric and I spent Saturday maneuvering three years’ worth of accumulated stuff from my fourth floor walkup into a Door to Door storage pod on the street below. It was so full by the time we were done that closing the door was like putting on skinny jeans after eating a burrito – it can be done, but it isn’t comfortable and you have to be ok with stuff bulging out around the edges.

This overstuffed little pod was then whisked away Monday morning and is headed west, due on our Clementina doorstep September 18th, which will also be Day 32 on the air mattress* not that I’m counting.

I paid a little extra for insurance that vastly overestimates the value of my things, which leaves me now in the slightly awkward position of feeling just a little hopeful that the pod somehow rolls off the truck and bursts into flame.

*Not aerobed, should you be so ignorant as to confuse them. I myself once made such a foolish mistake and was corrected with requisite condescension.