it's not pathetic if they actually remember you

I don't usually see my librarian crush on the morning train, even though he's usually on the same one as I am. Last week I loaned him my DVD copy of Hable Con Ella to start off the trade, pretty sure he wouldn't keep up his end of the bargain because he probably wasn't even interested enough in me to remember that he had my DVD.
He got up from his seat and sat down next to me handing me a copy of The Apartment starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine, which I'm now so excited to see.
He told me he's been busy, with friends in town since he last saw me and more coming today. We talked for a while before he went back to what looked like an involved conversation with his friend, but getting off the train he lagged behind to tell me to have a good day, and that tomorrow he was 'sick' because his friends were coming into town. Another killer smile.
It was so super cute that I walked to work with the stupidest grin on my face.

tricks of the trade

Today Jeremy told me that he saw my blog linked from Dr. Frank's blog. I know Frank Portman's strategy is to reference everybody who references him, but I was ecstatic to see the first link to my blog that wasn't a direct result of me telling a friend about it, so now I suppose I'm referencing it again - how postmodern.
Since I am not fooling anyone any longer about my nerdiness by working at the Internet and accidentally mentioning the new version of Excel when I'm drunk at barbeques, I started a techie blog, which is for nerds only. I have delusions will make me famous by the time I get finished talking about Office 2007.

Over the last few days in addition to text messages from friends I've been receiving text messages from boys who may or may not be trying to date or hook up with me. As if it isn't hard enough to tell these days with such delicate matters, they have to use the stupidest form of communication available - like an e-mail only less space and not free, with fewer social rules dictating response, and some guys apparently think a text counts as calling, which I'm sorry - it doesn't. Sorry, gentlemen, we don't appreciate it more just because it costs money - but that is some weird, sick Vox logic I've heard employed. I use text messaging only when necessary, polite or dating-related, and even then my maximum is one back and forth exchange before I decide whether or not to ignore it or use my Verizon minutes. In any case the possibly dating-related texts probably only warrant an e-mail or IM response, because I heard guys like it when girls play games, and that means always giving less than you receive. I obviously have a lot to learn in that arena because I hate games and I am overtly maternal and an excellent cook and caretaker. But since I'm doing this whole serious about dating thing I guess I will try to pick up the tricks of the discourse.

partying like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel

Memorial Day Weekend, which as we know is all about decadence, got started a little early after my post-blind date clubbing session on Thursday night. It was a good thing I had already made plans to meet up with some friends at 10:00, because the date was...the guy was nice and all, but I really wasn't attracted to him and by the end he was definitely taking every opportunity to touch my arm, shoulder and back and there was nothing I could do to make him get the hint.
I went out with some old Sunnyvale friends to popscene - where I hadn't been since years before I was old enough to drink. Of course I stayed out till 2:30 and somehow stumbled to work the next day only to go to another birthday party that night.
On Saturday I spent 3 hours at the bike kitchen trying to make my bicycle slightly more rideable (new chain, brake cable and brake pads and it still needs work), then went to Carnaval in the Mission for several hours.
When I tried to unlock my bike to go home, my cheap combination lock was jammed, and we had to ask a local resident to give us a hand. It took him ten minutes of intense sawing to get through it, which leads me to believe it wasn't that bad of a lock except for the fact that the combination gears jammed. Master Lock is definitely going to hear about this.

We had a barbeque on Sunday, and we might have been the only people to ever buy their actual barbeque at 10:00 pm the night before the barbeque ($25 at the Foods Co - amazing!).
The barbeque was utterly decadent and extravagant - six wines, three kinds of meat, two types of soy, three desserts.
Then proceeded to go out drinking in the Mission until the bars closed.
Now invited to another barbeque today that's supposed to be at a chef's house. I don't even know if my body is up to another day of decadent eating and drinking, but on behalf of research, youth and other miscellaneous values I will have to do my best.

about target markets

Got to talking last night about this theory I have that my generation, the most recent to enter the working world and which can only be called the September 11th generation, is inherently disenfranchised because we never got to become the target market. As in, we consumed media heavily and were subtly trained to identify with the Generation Xers portrayed and always feel like we were born just a few years too late to be part of something, and just as we were about to enter the promise of being the same age as the glamour portrayed in media the dot com crash wiped us off the marketing map and the Tweens were the next big thing. And suddenly we were not only born too late, we were never going to come into our own as glamourous or important because we were also born too early. And the only thing we got to identify with as a generation was September 11th, war, bad politics and an unpromising economy.
But a fellow 9-11 generationer didn't have the same sentiment, and felt that he was always part of a target market, especially now. Which brings up an interesting question: Was I just choosing not to identify with people in MTV programming, clothing, cosmetics and soda ads because I identified with some kind of supposedly counter-subculture?
If that's true, does that mean that maybe our generation isn't disenfranchised with something to prove as I have thought?
I concluded only recently that maybe it's not so much the sixties and seventies that I hate, but youth culture in general, which the more I study the more I realize is always consumerist in nature, fetishizing political action rather than actually taking it and commodifying culture by any means possible. Maybe the reason I didn't identify with advertising was because I was deluding myself so heavily into believing I was above marketing. But since most of the people I know identify with either another nationality or a subculture, maybe marketing has only been targeting the subcultures that would actually put up the money, and the only place where I fit in is as someone who rarely will. And could that be the death of a kind of marketing?

doesn't this warrant a warning?

