Rain: Give Lifes, Can Annoy

The whole day passed, and I only set foot outside once. It was to take a new jug of All detergent out to the laundry room in the back of our aparment building, an event that must have required twenty-five steps, tops.

Otherwise, I have been in here. Busy all day long: sewing, cleaning, baking, writing. I would have gone running, but it's been pouring since noon. We had some leakage issues with our apartment's crappy cheap mildewed windows, so we stuffed socks into the aluminum tracks where water was streaming in. What a wet day. I didn't even go outside and still I got wet. For a while it let up a bit and I thought I might walk down to the grocery store, but I could not muster the guts to face the damp. Plus it started streaming down really strongly not too long after I opten to remain indoors, so I think it was a sign from God: stay inside, apply yourself.

Really, I have stayed occupied. I think it's a good indication of how much time leading a productive life requires. There's wlays something to cut out; today it was excersie and grocery shopping. On other days, it's cleaning and writing. And, on very few occasions, it's sleeping. But overall, I think it's important to get a good 8 hours of sleep in. Resting the brain makes it more effective in the waking hours. And sleeping feels good. In a few hours, I'll do just that. But tomorrow brings work, and with it the outside world in all of its elements--weather and human.

Writers on Writing about Writng

Writers have major guilt issues. I do, at least. Like, if I don't write, I feel all poseur-y and lame...but if I do write, I feel creepy-crawly and get paranoid that I did a horrible job. At least sometimes--especially if I write an article. Every time I submit an article to my editor (and it's usually late), I cower around my email inbox, fearing a vengeful respone, something like: "You SUCK! This is terrible. I am offended that you wasted my time in this manner."

Sometimes I forget that I write for a living. Sure, I don't write the same volume now that I used to, but I do spend a lot of time pecking away at the ol' keyboard. I think it doesn't feel like writing, though--that's the thing. It doesn't feel like writng because it's not the kind of writing that I love. It feels like working.

That's fine. When the guilt settles in, it's good to remember that I spend a lot of time writing straightforward copy. It's a goof way to build up muscle, stay flexible, even if it's not the kind of writring that has any long-term worth whatsoever.

One thing that amazes me is how much writers write about the craft of writing. Go to the bookstore or library and you'll see a zillion "Blah Blah on Writing" kinda titles. What's up with this? Musicians don't write songs about wiring music. I'm going to edit an anthology one day called "Writers on Writing about Writing."

8 Hours Too Many

Working full-time blows. I like the part where I make more money, but my productivity on the writing front has gone downhill. All for some snobby chocolate company. Everyone in America does this. We all waste our time in stupid office jobs where things are managed so poorly that working hard is a moot point...or places where working hard is a requirement, but the actual mission of the company is a joke, like making grommets for Sharper Image catalogue items. Why do we waste our lives in this fasion?

It's the three-day weekend that did it to me. Ideally I'd finish up all of my loose ends, but that extra day actually opens up more avenues, more unfinished projects to stick your finers in. I think 32 hours a week should count as full0time employment. I think everyone would be more efficent with those 32 hours if they had the other 8 to themselves.

Too Pretty for Bloggy

God, it's amazing out today: blue skies, sun, Washington's Birthday, revised, plus Lincoln's Birthday, revised. This means no worky for Sara and Mr. Bir Toujour. In a little over an hour I hope to go on a nice, long run all over Albany, El Cerrito, and Berkeley. Joe's going to walk down to the Bulb and leave some Anonymous Artwork in the area we call Thunderdome.

Me, I'm going to sit in here and write. Kind of a drag, kind of not. I gots shitloads of work to attend to, two articles, a chapter in the ol' novel, plus some things to read and comment on. It would be nice to do all of this on the patio of a cafe while drinking a Pernod, not like I even like Pernod...okay, a Lillet, and I'm in the south of France and on vacation and can linger there for hours on the cafe's patio, sipping aperetifs and writing away.

The closest thing we have here is Starbucks. In a 2-mile radius I have 4 Starbucks to choose from. Sure, there are other places, but (ack!) they all suck more than Starbucks. Annoying people, no good place to sit, bad coffee...Starbucks is evenly mediocre in nearly all aspects, no matter which of the 4 I go to. You'd think in this hippy nest called the East Bay I'd be able to find a decent cafe to work and study in...but nooooo. Oh, the most vital thing: a bathroom. It's hard to find a coffee shop with a bathroom handy. There's no way a gal can get any writing done over a span of 2 coffee-sipping hours when there's no loo to be found.

