how charmed lives are finite

I've been thinking about looking for a new place to live for a while, not too seriously - I love my roommates and it's such a pain in the ass to move. But I realized while walking home on Sunday afternoon and seeing a plastic bag of excrement on my way home (the second such plastic bag this month!) that it would be nice to live in a neighborhood where the smell of urine isn't so common, because I do enjoy doing errands on foot, and I actually can afford it, and I work in the City now so I could live in a beautiful, enchanting neighborhood instead of the leather & urine district. I guess until now I've been secretly hoping someone would just ask me to move in and make it effortless, but it might be time I actually start looking.

Our friend came over last night. His live-in girlfriend (or rather, he's the live-in boyfriend, since she was there first) told him she couldn't do it anymore, and he stayed the night on our spare mattress on the floor. I told friends over a year ago that I saw this coming, so I'm almost surprised it lasted so long, but I'm not sure what either of them is going to do - because not only do they occupy the same stiflingly tiny San Francisco art scene, but neither of them works more than 3 days a week - when you share a room in a 4-bedroom and your rent is so low you can afford to rent a studio to paint in and still work only 3 days a week, any breakup is a full lifestyle change. So in a way, doing that I'm young and I don't have to have a full-time job or have a lot of money thing puts you a lot closer to a dependency like a 1950s marriage, even if you're not the one with the live-in boyfriend or girlfriend, because the breakup of anyone in the apartment could put the entire household in flux (which could be up to 8 people!) - and then it stops being about relationships and starts being about the money.

the tragedy!

My roommate just called to tell me my bike's missing.
It was just last night we were riding back from the Mission and I said I wonder if it's finally time for a better bicycle. But my 1950s, $15 garage sale bicycle, fixed with 3 Saturdays of love at the bike kitchen, ridden many a Saturday afternoon to the park and many a Thursday night out drinking, which I ride to the gym because I don't want to walk down 9th street in the dark by myself, with its gears I can't quite figure out how to change, my stylin' faded rustcolored bicycle that I never had to worry about getting stolen - I wasn't ready to give up on it yet. Now it looks like it's been stolen. I swear I locked the patio when I left this morning. And our neighborhood really isn't that bad. I mean - I didn't think it was.
Sigh.

subtext

On my second visit to Ruby Skye, which I called one of the clubbiest clubs in San Francisco and in which I only lasted 45 minutes the first time I went (to be fair, just after the Love Parade on the most techno-heavy weekend in the City), I was reminded of two things:
1. Regardless of how many drinks I have, I can't turn off my meticulously self-conscious analytical subtext about the music and dancing boys and dresswearing girls, and inevitably feel like what I'm doing is a form of domestic tourism and I am something like an imposter.
2. Even though I totally have a great time going out and dancing, one of my favorite activities at a very clubby dance club is to drink too much and vocalize some of my critical subtext in the form of raving lectures regarding such subjects as Gwen Stefani's image reflecting the decadent consumerism of a nation at war, and these raving lectures are not always appreciated per se by the other members of my party, who at best find them funny in that this-girl-is-crazy kind of way. (The girl in our party turns to her fiance and laughs, in good fun of course, "She's acting crazy!" which more than anything was redundantly stating the obvious, because that was the point, what else are you supposed to do to have a good time at a club when your own private narrative about the club that you can't turn off is so funny?)
She's a very sweet girl, and I'm past expecting most people to relate to me for being a nerd.
What's great is the girl adjacent to me at work likes me precisely because I'm such a nerd, and she thinks I'm just like her except for the fact that I'm a total doormat and she's not, so she's made it a point to teach me the ways of not being a pushover and gently trying to get what I want, which I tell her is probably impossible because of my pathological running self-conscious commentary, but I suppose is worth a shot.

I'm worried that I'm burning out in some way, from working too much too tediously at work during a crazy transitional period of undefined duration.
I crashed out halfway through National Novel Writing Month with about half a novel and the utter inability to write a single word without feeling that it is tedious, redundant, self-indulgent crap. And on Sunday, feeling like getting outdoors but not being able to get ahold of my usual hang-out buddies (on ski trips, moving, with misplaced cell phones out of town), I took a solo trip to some parks I usually have a great time at alone, but somehow it just felt like work to be out there in 40-degree weather by myself. Being as busy as I have been, I can't get over feeling guilty for spending my free time doing something not either productive or highly pleasurable, and I obviously need to get over it the old-fashioned way, by becoming absorbed with some pageturner trash novel in hardcover and blogging a lot until I can write again, at which point I can regularly scold myself for not spending my free time writing brilliant fiction while I'm not at work.

the russian hookup

-Hello, E-?
-Hi!
-Hey, how've you been?
-Good, I've been good. How about you?
-Really good. Listen, I'm calling because - naturally I thought of you - my roommate had this minor eye surgery at SF General, and they didn't prescribe her any painkillers, and she's just dying. So I was wondering -
-Oh, you should get her some Vicoden.
-Yeah, do you know where I can get some drugs for her?
-I could make some calls - is it like a stinging pain, or a throbbing pain, or does it just hurt?