A while back my mother mentioned that this lender she used to work with wanted to introduce me to his younger brother after he met me and was so impressed by my, you know, being a single Jewish female without a wedding ring. But besides the fact that I lived in Los Angeles, I was too young to introduce to his little brother, apparently about thirty. Now that I am a year older and no longer in college I am apparently not too young, and he got to talking to my mother about our City addresses. We are only seven blocks apart, in yuppie SOMA and in-transition SOMA, respectively. He was surprised we hadn't seen each other around, since he was unaware that we are separated by the 3-block stretch that is frightening ghetto SOMA.
Anyway I told her that I wouldn't be against meeting him, but I didn't know she just went ahead and gave him my number. You'd think she could have told me to possibly expect a call.
He left a message while I was showering after test-driving my bike (something fishy going on with the chain). When I called back I got his voicemail.
Looks like my mother has fixed me up with a game of phone tag with a stranger.
Love the way she looks out for me.


He called back half an hour later and we talked for a while, going to meet up later this week. I've never been on a blind date before. Yikes.

And speaking of tease

I saw my librarian crush at the station today with his buddy, who he promptly introduced me to. On the train, packed with Giants fans as of late, the friend sat down in an empty seat of a two-seater, leaving the two of us to a two-seater farther up. We talked the whole way, conversation was good though I was probably making some of my crazy nervous faces and laughing like a prepubescent boy.
Telling him about one of my favorite movies, Almodovar's Talk to Her, he suggested we do a swap. Then he got off the train at his stop giving me a killer smile and told me to have a nice night. Still no attempt to hang out with me. Obviously, he has lost all interest.
But that probably won't stop me from following through with the movie swap and dropping him a casual e-mail asking him to lunch, which I know is a terrible idea but what in God's name else am I supposed to do?

What a tease:

My boss e-mailed me last night to inform me that I might be coming with on the Seattle business trip to court a prospective client. I adore Seattle, and plus, I've never been on a business trip before. I was already plotting whether I could meet my friend there for a drink, mentally picking out my wardrobe and thinking about what great novel material it would be when I got the e-mail saying they wouldn't be needing my help after all, and they would get by just fine with the account manager I work with.
Not only that, my work highlight of the week was going to be lunch that day with the Role Playing Game people in the City. Now that's been postponed. I was seriously looking forward to the priceless material that visit would yield. When we met them at the client appreciation dinner, it turned out that they are so into this Online Role Playing Game that they not only play it all day at work but they then go home and play it all night.
One of my coworkers sat next to them at dinner and told me that the entire conversation was unclear as to whether they were referring to real life or the role playing game. Things were said like,
"I'm remodelling my house tonight."
"Oh, really?"
"Yeah, but I still need 200 land-units."
"Oh, I sold an evening gown for some yesterday. You could buy some off me for labor-units" (or something)
How postmodern...definitely going to be a chapter in my novel.
So now my highlight of the week is going to be taking my new bicycle for a test spin after work tonight and hoping not to die.
I finally played with the nozzle enough to get air in the front tire last night, and I took steel wool to the rusty handlebars. I was sure it was circa-1970s, but my roommate's boyfriend the bike superstar said he thinks it's easily 1950s-era, which makes my bike old enough to be your bike's grandfather.
Let's just hope the brakes don't explode on my all-flat ride down to the Mission.

History of bad dates Part I

Everything was going fine, we were having a good time eating Chinese food and taking the bus around town. He even grabbed a cookie for me for the road on the way out of the lecture, and at dinner served me only the prettiest, juiciest pieces of garlic eggplant. My mother taught me to be a sucker for such things.
Back at my apartment we're still having a good time for a while. He excused himself to make phone calls, but took other phone calls in my presence. If he hadn't been friends with my friends I probably would have thought he was a con artist or a drug dealer or something.
We're still hanging out, and all of a sudden without provocation he gets weird and distant. He says he has to go but doesn't leave. I offer to walk with him to BART since I didn't know if he knew the way, but he doesn't answer, just spaces out.
My roommate was in the hallway witnessing this, making wtf faces at me, which I made back at her. Neither of us knew what his deal was. Then another of his friends calls and he says, "Yeah, I'm trying to leave...unsuccessfully." Who's making you stay, buddy? I offer again to give him directions or walk him to BART. He says a few incoherent things but evades explanation when we ask him, and then babbles unintelligibly in Latin. My roommate and I exchange more wtf looks.
Finally he asks me to walk with him.
At the BART station he says, "We could do this again...go to lectures and hang out."
Yeah, we could. "Sure, yeah. You don't have to feel obligated or anything," I said.
"Of course not," he says. He kisses me goodbye and leaves.

