Is your refridgerator running?

I was biking down the Embarcadero yesterday afternoon, minding my own business, when a car full of aggressive women started yelling at me. The woman riding shotgun leaned almost her entire body out of the front window as she yelled:

"Hey! Hey! Your wheels are rolling! Your wheels are rolling!"

She looked sort of alarmed and was so insistent that even though I was fairly sure my bike was not malfunctioning, I glanced down at my front wheel.

The whole car busted up laughing, gripping their sides and nearly running the car off the road with their guffaws.

For love or money

Interviewing for jobs is a lot like dating.

You check each other out, try to impress each other and see if there is good chemistry. You want to put your best foot forward while still being yourself. And it can be hard to know how much cleavage is too much.

You imagine what life together would look like. Intense? Lots of travel? Challenging? Comfortable? Might you get bored? Does it require a new wardrobe?

Even when you know you don’t like them, you still want them to like you. And a string of bad meetings can leave you exhausted and wondering what the hell is wrong with you (and what the hell is wrong with all of them). Are all the good ones already taken?

People who are no longer on the market have forgotten the painful uncertainty of being uncommitted and feel compelled to tell you to enjoy the time because you will miss it when it is over. Play while you still can, they advise wistfully.

And now it is time for me to get ready for my hot date this afternoon.

A freedom film

In Improv class last night we pretended that we were in an actual acting class and worked on giving our on-stage emotions more depth by portraying them in natural pairs of opposites. The idea is that we almost never feel just one emotion at a time, but rather we feel the tension between opposed states of feeling.

The exercise was to sit on a chair facing the class and recite a nursery rhyme while vacillating between the extremes of two emotions. The teacher demonstrated using fear and excitement in a dramatic reading of Mary Had A Little Lamb, and then each of us took our turn working on pairings like rage & restraint, joy & sadness and lust & innocence.

One woman was tasked with horror & intrigue, which she executed so compellingly that the teacher literally leapt from her seat to tell us about how she had had that exact experience just the other night. She was watching a movie with her husband and he had fallen asleep. The movie, "A Very Young Girl," includes a scene where the entire screen is focused on a woman's vagina and a man has an earthworm and the teacher just had to wake her husband up because what she was seeing was so horrifying and fascinating.

"So you were watching porn?" a classmate ventured.

"No! It wasn't porn, it was French," explained the teacher.

The guy sitting next to me, who is a sketch comedy writer, took out his iphone and made of note of it.

"I like that," he mused. "Not porn, just French."

He did spend the last four years living in the UK

I met with a fellow yesterday who works for a small sustainability consulting firm that isn't hiring right now. I responded to an open position that they had posted on their website and the message back from them was "we're not actually hiring right now but we'd love to meet you anyway." Unfortunately, this is not uncommon: there may be as many sham job postings right now as there are married people on match.com.

But I figured it couldn't hurt to meet the guy and learn a little more about his business, so I joined him for a coffee and a chat at the Ferry building yesterday. That was when I discovered that even in this modern day and age, it is possible for someone who is well educated, has plenty of money, a respectable job and seemingly normal personal grooming habits to have distractingly hideous teeth.

Better late than never

"Getting into yoga" is an excellent, and popular, new year's resolution. Many of the members of the gym where I teach yoga have made this one of their goals for 2009. What they have not resolved to do, as far as I can tell, is be on time to class. For some reason, people coming to my yoga class for the first time always come in late. Maybe they waffle up until the very last moment about whether to come or not; they may even stand outside the door shifting uneasily from one foot to the other for several minutes, trying to will themselves into the room. I don't know. All I know is that, inevitably, the more inexperienced they are, the more likely they are to come in at least 10 minutes late when it is most difficult for me to help them have a good experience.

I had one woman last week come in 40 min late to an hour long class, take what looked like some sort of seat cushion from near the pile of yoga mats*, plop down on it and join in with the class, trying very hard to blend in and look as though she had been there the whole time. As if perhaps I simply hadn't noticed her there before.

This morning was no exception. At 7:03am when I started class it was all** my regular students, so I launched into our typical medium-advanced level class set to a playful Cirque de Soleil soundtrack. Sure enough, at 7:11am in slinks a new student. She sets up over by the wall on the far side and starts trying to join in with the flow but it is immediately obvious that she has never in her life been to a yoga class before.

As the teacher, this creates something of a challenge: you need to keep the flow going for the rest of the class, but you also need to help the new person flailing around near the wall to keep her from having a really bad experience and even potentially hurting herself. So I give more detailed instructions than I normally would for just my regulars, I offer all the beginner options to help her get oriented and find her way, and I walk over and help her as often as I can without letting the rest of the class grind to a halt.

I try to be graceful in my incorporation of different options for the newcomers because I really want them to feel good about their experience in the class, but sometimes it still sounds like I am pointedly singling them out. For example, I might take the class to a pretty basic pose and then say "some of you may stay right here. Those looking for a more advanced option might try balancing on your right leg and lifting your left." In a small class with only a few students, this feels painfully euphemistic. I might as well say "new girl stay right where you are until you collapse in a heap which seems to be imminent, people who actually know what you are doing, transition into artachandrasana."

*I have no idea where she even found it and in what universe someone would confuse this item of garden furniture for a yoga mat
**"all" = 3. But doesn't saying "all" make it sound like a lot?

Enormous cat feet

Starting a little after 4am this morning, two ogres held an intense farting contest just outside my window. It was quite a duel! They were very well matched and the competition went on and on...

When I finally got out of bed a little after 7am, it became clear what all that butt belllowing was about: I could barely make out the building across the street through the thick creamy white fog.

You might think that living near the water in a city known for its fog would mean that a) excessive foghorn activity would not be a surprise and b) it would have lost all of its novelty by now.

Aha! Not so. We get plenty of fog but for some reason this level of foghorn activity is totally unprecedented, at least based on the experience of the last six months.

I suppose it is possible that it isn't foghorns at all but some punks with airhorns down on Clementina. As soon as I can see the street I'll let you know.

Maybe this is why I'm not working

I can do a lot of things. Some of them even well. But I have an embarrassing gap in my repertoire of skills: I never learned to whistle.

This sort of feels like admitting that I can't tie my shoe or put on my own pants, but I'm afraid it is nonetheless true.

So, one of my new year's resolutions is to make right this pathetic wrong that has been allowed to continue for far too long. I'm gonna learn to whistle, dammit. And I'm not going to let anyone stop me.

In the eight days that I've been focused on this lofty goal, I've reached the point where I can somewhat consistently make a single feeble tone. Yet all this progress has come at a price. Perhaps it is because I have a cold and am pretty congested, but I can't practice whistling for more than a few minutes before I start to get really light-headed. I've had to stop practicing while driving for fear or suddenly passing out behind the wheel.

If things don't improve a lot and quickly, I might have to modify my new year's resolution to mastering the kazoo instead. It's better to set goals one can actually achieve.