Passive-Aggressivewear

I purchased the Emily Post book (along with a couple more Chris Cornell CDs) rather than getting it from the library because the only thing greater than my love for the environment (as would have been manifested by sharing the book instead of buying my own new one) is my dread of cooties.

Thus I use a brand-new paper towel to wipe off the counter in the kitchen at work instead of a sponge, though I use my own dish towel for my cups and silverware.

The Emily Post book came out long ago and the edition at the library could be decades old and crusted with boogers and have other people’s hairs between every couple of pages. I feel faint thinking of it.

Tom and I saw The Bourne Ultimatum two Saturday nights ago. It was absolutely excellent, even better than Live Free or Die Hard. It was extremely fast-paced. At first I wasn’t sure I was going to understand the whole plot and wondered if getting it would require having seen the prior two movies, but everything fell neatly and satisfyingly into place by the end. The fight scenes were tremendous.

The Sunday of that weekend, I took the bus to Novato to see Carol Joy. We had lunch at a Puerto Rican place in San Rafael that has “Sol” in the name and has two locations, one of which you can sit down in and which is painted a very bright green. The proprietor put in a glass-fronted display case outside the front door a letter they received complaining about the color.

The writer let it be known that Marinites prefer everything to be painted in muted earth tones, if I understood it correctly, and warned that he or she would not be returning, though the food was good, until the building was painted some other color.

The place was full, and when we left, there was a line out the door.

We went then to see No End in Sight, the documentary about the Iraq war. It was very well done, but, if you read Newsweek every week, you won’t learn anything new.

We had refreshments at a café across from the theater, and then I took the bus home. I was seated by another movie buff and we had a rousing conversation all the way back to San Francisco.

I received a request from my boss lately to change my settings in Microsoft Outlook so she can see not only that a segment of time is busy but what exactly I’m doing; we all received this request. I was taken aback.

Based on my informal research since then, it appears everyone puts personal reminders into their work calendar, and while if she called me and asked how I was, I might feel perfectly fine about saying, “You know, I have this dreadful rash—it’s itching like crazy; I can barely sit down,” whereas having her peruse my calendar anytime she feels like it and see “Put ointment on butt” just seems different.

(Ah, I love this blog. It makes me laugh all the time.)

I have just started Patrick Ryan’s novel Send Me.

Late last Friday afternoon, Tom and I went to see The Invasion, and then we split a burrito at Pancho Villa. He had asked me to help with a bicycle mechanic task that required three hands, so we did that when we got home. While I was in his kitchen, I asked if I could look in his freezer—you know, one likes to know what’s going on in one’s friends’ freezers—and noticed that he had some individual patties of meat wrapped just the way I wrap them when in the very rare meat-cooking phase (sorry, Mily; don’t hate me).

For a moment I thought perhaps this was the universal way of wrapping a meat patty, but then thought maybe these were items I had passed on to him, as I often give Tom food I know I won’t be eating.

He confirmed that I had given him these, and added, “When Thelonious died.” Sure enough, each one had a “B,” “T,” or “C” on it, depending on whether it contained beef, turkey or chicken, none of which Thelonious would eat right before she died nearly eleven months ago. I certainly never thought I’d see these items of last resort again.

On Saturday I figured out how to print a recipe on a 3 x 5” note card, two-sided. This is what my father does with his recipes, and I’m starting to think doing this and putting the cards in a little box in alphabetical order might be better than having recipes on a million different pieces of paper of various sizes, stuffed in no particular order into various file folders, so that I have to see nearly every recipe I have when looking for the one I need.

I’ve started washing all my clothes in cold water, but I still group items into the three colors: garish, somber and passive-aggressive.

A Heartfelt Testy-Monial

I’ve thought of a solution for all those people who are always rushing around in such a panic, leaning forward, scowling as they make for whatever it is they’re making for.

Try this: Pretend you’re Paris Hilton keeping the paparazzi waiting for three hours. That’s what I do.

A lovely CD: Chris Cornell’s Euphoria Morning. I played part of one song for Tom and he got a dreamy look on his face right away. Also, Chris Cornell’s CD Carry On, just out.

There is a Chris Cornell-athon underway at my place lately, between his two solo CDs and the Audioslave CD Revelations, Audioslave being a supergroup formed from members of Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden, the latter represented by Chris Cornell.

A supergroup, as I learned when I was getting my degree in pop music (picture academic lectures on Led Zeppelin, because that’s what there were), is a musical group made up of the members of other established groups. Another is Velvet Revolver, made up of Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots.

Tom and I were back to Sacramento the weekend before last for the birthday of one of his brothers, Steve. We took the train and were picked up by the birthday gentleman himself, who conveyed us to Ann and Mac’s.