high school part two

I met up with some old friends from high school this week, which is funny because they weren't actually my friends in high school, since I didn't really have more than a couple of friends at my high school and I loathed it so much that I left my senior year for a community college program. When they found me on thefacebook, I genuinely wanted to meet up.
It's cool to meet up with people you used to see every day 6 years ago, because they're usually the same, but older and funnier.
I did remember Igor Belogolovsky (the ultimate first-and-last-name name) as being the only one in our Physics Honors class as cynical as I was, but I didn't remember him being quite so funny - I definitely want to be friends with this guy.
And Kasey, my dance-team buddy for the month I was on the team before I quit in a panic attack, has never been more fun or genuine.
(sidebar: I'd been wondering where all of the twentysomethings in the City are when I go out during the week and see only thirtysomethings. After hanging out with Kasey I now know - they're all at kickball afterparties in the Haight, screaming along to "Livin' on a Prayer,' playing some kind of game called flip-cups and generally carousing at Frat-party decibels)
Other than the blatantly obvious fact that good people were under my nose and I needed to get over myself in high school, I think this also teaches me that maybe that feeling that things were going to be better once I got older wasn't media-induced pre-target market envy, but actually right on. I've always had a fairly good feeling about my coming twenties and thirties, and honestly, even my fourties. So if that whole planetary armageddon doesn't happen in the next decade like I've always thought it would, maybe I'm looking at a pretty great 3 decades coming up.
Doesn't it just make you feel like they should invent something to allow you to opt-out of adolescence, or at least a year or two of it? I'd have opted out of 14 and 15 in a flash. And I'm still not convinced that things had to be so bad for them to be so good now.
Though that's probably because I'm resistant to any kind of fate-narrative theory that precludes "my life is a movie" kind of thinking.

I'm supposed to be meeting up today with the Berkeley graduate student, who finally called me on Thursday night. He invited me to a museum and I told him I had reserved seats to see Amos Oz speak and he was welcome to be my plus-one. But it's already 2:00 and I haven't heard from him yet. What gives?

things nature engineers

I was on the Caltrain coming home from work, rocking out to Pavement and reading Microserfs, the amazing 1995 Douglas Coupland novel I am currently obsessed with, so I was pretty into what I was doing and it's astounding that i even noticed something moving in my hair, on which my eyes suddenly focused -
3/4 of an inch long, black and red and yellow with white tufts of spiky fur -

a caterpillar!
(in my hair!)

I didn't scream, just jumped up and yelped quietly...nobody even noticed.
It was especially strange because I hadn't even walked close to any trees or leaned back on anything. All I did after the office was go to the pharmacy.
My first impulse was to assume it might be poisonous, since the last accessed mention of a caterpillar in my recent memory file was Vincent talking about the poisonous caterpillars in his apartment in Japan. Even though, logically, this caterpillar was from Palo Alto, and city council would never let a thing like that exist within town limits.
I was fumbling for a tissue or something and realized I really didn't want to kill that big goop-filled furry guy in my hair, and plus - I'm a vegetarian!
I found an e-mail printout from my dentist in my bag and tried to maneuver it but it was too close to eye-level to focus on, so I turned to the poor guy behind me on the train and talked to him until he took his headphones off.
"Uh, excuse me, this is going to sound a little weird but there's a caterpillar in my hair, could you help me out?"
I tried to hand him the paper but he just fished it out with his fingers and plopped it down on my laser paper.
Several headphoneless people were laughing like crazy.
A guy in the back of the train said I should just throw it down on the luggage rack, but I said I didn't want to kill it.
He made some jokes about keeping it till it became a butterfly and other things, but I said I didn't want to kill it if it had come this far. I watched it crawl, curl, sit still, arch and slither for a couple of minutes. When we started to slow down before Hillsdale, I went downstairs and asked a stranger who was detraining to put it down in a safe place for me. He got a big kick out of it too, but not as much as the guy in the back of the train.
When I sat back down he started to joke about how it was a Stanford butterfly, and wouldn't be used to the Hillsdale environment, but I said at least I gave it a shot. We made a few more jokes about hitchiking caterpillars, shopping caterpillars, documentary-star butterflies and otherwise intelligent caterpillars, but in the end exhausted all material. Connecting with a stranger is only possible to a certain point without additional excuses or lowered inhibitions.
As for the caterpillar - I trust the kindness of strangers at least allowed him another honest shot at this crazy life.

low-impact dating

My ex-boyfriend left San Francisco today to relocate to Big Sur. I think both of us were relieved that now the most essential elements for drama – proximity, history, emotions – would be all but removed and the drama could fizzle out.
I will argue to the end that since I have already formed a successful friendship with my ex-ex-boyfriend that I am capable of it and not at fault for our inability to in this scenario, but he always used to say it takes two to tango. I don’t think I’m difficult, but I am a sucker, and emotional and a pushover. My ideals in these situations are now long gone.
So bon voyage, ex-boyfriend. I wish you the very best living in the forest, as you incessantly told me you preferred over living in what I think is the best place ever. Please, let’s let this be the end of drama between us, because, among other reasons, it’s just not convenient or practical anymore. And I am a busy girl.

