doesn't look like a day spent in bed

At the advice of several people I used one of my sick days for a mental health day off work today, which was so great for my mental health, and helped remind me that life is in fact very good. Several people at work probably knew what was going on, and none of them could blame me. The weather was stunning, I ate Tartine take-out at Jon's house for breakfast and sat at ocean beach with my roommate. But now I have a total sunglass tan, and even under those dim office lights it's going to be hard to pretend I spent the day out sick...

really.

Avi Ehrlich to me:

AND while you're online and bored, this is really
funny and I just ordered $100 worth of free awesome
shit to display in my apt:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=54084

nerdosphere

My coworker took me aside for coffee during 'lunch,' (which I almost never really take anymore).
"I was like you about 6 months ago," she said. "I was so stressed I couldn't sleep at night, I had nightmares about accounts, I stayed late, I worked so hard, I was always telling our bosses what I thought needed to be changed. Then I realized that I wasn't going to be rewarded for it, and it was just costing me my health. You have to learn to separate yourself from it and put your health first."
I knew she was right, but it's hard to tell someone with a relentless work ethic to toss it out the window, and it's not really possible in the midst of this total chaos insanity to blow things off.
"Oh, and you should ask for more money too," she said.
After months of bragging about my phenomenal job that leaves me free to pursue adventures after work, my foot has now been in my mouth for so long that I'm worried my face is going to stay that way. My job has been bursting at the seams of 9 to 6 and invading my life. It also seems to combine itself with all other anxiety associated with my personal life, since the stakes seem to be higher on everything since life started getting really good a few months ago while work has been getting worse and worse.
"You're so different from the Lee I knew 3 months ago," said our former Marketing Director (who just quit, coincidentally) on the train last Thursday.
"What do you mean?"
"You used to be like, 'Oh, I'm going to an art opening,' 'I'm going to a reading,' 'I'm going for a bike ride' and now you're so stressed you bring your work home." I told her I still believe what I've believed for three months because that's what they've been telling me, that these are temporary Startup growing pains and any day now it's going to change. But it's only been getting worse.
"Isn't it pretty ironic that you care so much about your job when you said you only wanted to work for a few years and then write your novel?" Igor said at the Oh No! Oh My! show at the Independent tonight, which totally made my week and saved my day.
Yeah, yeah.
See, it's all things I know. But the problem about trying to be open-minded and open to opportunities is that it puts a damper on stubbornly chasing whatever you think your dreams are or sticking to whatever you think is really important. It's not like I'm ready to quit my job, but something needs to change, definitely.
It took two drinks and two bands to make me shake the anxiety and dread of everything hanging over my head and all of the careless things I've been doing and regretting in all avenues of life as a result, but eventually F.U.N. kicked in under the shaking heads and movie projector lights. Made me realize I need to try harder to find it under the building mess of all this, and stop putting myself aside.

My dad came home from work and came upstairs to see my brand new Macbook. He opened up Ha'aretz on the browser to 15 soldiers killed Wednesday in south Lebanon and said it was my cousin's paratrooper battalion. Apparently he sent my uncle a text message telling him he was okay.
It should have been obvious to me that his reserve would be stationed there by now. I guess it just didn't occur to me to ask.

quasi-sickday

I didn’t realize why I was feeling so awful last night at the Google Dance, I just assumed it was the hard day at work or the hangover, or drinking on an empty stomach. I didn’t much feel like exchanging business cards, dancing, playing with remote-controlled robots or standing in front of a bluescreen and having my face projected onto a dancer’s body in a cartoon background. It hit me late last night that something was probably wrong with my body again. I took a number of herbal supplements my roommate recommended and went to bed. I got up and dressed to a T for my half-day appearance at the trade show, but an hour into work I realized I was going to have to see a doctor, and spent the next hour panicking about potential complications I’d read about on the internet and dealing with idiotic Palo Alto Medical Foundation bureaucracy while squatting on the office bathroom floor. It’s hilarious to work in an office where upper management is always gone and everyone else is so busy that no one realizes when you’ve been gone for 40 minutes, or that you’ve spent the last 15 minutes reading medical websites about hypothetical severe illnesses until you feel physically faint and your face is a shade of pale green. I finally got an appointment after cutting through bureaucracy that could almost rival Kaiser’s. I went back to the office and basically hung around just to see what my test results were and wait for my prescription to be filled. When I left the office at 3:00, there was no upper management to tell, so I was able to get away with saying I’d be “working the rest of the day from home,” when really I was moping around my parents’ house in Sunnyvale (the best place to be sick ever) and there’s no way I could have accomplished anything.