This morning at breakfast (Mr. Bir Toujour and I went to our favorite eating-out breakfast place, Royal Cafe), I read in the paper that Hunter S. Thompson had died from a self-infliced gunshoot wound. Geez. That's something I never expected to hear. I figured he'd live forever, preserved in his own picking jiuce of liver secretions. Really, I thought he'd sort of ossified himself over all these long, hard years of ceaseless self-abuse on the chemical front.

I guess that he shot himself makes sense; probably he didn't want to die a helpless invalid old man with poo poo diapers and baby food lunches. Maybe this was his plan all along...or maybe it was an accident, the result of a typical HST revelry of hyperbole, drugs, firearms, and overinflated terror. Maybe this was the accident that's been threatening to bite the ol' Doctor in the ass, and it just happened to him in his more twilight years.

67. That's how old he was, 67. These days, 67 is not old. Mr. Bir Toujour's dad, for instance, is 67. Sandra Dee died a few days ago, and she was only 63 (I think it was a kidney diesease thing). My mom is close to 63. Oh, mortaility. The older I get, the older those I love get. Mortality's creeping up on them, a prelude of things to come. I don't mind getting old, but I do mind other people getting old. You can act like you're 23 all of your life, but your body doesn't get it. It will think a 67-year-old vessel is 67, despite everything. I guiess that why Hunter S. Thompson opted to exit his vessel before that fact clicked in too much.

Champion Bleeder

Last night I sharpened my knives. A good, sharp knife can make a lot of difference when you're doing prep work in the kitchen, dicing onions and mincing garlic--that sort of thing. I use my chef's knife and paring kife the most often, so I only sharpened those two. About five years ago when I worked in the kithcen of Dean & Deluca, someone knocked my paring knife off a table and nicked the tip off. I had to grind it down a lot to make it useable again. A kife is supposed to have a convex edge, but after all of these years of abuse the edge of my paring knife is nearly concave. That makes it tough to sharpen--I pretty much have to sharpen it all the way down to the tang, which (on a good knife) is the metal part that meets the bolster. The tang isn't supposed to be sharp, my the one on my paring knife is.

So this morning as I was cleaning up from a tasty waffle breakfast, I wiped my paring knife off with a sponge and reamed the tip of my right middle finger on the now-sharp tang. It's not a very deep cut--it's more borad and shallow--but it bled tons. Blood is thickerthan water, but not mine. I bleed like a champ, even from the smallest cut. Crimson droplets of watery blood were splattering all over random locations of the countertop, the sink, clean plates in the drying rack. I just put a Band-Aid on my fingertip, which makes typing tough. This had happened before, they Band-Aid-typing fiasco; I get a lot of hangnails.

Why is my blood so thin? It's genetic. I think us folks on the Bir side are borderline hemophiliacs. I also eat about a pound of chocolate a week (an exaggeration, but not much of one), and chocolate thins the blood. That can't be helping any.

Joe is here right now, fussing overone of his art projects. They look very good. I'm rpoud of him. But we have too many. He works on these things like a man posessed, banging out about four new works a week. Do you own a cafe or gallery, or are you redecorating your home in a super-mod theme? Just contact Mr. Bir Toujour, he'll hook you up with a bumper crop of original art. If I had a digital camera, I'd post a photo and put up a PayPal account, make this thing an online art emporium. Come one, come all! Sneezy & Tacky has top-quality art masterworks at bargain-basement prices!

Drunk Driver

Last night I came home drunk. It wasn't a violent, beat-your-spouse drunk, or a pathetic depression drunk, just a goofy drunk. I wanted to sneak in the door and slip behind Mr. Bir Toujour and surprise him by jumping in his lap, but that didn't work because he heard me coming in, and he hid from me behind a door to surprise *me*.

I had been out with work friends at this bar in Oakland. We were having fun, people were being nice and buying me beers. The DJ was playing stuff like Joy Division, Brian Eno, and Echo & the Bunnymen. I ate a hamburger with a huge pile of fries.

We left the bar around 11:00. I sauntered crookedly to my car in the drizzle, across the street and across the multicolored blinking reflection of the Paramount Theatre marquis in the puddles and rain slicks on the blacktop. I don't know my way around Oakland very well, but I did know my way home.

One of Joe's old mix tapes was in my car. I listened to the Stone Roses pretty loud, and then I remembered that this one really great My Bloody Valentine song was on the end of the tape, so I fast-forwareded and swerved all over 1-580 trying to cue up the song.