In the interim, I must say I’m as astounded as you are that I’ve become a person who doesn’t *hate* to date.
After some deliberation my roommates and I decided that what I am doing is probably called dating, even though I only went on a singular date last week, and spent most of my energy chasing another guy who cancelled our date and my most recent prospect is a third guy who may or may not actually call me. It was the most eventful week of my adult dating life. Granted, prior to this I only tried to date in the high school and community college scene of San Jose and in and around the college scene in Los Angeles.
Everybody, particularly my mother, used to tell me I should entertain several guys at once and play the games and not get my heart too set on anything if I want to date without getting too hurt or demoralized. I thought this was officious, detached, cynical bullshit that would be profoundly depressing to entertain.
Now I’m trying a similar model based on low-impact dating. I still get just as excited and junior high-level stupid over boys, but I try to lower the stakes tremendously, partly by spreading myself thin over several simultaneous prospects and vowing to use everything that does not help me achieve ultimate happiness or mind-blowing self-actualization as material for my Suburbia novel.
Because one of the reasons I and my fellow imaginative females think and talk so much about boys is because television and suburban dullness have brainwashed us into thinking being alone isn’t as fun and that ultimate happiness and self-actualization can come from intense love relationships. Sadly, it’s kind of true some of the time.

camp Potrero

I went to this design-school-graduate party on Saturday with my roommate - her industrial designer boyfriend just graduated and threw a rager at his Potrero Hill pad complete with keg and backyard campfire. That neighborhood is so crazy they can get away with a backyard campfire in the middle of the city. They called this “End of the Year Explosion at the Shack” on the pink 2x4 flyers that were distributed a month in advance. You have to love designers for the extra attention they put into everything.
First highlight of the evening was when we didn’t know where we were going on the bus and accidentally got off at the projects. We couldn’t quite tell – it looked like a yuppier version of the neighborhoods in the Presidio.
“Um, are these former military buildings or are these the projects?”
A passing SUV answered our question when he slowed down and yelled something to us about wanting to “hit that.” What a crazy neighborhood.
We walked for 20 more minutes and got to the party just as everyone was rolling in by carfulls.
Things got crazy, and next thing I knew my scalp had been sprayed neon green and I had absorbed that yummy campfire smell so thick it would take 2 showers to clean up.
This guy from the design firm IDEO who rides the Caltrain with me was there – I tried talking to him – “You ride the Caltrain?” but he wasn’t up to relating on our mutual commute. I guess the divide between the bike car scene and the other cars is bigger than I thought.
There were a few people there who weren’t designers or former designers. It took a couple of hours before I figured out the connection - they were freemasons who were friends with the designers. Freemasons? Yikes, I thought, being an immigrant raised in a middle class California suburb and taught to be vaguely skeptical of anything too VIP or exclusively prepschool.
Now as far as the Berkeley graduate student who had gone to UPenn, this was only to be expected from a former Ivy-leaguer, but designers from California? I was just surprised.
I knew my roommate had said something about wanting to join the women’s group related to the Masons, and I never really got into it with her why she was interested – she said she’s excited about the potential of the group to be politically or philanthropically active and stop being just a bingo club. It did sound kind of cool, but the nature of the actual social events-in-robe remain enshrouded in an eerie mystery.
As for the Berkeley graduate student – he gave me his phone number telling me to call, and then pulled a disappearing act. Was this a kind of freemason code-test? Evasion of awkwardness? Or did he just have to leave in a hurry?

My new bicycle

I went to that 8-block garage sale on Fair Oaks, because I was in the market for a new bicycle. I saw it near 22nd street: red, comfy seat, round handlebars, flat tires.
Awesome. Needs air and some love. Two things I've got. Also probably needs some safety-check and expertise. I will have to find those things elsewhere.
I walked it down to the bus, latched it up front, rode the bus with it and then walked it all the way home.
Completely made my day.

Israelis at Revolution

Avi flaked on our plans (no hard feelings) and I was all dressed with nowhere to go, so I decided to go out anyway to find a bar or cafe to drink wine and scribble in my notebook at. It was obvious where I should go when I saw the Revolution Cafe, with red walls and open patio doors and a live band playing a combination of jazz, latin, blues and folk.
I asked a stranger whether I could sit at the tiny open table attached to theirs. They answered in a vague accent that I could. When they started speaking Hebrew to each other, I almost lost it laughing. There are so few Israelis in San Francisco, what are the chances I just sat down at a table-full of them?
I asked the one next to me in Hebrew if they lived here or were on vacation. He said they all live around here. We watched the band play and talked about my hangups about speaking more than one language at a time (my parents got me to speak Hebrew as a kid by telling me not to speak any English) and about generally living around.
Somehow he convinced me to leave with his friends and hang out at his apartment, where I started to suspect I wasn't just making a 31-year-old buddy to speak Hebrew with, and now I might have a problem because I was in the apartment of a guy I wasn't attracted to. I was sitting on his chair and he motioned me to sit on his bed. I said "I'm okay." Ha. He asks, "Does 31 seem really old to you?" "A little," I answer, lying through my teeth since I had been throwing myself at a 32-year-old all week. I told him I had to go soon and soon after that he dropped me off at my place. My biggest worry was that I didn't have the vocabulary in Hebrew to make excuses or let him down easy if he made a pass at me.

