Volvos only smile at the Sun.

The 10-Day Forecast for Oakland calls for rain for nine of them. It could make for a romantic couple of weeks, except that Joe left today and he’ll be gone for both of them. And it’s the holidays. And no matter how much I tell myself that Christmas will be wonderful - just me and mom and enough wine to make each other wince - I can’t help but feel a little lonesome.

I don’t want to play the sap card too hard, but in the midst of it all, my car broke down this morning. In the middle of Broadway.

Moments before, I had dropped Joe off at the BART station, so that he could catch his flight back East. The car had been acting up on the drive over, so he told me to promise to keep it in third gear on the way home and take it to the mechanic first thing Monday morning. We kissed goodbye, he boarded an escalator down to the train, and as I tried to edge my way back out into traffic, everything on the dashboard lit up orange and yellow and red, and the car rolled to a stop. Joe was, of course, already underground. Thanks again, gods of timing, for one of your most graceful choreographies.

As I listened to my heart race through my ears, I turned the key again and again, but each time I tried to drive forward, the car would move about a foot, then sputter and pause, only to roll to a stop, always displaying its dead dashboard carnival.

Fortunately, I’m one of those girls whose parents instilled in them the idea that a AAA membership that is continually, though begrudgingly, renewed each year, pretty much equals a valiant horseback prince. He might drive you nuts when you’re feeling all self-sufficient and righteous, but when you need him, there he is, in all his damn needed glory. It’s just one of those things. And when you’re feeling supremely helpless, that stupid plastic card suddenly feels like 50 annual bucks well spent.

The car sits at the mechanic now, awaiting a brand new repair price tag (my guess is $850), and I sit on the couch, mildly proud of the fire I built for myself. I may watch a second movie, because my afternoon film, the not-at-all enchanting Sweet Home Alabama, wasn’t anything I’d hoped it would be.

It just rained so hard I thought I might go deaf from rain on skylight. It woke up both cats. And that says a lot.

Looks like Joe is now flying over Michigan’s Pere Marquette State Forest (thank you technology), which sounds dark and beautiful and entirely foreign to me. I hope he is enjoying his extra legroom. I am stretched out on our couch, writing my half of our story. I will go grab the last half of my day-old macaroon, browse the Netflix queue, and settle in for another few hours of delicious sloth.

The logs just caught themselves on fire again, so I’m giving myself a well-deserved point (and potentially pouring another drink) to celebrate this minor success.

I want to be Natalie Portman

On my way home from work last week, I listened to half an interview with Natalie Portman and realized, once again, that I want to be her. I always fall back on this sort of thinking when I don't know what to do with my life. I got bored again at work, and so naturally fell down the wormhole of what ifs.

While watching dumb TV shows, I thought I could maybe be an actress. And before I started typing this post, I surfed the web for "somatic psychology graduate program," because I've been digging my new found meditation and yoga classes for the past few weeks. If a few weeks isn't long enough to make a career change choice, what is? I pretty much decided against that future, because I spent most of that internet search judging the pictures on the school websites, deciding that I wouldn't want to get locked in a room with any of the touchy-feely earth tone scarf people in the pictures.

I also thought briefly about becoming a baker yesterday, after watching a video of a girl singer who has a day job baking bread. I also listened to an interview with Ina Garten, and decided that I will continue to watch her cook things, but that I never want to run into her because she seems like a real annoying handful in person.

Thanksgiving was fine. I was getting over a head cold, which made the whole holiday kind of blurry. Unfortunate that I couldn't really get into the moment, because now I feel like I really wasted an opportunity to practice awareness. God, that sounds ridiculous. Scratch the somatic psychology graduate degree completely.

One especially exciting thing that happened during Thanksgiving was that my kitchen sink broke. Again. Rough holiday for a plumbing issue. Joe's mom, who was on crutches with a broken fibia, laid herself down on the bathroom floor and did dishes in the tub. Joe donned a slicker. My dad did some really good supervising. I went back and forth, back and forth, between my house and my landlord's cabin, which had a working sink and about an ounce of mushrooms in the freezer. Forgive me Jesus, I had to peek.

