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september, 2006
Sat, 2 Sep 2006 09:57:38 -0700
Though it's Saturday, and there were Goat-and-company festivities chez
Karina last night, which meant I'd planned to sleep until 9ish and
only then get up for yoga, I awoke two hours before my alarm was even
thinking about going off, from a nightmare taken directly from the
news. "Involuntarily empathetic," Shane called me when I told him of
it; while he's right that reading the paper can disturb my dreams (and
his explanation also covers my aversion to violent movies), I think
it's also that I'm just more susceptible to it
with him on the opposite coast.
I've temporarily replaced Gabe's Icelandic black-and-white-scape with
the
picture of Shane & me in front of the Calder as my PowerBook's
background image, visible through transparent terminals. I want the
reminder that New York (really, him in it) is only three hours' time
zones, and one plane flight, away. I am having a hard time, as he
predicted, having my head in [my new love] one place (this magical city) and my heart in [my newer] another.
But off with me, now, to yoga, after the exertions of which this
morning's unwarranted angst will hopefully fade, just like today's
September fog will burn off with the afternoon sun.
* * *
Post-yoga: As we struggled and sweated this morning, Les told us:
"Seek out the challenge; avoid the suffering. There's a subtle
difference." Ah, yes -- yoga is good for metaphors, as well as
mind-clearing endorphins.
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Sun, 10 Sep 2006 23:19:03 -0700
My eyes are again clouded with
salt, or were, before I took out my contacts this evening. My worries of the past week or two proved to be not
ill-founded -- I thought for a while it was hormonal, then craziness;
but no, it was in fact me picking up on the telltale early signs of the dissolution of
something I've now thrown myself into one too many times. This
afternoon, I confirmed it ("is everything okay?" -- and it was not);
this evening, the fog and the sunlight of this "frontier town" (his
words; Jaime, currently in fullblown culture shock coming from the
cosmopolitan London, seconded the phrase) glinted fuzzily off the
clinquant streetcar tracks going up the hill on California, as Jaime,
her new phone, and I walked up to dinner in North Beach, at which the
ever-flirtatious Italian waiter solicitously placed a hand on my
shoulder and asked (referring to the pasta, of course) "tutto
bene?" And I looked back into his eyes and thought about how to
say in Italian no, my boyfriend and I broke up today, my heart is
cracking along old fault lines, and if you could just top off this
wine glass and sit down I'll tell you about it, but all I could
think of was the unconvincing lie "tutto bene, grazie" and so
he never knew. Walking to and from a cheer-Nori-up movie at the
Metreon, a cloud came over my vision, thick as the fog coursing around
the middle of the Transamerica Pyramid, and as blinding.
My heart calcifies the more my eyes salinify. It must. Because how
can I do this again? How can this wholehearted approach gain me
anything? It appears to just get me in too deep, too fast, and to
make what has to date been the inevitable end that much more painful.
At least this one was short (and yes, sweet) -- and, like they've all
(three) been, honest.
But that doesn't save me from thinking that something must change.
Three is either the charm or the undoing; whereas two may have been
circumstantial, three points are enough data from which to generalize;
three is telling. Three makes me mad, and will probably make me
cautious. I don't know how else to approach this. I have no sense of
how to protect my heart in its matters, nor have I wanted to gain one.
"In order to gain balance you must lose it," philosophized yogi Les at
my usual Saturday-morning class through which Jaime snickered a few
days ago -- but for how long? This fever pitch of intensity is my
hallmark; it appears that to continue it would be to wantonly expose
myself to needless hurt. I feel jilted and jaded -- not just out of
something I had been lulled into thinking might
this time last, but out of a zest, a vim.
I hope I'm wrong. But I don't know how I can be. And I don't know
how to not set myself up for this.
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Mon, 18 Sep 2006 21:00:03 -0700
Last week, I will readily admit, was kind of shitty. Sunday sucked; Wednesday, I found out that my hopeful
sojourn to India for the forth quarter isn't happening as planned
(just postponed until Q1, but still!); while Thursday ended in a fit
of optimism following partying with Sean, his fellow chefs, and their
Mission-slacker drink of Fernet,
yesterday reconfirmed that, if there are Pacific fish to snack on,
they're not biting yet (this vegan plants her tongue in her cheek and
dons her "Bacon is a vegetable" T-shirt). Damn it all.
But I am resilient, and I know what makes me happy. Sunday I was back
at it, at Zeitgeist with the same set of rabble-rousing culinary
geniuses (from whom I extracted drunken promises of vegan fare at the
workplace cafés), drinking more Fernet, even more beer, and
pushing my luck. "@Zeitgeist ! Cafe 150 chefs getting in the mood
for Hangover Menu Monday" read my dodgeball that made [Googler]
Shane (L.) text back in jealousy from an evening at the New York
office.