Things I'm over.

After an exceedingly dull day at work and a cut-short conversation with my librarian crush, who made no attempt to try to hang out with me outside of Caltrain, I came home frustrated. Whatever, I'll just add him and the day to the list of things I'm over. Proofreading some kind of legal letter for my mother over the phone with her pushed me over the edge, and I had to put on a sweatshirt and sneakers and listen to bad screamo and walk up the hill to where I could see the sunset. I wasn't sure which direction to walk in, but half an hour later I was at Alamo Square just in time to see a corner of the sky glowing hot gold and pink.
"Isn't it amazing?" a stranger said to me as I walked towards the log-bench. I was walking too fast to stop, but I showed him my gigantic grin. "You seem pretty stoked to see it," he said. By that point San Francisco had given me its usual payoff. I watched it till it faded to white, and walked slowly down the hill over the pink city turning on its lights.

The last sentence only took me half an hour

There are two kinds of people in this world: those that obsess over e-mail and meticulously craft responses in which all conceivable angles are first weighed out and carefully edited and pieced together and later rethought and regretted, and those who feel like the internet doesn't actually really affect real life and you could almost say anything you want with next to no consequences. The overall trend of the universe tends towards the former, but for me it's more like a problem.
Let's ignore the meta-levels of irony of the fact that I am writing an exceedingly candid blog.
I, of course, lead my real life only on the two extremes, because I am cursed with no head-to-mouth filter but a highly-paranoid behavioral self-analysis side.
4 e-mails, a cancelled lunchdate and another train conversation later and I still have no concept as to whether this guy has an inkling of interest in me.
An unusually slow week at work combined with the receipt of several 2-3-paragraph e-mails from the caltrain crush has made for some epic analysis prior to each 2-3-paragraph e-mail response.
For some reason on the train I ended up talking to him about sports, mostly Olympic, which I know very little about, and generally babbling shallowly about roommates and novels. Making an accurate impression in 33-minute increments is a lot of pressure.
But the really sad thing is that it might just come down to whether I'm beautiful enough for him or not. Which I may or may not be.
But it was a killer look he gave me when he said it was nice talking to me, and have a good night.

My ex-boyfriend (who is, incidentally, now moving to the forest) has said it seems really adult to meet strangers in public places and date them: something I said I'd tried to do (in Los Angeles of all awful places) but never successfully. There's definitely part of me that wonders whether I could successfully date somebody I didn't meet through a friend of a friend, through some kind of institution, through alcohol consumption, or even (I'm certainly not courageous enough yet for) the Internet. The actual fact would change all of my conceptions of the limits of the universe regarding self and otherness and the ability to relate to others.

I went to see Frank Portman read from King Dork after work. I'm halfway through his book, and half-fascinated by how much a Young Adult genre writer can get away with. Makes me think it might be the most promising genre to break into. I'm not even sure what makes his book appropriate for Young Adults except that it is set in High School. There are some serious High School sexual experimentation scenes which I find fascinating he squeezed successfully past the publishers. I asked him about things I suspected were puzzles in the book, and he basically answered that whatever doesn't get revealed in the book is something he played with but never bothered to figure out himself. Like I said, those YA writers can get away with anything. There were only about 20 people there, and at least a third were obsessive fans wearing homemade "Chi-Mo's" patches and MTX shirts, taking pictures with him and having him sign album liner notes. I'm rarely starstruck, maybe I couldn't relate because it feels like he's more of a friend of a friend of a friend than a celebrity of any kind, partly because their drummer, Jim, used to have the radio show right before mine. I was pretty impressed that Dr. Frank still had such serious fans. They were way more interested in his being a rockstar than they were in him being a writer of any kind, even though his talk and his blog made it sound like he thinks the book is going to make him famous and give him the recording budget he wants. Literary fame is a mysterious thing.

