1 out of 1,200,000

That's me.

Unemployed.

And I've decided not to be deterred by the social stigma associated with collecting unemployment while I look for a job: I want my free government money!

Because I've worked in more than one state over the past 18 months, I can't file an online application and need to speak to someone to file my claim. The problem is that there are so many people trying to get their mouths on the government teat, the unemployment office is overwhelmed with calls and doesn't have enough staff to answer the phones.

I have an idea: hire some people to answer the damn phones.

A VILE henchman has been detected!

I spent a significant portion of my time as an 9 year old planted in front of our Macintosh's 4-inch screen, World Almanac in hand, playing Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?

I credit this game with teaching me important life lessons such as that Lima is the capital of Peru, bahts are the currency in Thailand and computer games are valid substitutes for real human friends. Sure, I probably would have learned that stuff eventually, like when I went to high school or traveled to those countries, but it was gratifying to be so well-prepared so young. (Traveling overseas later I was surprised, however, that the flights were so long since in the game you can get most of the way around the world in about 4 hours. I'll know to bring extra granola bars next time.)

In a moment that was either the purest form of boredom, a lapse in my ability to stave off childhood nostalgia, or both, Eric and I found an online version of the game last night. It's not exactly the same - it's "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego" - but it was close enough to be very satisfying: the same primitive graphics, the same tinkly midi music, the same tantalizing tidbits of history and geography. It came close to provoking that same feeling of extreme social isolation but I fought the urge to reach for a volume of Tolkien and after nabbing the suspect successfully we rode the wave of nostalgia to Simon. I must now add myself playing Simon to the list of things I can't control because given the choice between working on my resume and beating my current best score of 13, all I have to say is R-R-Y-R-B-B-R-G-R-R-G-G-G-B.

Yeah, I've had to put myself on that list twice now. What's your point?

Free comedy and more free comedy

Eric and I cashed in our free comedy tickets last night. We're quick learners and there were a few things we did differently this time: we drank some beers prior to the show rather than waiting until we got there, we brought more beers to the show than we did last time, and we arrived at 9pm when the show is supposed to start rather than 8:25pm which is 5 min before doors open and a solid 40 min before pretty much anyone other than the comics' wives showed up.

Imagine our surprise when, stepping out of the elevator at the fifth floor, the place was packed and there was a line out the door. Turns out the show was doubling as a benefit for Sports for Kids, a non-profit that brings the gift of sports to kids in Oakland. The host comic works with them and her biggest laugh line of the night - which she returned to often - was "Kids are fucked up." Pretty funny.

We ended up finding a couple of empty seats next to three Canadian women on a girls' weekend trip from Edmonton. They were drinking Smirnoff Ice and by the end of the show had confirmed my long-held suspicion that vodka and artificial apple flavoring in a single-serving glass container makes people mean. These simple, kind Canadian women heckled the hell out of the headliner comic and just would not stop until practically the whole audience had turned on them. Just as I started to be truly concerned that I would need to dodge empty beer cans and giveaway Sports for Kids keychain bottle openers, they simmered down and let the show limp to an unsatisfying conclusion.

The highlight of the evening came at the end: they're still doing the tell-a-joke-for-a-free-ticket deal but it was a different dude videotaping this time and so Eric and I shamelessly told the same jokes we told the first time and each got a new free ticket. Take that comedy jokers!

When your room looks kinda weird

Muppet Babies, we make our dreams come true
Muppet Babies, we'll do the same for you
When your world looks kinda weird and you wish that you weren't there
Just close your eyes and make believe and you can be anywhere
I like adventure
I like romance
I love great jokes
Animal dance!!

I've got my computer
I swing through the air
I play the piano
And I have blue hair

Me, I invent things
Mee mee mee meee!
[Is everything all right in here?]
Yes, Nanny.

Muppet Babies, we make our dreams come true
Muppet Babies, we'll do the same for you

Muppet Muppet Muppet Muppet
Babies Babies Babies Babies

Make dreams come true.

Roller coasters

My dad and stepmother happened to be in Berkeley for a few days this week and came over for dinner last night. It was their first time to see our place here and they were very impressed at how nice it is. They were so enthusiastic about how much better it is than anywhere else I've ever lived that you would think all my previous apartments had been vermin-infested shitholes, which at least one of them wasn't. At least not right away.

They brought us a set of coasters as a housewarming gift. They're made of glass and they come with a stand-up holder thing that, to me, looks like they're about to go on some sort of really fun ride like a roller coaster.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

This is when I remind you that I am 30 years old and extremely sophisticated

Strolling along Market Street with Eric's parents this past Friday night, I showed a little too much excitement about a large pile of finger puppets that a small Peruvian woman was selling on the sidewalk. Eric's father insisted on buying me a couple, which I proceeded to keep in my purse all weekend and secretly play with during quiet moments.
This may have significantly influenced their impression of me: for the rest of the weekend, every time we passed a toy store - in Palo Alto, Sonoma, Berkeley and San Francisco - Eric's mother would say "Oh look Ellie! A toy store!" pretty much in the voice you would use to address a five year old.