Yarn: My Newest Nemesis

Last week, I attended my first and last crochet class. Prior to that one fateful day, I found myself harboring grand delusions of sewing up fabulous creations for everyone for the holidays. Friends and family would be fighting over all my amazing hats and scarves and whatever else one crochets. I went so far as to spin around the idea that I would naturally be such a natural fiber arts star that I would quit my day job and sew my way to riches.

Fat chance. I might be the worst crochet-er in California. I should have known something was up the week before, when I would excitedly tell people that I was about to take my first croquet class.

So I'm in the market for a new hobby. If anybody has any ideas, I'm all ears. The only requirement is that it cannot involve yarn. Or string. All I will make, if said hobby includes any sort of twine or rope, is knots.

Oh, and fyi, if anyone is in need of a big ball of hippie yarn and one dumb pink crochet needle, they're in my dining room, hiding in the china cabinet with all the other castaways from half-ass art projects. This is just like when I decided to help run a clothing company. The realization hits: I like clothes fine; that doesn't mean I have to make them.

Roommates

I am moving. To a big old house up on a hill. I don't get the whole house, but I get the top half of it. And by "I," I mean "we." We are officially about to embark on co-habitation. After 2 years and 8 months on my own, I am shacking up.

Here's a picture of me and my new roommate.


I think we look pretty good together.

After all the fun of moving in, we plan to host Thanksgiving at our new home. The confirmed guest list includes: my mom, my grandmother, my dad, my step-mom, his mom, and his two sisters. It should be quite the to do.

We discussed inviting our new landlord, who lives in a cabin on the property six months of every year. His name is Lucky. (the other six months, he splits his time between Indonesia and Mexico)

Last week, I got a semi-frantic call from Lucky. I ended up driving up there during my lunch break because he was concerned that he didn't show-and-tell me enough about the move-in protocol, and he was about to be traveling, and I was about to be traveling, and Joe was already traveling, and god forbid he didn't communicate some essential information to me before I moved in.
Such as this:

"Here is where you will find the hidden key to get into the room where you will find a furnace, just in case. Here is the pot that hides the key that lets you into the room where you can turn off the water, if you ever need to. Here is the piece of the house you lift up to find the spot where you go to flip the switch when you blow the fuse." If the apocalypse comes early, I feel ready.

Maybe for Thanksgiving, I will show how serious and big deal this whole moving-in-together thing is by doing this to the front door:


Things keep changing, and 50% of the time, I feel like that's a good thing. I can't tell if I feel older or wiser or better than I did before, but I'm trying to take it all in stride. This is the man I want to be with, so we're going for it. Some people might shrug it off as not a very big deal, but for me, right now, it is. I got back in touch with an old friend recently, and she ecstatically told me how her and her guy were moving in together. They met each other three weeks ago. Joe and I realized there was something big and good between us that we couldn't ignore, and that was three years ago. It takes all kinds.

We will have room to spread out in this new home, and that is exciting. I will have room for a garden of my own. And now, when I get home from a long day at work, I won't walk up to my doorstep and smell my 72-year-old alcoholic shut-in neighbor and hear his blaring TV tuned incessantly to local news that I never care to hear. Maybe this will be me now:


This is a new beginning, and as dorky and cliche as it sounds, I will treat it as such.

You just see more from a bike.

Watch Out Now - Straight Outta the Cubicle!

It's official. I'm work-blogging. Don't tell the boss.

The truth is, I can hear my entirely work-related print job happily printing away a few feet from this here desk, so some could call this multi-tasking. If you are one of those people, then you are a lazy bum, too.

Here's a handful of highlights from the past week:

Last weekend I went to a concert and was told by this total asshole that I should find another place to stand because I was blocking his view. I was standing up, and he was sitting down. This was at an outdoor concert on a Friday night, mind you. At a rock concert, by the way. I asked him if maybe him and his friends wanted to stand up and enjoy the concert, too (not even in a bitchy way), but then he said that what I was doing was "really uncool" and that if I didn't move, he would "contact security." So I didn't move for a minute for the pure principle of it, but then him and all his sitting down friends actually started booing at me. It was amazing. Bottom line: I can't stand people who tell you to sit down at concerts.