Paul and Eva had other plans for the evening, but came by for a while, which was great. Roster of attendees, for our New York reader, who may or may not still be with us: Paul, Eva, Ann, Mac, Steve, Julie, me, Tom, and Dan.

We had hors d’oeuvres, dinner and the opening of presents. Steve is an avid photographer and was given a photo printer by Paul, Eva, Chris and Sarah. He was bowled over—what a generous and thoughtful gift!

Tom and I gave him the KT Tunstall CD, another gem (not another gem like a photo printer, another gem like a Chris Cornell CD).

The other night, Hammett leapt into a tub of fine washables, and then went sloshing into the kitchen. I had to pick him up and try to mop him off before he licked half a cup of lavender-scented laundry soap off himself.

At first I was surprised he had made such a miscalculation, but then I realized it wasn’t an error at all—given his love of anything wet, he had probably been resisting the temptation to do this for months, and finally decided he could put it off no longer, even if it earned him a reputation as heavy on his feet.

I read an interesting thing in a recent New Yorker, about a man who has Asperger syndrome and learned how to get along with other people by reading Emily Post’s book Etiquette. Maybe it could work for me! I have ordered a copy, of the original, not the version updated by a relative of hers, per a review saying the later editions cover stuff the original wouldn’t have known about—email and cell phones—but that the original is better written and that if you apply the spirit of its instructions to any situation, you’ll be OK.

I told a male colleague of mine in Arizona about this, and he’s going to order it, too.

While I was feeling gloomy about my career options, I happened to see Jack, who does the wonderful bodywork, and he advised me to have a chat with his partner, Rod, which is a pleasant thing to do in any event.

Rod and I went to Soup Freaks on Mission St. between Third St. and New Montgomery—it’s a great place; good food and not expensive—and I told him my problems. He told me about a wonderful class he took at City College on career exploration, whose instructor said to let yourself be led by what you are curious about.

In the course of this conversation, I realized (again) that if I were ready to find another job, I’d be looking for it, and if I were ready to move to Ann Arbor, or anywhere else, I’d be in a U-Haul. Since I’m not, I must not be ready, so I might as well stop fretting about it. What a relief!

I read a really horrible novel lately, which received a huge number of glowing reviews from prestigious publications, which left me scratching my head. I thought the characters were flat, the plot turns improbable, and the motivation for many actions obscure. It also relied very heavily on sex scenes; we were asked to believe that when someone really loves you, he shows it by trying to get you to partially undress in public.

I won’t name it because I don’t want the young author to feel discouraged when she makes her way here, as is inevitable, but there actually was something helpful in it. One of the two-dimensional characters says to another two-dimensional character, paraphrasing here, “Since the people you love live in all different places, no matter where you live, you’ll have to miss someone.” I gave my forehead a resounding slap. All my problems solved (again) in one week.

That #%#@*!!! Does It

The weekend after Ann and Mac moved to Sacramento, I was on call for work and had arranged to listen for pages on Saturday, with my colleague to the east handling Sunday. Saturday turned out to be an absolutely gorgeous day; Sunday, of course, was overcast and wintry.

I felt kind of gloomy on Saturday. Right before I woke up, I had a very realistic dream about Lisa and David, which made me sad about their impending departure.

I called the mother ship. Dad said Mom was in the kitchen cooking up a tasty dish and then they were going to watch a Netflick. I felt so lonely after we hung up, and I wished I were there, for the millionth time.

We had been alerted at work that it was likely that some major issue might arise over the weekend, so I prudently stayed near my laptop, as I could all too readily imagine the conversation that would occur on Monday if I was derelict in my duties.

While milling about, I got on my own PC to print out a form from a website. “Here comes your form,” said the status bar, or words to that effect. “Here it comes! Here it comes!” Sure enough, a mere two a half hours later, there it was.

“That #%#@*!!! does it,” I said, and resolved to buy a new PC (or Mac), which will also put an end to my mother guffawing at the limitations of my current system. I told her my PC has 64 Mb of RAM.

“Haw,” she replied.

I also set up my piano keyboard, though it meant my big chair had to be in the center of the room. For a couple of days, I enjoyed playing it, but then began to detect a very annoying high-pitched overtone that occurred when a few notes in the octave above middle C were played. It drove me so crazy, I ended up putting the keyboard back in the closet.

A few days later, Lisa and I had our last monthly lunch, at Medicine. Because it was a special occasion, I had a special lunch: two orders of maitake tempura, and some yuzu lemonade. They’d forgotten to put the sweetener in (evidently); I fixed it with five packages of sugar.

The very next night, Lisa, Tom, David and I had our ceremonial last dinner at Chef Jia’s, where we have been together so many times.