On nerdiness in general

I felt like I was in Junior High School for most of the day in anticipation of an actual human interaction with my caltrain crush. Interactions with strangers I stare at are rare, especially considering the inverse rate of how long I have stared at them without any interaction to how much social interaction will ever occur.
I arrived early and saw him talking to his friend. I surveyed my options: a. stand nearby and pretend not to see him, b. stand nearby and smile and wait for him to come up to me or c. come up to him and his friend, I opted to instead hide on the other side of the bushes and check my cell phone messages and generally pretend to be busy with my handheld device. I was able to maintain this for as long as 6 minutes before the train arrived. He saw me approaching the door and came up to me, his friend had just departed - possibly in response to the universal male game signal.
He was very friendly, so I was able to suppress some of my cardiac alert shock at the apparent possiblity of disrupting immutable contemporary social isolation rules and the catacalysmic possibilities this could have on my entire universe.
He said something like he had had a relaxing day, so I asked him if they were still in classes, and he laughed and said,
"I'm not a student."
"Oh, you're not?"
"I'm a librarian."
"Oh, a librarian! I thought I could pick out a grad student in a crowd of office workers."
"Are you a student?" as I'm saying no he says, "I gathered you weren't since you seem to be leaving at more or less the same time every day."
We sit next to each other on the train crowded with game-bound Giants fans and have a conversation that somehow strays into talking about travelling Europe, a subject that makes me sound like an exceptionally boring person.
He was an American Studies grad student who quit for Library Science when he was over it, like a lot of former Literature grad students I've met. I have to admit, the librarian thing is super-hot. It also means he might actually have time to hang out. He is from Kansas, which to me is almost the equivalent of being from another country.
So of course, by the end of the conversation I know quite a bit about how cool he is and all of the obscure literature and music he's into, and he knows very little about me or the somewhat less cool or obscure literature and music I'm into, partly because I am nervous and trying not to make it obvious.
We're slowing down coming up to his station and he says we should have lunch sometime, but then realizes he doesn't have enough time to put my phone number into his handheld device. I hand him my business card(s) (and consequently further blow my nerd cover), and he said it was nice talking to me before leaving.

I decide to take the guy from Saturday up on his invitation to the Giants game, even though he contacted me all of a couple of hours before the game. I thought it might be fun, and he said he was going out of town for 3 weeks the next day, and I'm trying to be spontaneous and cool, and I obviously need to start hanging out with boys in real life rather than sitting at home planning lines for hypothetical conversations.
He's pretty cool and a lot of fun and everything. I do kind of have a feeling that it's a total fluke we ever met or spoke, we have very little in common, and I am probably little more to him than casual female entertainment. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
He kind of talked like he thought we might start some kind of regular dating situation, but the guy is going out of town for a few weeks, so I don't feel like I need to feel guilty about trying to date other people.

caltrain crush

Last year, when my friend (who would probably prefer to remain nameless) and I would sit at the cafe staring at UCLA English department graduate students as they held office hours with their students for our sheer entertainment and narrative-fantasy, a fetish was born.
Of course, we were not the only undergraduates on campus marvelling at the academic cultural phenomenon that is the result of the weakened economy on the college campus. Our lower-division TAs had been predominantly bitter, married 35-year-old women, but this new crop of 23 to 28-year-old nerdy-cute, brilliant, attentive, culturally-insightful, cool TAs were a sight to see, and beyond the simple research I was doing in contemplation of my own graduate studies, we kind of just wanted in on it. We of course only succeeded in having several-line conversations, swaps of extra chairs and embarassing eye-contact exchanges. But at least - some of the funniest things that either of us have ever said out loud were said in context of staring at this or that English department TA.
As a result, I am exceedingly good at picking a graduate student out of a crowd (namely, a crowd of office workers), and I ride the train down to Palo Alto with several from Stanford. Just out of force of habit, I stare at them (because it's something to do) and try to casually eavesdrop on their conversations, which is not terribly unusual, seeing as how I eavesdrop on a lot of people's conversations, but I find it slightly more interesting since they are, after all, Stanford graduate students who live in San Francisco. In addition, I fantasize about dating one of this demograhpic because he would have two deadly-hot characteristics being a. A Stanford graduate student and b. Somebody who has the same commute as I do.
As always, there is one in particular that I stare at, of course knowing from experiences of both staring at people on the train and staring at graduate students that he will never acknowledge my existence except for awkwardness of obviously being stared at.
But no!
Last week as I strategically placed myself in front of him and his friend so that I could eavesdrop on their conversation and possibly use it for material in my "novel," I couldn't hear much, so I put on my headphones. Then the most adorable 3-year-old pops up out of nowhere in the seat in front of me and looks right at me.
"Hey there."
The kid loves it. I start to have a ton of fun with him, pointing out the water and the ducks on the way and making the kid lose it laughing and possibly even educating him slightly about the beauties and mysteries of life if I may be so self-indulgent. He gets off with his dad at 22nd Street, the stop where I know the vast majority of Stanford graduate students get off at. As the kid is making a big production of saying goodbye to me, the whole car is almost as excited as that time somebody in the 2nd car gave out free beer to any takers in a group of teenage Giants fans before a game. And as the kid says goodbye, intriguing graduate student notices me once again staring at him and smiles in return.
The following Friday, I am leaving the office with my co-worker who occasionally trains it, and I see him as the train is approaching, my co-worker rushing towards the ticket-validating machine at the front of the station. Intriguing graduate student waves at me, and I smile back while keeping up with my companion, but am unsure whether he has seen me or whether he believes his gesture of recognition was lost on me.
The suspense!
Ha.
Today I see him at the station speaking to presumed professor he and his friend frequently speak to, so I keep my distance to avoid putting him in an awkward position, also because I am a weak, pathetic chicken. But I gave him a close-lipped smile before boarding the unusually crowded train car. There is nowhere to sit, so I end up sitting two seats in front of him.
Just as we're approaching the 22nd Street station, I feel a tap on my shoulder. No kidding!
"Hi," he says.
"Hey, what's up," I say.
He introduces himself, and I do too.
"I'm about to get off at 22nd Street. But are you going to stay till 6:00 tomorrow?"
"Probably."
"Alright, then I'll see you tomorrow."
He is clearly a genius of timing and language.
And it looks like I'll be staying at work until 6:00 again.