I was at dinner at a friend's house a few nights ago, and this friend happens to be a police officer. We were talking about how high the murder rate was and this and that, yadda yadda, and then he mentions that not only was the murder rate way too high in our city, but that I should also be aware of the recent rise in rape sprees near my neighborhood. Come again? "What's a rape spree?" I asked. I mean, how many rapes makes a spree? My friend's pregnant wife didn't much like the direction of the conversation, so I guess we just kind of moved on, but I found out later that said spree was only 2 rapes. So that's good.

Oh, another interesting tidbit from My Dinner with the Cop: a charge of mayhem is what a perp (look, cop talk) gets when they bite off a piece of somebody else's flesh. So by all means, watch out for the mayhem.

It's been pretty hot lately and the city gets a little stinky, but when I drove out into the suburbs, it smelled nice like eucalyptus trees.

I'll be happy when the auditors leave, because one of the auditors is a little too friendly with me, and sometimes I think I catch him spying on me when he goes out to smoke cigarettes.

In other news, the atheists and agnostics did better than everybody else on the Pew Research Center's Religion Test. They were followed closely by the Jews (L'Chaim!!). I took the abridged version of the test and found out that I did better than 80% of my fellow Americans. And I don't know jack about religion. Seeking some deeper analysis of the test results, I inadvertently landed at a Fox News opinion piece entitled "We Didn't Flunk the Religion Test." Actually, we did, but whatever.

More interesting than that guy's bunko story was a headline I saw on the side of the page: "Gay Cupcake Controversy Heats Up." Swear to God. The story itself was about a bakery owner who didn't want to make rainbow cupcakes for a Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Transsexual university group's celebration for National Coming Out Day. Pretty sad. Sort of newsworthy. Anyway, the most fascinating thing about it was the number of nasty comments from readers. The best one was this, and I am not editing it for punctuation, grammar, or spelling: "You'd think that with a, er, shitload of gay men, you'd have all the chefs you need... "

On that note, sleep tight all, whoever you're sleeping with.

Depression on the 1 to 10

I went running this evening for the first time in months. Mainly because I've felt like crying for the last 24 hours and I can't seem to shake it.

A few months ago, when I found myself swimming in sadness more than was legitimately healthy, I started thinking about suicide. Not actually contemplating it for myself, heavens no, but really just thinking about how it didn't seem entirely implausible for other people to off themselves, and how I was kind of surprised more people didn't pull the trigger, so to speak.

I remember thinking that you never hear about people who go out hiking or jogging or something and then decide to kill themselves. And maybe (this is just a guess here, I have done zero research to back this up) if some of those people who decided to jump off a bridge had decided to take themselves on a long walk in the woods first, maybe they would make another choice at that final grim moment. Which led me to the conclusion that if I ever feel really bummed, I should probably get my ass out into the world and get my blood flowing.

I did run the whole way, and my spirits are indeed on the rise, but unfortunately, about 2/3 in, I saw a giant Canada Goose with a bum leg, hobbling around looking awfully pained, and I just about lodged myself into Lake Merritt while my eyes filled with tears. Ridiculous.

My boyfriend told me that he thought I had been physically sick more in the last year than anybody he's known in his whole life. Statements like that don't tend to make the recipient feel much better. And if they're real examine-their-own-lives-to-a-fault type, they'll probably overthink statements like that so much that they create some sort of psychosomatic disease that keeps them sick forever.

This ain't no novel and I'm still not convinced that white type on a black background is indeed easier to read than the other way around, so I'll wrap it up. Fear not, you will not read about a 30-something white woman living in Oakland who slit her throat tonight for no apparent reason. Instead, I'm going to heat up some potatoes that I had previously undercooked (weird), over-easy an egg on top, drench it in green tabasco (the only tabasco that is worth anybody's time, in my opinion), and call it a day. If that doesn't brighten my mood, the nightly antics of a certain Girl Cat and Mr. Meowsers are bound to make me laugh before the gig is up.

I also hope New Orleans wins the football game.