I just finished Naomi Wolf’s The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See, which made me completely miserable, which I knew immediately it would do. If I were smart, I would have returned it to the library after reading half the first chapter.

Her father says to follow your passion and that you’ll be happy if you’re doing your art—doing what you were put here to do, whatever that may be; maybe your art is to help people arrange auto loans. This makes me very unhappy because it makes me feel like I should quit my job this minute, which I would absolutely do if I had any sort of plan for what I’d do after that, but I don’t, and I can’t settle on one, because I change my mind all the time.

The options all seem unappealing: Work at a non-profit for WAY less money? Work part-time for WAY less money? Stop working for a year or two to pursue my interests and then hope I can get a job again as I near 50? That seems worrisome. So I end up feeling trapped.

Of course, my view of this job ebbs and flows. In one mood, which I’m in fairly frequently, I would say, well, this job pays decently and allows me to save for retirement, and I work (mostly) with nice and smart people, and I have the freedom to direct my own projects, and I’m always learning something new.

In another, I would say that I took a major wrong turn nearly ten years ago, that I could not be in a situation that is less of a match with my talents and interests, that I don’t have any particular passion for the goals of this organization. That, in fact, my soul is dying here. And I think that’s quite true; right now, I think that.

Then again, who is this I who is so unhappy? Is there an I who can find permanent happiness by arranging conditions to be just so? If “I” get everything arranged just so, how long will it stay that way? Is the thought that my soul is dying anything more than just a thought, fleeting and insubstantial? Is even my feeling of distress anything more than just a feeling that will pass when the next one arrives?

Then yet again, if I had a fairy godmother, I think she might say, “If you want to quit your job, quit your job! If you want to live near your mom, live near your MOM!” One can always choose again if one makes a mistake; so they claim.

Three Traffic Vignettes

I

I’m cycling south on New Montgomery, which has several lanes of traffic going in the same direction (south!) and always many jaywalkers, as there is a hotel on one side of the street (a favorite venue for visiting politicians) and the Academy O’Fart University on the other.

A fellow, 55ish with dark curly hair, is jaywalking across the street pulling a little luggage-type cart behind him. He will soon walk into a truck in the far lane, but expects he won’t actually, because he expects the truck will move along, but it doesn’t, and when the man gets over to the truck, he goes like this: “Aaaaurrghahgh!!!!” He howls with rage at the top of his lungs.

“Tsk,” think I, observing this self-inflicted misery. As if it’s the truck driver’s fault the man can’t cross New Montgomery, which it wasn’t, unless the truck driver called the man and said, “Eh, don’t bother walking all the way to the crosswalk. Just step out there and watch the traffic part!”

II

I’m cycling home after work, westbound on Market St. A small boy on a bicycle sails off the curb and out into the street. I’m startled and dismayed. I ride behind him, watching as he weaves in and out of the bicycle lane. He turns to me and says something gleeful about going faster. He is a very cute young feller. I finally realize he is attached to a woman cycling along some feet ahead of him, who hasn’t looked over her shoulder once.

At the next light, I confirm: “Is this your child?” She just smiles and nods, as she is no doubt sick of getting in arguments with lecturing cyclists: “Where’s his helmet? Do you know he’s not always riding in the bike lane? Why don’t you put an orange flag on the back of his bike so drivers can see him?”

If he doesn’t get flattened by a car, I imagine that boy will grow up to write a critically acclaimed book about the wonderful adventures he had with his free-spirited and/or insane mother. You know, like The Glass Castle or The Liars’ Club.

III

I’m cycling to work, eastbound on Market St. As is not at all unusual, I’m in a group of 10 or 15 cyclists. Most are in the bike lane. A few are not; they are riding next to their friends who are in the bike lane. The driver of a silver Prius honks and swerves around the cyclists. A cyclist says something to the driver through the driver’s side window.

The driver retaliates by swerving into the bike lane, all the way to the curb. No one is hit. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen a driver do. The driver speeds through the next light, probably thinking he will leave us all behind staring at a red light.

Of course, we all make it through the light, too—you can’t lose a bicycle in city traffic—and the driver pulls over. I assume there will be a physical confrontation, or that the driver is even going for his gun.

But the cyclists all simply pass him, which makes me feel kind of proud.

As I pass the silver Prius, I take a long look at the license plate, shorthand for, “We could find you if we wanted to.” I don’t try to remember it, or stop to write it down, maybe due to the good example of the other cyclists.

In front of the Prius is some sort of truck, whose driver asks me, “Why is everyone looking at that car? I just saw six cyclists go by in a row and they all looked at that car.”

I tell the truck driver what happened. I keep an eye on the Prius over the truck driver’s shoulder. The Prius driver gets out of his car, starts to approach us, and then doesn’t.