other people's epiphanies

My writing was going nowhere so I went in search of epiphany and found it at the top of Buena Vista Park while watching the sun fall closer to ripples of green-magic hills floating in the blue bay, kissing monterey cypress and pine trees lighting the white-mist coast. I was by myself, but it could not have been more perfect, except for a homeless man screaming monologue under a blanket beside a wheelchair, you had to wonder how he got up all of those steep hills in that wheelchair. But it didn't kill the mood for the most enchanting gay couple in the city, two lovely men in their 50s, one was grabbing handfulls of scent off flowering bushes and pirouetting while the other held his hand and drank the air in. There were even three 20-year-olds in club-scene homie-worthy attire; San Francisco is so beautiful everybody can appreciate it.
It's hard to follow a beautiful, thoughtful evening with a night full of drinking and dancing without feeling a kind of dumb culture shock. It was a charity benefit party for Israeli Independence Day, and after wine on the bus with Ingrid all the way to the Sunset (not nearby, let me tell you) I found myself profoundly drunk having an intense conversation with a stranger whom I somehow (I swear I can't fathom how this began to occur) found myself kissing behind a curtain in a control room of some kind, accusing him violently of having picked the location before the girl. The strangest part of it all is going from intense imaginary romances to blurry, casual actual romances that leave no room for excitement or reflection of any kind and wondering which I prefer. Somehow I get the feeling he does that sort of thing all the time. Of course the real irony is that in a room full of 95% Jewish and Israeli males I managed to hit it off with the one Catholic in the room.
The next morning I went to the How-weird Street Festival because it was 3 blocks from my house. Be it the vague hangover, the booths of all hemp-related products or the intense drug use in the air, I could only handle about 45 minutes of it before I left to avoid becoming an actual vegetable. I'm a tremendous fan of public spectacle and street festivals, but I'm either too timid or just too turned off by drugs to get into intense public daylight dancing in nondescript costume. The crowd was into it though. 10 hours later while picking up Brokeback Mountain from the video store with my roommate we saw many of them just leaving, stumbling through the dark streets in green capes and gold running shorts back to their vehicles which they would hopefully stop hallucinating enough to drive home safely.

I wonder if he just does this at random.

I'm walking down the street in SOMA with the evening fog rolling in and I stop at a light behind a man. As we're both waiting to cross he turns to look behind him. Then he smiles like he's going to say something.
"Hey, could I ask you a question?" he asks.
"Sure."
"Think of a number between one and ten, and don't tell me what it is."
"Okay," I say and think of eight.
"Now let me guess, your number is seven. Am I right?"
"No, eight."
"Aren't you an optimist! You're that much closer to the number ten than I am."
I laugh.
"Are you an optimist?"
"Not really."
"Do you think optimistically?"
"Not really," I laugh.
"Well do me a favor."
"What?"
"Be optimistic. Can you do that for me?"
"Sure." He crosses the next street and leaves me at the bus stop, still laughing.

getting emotional over mobiles

It had been kind of a hard week at work, so on Thursday night I felt a need to purchase brightly-colored, low-quality consumer fashion products. But on the bus ride there I passed the SFMOMA and it occurred to me that it was Thursday, and the museum is open late and half price on Thursday nights. (Though somehow it did not occur to me that it was also First Thursday and that I should have gone to that when I could go to MOMA anytime)
But anyway, I did really feel like going to the MOMA. I hadn't been there in almost a year, which was coincidently also the night my friend became my last boyfriend. The exhibits then were nothing special, so I was expecting a lot of the same last night. But they got better and better as I climbed the floors, and by the time I went through the 1906 Earthquake and Fire photos exhibit I was in highly-aware astute artloving mode before I even reached the Calder exhibit, where I had an art orgasm and got emotional over mobiles. About 30% of my taste in art is influenced by Comp. Lit major theory-laden overanalysis, but the other half that really counts goes by whether the art makes me have semi-embarrassing emotional outbursts like smiling uncontrollably, laughing wildly and almost crying. Those tiny cartoon shapes on fragile lines of communication made me start to find everything poignant and I grinned enormously and almost cried over several sculptures. I walk out of the museum in a fantastic dreamlike state towards Market, mostly because I wanted to look at the buildings that were in the Earthquake photo exhibit.