and another tradeshow week

Funny, because I started this blog during my first tradeshow. Luckily this second one probably only means a few hours of floortime and several who's-who high techie parties. At the Ask.com party tonight (where out of sheer hunger I accidentally ate two kinds of meat in the form of hors d'oeuvres and luckily did not become violently ill, after all it has been over 8 years since I'd eaten meat of any kind) we drank on the open bar tab of the always-hopeful former AskJeeves (where's the butler at, after all?) and my empty stomach left me writing drunk text messages at the Gordon Beirsch about the highlight of the evening, when I watched my almost equally-drunk coworker schmoozing with the VP of Yahoo Search Marketing on the way to the Ask.com photo booth with our El Salvadorian coworker who was there on business. Ask.com knew their shit, and made strong drinks for the important, and weak watered-down shit for us nobodies. When the VP told her his drink was a monster, my coworker slurred, "let me try," and stuck her cocktail straw into Mr. VP of SEM's glass and took a slurp - fucking priceless. She kept blushing while telling it later, swearing that tomorrow he would be pulling their BUs accounts, but you had to admit it was pretty awesome of her to really take schmoozing to a head to head like that, and he's probably a cool enough guy to have been okay with it (let's hope).
On the drive back to the city with my North Beach-residing coworker, I played DJ via iPod (such Suburban trash, I know) and leader of raving, drunk conversation, screaming about how the lights in the distance in Colma knew something, and the downtown and Bay Bridge lights know something about what makes inspiration, because we keep paying San Francisco and coming back, and we can't get enough of it - this inspiration we drink till our eyes water and we fall asleep, dreaming techienerd dreams and imagining a life in creativity that is so, very tangible it is coded in a language so many can learn, and we keep coming back making the blocks that build the internet-country that begins to tie us back together again - Finally.

baloney

Elaborate misunderstandings always begin to reveal themselves in disjointed events you fail to take note of.
Last week I went over to my friend Colleen's place for drinks, and she asks me, "So what's going on with you and Yoni?"
"What are you talking about?"
"You know, Yoni, who was at your party," she said. I only vaguely remember meeting a friend of a friend named Yoni at my birthday party, and definitely don't remember what he looks like, nor did we exchange more than two lines of dialogue.
I set the record straight: "I'm dating that guy Jon who was at my party, and we're going away for the weekend together. I hardly even remember meeting that guy Yoni."
"That's so funny, because according to (name of their mutual friend), you guys have been text messaging like crazy all week."
This is especially funny because not only do I not exchange phone numbers with this stranger, I also hate text messaging that doesn't go anywhere, and I like to keep my text messaging conversations to a maximum of two back and forths. I take out my cell phone and look at my most recent messages, just to make sure I didn't receive any messages from a mysterious new number that I didn't notice. Definitely nothing there.
Bizarre! We hypothesize that maybe he met a different girl at my party and confused my name with her's, or maybe there is a girl out there pretending she is me.
I think nothing of this episode until today, when I am talking on the phone with my mother. After about 20 minutes, she says, "Oh, I have a funny story." She proceeds to tell me that at a party she ran into a friend, who told her that one of her friends is the mother of my boyfriend. My mother is confused. The woman says her son's name is Yoni, and that he is a graduate student of some kind. My mother tells her she doesn't know about any Yoni, and only knows that I've been dating a guy who works for Google for over a month. Apparently, Yoni's mother is thrilled that he has been dating an Israeli girl in San Francisco for about a month, and upon repeating my name, word got back through the grapevine to my mother, because how many girls could there be in San Francisco with the same name as me? My mother tells her friend not to tell Yoni's poor mother that she said anything.
Now, one of two things is possible:
1. Yoni's mother and friends are giving him shit about not dating girls or not dating the right girls (he could be in sexual orientation denial or have bad taste in women, or still getting over a girl from months ago he should have gotten over) and he is telling them he's dating me because I'm a convenient scapegoat he can namedrop.
or
2. He is seriously delusional and thinks we're dating although I have never exchanged more than one line of dialogue with him and have not seen him once since I met him three weeks ago.
3. Some girl he met at the party is pretending to be me or using my name as an alias for whatever reason.
So long as it's not #2, I'm fascinated to be mixed up in such a weird (and creepy) situation. And seriously curious to get to the bottom of it.

acronot #1: F.U.N.

After being out of San Francisco commission all weekend (with Jon in Mendocino: stunning, enchanting, sleepy, immensely calming), catching up with friends revealed that two of my friends were in complete romantic crisis. I'm not sure how it happened that I've become someone people go to for dating advice, or why anybody thinks I'm qualified to do so, but apparently I give effective advice, and after a few months of seriously trying to date I've learned something about crush e-mailing. Part of me feels weird rewriting and composing crush e-mails for my friends' crushes on behalf of my friends, but in a way it's remarkably similar to rewriting my friends' resumes and cover letters (which I'm tragically good at and secretly kind of like to do). I totally think dating should come with resumes now, so it's not a conflict of interest or anything. After my roommate had a mini-triumph this week (he calls my advice+storysessions Dating Club), I knew whatever I'm doing is working. Which is good for when I'm kicking myself for not being serious about writing or otherwise not being productive, because I think helping people is important. So I'll keep helping people in whatever way I can, one peptalk and crush e-mail rewrite at a time.