The truck driver is very friendly and says he’s always very careful when he’s making his rounds. He peers around the corner of his truck before stepping past it into traffic.

Our pleasant chat concludes and I see the Prius driver approaching, so I wait for him to walk over, and I say, “I don’t want to get in a fight,” because I don’t. (Why? I don’t know; just didn’t feel like it.) He is a 50ish guy with intense blue eyes and a silver crew-cut.

Our conversation goes more or less like this:

“You need to be more careful.”

“I know that some of us were overflowing the bike lane: you got frustrated.”

“That’s right.”

“But it was very frightening for us when you swerved into the bike lane, because we don’t know if you’re going to kill us or what.”

“Yeah, I know you’re vulnerable out there.”

“I know not every cyclist always behaves perfectly.”

We had a perfectly amiable conversation and parted in a similar manner; he even smiled during it. It was good that his memories of the event won’t all be bad, as maybe he will refrain from doing something so dangerous next time.

Lucky Is Gone

Lucky the Rat
2006-2007

A Thursday or two ago (I’m a little behind here) was euthanization day, at All Pets Hospital on South Van Ness.

We took a cab over there and were shown into an exam room where we told an assistant the highlights of Lucky’s story. Lucky had refused to walk through a cardboard tube into her other, smaller cage, so we had her in her usual cage, which was due for a cleaning and didn’t smell very good.

The vet came in and proved to be a lovely, kind young woman. She said she was sorry to meet us under such sad circumstances, and then she reached right in and took Lucky out, using a towel to protect against bites. We were terribly impressed. Lucky did her best to wriggle free and let out a little squeak, but soon found herself cradled in the vet’s hand.

The vet looked her over and listened to her heart, and said the tumors probably weren’t causing Lucky any pain, but that they would no doubt continue to grow, and said her back could probably be treated, but that it would be difficult for Tom and me to put any kind of ointment on it (to say the least), so she agreed euthanasia was the right decision.

She took Lucky away and brought her back a short while later on top of a fancy cart with all kinds of tubes and dials. She had already received anesthesia in gas form, and I thought she’d appear to be peacefully asleep, with her eyes closed, but her eyes were open, and she was breathing normally, which in her case looks like gasping, because her rat metabolism is so fast. So that was kind of alarming, though the vet assured us she couldn’t feel anything.

The vet put Lucky’s little gas mask back on and we were able to pet her, for the first and last time, and then the heart-stopping shot was administered, and over the next minute or so, her heart slowed and stopped, and she was taken away, and we walked home with her empty cage.

I got several nice notes of sympathy from my online buddies, plus an e-card from Marilyn in Las Vegas that had little drawings of animals with the caption, “All animals go to heaven.”

The next night, a Friday, some neighbors had a noisy party until at least three a.m., which meant I got only three and a half hours of sleep, but I didn’t want to miss Moving Day, which started with another bus ride to Mill Valley, where we picked up Ann and Mac’s car for the last time, and then drove to San Rafael to pick them up.

They were all ready to go, so we hopped in the car and headed east. While Tom has been busy helping Ann and Mac in various ways in Marin the past couple of months, his brothers Steve and Dan have been hard at work on their new condo in Sacramento.

After Ann became unable to get on the computer or drive anywhere (due to a broken wrist), Steve took over and coordinated a million details, including putting felt on the bottoms of all the chair and table legs—on every single thing that touches the beautiful wood floor. He dealt with the cupboards person, the window person, the counter person, the floor person, and so on.

Meanwhile, Dan did one of his beautiful, perfect paint jobs; Steve said Dan touched every single surface in the place. The result is just lovely, and I hope Ann and Mac will be happy there.

Steve treated us to lunch from a local deli and we sat together around the dining-room table: Steve, Dan, Ann, Mac, Julie, Tom, me and Ann’s friend Geri. Dessert was chocolate cake brought by Geri. Tom and I spent the night at Steve and Julie’s, and we gathered again the next morning at Ann and Mac’s for breakfast.

After that, Dan took Tom and me on a drive in the country—some of my happiest moments have been spent in the backseat of Dan’s station wagon on such drives—and then to Sacramento’s immense farmers’ market, where I filled a bag with produce. Dan dropped us off at the train station, and I took the train home while Tom went south by bus to visit a friend.

At work, I have volunteered to lead a project to support the company’s employees—100,000+ of them—in riding their bikes to work if they want to, which I think involves making sure there is ample, secure bike parking at all company locations and that employees have the information they need to do this safely.

This is very close to my heart and I’m really enjoying working on it, though it means I’m busier than ever before, because it’s filling up all the little cracks of time. I know the bike-related parts pretty well, though I’m sure I will learn plenty, but I also have a wonderful mentor who is going to teach me about the process of doing a project like this in this setting.

