Boyfriend of the Week

This week's boyfriend is Jonathan Ames. He is my favorite writer. As a real boyfriend, I have a hunch he'd be a moody drag, all fussy with stomach problems and health worries. But he's a great pretend boyfriend, mainly because I enjoy reading his books. www.jonathanames.com

Legless Pick

This afternoon I walked down to the junk store a few blocks from work. I was strolling down the sidewalk picking my nose when I saw this one-legged man hobbling from his car over to the mailbox on the corner. He dropped a letter into the slot and quickly hobbled back to his car.
A few things are odd about this.
-Why wasn't this guy wearing a fake leg? Does he always hobble on one leg, or does he sometimes bust out the fake leg for special occasions.
-Maybe he noticed me picking my nose. I'm a bad nose-picker. It's an awful habit, but I can't break it. I especially like to pick my nose in the car in heavy traffic. I pick my nose so muh that I've destroyed some of my nasal passages, I think.
-Other people write blogs about politics or issues. These are the kind of blogs that you see mentioned in Newseek and the like. But on Sneezy & Tacky, I write about picking my nose and seeing a one-legged man dropping a letter into a public mailbox. That's why the only place you see my blog mentioned is...um...well, Bryan and Vic N. kindly linked their blogs to mine. I'd actually take that over Newsweek. No telling how many Maffs national exposure might bring in.

Donut Addicts

Some kind co-workers brought donuts and assorted fattening pastries to work this morning. Most of the generic mom-and-pop bakeries (a lot of them are owned by Cambodian-Americans, it turns out) out here pack their tasty treats in bright pink boxes, so right away when you come to work and see those telltale grease-spotted pink cubes, you know there will be joy and pain to come. I was good and only had a bite of a glazed and a bite of a chocolate-iced crueller. I love to eat donuts, but they make me feel sick, sluggish, uncomfortably full but nutritionally unfulfilled.

I've pretty much stopped eating donuts. I used to eat maybe two or three a day. This was about ten years ago, when I worked at a bakery near Columbus, Ohio. It was one of my first real jobs, and by "real" I mean "underpaying, soul-sucking, labor-intensive with few to no rewards outside of a skimpy paycheck."

My shift started at 6am, right when the bakery opened. I didn't have a key, so I'd pull into the wintery darkness of the parking lot and wait for my co-worker Kim to arrive and unlock the door to the dark bakery. I tried to arrive about ten minutes early so I could start brewing huge urns of coffee and "tray up the donuts", which would have been friend and glazed just a few hours prior by the trashy night baker. I think he smoked while he worked, and I had this mental image of his ashes floating down into the gently sizzling vat oil that bathed and browned the cooking donuts.

I liked the routine of the morning, but I didn't care for the rush and pressure to ready everything before opening the bakery. We had a parade of regulars who'd come in most mornings--an alder classy woman who always got to ieces of toast with jam, a cop who'd get a large decaf and then pour about ten little cups plastic of half-and-half into it. As he emptied the little cups, he'd line them up across the counter and then leave. I hated him for that, how he couldn't just throw them away himself.

Some regular customers I liked--most I liked--and some I had no opinion of. A few I hated, like that cop. They were snobby (this was just a regular little bakery in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, not Payard or nothin') and treated me like a high school dropout. Wrong--I was a college dropout, and a very unhappy one.

Two of our regular customers I couldn't make my mind up about. It was a man and a woman--husband and wife, I assumed--who met every morning and stood in the frigid darkness outside, waiting for us to open up the bakery. The woman--who, in cold weather, wore a scarf wrapped babushka-style over her hair --ordered two glazed donuts and a decaf coffee, while the man ordered an iced jelly donut and a regular coffee. I'd fill up their coffee cups from the huge Bunn coffee urns and place their donuts on industrial-grade white ceramic plates. Then the couple sat at one of the little tables, sipping their coffee and leaning in close as they spoke to each other. They usually stayed for about fifteen minutes.

I never knew thier names. They were nice people, nothing too noteable about them from what I could see. For a while, maybe about a week or two, the woman came in on her own. Where was the man? But he came back the next Monday, standing by the door, waiting in the dark for donuts.

Who were these people, who were so smitten with routine that they woke up early just so they could make it to the barkey before it opened...so they could *wait*? It was charming but frustrating. I wanted more for them and for their lives. I left the bakery after five long months of employment so I could work in Wyoming for the summer. But I'm sure the couple stayed, kept on coming back at 5:55 into the summer and the fall and then winter again. I'm not sure if donuts every morning make the best breakfast.

Me = Awesome

Sometimes I rock. Today I feel pretty good about things. I'm in a bragging-for-the-bio kind of mood.

This started with the news last week that I was a finalist for AAN's Best Music Column, circulation less than 50,000. Last year I won the award, this year I am again a finalist. That's cool and all, but what if I won again? I'd start wondering about the validity of the award...anyhow, awards are the kind of thing that you should appreciate on a professional level (you can get milage out of them if you play your cards right) but disregard on a personal level. I try not to let this stuff go to my head...after all, who has even heard of the AAN awards?

