Blab

I have to say, I’m having some misgivings about the whole blogging enterprise lately—are my efforts in the blaboratory really worthwhile? I think this is yet another result of the Tejaniya-style retreat at Spirit Rock in April: What are my motivations for doing this? To what end? I enjoy doing it, which maybe is reason enough, and since I like reading about other people’s lives, perhaps there are those four or nine or as many as 12 people who like reading about mine, but if not, I relish my minutes of writing every day, anyway. Knowing that my father faithfully reads every single post is a motivator. (Thanks, Dad!) But lately I find myself, on the one hand, deleting many paragraphs of draft material after I ask myself, “Does this actually seem interesting?” and many other paragraphs after the question, “Do I actually want to share this about myself on the Internet?”

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A couple of weeks ago, instead of taking my customary walk, I took a bike ride around the city, and found myself cycling along the Embarcadero, where I heard what sounded like one of those super-loud motorcycles, but it turned out it was a low-slung Mercedes convertible covered entirely in a gold-colored metal. Very striking, and it made an absolutely earsplitting noise when moving. Then I realized that wasn’t the car making the noise—it was a similar Mercedes, right next to the gold-colored one, this one covered entirely in shining silver. Even more fabulous looking, but obnoxious beyond belief. I’m sort of sick of living near rich people (which I guess is not news, in this blog).

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To celebrate my birthday earlier this month I had a massage including TMJ work—I felt great afterward—and then Tom and L. from meditation group took me out to dinner at Radish. I had the veggie burger again. Tom had their hickory burger, overflowing with cheese and sauce, and L. had one of the specials, a fried chicken dinner.

The next day I treated Tom to brunch at Radish. Yelp advises that there can be a two-hour wait if you get there at 11 or noon, but we went minutes after they opened at 9 a.m.—there were other people there already—and had no wait, but the service tends to be slow and somewhat haphazard, though the people who run it are darling. When we were there the night before, the adorable woman (maybe the owner) who took our plates away dropped one item and then another. As the silverware crashed to the floor, she called, “I got it!”, making everyone smile.

Brunch Saturday was tasty scrambled eggs—there didn’t seem to be any way of adding items to the eggs themselves—and crispy home fries and a biscuit. I ordered a side of avocado, which turned out to be about one quarter of an avocado rather past its prime and cost $2.50. In sum, I would say go to Boogaloo’s, where the potatoes are tastier, the biscuits are larger and softer, and you get a good amount of soft butter in a cup instead of a single pat of cold butter. The prices are better, too. But Radish seems like a fine place for an afternoon veggie burger and giant pile of fries, and it’s a pleasant place to be, open and light.

In the afternoon I went to Berkeley for a stroll in Tilden Park with Lisa M. That was fun, as always, and in the evening, I watched The Ledge, with Charlie Hunnam (wow, he’s cute!) and Terrence Howard. It also featured Liv Tyler and Patrick Wilson. The latter two seemed kind of strange and wooden, even beyond what might have been appropriate for their characters. The only character who seemed entirely real was the one played by Terrence Howard, though Charlie Hunnam also did a good job and is highly watchable. The movie starts with Charlie Hunnam ascending to a ledge he means to jump to his death from. Howard is the police detective trying to convince him not to, and the story mainly unfolds in flashbacks. I watched the whole thing and found it absorbing and affecting, though it seemed in a way more like a theater piece than a movie, slightly stylized.