So I Don’t Have Gout! Is That So Wrong?

I got home yesterday and was met by Hammett at the door and thought, “Here’s a good thing that’s still here: this fantastic cat Hammett.” He’s such a delightful cat. Sometimes when I pick him up, he flails his hands in all directions, though I don’t detain him against his will. If he wants to be set down, I set him down. He still likes to lick me when he gets a chance, though he’s starting to lick himself now and then, too.

I’ve thought of three semi-painless ways to make new friends:

Answer ads for activity partners on Craigslist, look for one-time volunteer opportunities on Craigslist, and probably best of all, make it a point to get to Eugene Cash’s sitting group on Sunday evenings, which is certainly a bunch of like-minded souls.

Why, already I saw an ad on Craigslist that said, “Do You Have Gout?” Maybe that will be my new best friend! I hope he or she won’t reject me because I don’t have gout. If people really care about each other, they should be understanding about goutlessness.

Oh, turns out I was still looking at the Los Angeles Craigslist, where I went to post a question asking if John Stamos ever spent time in Ann Arbor, Michigan. When I was in kindergarten or thereabouts, I had a crush on a very cute olive-skinned boy (I would say “little boy,” but at the time, he seemed pretty much regular-sized) named John Stamos. I could easily imagine that this boy, who was only around for a semester or so, grew up to look like, and in fact be, John Stamos the actor, who is about my age.

However, I have never been able to find any mention of this online. Anything I see about John Stamos says he grew up in Southern California. Maybe some Los Angeleno will clear this up for once and for all.

I went up to visit Lucky the rat last night and found her in an unusually sociable mood. She was getting rather portly for a time, but now is smaller, no doubt due to her cancer. She used to not mind if you stroked the end of her tail if it was sticking out between the bars of her cage, but now she reels it in if you touch it.

It also used to be common for her to come out whenever there were people around, but lately she spends much more time huddled under a ramp in her cage, even if someone is talking to her, so it was a treat to have her want to visit, and a very good thing, since it was her last evening alive, probably.

I was having the fantasy that the vet will say, “Oh, she’s not in pain, and I’ll fix her scratched-up back with a one-time application of this stuff"—because I don’t think there is any way we could put medication on her ourselves—“and if she’s eating and drinking”—which she is, albeit losing weight—“she can go on for a time.” But I don’t think the vet will say that; I think Lucky will be euthanized this afternoon, and so I kept having to step into Tom’s bathroom and blow my nose and dab at my eyes.

I feel so sad about that little rat.

Tom asked if I really think he shouldn’t have another caged pet, which is a condition of my paying for Lucky’s euthanasia—the mice at the pet store are so cute! Indeed they are, but I think he wasn’t paying close enough attention to Lucky, or he would have seen sooner that she was growing tumors, and I think if a pet of his had a problem that required lots of medical care, as so many animals do when they get old, it might be impossible on his budget. I tried to say it kindly.

But there are other things I pester Tom about a lot, and in a much more critical way. He’s such a kind soul that people tend to hugely take advantage of him, which drives me berserk. Sometimes my mother says, “Don’t nag him!”, but that advice would be so impossible for me to take, it’s almost incomprehensible.

I could probably get it if she said, “Nag him 99 times a day, but stop before you get to a hundred!”

The fact is, it is a strain on our friendship for me to offer the same opinion or criticism over and over—even if he’d be way happier if he did what I said!—and what he does is well beyond my control. I can’t pester him into saying no to people who need to hear it once in a while any more than someone can talk an alcoholic into quitting drinking.

The alcoholic will quit when he or she is ready, which may be never, and Tom will say no when he’s ready, which may be never. And if he learned this skill, the first person he might say it to is me. That’s not such a good feeling.

Friends Go North on Vast Wave of Opportunity and Bliss

Now the truth can be revealed. Why so much crying this past weekend? Well, sometimes one just gets in that mood, and yes, that is often right before one gets one’s period, which is fine. The sloshing of hormones is a beautiful, natural thing! I read once that maybe these more intense feelings are, in fact, one’s true feelings and that’s how I like to think of it.

The Stevie Wonder album I just got, Signed Sealed & Delivered, has on it, besides the song I was looking for, a couple of incredibly lovely songs that I have listened to over and over. One is called “Gotta Have a Song,” which is about the power of music to heal heartbreak.

He sings that his wife used to be in the kitchen cooking for him all day, and he keeps rushing home to see if she might be there, but he knows she’s gone. That’s so sad!

But the overshadowing melancholy thing was the possible departure of our very best in-person buddies, David and Lisa, who were across town in their apartment mulling over a change of venue to Seattle, where David had been offered an excellent career opportunity.