-Is it a stinging pain, a throbbing pain or -
-It just feels like they cut my eye open. Like when you have your wisdom teeth out and it hurts because they've cut you open.

-It just feels like they cut her open.
-Oh. Yeah, you should get some Vicoden or something they give you after oral surgery.
-Do you have any?
-I could make some calls.
-Could you? That'd be great.
-Sure, I'll call you right back.

The phone rings five minutes later.
-Hey.
-Hi.
-I made some calls to my Russian friend - and my friend, being Russian, has Russian drugs. So if your roommate is okay with taking Russian drugs...
-Are they...shady?
-No, they sell them over the counter in Russia. It's like Ketamine, but for humans, not animals.
I put E- on speaker as he explained the history of Ketamine.

An hour later, E- came over with an unmarked pharmacy bottle containing 8 small green pills. I offered him a glass of water, which he gladly accepted, sitting on our floor to roll a splif.
He looks at my roommate, lying back in her bed grimacing with ice over her eye.
-I'm going to put some cannabis in your tea.
-Okay.
Now she's losing interest in finishing complete sentences, but hopefully she feels a little bit better.

Acronot #2: bl-iatus

This blog *should* be on hiatus for the month of November for nanowrimo. I can't make any promises though.

Virtually awesome

Overheard in the kitchen:

"I can't believe I totally made out with a guy on second life."
"...what? hahahahaha."
"It totally sounds funny once you process it."
"I think it's funny pretty much the whole way through."
"You can make out on second life?"
"You can have sex in second life!"
"He wanted to go all the way!"
"You don't even know each other!" "We don't even know each other!"
"Yeah, he asked me to go to the bathhouse!"

"He just said 'click the orb' and I was like, ooh, what's that?"

"Can you get out of it?"
"Yeah, you can just hit escape."
"You can totally do so many funny things. If I played it I'd be like, 'come here, hug me.' escape. 'just kidding. okay, for real. hug me.' escape. 'now for real, hug me.'"
"You'd be an asshole!"
"ha hahahahaha."

"I was totally innocent, he was like, 'let me show you around' and I was like 'I don't even know what to expect!'"

"Afterwards he...held me and we watched the sunset...I can't go back online tonight, he's sent me two messages, he's totally going to jump me."

"Apparently, you can totally like purchase genitals for your second life character."
"Oh my god."
"Yeah. I bet there's a whole culture about it."
"I have two penises."
"ha ha!"
"I have one on my head."
"I'm a unicorn."

"I wanna be a floozy on second life."

"Yeah, they totally have prostitutes on second life."
"I should be a prostitute on second life."
"Oh my god, you totally should."
"That would be so easy!"
"All you have to do is click the orb"
"I could quit my day job"
"I think you'd probably have to learn to...talk, too."
(in monotone) "oh wow, give it to me, big boy."

"Whoa, what if you catch an std?"
"Like a virus?"

"if I were to actually like, be a prostitute on second life, I'd have to have sex, like, a LOT."
"heee heee hee hee hee hee"
"Otherwise it wouldn't be enough money. I'd have to be like a pimp, with a lot of people below me."

paradise and the City and such

I thought it would be sad to leave Hawaii and come back to San Francisco, especially because Jon was leaving for a week the next day. Back in my apartment there was a vague post-vacation depression hangover in the air, provoked by my still having a cold and laryngitis almost a week later (and all during my trip), amplified by my bitterness at the experience of trying to catch a late-night taxi solo with my suitcase near Civic Center BART (ugh, should have gotten off at Powell). But I fought off low spirits by changing my employment information on LinkedIn and Facebook in preparation for my first day at my new job (so satisfying), and soon I'd never been happier to be back.
Maui was outstandingly relaxing and totally gorgeous and Jon was a ton of fun, but after an early morning earthquake we were in trapped mentality and instantly ready to come home the next day. We were in the comically remote Hana town (two restaurants and one general store total, a two-hour drive down the windiest highway imagineable). I just figured it happened all the time (er...volcanos just come with the geological volatility territory, right?) and rolled my eyes at Jon's attempts to connect to the internet to check for Tsunami warnings, until he finally connected and the papers said we should have run for higher ground. When they closed the roads, we thought we might be trapped in paradise (ha), so three hours later when they opened the roads any prospect of sightseeing went out the window and we booked it back to town (booked it as fast as one could book it down the windiest road ever, which under normal circumstances becomes one lane instead of two around snaking cliffs, and now had giant rocks fallen along one lane). It definitely cut things shorter, leaving even more room for slight regret that I'd let myself catch a cold that lasted all week and stole my normal voice away, and that I had in one way or another failed to take advantage of the situation and make things perfect.
Still, it was a really great trip - I got to swim in perfect water with awesome fish, read mediocre paperbacks with my knees in the waves, eat fruit and sorbet in divinely comfortable chairs, dig my toes into cottony red sand, and spend tons of time with my still-relatively-new boyfriend. While the restaurants were nothing to write home about, the guacamole at Maui Tacos was uncommonly good, and the Thai food was definitely up there. I was ready to go back and do some real work (I'd done so much screwing around at the end of my last job it felt like I'd forgotten how to do any real work).