Did you ever drive drunk by yourself, with nothing there to distract you but your music? It's one of my favorite things ever. I used to drive down windy rural Sonoma County roads in the middle of the night, from Cotati to Sonoma. Sometimes I'd be coming home from seeing rock shows at Inn of the Beginning, a few beers in me and some tasteless behavior behined me. The shows were fun, but the best part of the night would be getting into my car, where I could blast my music as loud as I wanted. I'd put in the best tapes I had and no matter what, those tapes always sounded better than any of the bands that played at the Inn.

It's been a while since I've done that. It's not a very good habit. I was never drunk enough to impair my vision or anything, but I was definetly drunk enough to get pulled over and arrested. I hardly ever go to shows anymore, and if I go to the bar it's usally one within walking distance, so it won't happen again any time soon. But I'm not going to lie about how driving drunk last night was fun.

Fenced In

I went on a walk to the hardware store after lunch. I like to talke little walks in the middle of the work day, especially after I've eaten. I needed to buy a new filter for the air vent over our stove at home. The one that's there now is clogged with about 20 years of grease, and it drips yello-brown goop onto the counter. I tried to clean it out once, but the accumulated filth wouldn't budge.

Then I found out you could simply buy new filters at hardware store. In the strange, sleepy little industrial neighborhood were I work, there's a big-ass hardware store hidden behind a series of alleys, driveways, and fences. I've walked past it about a dozen time without knowing the entrance was in the back, facing away from the road. I've walked past lots of unknown places in the blocks surrounding our factory, warehouses with secret wares and studios with secter artists, workshops and loading docks with no one but workers taking cigarette breaks.

There are a lot of chain link fences in the neighborhood. I thought I could take the alley all the way back to work, but there was a warped fence topped with twisted barbed wire in the way. I thought about climbing over the fence, but I spotted a few folks in the distance loitering at back doors and dickign off from work. For some reason, I didn't want to bee seen jumping the fence.

I've climbed over a lot of fences, usually just to persue the good clean fun of climbing something else (bridges, contruction sites) that was off-limits. It's a good feeling to jump a fence, and it's usualy not that hard. It's easiest to just plunge into it.

But today I was wearing a skirt, and I had this brand-new metal filter with me, plus my handbag. The filter--which was flimsy and cheaply made--had cost $11, and I didn't want to toss it over the fence just so it could get all twisted and ruined before we even installed it at home. Plus I had visions of runs in my tights, tears in my skirt.

Once a few years ago I drove to San Francisco to record an essay for this radio show (www.invisibleinkradio.com) on the NPR affiliate station KALW. The station itself is behind the parking lot of a high school in the boonies of San Francisco. I arrived way early and decided to explore the neighborhood, taking a path that I discovered leading away from the high school parking lot. It took me to a park, and I walked around the park before heading back. But I'd dicked around too long--it was nearing my time to show up for the recording, and I didn't want to take the long way back.

I spotted another path that cut straight down a hill, directly to the high school. But there was a chain-link fence about 8 feet tall in the way. I stood, considering the fence and my options, when a group of younger high school girls came up behind me. They seemed in a hurry.

"Go!" one of them said to another. "Just do it! Jump the fence!"

"No way," she protested. "I can't climb that!"

The girls looked at me. "Can you jump the fence? Have you seen people do it before?" they asked. Like I knew.

"Um," I said, "I'll try, and then we'll know."

It was hard to do with all of the girls watching me. The fence was tall, and I don't like heights. But I wanted them to think I was cool, and I liked that me presence hadn't been fishy or intimidating to them. I jumped the fence, but I was wearing a skirt and I know tha tthe process wasn't very ladylike. The girls followed over the fnece and we paarted ways, me to my taping and they to naughty teenage girl stuff.

Thaty was the last memorable fence-jumping in my life. This afternoon I backtracked to the street again, forgetting about the alley, and instead I stuck to the sidewalks. I need to jump a fence again soon, but today's not the day.

Airport Goodbye

I dropped my Mom off at the airport this morning. It's very hard to say goodbye to her, harder than it is to say goodbye to anyone else. She'll fly back to Ohio, back to the place I left. Every time Mom leaves I think of her going back to the Ohio I grew up in, but when I come home for visits I realize that it's a different place and I'm a different person now. Mom, though--she's always the same, only a little older.

I love my parents so much. Someday they'll get too old to take care of themselves very well, which is hard to accept. In my mind, Mom and Dad are ageless to me, locked in their mid-40s forever. But Mom just turned 62. Remember how old 62 used to be? Someone who was 62 was slow, with white hair and a polyester pantsuit. Mom is none of those things.