I'm walking down the foggy dusk street in this enchanted state where everything is surreal and beautiful when I hear a man to my left say in a vaguely familiar accent, "You are honestly wearing my favorite colors." After studying abroad in France two years ago I became really good at effectively handling strange men picking up on me in the street. In France they are sometimes borderline violent and creepy and unpredictable, but In San Francisco they almost always just compliment you to feel you out and then leave you alone unless you're at a club, so I just smiled and didn't look at him and kept walking, until I realized he was following me.
"Burgundy. It is bordeaux in French." I smiled and glanced slightly to see who I was dealing with. "In French it is pronounced bordeaux." It was this pudgy black guy, harmless.
"Vous etes Francaise?" he asks me. This immediately throws me off, because I have emotional problems with switching languages in the middle of a conversation, and when someone switches up the language on me my brain switches to that mode, which given how out of practice I was was an especially paranoid mode. Somehow he can tell that I understand him.
"Vous parlez Francais?"
"Non." I lie, accidentally answering in French.
"Are you French?"
"No." I answer in English.
"I swear, you look very European. Are you European?"
"No." This is also a lie, but I don't want to get into the fact that I am an Israeli Jewess (this is an excellent term I am trying to bring back into circulation) of Eastern European origin.
At this point he is clearly following me a la Francaise, so I walk into the first open store I see, which happens to be an Aldo.
"You are shopping for shoes?"
"Yes." This is funny because I have probably only been inside an Aldo twice in my life, and it has never crossed my mind to purchase anything. He tries to follow me into the store.
"I'm sorry, I dont' really feel comfortable having you shop with me," I say.
"That's okay, I am going to Sephora, I will meet you?"
"I'm sorry, I have a boyfriend." (an outright lie)
"You don't want to meet, we could drink some bubbles."
"I'm sorry, thank you."
"We could drink some champagne."
"I'm sorry, thanks."
"Okay, take care."
They sure are persistent when they meet you on the street.
Waiting for MUNI I start staring at this very attractive stranger who is reading a magazine waiting for the M. He sees me glancing and doesn't smile back, so I try to be discreet because he might have a girlfriend or be gay, but there is nothing else to do but look at him. He didn't appear to be cool with this. Our nonverbal dialogue went like this:
-Uh, excuse me? What do you want?
-I'm just looking at you because you're attractive.
-Do we know each other?
-No, I'm just looking.
-You're insane. (this is where he looks away and makes a face to no one like she's crazy why is she staring at me)
Evidently he was not used to being stared at by young single females on public transportation. Oh well, his loss.

At the party

This guy was being unexpectedly witty, so we were talking and I might have almost been attracted to him until
Red Flag Number One: "I'm moving to Berkeley next week to live on my boat."
Uh, that's cool. Guess we're probably not going to hang out.
We're both back to the party and at 3:00 my cold starts telling me it's time to go home and sleep.
All of the sudden he remembers me.
"You're leaving? Don't leave."
"But I'm sleepy, I have a cold."
(Cue: first obvious moment borderline-sincere boy could ask for my phone number)
"That's good. Sometimes you've gotta put the body before the party." This is the sort of talk that made me think he was a winner.
We are laughing.
"But it's really important..not to lose the party."
We are laughing more.
Boy-with-girlfriend is giving my roommate some kind of a back rub. She is recently single, laughing and humoring him with a vague bitterness over the pathetic-ness of male that he is not doing much to prove wrong.
"Less thumb, boy-with-girlfriend," I say.
He tries to laugh it off as he teeter-totters on the edge of cheater-slut.
The guy is back up in my face giving me eyes this close and saying "Don't go, I want to kiss you." He goes for it before I even know what's going on. I get a mess of lazy rubberlip and tongue on my mouth before I turn to get away.
"What are you doing? There's too many people watching, it's weird."
(Cue: second cue for borderline-sincere guy to ask for phone number)
"Come on."
"It's weird. I feel like we're on stage." (Light in room we are in is on. Other lights are off.)
"Come on, play the part." Yikes. "Let's go make out."
He is pulling at my arm trying to get me to go into the backyard.
"I'm sleepy." This is true. More than my obvious qualms about kissing a stranger at a party who does not intend to ask for my phone number and just happened to realize his attraction for me when 3:00 AM rolled around and he didn't feel like going home alone, what I was really thinking about was how sleepy I was.
"I'll wake you up," he says. Ewwww.
"No. I'm sleepy."
Somebody asks him to close the back door. The cops are there. This is definitely the first college party I've been to since I graduated that was hosted by college graduates, complete with noise complaint, keg and fratboy-caliber makeout attempts.
He tries to pull me outside with him. I shake my hand free and he goes out back alone and closes the door behind him.
He comes back in 5 minutes later and proceeds to ignore me, and doesn't even say goodbye. That's what happens when you get in the way of a man with an agenda.

We get a cab on Fillmore and Oak and drop two girls off near Market and Church. In the taxi I say I hope my cold doesn't get any worse. The cab driver starts making jokes about how I have the heebie-jeebies. This is all fun and games until he drops the two of them off and it is just me and my roommate in the car, at which point he reveals himself to be completely psycho.
"I once had the heebie-jeebies, but I decided to have sexual intercourse with this woman anyway. Once I lost all that protein, I was all wrapped up in blankets and useless for days."
Because I am overly bold I partake in this conversation. Obviously a mistake.
He keeps turning his head all the way back to look at us and make jokes, all while driving 11 miles an hour, conveniently missing every light.
"Whoa, watch the road buddy," I say.
We are beginning to think he's drunk.
The relief of making it home alive leads us to tip him much more generously than he deserves. We hope he will buy himself something to help him sober up before he picks up anyone else.