All ready to go back to work except
why hasn't my voice come back yet?
why is it even worse than before, even though I'm feeling better?
My first day at work was great - everyone seems really cool, the commute is phenomenal (8 blocks!), the office is awesome, and I'm pretty excited about the work. I was even showered with corporate gifts (embroidered laptop bag and matching folder) and the promise of inconceivable publisher client perks (I heard a rumor involving massages and expensive concert tickets). Beyond the existential guilt crises I vaguely felt obligated to have (did I *sell out* to get this dream job? Is it *wrong* to have changed my plan to have a job in which I suffer in order to hold a job title that once seemed glamorous on television? Will I never be a *real writer* because I am on a career track that does not involve being paid to write?), I had the additional pressing concern that my raspy voice was in and out while introducing myself to various superiors. And oddly, the better I felt, the worse my voice got, which got me worrying it wasn't just a matter of one more day, and while my superiors might think it's cute now, in a few days they won't think it's very cute anymore that they hired a mute to talk to clients on the phone.
I went to Rainbow grocery and whispered my problem to a vitamin-aisle lady. An hour, 6 cold-related products, 7 unnecessary luxuries and much money later, I headed back home, generally loving San Francisco and life, because all of these lovely organic product are only 3 blocks from my home. It's not so bad, being back.

the horizontal billboard dance

I was heading home from the Mission the other night when we saw a crowd of people at the 14/49 bus stop. There was dramatic borderline-circus music, and maybe 150 people standing above the BART stop watching a red billboard across the street, with two women harnessed from the roof dancing horizontally on the side of the billboard, merging themselves with the architecture. I had a chance to check it out while waiting for the bus (which conveniently arrived just as the show was over).
All I can say is I love San Francisco.
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eve/213686783.html

out there in dorkosphere

exciting upcomings:
1. after upcoming final day, complete tenure at current uninspiring, meaningless job
2. no longer have to commute daily to Palo Alto, which while I love the Caltrain segment of said commute, there have been 4 disasters in the last month that significantly delayed my journey and left all passengers trapped aboard, a first-ever Caltrain fare citation for the charge of "misuse of fare media," and the final leg of said commute being the worst free shuttle service in the galaxy because drivers are so unreliable and uninspired they will sometimes drive off with no passengers even as you are waving your hands wildly and running after said shuttle because the bullet train was 2 minutes late.
3. start brand new job I am lucky to have landed at awesome company in just over two weeks, meet new coworkers and work 8 blocks (albeit long, SOMA blocks) from my apartment
4. go to Hawaii with boyfriend for 5 days
5. have 4 weekdays off with zero responsibilities in between final days at current job and Hawaii trip to pursue current nerdy projects

reservations:
* I will miss lovely current coworkers, a number of whom have said sweet things about how they will miss me, and talking to current train friend, a married Irish man in his 40s with whom I talk historical politics and who lends me Nicholson Baker books about stalking and perverse sexual fantasies (!), as well as sparkling conversations with other train acquaintances
* I will fuck everything up because I am not as awesome as I talk and mean clients take my confidence down instantly
* I will fuck everything up and my boyfriend will tire of me and/or dislike me after spending 5 days with me
* I will fuck everything up by being generally shy in all areas of life and not be able to be myself because I am worried about fucking everything up

notice.

Almost as nervous as before an interview, I went into my boss's office to tell him I had received another job offer I couldn't pass up, and I would be taking it once two weeks were up. I chose my words carefully off a selection of HR websites to be as diplomatic as possible.
He probably couldn't have guessed how good the offer was with an industry-leading agency in the City, only 8 blocks from my apartment. Honestly, would anyone in their right mind turn down a more interesting job with a more prestigious company, more money, better benefits and no commute?
And luckily, enough time had passed so that I was over any spiteful impulse to say what did you expect after the way your partner treated me, because I am burning no bridges here.
The office is buzzing with rumors about my leaving, and I've been assigned very little to do so I'm still doing very little.
I couldn't tell if they were surprised or saw it coming, and I can't suppress a smile at the fact that even they might be surprised at how well I've done, when they look me up and down and I don't look as put-together as I should. When it came down to it I even surprised myself at how tough I can talk. I keep playing diplomat and smiling sweetly, half-beaming about my awesome new job, and life - is looking pretty good.