Capades

We went ice skating last night in Union Square. It was uncharacteristically warm out for San Francisco but somehow, blowers going full blast, they kept the ice frozen and the wee tiny ice rink was packed with people skating in t-shirts.

Pretty much everyone out there, except for us and a handful of ponytailed perverts, was probably procrastinating studying for their 10th grade geometry test. When skating around the rink one had to maintain peripheral awareness of the writhing amoebic mass of shrieking, giggling tweens, to avoid accidentally checking them into the boards or slicing off one or more fingers, especially given that several of them spent much more time on their buns on the ice and laying on each other on the ice than actually skating.

Eric hadn't been on skates since childhood but took to it with the grace and ease of a newborn baby deer learning to ice skate on a planet with an unpredictably oscillating gravitational pull. Impressively, in spite of many nervous wobbly flailing moments, Eric stayed on his feet and even got to a place of steady competence going around and around the ice.

I was just settling into my mellow skating groove when Eric came up to me, poked me in the arm, yelled "You're it!" and then took off like a wild banshee, his long legs and arms flying everywhere*, somehow managing to pick up significant speed. I had only barely begun to give chase when Eric took what was by far the most dramatic spill of the evening, wowing tweens and pervs alike.

It was one of those falls where it's almost more entertaining to watch everyone else watching it happen - horrified wincing, almost closing the eyes but keeping them open just enough to see, slightly turning their heads away, but then peeking back to not miss anything. It was an absolute train wreck.

"Dude! Are you OK!??" exclaimed about a hundred people as they rushed over. Somehow, in spite of the thunderous, sickening sound of bone striking ice, Eric had sustained only minor scrapes and bruises. And, being a tough guy, he rejected proffered bandaids for his bleeding hands and elbow, preferring instead to bleed on my shirt while we walked home to watch 30 Rock like the rest of the people our age in this town.


*The most apropos though seasonally inappropriate comparison I can think of is Willy Willy Waterbug, that little guy you’d plug into the hose in the yard on a hot summer day and all his little hair-shaped hoses would squirt water at you while they whirled all over. Loved that guy.

Blackberry with the bathwater

The Meet-The-Parents Dinner was to take place at a Mexican restaurant in a mall in the outer East Bay burbs. I drove us all the way out to there and needed a few minutes to check my makeup and hair before going in, so when we arrived I cruised past Guadalajara Grill and parked two lots away out of view to primp privately.

Applying makeup in the rearview mirror with the feeble glow of the overhead light is awkward to begin with, and it is made significantly more awkward when you realize that you have an audience: Eric’s mother, father, aunt and uncle had suddenly appeared about 20 feet in front of us and were all looking at us sitting there in the parked car as they dropped several postcards into the mailbox which we had unwittingly parked in front of.

Rather than wave, smile or behave like a normal person, I snapped off the light, slunk down in my seat and tried to be really really still, because that was clearly how to make the best of this situation.

They hesitated for a moment by the mailbox, and then drifted slowly back towards the restaurant.

“Do you think they saw us?” I whispered needlessly.

“They were looking right at us in a lit car at night.”

“No fair!” I whimpered. “That’s not supposed to happen!”

We joined them in the restaurant a few minutes later. No one said a word about it.

Once we’d gotten past the handshake/hug fake-out greeting, dinner was actually as close to fun as I think it could have been. Dinner conversation never made it around to unicorns but we did spend an inordinate amount of time discussing mice. Eric works with mice, his dad has had some hilarious run-ins with mice, his aunt is afraid of mice and told no fewer than 17 consecutive and uniformly boring stories about her experiences with mice, and then Eric’s mother, expertly facilitating the conversation, turned to me and said “Everyone seems to have a mouse story. Do you?”

I do. It’s a story I usually tell as a whodunit thriller set in my Philadelphia apartment that starts with my discovery that, mysteriously, there are large holes in the crotches of all of my panties in my laundry basket. The story explores possible roommate passive aggression and fabric-dissolving diseases before revealing that the culprit is a mouse, and the little pervert has eaten his way through my dirty underwear.

Better judgment prevails. I choose not to upstage Eric’s aunt: I follow suit and tell another boring mouse story that goes nowhere. Eric, familiar with the Philly mouse mystery, looks visibly relieved.

And so we made it through dinner without any major gaffes.

The Denouement
It may provide some insight into my overall state of mind that then the next morning I accidentally threw my Blackberry out of our fourth story window.
I was hurriedly doing a last straightening of the apartment before heading off to work for an early meeting and I noticed that the dining room tablecloth had a few crumbs on it. I figured I would shake it out the window a bit to get it cleaned up, as we always do, and so I gathered it up into a bundle, extended my arms out the window and shook it out. I immediately knew something had gone wrong when I heard the crack of something significantly more substantial than a crumb hitting the window below ours. My Blackberry, shattered, lay strewn not just around the street below but several key chunks had ended up in the open trash cans waiting to be collected, it being Friday trash morning. I opted against dumpster-diving and, in a stroke of extraordinary luck, the Verizon woman was able to treat the accidental death and dismemberment of my phone as a warranty claim and handed me a brand new phone on the spot. This may yet be a good weekend after all, I thought.