The older I get, the closer I want to be to my family. I don't know if it will ever happen, though. I love the idea of moving back to Marietta, but the reality of it is something altogether different. In the meantime, twice a year we have these airport goodbyes.

I dropped Mom off at the curb of the terminal, where all of the taxis zip in and out. Every minute there are farewells and greetings there, but they mean nothing to me. I put the hazard lights on, we pull Mom's luggage out of the back seat, embrace, and then I get back in the car as she pulls her rolly suitcase through the automatic doors. She gets in the check-in line, but I don't see it because I pull out and drive away, drive off to work with the radio on, playing the morning news. The faster you go back to your regular life, the less it hurts.

The Clinging Chocolate Death Stench

Despite all indications published through this outlet, I very much enjoy my job. On a scale of 1 to 10, 5 being merely acceptable and 10 being an unbeliveable dream job, I think this position is a 7.75. That's pretty good. I'm high-strung, though, so things get to me. Even a 7.75 job has its drewbacks.

Here's one that all employees of this company have to deal with. It's a smell. The factory itself smells wonderful; in fact, one of the comments I overhear most often in the building's public restrooms is "Gosh, it smells so great in here!" People say this in repsonse to the pungent smells of molten chocolate that permeate the premesis, and not in response to the huge craps that I take; the chocolate overpowers the craps.

So the general smell while you are present is nice. But there's a take-home smell, a hidden smell. There's a technical explanation for it (the grinding of the cacao nibs releases the residual aceitc acid that proliferates during the cacao beans' fermentation), but all you really need to know is that people who enter this factory and stay in it for over two hours leave stinking like sweaty gym socks. Like that and a nursing home--like slowly rotting sour death.

These vapors attach themselves to textile items, in particular: denim, wool, and fleece are all especially subject. I come home and try to put some love on Mr. Bir Toujour, but he rejects my advances. "Phew!" he'll say. "You stink!"

I do. There's no getting around it. This wonderful-smelling building actually smells like hell, not heaven. I wear this one gray fleece hooded zip-up thing all week long to work, and the smell piles up on it in layers. It stinks like a homeless man by the middle of the week. I'm about to go pick my Mom up from the airport, and I'm very excited. But before she greets me with a hug, my stench will greet her from a distance.

Very Alarming

I've not posted in a few days. More than a few, in fact. This makes me feel badly, but the reason has been a mixture of a renewed committment to actually apply myself at work, as well as the arrival of my new laptop computer. Theoretically, the laptop should make me write more blog entries, but it's quite tedious (simple, but tedious) to set the thing up. I still have to install an external mouse, as well as my printer. And I need to get rid of my old behemouth computer as well (anyone? any takers?)

Since the last posting:

-I interviewed my friend Chun for an article about her book. Chun, who was born and raised in China, made us a wonderful dinner consisting of these pork and egg dumplings (I absolutely fell in love with them!), roasted broccoli, steamed Chinese greens, whole steam-roasted fish, and rice. Chun's book is coming out in March. All three of you who read this blog and somehow don't know abut Chun can go to www.chunyu.org to find out more.

-I went out for pizza with Mr. Bir Toujour. Then we watched part of "Control Room" but fell asleep midway.

-Mr. Bir Toujour and I sallied over to SF's Chinatown for the launch of my friend Rosemary's book Good Luck Life (www.goodlucklife.com). The launch was at the Chinese Historical Society, and it was packed. Rosemary was a graceful rockstar as hundreds (seriously!) of people lined up all afternoon to have her sign their books. In the alley next to the Historical Society were these great events in conjunction with the book launch. Lion dancers (ages 10-16 or so, I think) performed twice, and then a dance troupe of young girls called the Flying Angels performed. Flying Angels = Chinese American Sparkle Motion, for you Donnie Darko fans out there.

In between attempts to say hello to Rosemary and catch the Flying Angels in action, Mr. Bir Toujour and I tromped all over Chinatown. Chinatown is a dangerous place for me, as I love cheap, useless plastic crap. I also love cheap, useful cooking utensils and overpriced, overpackaged Asian candies--all of which can be found in spades in Chinatown.

*Dude!* The fire alarm just went off. This is not uncommon at our chocolate factory. In that aspect, the alarms are not very effective, because they are the alarms that cried wolf. But they are loud as hell, and by sheer force of decible clear the place out.

I just got back from an anti-alarm walk around the block while the Fire Department came by. It's like high school or college dorm life, seeing all of these co-workers milling about the parking lot all interrupted and digruntled.

So now there's no point in picking up where I left off originally. Now it's time to return to workday life, to decide if I should write that article about Ashlee Simpson for Metro San Jose...