David called this morning and said that after much soul-searching on both of their parts, they have decided to move to Seattle, and he has called his new employer to say he will take the job. I think that was absolutely the right decision (though I would also have thought it was the absolute right decision if they’d concluded they preferred to stay here; in other words, there was no way they could go wrong), and now that the decision has been made, I am excited for them.

Not to worry; Lisa’s current and also excellent job can be packed up and shipped to Seattle, too.

My dear friend Elea and her family are near Seattle; maybe the two couples will meet and like each other.

Of course, this basically puts my blog out of business, since a good portion of my in-person socializing is done with Tom and David and Lisa. We have also seen Ann and Mac a fair amount lately, and they are moving to Sacramento on Saturday! We’re utterly abandoned. Even our rat is leaving, to be with my grandmother and Thelonious in heaven. (Oops, going to cry again. Hold on.)

Now the trick is not to cling to the idea that maybe Lisa and David will come back some day. Maybe they will, but who knows? Maybe they will really like Seattle, which by all accounts is a great place.

I will be able to get to know it vicariously, and of course it is an easy place to visit from here, a short enough flight that one could go just for a weekend, so maybe I will get to know it in person, too, which will be great.

And of course we can talk on the phone and email just as we do now. I talked to David for an hour this morning and shortly after we hung up I had another thought and called back. I said into their machine while waiting for David to answer the phone, “I feel too much time has passed since we chatted”—it had been 20 minutes—and when we hung up a few minutes later, David said, “Don’t wait so long before calling next time.”

At some point in the past several days, I thought, “I’ll have to get out there and make some new in-person friends.” Then I considered how I met my current crop of best friends: in school, at work (particularly at a job that had great meaning to me), in AA. That is, by hanging around a group of like-minded people on a regular basis.

You’d think I would have made millions of friends via the Bike Coalition, which is a huge group of extremely great people, but the only friend I ever met that way was Tom (I think that’s how we met; I can’t remember exactly), who in turn introduced me to about 20 fantastic people, including David and Lisa.

Fortunately, I have several friends I could tell anything whatsoever to. Unfortunately, mighty few of them are physically available on a regular basis, this type of friendship being a casualty of our mobile society. There is a handy clump of them in Sonoma County, at least.

I don’t know if I’ll exert myself to make new in-person friends. That might require more hanging around groups that might produce friends than I have time for.

My friend Margaux and I have sort of been planning a spa weekend, which is not necessarily my kind of thing, though I ended up enjoying the two we’ve been on. Because I’m ambivalent about this activity, I’ve not been actively pestering her about our plans. Certainly this is no reflection on what I hope will be our lifelong friendship; we met in eighth grade. However, now that my circumstances have been so suddenly and severely reduced, I have just emailed her: “Hey, when’s our spa weekend???”

Lunch on the Water

This weekend Tom and I took the #70 Golden Gate Transit bus over to Mill Valley, where we picked up Ann and Mac’s car and drove to San Rafael to pick them up. Then we drove to Sausalito, where they treated us to lunch at the Spinnaker, which is right on the water, in fact, over the water. I think you can actually kayak right under it, and it’s a fine place to watch people sailing and motorboating by. It was a beautiful day.

Then we stopped by their apartment in Mill Valley to drop something off, and then we went back to their assisted-living place in San Rafael and hung out. Tom and I took turns catnapping on Ann’s bed, and then I sat in the hall reading with Mac, where it’s a bit cooler, though it wasn’t overly hot in their room.

At the end of the afternoon, we drove back to Mill Valley, dropped the car off, and took the bus back to S.F. Someone had left a ziplock bag of edamame behind in the bus stop. That’s what they have in Marin, whereas we prefer barf and beer cans in our bus stops here in the city.

We went then to the Embarcadero theater and saw Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, in which Christian Bale, whom I like very much, portrays Dieter Dengler, a U.S. Navy pilot who was shot down over Laos at the beginning of the Vietnam war and eventually escaped. True story, good movie.

Then we went to Buca di Beppo on Howard St. for Italian food. That is one of two restaurants my coworkers and I often patronize for going-away lunches and the like. The other is Henry’s Hunan on Natoma. Both are chains, though Henry’s has just four locations, all in San Francisco.

In both cases, after visiting a few times, I thought—and this appears to be a common trajectory —“Boy, what a grease pit,” and would think, “Ew,” when either was proposed. But after going to each five or more times, I became a fan of both, and now it’s like, “Yeah, Buca!” and, “Yeah, Henry’s!”

Tom was wowed by Buca’s enormous platters and the very busy décor, one vintage photo next to another. It actually was the first time I ever sat upstairs. When I’m there with coworkers, they always make us sit in the basement.