List of things you don't talk about in polite company

I'm meeting Eric's parents tonight for the first time.

Let me be totally honest here for a moment: part of me thinks "Of course they'll like me. I'm extremely likeable" and then there's another voice that reminds me that our belief systems are almost completely diametrically opposite and they would likely disapprove of most everything I have ever done or thought should they ever learn of it.

In the interest of everyone having a good time, there are a few topics that are off-limits:

• God, Jesus, morality, religion, etc
• Sex and masturbation*
• Politics
• The economy
• Major US automakers and pension plans thereof
• And pretty much everything that happened in my life prior to the present moment

My plan is to stay focused on topics that can't possibly be offensive to anyone:

• The weather
• Whatever it is we are eating
• Unicorns

So it should be a pretty lively conversation.

*You'd think this would be an obvious topic to shy away from when meeting your boyfriend's parents, however Eric did bring up masturbation not once but twice with my mother when he met her for the first time in Chicago a few weeks ago, so I think it needs to be explicitly mentioned on the list.

Scooby snacks

Eating your Scooby-Doo Fruit Snacks before 11am is either a sign that you're having a really bad day or totally awesome.

I would say the biggest downside is that you might happen to start humming that song from the late 90s by the Fun Loving Criminals ("...running around robbin banks all whacked out on scooby snacks...") which is really what could make your day take a turn for the worse.

And thus, let me add to the list of things I can't control: myself, in the presence of food containing sugar and in the shape of the Mystery Machine.

Breakfast, circa 1986

I honored a past era at breakfast this morning: I put cream cheese AND strawberry jelly on my toast.

When we were kids, my brother used to ask our mother to make him bagels in this very fashion and we called them "flashy bagels" because, well, they were kind of flashy looking. They brought a little extra pizzazz to the breakfast table.

Getting overly nostalgic at breakfast can be dangerous, so for the other piece of toast I put cream cheese and on top of it...pumpkin butter. A rogue move for sure, but living life without taking risks simply isn't living.

Easy go

I've been trying to sell my futon couch (that lays flat to be a bed) on craigslist since the week before our chocolate brown couch was delivered, so about a month now. Once we got the couch, we put the futon in our storage area, which is also known as the space in the parking spot not taken up by the car. It was clear the futon was not going to age well in this damp basement-y environment, especially with me rolling into it every time I parked the car.

I reposted it again yesterday at the fire sale price of $75 and got a woman who was interested in just the frame, which seemed to me like a good start. She came by mid-morning to pick it up in an SUV which was too small for it. As we were trying earnestly but unsuccessfully to force it in anyway, a chick mechanic from the hybrid garage across the street sauntered over. "Looks like you ladies need a woman's help," she cooed. Apparently we did: with a power drill she unscrewed the awkward piece of the frame that was causing the problem and she had the frame in and the SUV's rear door closed lickety-split. Off drove the frame, leaving me with just the moldering mattress remaining to unload.

The first guy who responded to the mattress-only ad asked what size it was. I told him it was a queen* and he wrote back "Woohoo! I'll take it as long as it's not covered with animal fur or blood haha." I told him it was his and that he would have to supply his own animal fur and blood. I didn't mention that the plum-colored cover it was wearing was doing an excellent job hiding the large greasy stain on the original cover from a piece of aged manchego left sitting on it overnight, possibly because I once fell asleep on the couch while eating cheese at 2am, or maybe from something else.

And thus, the futon now joins a table and chairs on the (troublingly long) list of things I paid to move across the country just to sell on a different craigslist.

*I'd say there's a solid 40% chance it was not actually a queen

Vroom vroom

This past Saturday was simultaneously and at the same time a great and miserable day for me. Saturday was the day I learned how to ride a motorcycle (yay!) in weather comparable to the storm at the end of Karate Kid II (boo!).

I'm still thinking about it on a Thursday because after six hours soaking wet in black leather gloves last Saturday, today my hands still look like they are attached to the wrong body. It looks sort of like I got a manicure on opposite day*, where instead of cleaning up your hands, nails and cuticles and making them look healthy and pleasing to the eye and touch, I had a team of small Korean women rubbing inky blackness deep into every line on my hands and extra deep around my nails. They were totally talking about me in Korean while they did it, too. I hate when they do that.

I don't think it is optimal for one’s introduction to riding a motorcycle to be in three inches of standing water, but the upside is that if I ever need to ride a motorcycle through a kiddie pool, I will have much more control over which children I decide to hit.


*which usually fell on Thursdays where I was growing up, but I'm not sure if that was true everywhere.

5-7-5

Tally Tallyman!

Time ticks; take truth to the test

Today the tide turns

Food on the walls

Our living room and kitchen are painted with Warm Apple Crisp and Chilled Chardonnay, respectively. It seemed only appropriate that we have an unofficial housewarming event last night to celebrate - and quality check - our paint job.

The Warm Apple Crisp was right on! Whoa!

Chilled Chardonnay was not even close. I think the color we've got is more accurately described as Flesh.


The bedroom is painted "Ol Blue Eyes" so we'll be contacting Frank Sinatra to come by and quality check that paint job.