And Monday morning, there they were: Maybe it was the mythological
restorative properties of the Fernet, or maybe their livers are just
used to taking a beating, but those chefs served up a menu that,
despite being mostly non-vegan, included at least Leesa's
sans-dairy biscuits (no one's taking them!" she complained; I
made her a sign that said "CRAXY DELICIOUS" with arrows going towards
the pan, to encourage timid Googlers to try them). From there, I
walked a block to the new Pintxo, at which Will had sworn I would be
able to eat. And he wasn't lying: There, he was serving up tiny
double-shot glasses of pineapple-cucumber-coconut gazpacho; pears and
white asparagus; vegan paella. The small gelatinous yellow thing on
top of the pretty paella plate made me suspicious until I put it into
my mouth and nearly melted -- Shuna had said, when she
taught us the trick to the tedious labor of peeling cherry tomatoes,
that if anyone ever did that for us, it meant they really loved us.
As the unexpected purity of the skinless garnish washed over my
palate, I was reminded of how damned lucky I am to not only be working
at the coolest company ever, but with chefs who will peel me cherry
tomatoes.
"You look happy," commented Roxane broadly later in the meal. I
looked up, surprised, reflecting on the crappiness of my previous
week. But then I recalled that I was an hour and a half into a
swoon-worthy café-hopping at work, that Leesa had promised to
make me a vegan chocolate cake for my birthday, which is coming up on
Wednesday, and I stopped being shocked that I should be radiating. I
have reasons to be happy.
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Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:55:16 -0700
"What's the opposite of an apertif?" asks Mike on Saturday
night, having arrived in a three-piece suit and bearing a martini kit,
ready to make same, even if we can't name it. But this week, I can:
"digestif," I quickly reply, and as Mike and Ajay raise their
eyebrows ("Look at you with the French!"), I explain my recent acquaintance with Fernet, a drink which is
exactly that; a glass of which I had
post-operatic-press-room-champagne (Karina of the box office had
tricked out the VIP alcove with banners, decorated flutes, and vegan
cookies; Joanne, Blake, Jaime and I pranced around same in our new
finery, eating tofu burritos and rushing back to our row-H seats just
before curtain of the second act of Un Ballo in Maschera,
everyone else's first Verdi) at Absinthe; the bartender who brought me
the tiny glass of it proclaimed, in response to my having ordered it,
"I love you" (and it was then that I knew I had joined an
underground SF cult). This, certainly, is why the word is on the tip
of my tongue; but as I explain it away, I get cautioned not to
diminish my vocabulary -- which, I embarassingly realized, I'd been
doing. Oops.
I haven't had a weekend like this one in a while: Not only did it
start early -- despite two well-intentioned, end-of-quarter days put
in lateish on Monday and Tuesday nights, I left early for my birthday
opera on Wednesday, and then again for a team dinner the next night,
fluid with Greco di Tufo and the storied Barolo and
Brunello ("the Bach and Brahms [respectively] of wine," McInerney called them; I ordered
bottles for the table of appreciative engineers) -- but Friday, Derek
and I again profited from an unmet coworker's extra concert tickets,
and, stopping only briefly at his house to meet his roommate and eat
half a cookie, BARTed across the bay to the Greek just in time to see
Massive Attack. The trip-hop, the Berkeley
hippies, and the light show were all so very high school, had that
been my scene then; as it was, Derek and I soaked up the sound,
surrounded by a crowd two-thirds our age.
For the first time in recent memory, I didn't set my alarm on
Saturday, opting rather to sleep off the remaining buzz. Jaime and I
didn't start baking until late in the afternoon, but nevertheless
threw down, turning out four cakes and pies in the space of a scant
three hours (as usual, the chocolate Guinness and carrot cakes were
the two winners; Eric (C.) swore that, with them, I'd successfully
wooed him twice in one hour). People showed up in finery -- my
"black tie" instructions were more or less honored; cufflinks even
made an appearance -- having not read the Evite, Nick even went home
to change.
And Sunday, waking up as if in college at 1:15, too late for an
Herbivore brunch, Jaime, Andrea, and I ignored the accumulated mess
on the counters (Ojan's
robot had already sweetly vacuumed, even though I had to rescue
it, like a trapped puppy (albeit one that didn't bite), from under
his bed when it got stuck) and walked up to a brunch off Haight:
spicy tofu vegan sausages (mango chutney!) from Rosamunde consumed on
a trattoria table with coffee and soy milk was all I wanted until 4
o'clock or so. (God love the Haight.) Dishwashering the million
champagne flutes and layer-cake pans later that evening, I reflected
that the weekend -- week, really -- had been one long birthday
celebration, from Leesa's vegan chocolate birthday cake at
Café 150 on Wednesday afternoon through the Roomba's gift of
floor-cleaning and a hazy, slow, windy Sunday in Duboce Triangle.
And a very SF-affirming one, at that -- I've said before that I'm
never leaving, but the more friends provide me with free opera
tickets for my birthday, the less distance I must venture from my
door to obtain vegan delights, the more I become ensconced in my
city. Here's to many more birthdays in SF.
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all this Šnori heikkinen, September 2006
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