On Sunday I went to Rainbow and later made bean and corn salad, and butter cookies with lemon frosting, though my oven really misbehaved and I fear the cookies are on the raw side.

I have been missing my big salads, so I decided to try to find some salad dressing that doesn’t contain vinegar or lemon juice, and was surprised to see even ranch dressing has vinegar in it. I read all the labels and found a couple of dressings in which vinegar was far down the list of ingredients and was heading to my cart when I heard my mother’s voice as sure as if she was standing behind me: “For goodness’ sake, get what you like!” Meaning, whatever looks tasty that isn’t an out-and-out vinaigrette.

So I put back what I’d chosen and got some ranch dressing instead, and found it to be quite good, and hopefully low enough on vinegar.

My mother is opposed to eating something you don’t like just because it’s good for you. She says if something is good for you and you like it, then fine, but you should eat what you like to eat.

I have stopped being vegan because my lady acupuncturist (by which I don’t mean the default acupuncturist is male, just that I have both lady and gentleman acupuncturists) convinced me that I should eat butter instead of fake butter for health reasons.

In baking, the taste is the same, or close enough, at least to me, which is why I was using the fake stuff, to spare animals, but now I’m using the real stuff, because I think the fake stuff probably really isn’t good for your health. Well, you know, whatever you do, it’s wrong.

I finished Sigrid Nunez’s unputdownable novel The Last of Her Kind and am going to request her other novels from the library, excepting the one that imagines the life of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s pet monkey.

I gave my parents a call on Sunday afternoon and while my father was talking, I became suddenly overwhelmed with the unbearable poignance of life and started to cry, silently. It was a weepy weekend; everything made me cry when I wasn’t actively engaged in dining or viewing: Lucky the rat, Stevie Wonder lyrics. When it was my turn to talk, I was busy crying, and my father asked, “Are you still there?”

A few minutes later, I was talking to my mother, who I have lately realized I rarely let finish a sentence. I have vowed to be a much better listener, so I was listening with complete attentiveness and, when I failed to interrupt her, she asked, “Are you still there?”

Begone, Accursed Polystyrene Cups!

Whew, looks like I struck the right tone in my note about the smoke from the grilling. I got a nice reply thanking me for my flexibility and saying she’ll let us know before grilling and that she also has gathered some suggestions for reducing the smoke next time.

As mentioned, I have joined a Green Team at work, and have been thinking about two things in particular: ridding my floor of Polystyrene cups, at the modest end of the spectrum, and convincing all 100,000+ employees to ride their bikes to work, at the other.

My Green Team mentor has gone off to Eritrea to do good works. Before he left, he sent an email telling me to get the cups thing rolling.

There are several groups on my floor, and I had no idea what managers were involved, so I was kind of stumped as to how to go about this. I figured I would have to start by interviewing every second person to see whom he or she worked for, and then I’d have to approach managers who had never heard of me and try to convince them to do something: right.

There are two administrative assistants on this floor, one of whom is super-friendly. I’m sure she couldn’t tell you my name, but she always acts like seeing me is the best thing that has happened in her whole life. I think that’s a fine quality, and I don’t care if she’s being sincere or not—I think it’s OK not to be sincere if you can do a convincing impression of being sincere.

I told her I was working on a project to get rid of the Polystyrene cups, which are horrible for the environment. Sometimes I see someone snatch up a brand-new cup, put a quarter-inch of water in it, pour the water down his gullet, and toss the cup into the trash.

The administrative assistant was all for this, so this week I went to see what she thought of simply ceasing to order these cups, but she said, “I can’t make that decision,” and she told me who pays for all of the cups on this floor, just two managers.

So I then drafted an email asking the managers to consider doing away with these cups. I edited a PowerPoint presentation that had come my way about the money that can be saved by not using disposable items, and included that. I said I would schedule a meeting for next week, after they’d had time to look at the PowerPoint presentation.

I figured I would hear nothing back, and they would decline the meeting invite, and if I actually got to talk to them, they would say they weren’t comfortable depriving all of their team members of cups, and the whole thing would drag on for months, and I’d have to find time to brood about it when I already have my hands full brooding about the bike racks.

But what actually happened was that not 15 minutes after I sent my email, one of the two managers sent a directive saying the cups would be phased out, and a couple of minutes later, the other wrote, “Ditto,” and said he’d ordered mugs for his team members; the first manager said he’d ask his people to bring their own from home. No meeting needed!

The euthanasia of poor Lucky the rat is scheduled for this Thursday. I should say that even if we couldn’t pick her up, we were still fond of her, and I feel terrible about her current condition.

Tom always kept a supply of baby carrots for her, her favorite, and we talked to her and told her she was a good rat and a pretty girl. I think she knew we liked her, even though she would have been forced by instinct to bite us if we’d tried to pick her up.