But then, today, I got an email from Houhgton Mifflin requesting me to give permission for my Peanut Butter Buckeyes recipe to be included in the "Best American Recipes 2005-2006" anthology. I get $100 and a copy of the cookbook, all for doing nothing. That's cool, I like it when work you've done in the past gets resurrected and given this second life.

So here's my new bio. Actually, let's pretend this is me and Joe's wedding announcement that will appear in the Marietta Times.

Sara Bir wed Joe Ryckebosch in an intimate ceremony in the scenic hills of Berkeley, California on the afternoon of August 13.
The bride is a 1994 graduate of Marietta High School and a 1999 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. She is currently a marketing assistant and recipe developer at Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker, the one of the world's premier chocolate manufacturers. Sara is also an award-winning music journalist and media critic (the coule met when she was on assignment to interview his band). She performs frequently at readings throughout the San Francisco Bay area. Sara's recipe for Peanut Butter Buckeyes will be included in Houghton Mifflin's "Best American Recipes 2005-2006", to be published this October. She knows this lady whose son directed Heathers, and another who had an affair with Mark Rothko. Sara also once interviewed Art Garfunkel.
The groom is a 198? graduate of Quartz Hill High School in Lancaster, California and a 1999 graduate of Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. In his early 20s, after being discovered by renegade skater/artist Ed Tempelton, Joe skateboarded professionally and was sponsored by Channel One and New Deal skates. He is currenty a discovery assistant at a high-profile law firm in Berkeley, California. Joe plays drums in the touring rock band The Rum Diary, who have recently completed mixing their third album with Tim Mooney of the band American Music Club and Pal Jenkins of the Black Heart Procession. The Rum Diary has opened for the likes of The Decemberists, Pinback, and Sahara Hotnights. Additionally, Joe is a visual artist whose work graces walls from California to New York.
After honeymooning in Turkey, the couple plan to reside in Albany, California.

Conquering Pens

This morning I was balancing my checkbook. I always use the same pen, a black fine point rolling ball--not like one of those jenky ball-point pens, but a good inky pen. Even so, I'm not too find of the black fine point rolling ball pen, so I've been making a point to use it often. That way, it'll konk out soon and I can focus on a different, better, more pleasurable pen.

We have about five hundred writing utensils at home. Joe likes to steal them from the office supplies at his work. Then he likes to chew the ends off beyond recognition. I have to keep my own, more special pens in isolation to preserve them.

A house with many pens and pencils is a good place. I wish we went through pens and pencils faster, in fact. Every time you use a pen to the end, it's a little triumph. It's a way to measure how creative and productive you have been. This is why I like to focus on using two or three pens instead of whichever random pen is available at the time. Otherwise, you'll never get to the end of one. And it's such a good feeling.

Boyfriend of the Week

Bryan has a Girlfriend of the Week on his blog. I like that idea. I may try to do it here, but I don't have many imaginary boyfriends--at least not like I used to. I was going to have that Greman actor who starred in "Goodbye, Lenin!" as my Boyfriend of the Week, but first I want to see "Ladies in Lavender," which he's in. I want him to prove his worth before I go naming him Boyfriend of the Week.

So instead I'm making Donovan, circa 1966-1968, my boyfriend. Only young Donovan--old Donovan will not cut it.

The Dealbreaker Game

I went to the work-sponsored yoga last night. It was great; I think I'll make a habit of going. This does not indicate that YOGA BLOWS no more, because it still does--or rather, it still can. But I like our instructor here. She brings on the burn without 1000-degree-plus heat.

Today I walked down to the ghetto hamburger stand called Twin Castle. They sell hamburgers, tacos, chow mein, and ice cream. Probably they sell gyros, too--I've never checked. I've only had their soft serve ice cream, which is $1.09 for a small cone. The ice cream is pure white and slightly icey, and the cones are pointy on the bottom and stale. I ate the ice cream cone while walking back to work and wondered what soft serve is made of. Once I heard that soft serve ice cream--"frozen custard," it's called sometimes--is made of nonfat dry milk powder and vegetable oil. Maybe I'll research it and get back to you all on that.

I never wrote about the wonderful things I did on my trip to New York. I'll divide it into two lists.