Palo Alto explorer

I went to see the birthplace of Menlo Park on a walk during my lunch break the other day, from my work's new Palo Alto wasteland-area office. The city of Palo Alto was born near downtown, by my work's former office, when a passing Spanish explorer camped by the creek at a tree they called El Palo Alto. Spaniards soon decided against settling there and abandoned it for the Presidio. But Menlo Park was born in 1850 when Irish sea captain John Greer sailed into Palo Alto harbor, just a 5-minute walk from my work. He and his brother-in-law fell in love with the landscape and built homes and a gate that read "Menlo Park."
"The men named their new homes after their old, in Menlough on Lough Corib, County Galway, Ireland. No one knows whether they abbreviated the name to "Menlo" because the space on the arch precluded the longer version, because it was their way of Americanizing the name or because they just couldn't spell."
San Franciscan aristocrats began building vacation homes in the area, attracting then more aristocrats, who attracted more aristocrats who make up the present-day demographic of Palo Alto and Menlo Park. The area by the former harbor, past 101, remains the desolate and depressing home of soulless gray business parks, the Municipal golf course, the Palo Alto airport and the semi-restored wetlands.
I started walking past the airport. The sidewalk disappeared and left me to walk in the bike lane while cars crawled back from the bayside road. The marsh was surrounded with that yellow grass that grows everywhere in the South Bay in summer months. An egret and some seagulls were standing in the stagnant water. The sound of loud, small planes taking off was constant. It smelled of fennel, except when the wind blew a certain way smelling vaguely of sulfur, probably from the nearby recycling center. There were dull green reeds everywhere, the occasional green shrub. I followed the path past the abandoned harbor building, now surrounded with dirt and reeds grown over the carved wetlands. Around the bend was a duck pond, and a sign that read Duck Pond, where sad gray geese and ducks were dragging their feet, looking stupidly at this awful fountain that looked like an upside-down pyramid throwing slaps onto the surface of the gray-blue water. Everything had that gray, humid-looking color that parks in the South Bay suburbs have, which you have to be completely numb to in order to live there without becoming inordinately depressed. The benches along the trail where no one sat, the industrial towers in the distance by the bay, the electricity pylons and the rows of masts on the hill all colored by a clear film of dull, the kind that tells you you have to get out someday and do something big to keep from wasting away here.
I totally mythologize the Silicon Valley, its engineers and dreams and bright ideas. But it makes more sense than anything - this is how the Silicon Valley was born.

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.

workplace conundrums

I may be speaking too soon but it seems like work is starting to veer on the side of reasonable again, and I was back on the 6:06 train today. Which is a good thing because the crowd on the after-7:00 trains is pretty dejected.
I was feeling out that bleary-eyed crowd while waiting for the train and I saw this man smile at me, several inches shorter and easily pushing 40. We didn't exchange so much as a 2-second glance. When I got on the train, he sat directly behind me. Since I was on the super-long train that makes every stop after a totally frustrating day, I spent the better part of the train ride talking trash to others in my Verizon network and leaving grandiose voice mails for people I'd meant to catch up with.
At Millbrae, the man gets up and hands me his business card, very quietly mumbling something that resembles "dinner" and what I think was "from one commuter to another." At least, it was from one something to another, I thought it best not to ask. He was a director of development for some department at Stanford. I didn't notice until I took his business card out of my bag that on the back he'd written "Text me your name and phone number if you would like to have dinner some time!" I guess he had nothing to lose, but I was pretty surprised because it didn't seem like we had even a moment of connection. That's when I realized how lonely the 7:20 train is. When I used to ride the 5:06, it was hard to even get a guy to even look at me, let alone smile back, but on the 7:20 they'll go for any female who's merely present.
Anyway, I think it's time to get back to a work schedule that conforms more closely to my salary. At least the amount of trash talking via i.m. and in elevators with coworkers just to get through the day can't be good for my karma. And giving in to the urge to buy consumer products after an infuriating day can only be sustained for so long. Plus, yesterday, in a seriously low point of frustration and hunger, I went into the office kitchen and prepared one of those Instant Lunch things I used to eat as a kid, which my coworkers eat all the time. I don't eat much processed food, and most of that consists of veggie burgers or Trader Joe's frozen food, so I guess my body was extra-sensitive to that noxious poisonous crap - ugh, my body went into MSG-stupefied insatiated bloated shock. I don't know how people eat those things, especially out of those horrifyingly toxic styrofoam containers.
Guess I'm not cut out to work late.