She did manage to escape one time and proved to be quite a destructive force, chewing through, among other things, Tom’s iPod wire.

Her euthanasia will cost more than previously mentioned because she will need anesthesia in gas form because she can’t be handled. I will pay for it because I know it would be a lot for Tom, and because I did, after all, lobby for him to keep her as a pet after the snake didn’t eat her—twice—and maybe mainly because I feel like I’m her mom.

If your mom is the person who gives you carrots because she knows how much you like them and strokes your tiny fingers as they grasp the bars of your cage and tells you you’re a good rat, then I’m her mom, and so is Tom, so we must do what we can to help her out of the world painlessly.

Painless death at a pre-determined time is something rats can have that’s better than what humans can have, though I suppose there are a lot of a lot of things that are good about being a rat, like not having to be deployed to Iraq.

Unluck

Behind my apartment is a small yard, maybe twenty-five feet by eighteen feet. The building manager prior to the current one turned it into a paradise, with lush lawn, beautiful roses, and a burbling fountain. Once she moved out, it declined rapidly and became sort of a jungle, albeit with the couple of rose bushes and a wonderful huge mass of bougainvillea with shimmering fuchsia blossoms.

A couple of weeks ago the building manager started clearing excess plant material out of the yard. When I saw her, I commented on the improvement. I mentioned how beautiful the bougainvillea is (was, as of this writing) and she said that it was kind of taking over, from which I gathered she meant to prune it.

The next time I looked out the window, I saw she had hacked every single blossom off the plant, leaving nothing but mutilated bare branches. She had done the same to the roses, which now are bare twigs eighteen inches long. It is mid-July, the weather is beautiful, and there is nothing to look at in the garden!

I pointed it out to Tom after he returned from the Death Ride last Sunday and he said, “I believe the term for that is ‘scorched earth.’ Gardening does not seem to be her forte.” I complained to my mother about this pruning job (since something very unpleasant would happen if I complained about it to the building manager, with whom I am getting along very well lately) and she agreed that one may find occasion to prune, but not, as a rule, while the prunee is in bloom.

Next I saw that the building manager was soaking the ground around the murdered bush, so I guess she means to tear it completely out. For a time, there were some blooms remaining on the other side of the fence, in the neighbors’ yard, but even those disappeared. The building manager must have gone over and said, “We have to cut this conniving bougainvillea off at the knees before it murders us in our sleep.”

Then we got a note saying she had been doing some work in the yard and was going to have some friends over to celebrate! Evidently these are the type of friends who like to look at hacked-off stubs rather than flowers.

Last night was celebration night. A fire was lit in a grill and a few folks came over with beer and hot dogs. It wasn’t particularly loud, but it was smoky beyond belief. My apartment was saturated, even with all the windows closed.

Hammett, the bedding and all the clothes in the closet ended up reeking of smoke. I had to wear a t-shirt to work today that smelled like it had survived a house fire.

As the manager and I are extremely prone to getting in fights, I wasn’t sure what approach to take; as we know, I'm incapable of the no-approach approach. In the end, I sent a brief note saying it had been pretty smoky and offering to try putting plastic over my windows next time.

Last night, I ended up going up to Tom’s, where conditions were slightly better, but where I also made a sad discovery: His pet rat, Lucky, so named because a snake declined to eat her not once but twice, has developed two sizeable tumors.

In addition, her back has open wounds on it from her scratching herself. Tom tried changing her bedding, but it didn’t seem to have helped, so I was just saying I thought it was time to take her to the vet when I noticed the tumors. I’m afraid poor Lucky is going to have to have a euthanasia experience, which I will pay for ($150, if you’d like to know).

Mission Pet Hospital does not treat small animals, but they referred me to an office that does. Someone there assured me that Lucky’s euthanasia will be painless. She asked if we preferred private cremation, so we could get her ashes back, but I said that since Lucky totally bites and therefore has never been held by either one of us, I thought we’d be OK with the group cremation.

We’ll be with her when she dies, if possible, albeit not within biting range. I can’t blame her for being a biter, after having nearly been snake cuisine twice.

I have finished psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, which Tom gave me for my birthday. I didn’t think the writing was all that charming, as did others, but it has given me a lot to think about. Just in the two days since I finished it, I have seen several examples of things he mentions.

I received the Stevie Wonder album Signed Sealed & Delivered, and it turns out “Never Had a Dream Come True” is indeed the song I’ve been hearing in my head for so long. I was so happy, I cried.

I also received in the mail at work a garment whose box blew out of my bike bag on the way home! Now I’m going to have to order another one and I don’t even know if it’s the right thing.