List I: Song Kari, Brown and I sang in our private kareoke room.
If I Could Turn Back Time (Cher)
Girls and Boys (Blur)
La Isla Bonita (Madonna)
Copicabana (B. Mannilow)
Cabaret (Liza Minelli?)
Eye of the Tiger (Survivor)
Everybody's Talkin' (Harry Nilsson)
Escape (The Pina Colada Song) (Rupert Evans)
Enter Sandman (Metallica)
Suspicious Minds (Elvis)
Do You Remember Rock'n'Roll Radio (Ramones)
...and others, too many to recall

List II: The Game Brown and I Invented. We played this game on and off for four hours on a drizzly afternoon while walking through museums, waiting for food to arrive, and riding the subway. Let's say you meet this great guy/girl whith all of the qualities you look for in someone, and you really hit it off. Maybe you go on four or five dates, whatever. But there's this one thing about them. Is it a dealbreaker? What if that person...
-had that space on the bridge of their nose (right between the eyes) pierced?
-had dreadlocks?
-was white and had dreadlocks?
-smoked?
-smoked inside the house?
-had really creepy long fingernails?
-sincerely loved Celine Dion and made trips to Las Vegas to see her perform?
-was a bodybuilder?
-was a vegan?
-was a vegan and didn't want you to eat meat or dairy?
-kept Kosher and could not eat most of the things you made to share?
-didn't drink alcohol?
-drank an awful lot of alcohol--enough to make you wonder.
-ate mostly fast food?
-was a famous writer but you didn't care for their writing?
-was Matt Damon, except he turned out to be *really cool* in person?
-was bisexual?
-had permanent onion breath?
-had a very prominent bad tattoo?
-was a conrevative Republican?
...and so on

Foiled at the Barnes & Noble

Last night I felt like writing in a different place. This happens often, but there are surprisingly few good places to go write. I complain about this often, in fact; I'm sure there's an old post somwhere back there whining about the same thing.

I don't belive in dribing to a coffee shop. The only three within walking distance are Starbucks, Starbucks, and Starbucks. I like the Starbucks in the Barnes & Noble best, perhaps because being around hundreds of best-selling books is somewhat inspiring.

So last night I packed up my under-used laptop and strolled over to the huge new shopping plaza that I seem to spend so much time at. It's only a few blocks away. The sky was an electric cobalt, the color it get right before it's truly dark and eveningtime. I take the back neighborhood streets that Joe and I walk down at least four or five times a week. I see those tiny houses over and over again, but every time I notice a few tiny new things about them--the way flowers are arranged in a planter, the way a whirlygig hanging from the eve of a patio moves in the breeze, the mewing of a cat who eats cat food dumped on the same soild, greasy patch of sidewalk.

Then I got to the bookstore. Before ordering coffee I browsed (Bitch magazine, which I think I may have an article in the next issue if they haven't axed it already, Jonathan Safran Foer's new book; I'm smitten with the author but only mildly inerested in his actual writing). This is why Barnes & Noble is dangerous. But I like its sameness from store to store, and I like the sameness of the music they play at the same nearly ignorable volume, just a few decibles louder than airport Muzak. This may sound gross, but I feel like I can be a writer there. It's so generic that it's easier to grasp onto extraordinary thoughts.

I never did get my coffee. Every cafe table, every grouping of benches, every lounge chair--they were all taken. Writing, for me, is (unglamorously) like a bowle movement. When it's happening it's happening and that's all there is to it.

So I didn't want to hand out and browse more while waiting for a table. I'd left home so I could concentrate and not dick off; what was the point in dicking off more now that I was there? I split, not having purcased a tall americano or Bitch magazine or Extremely Lound and Incredibly Close (not only does Jonathan Safran Foer actually write and have books and stuff--he probably types and spells way better than I do).

At home, I let the laptop run on its battery from the kitchen table, a very minor change of scenery that was slighly fruitful nevertheless. Joe watched Cheers and we both ate the last two slices of butterscotch pie, which by then had lost much of its initial creamy-sweet appeal. Joe ate his pie and laughed, I ate my pie and wrote and read. Then I closed up the laptop and wathced Cheers, too.

Pie Yesterday, Pie Today

I made a butterscotch pie yesterday. No reason, except I felt like making and then eating a pie. I love pie. Joe pointed out that it had been a while since I'd made one. True! We're in-between seasons for fresh fruit, so butterscotch it was. I like the pie's flavor, but the custard filling is thickened with flour and I don't think it cooks out all the way, so it has kinda a floury feel to me.

That didn't keep me from having two slivers last night and one this morning. I got up, got dressed, made coffee, ate Trader Joe's Honey Nut Os with sliced strawberries, and then a sliver of butterscotch pie. That's how I feel about pie--eat it while you got it. Pie is one kind of food that does not improve with age.

This weekend we got ZERO wedding planning accomplished. That's kind of okay with me, which is sort of scary. It's a small wedding, it's not like we have a million things to attend to. We did come up with the idea to take a big road trin instead of honeymooning in Hawaii. Hawaii would be great if it didn't put us into a small amount of debut, which it will. I think I'd rather go into debut over other things, like a trip to South America or Europe. Joe agrees.

I'm the first one here at the office this morning. I love it. I have all of this time to do stuff--email, blog, tidy--and half of it's not even related to work. But it makes me feel like I've accomplished a lot, like a work placebo. I think it's good for efficiency.

Yoga Blows

I don't understand the appeal of hot yoga. People would tell me stories of their first class, of puking or fainting or general misery. "It's so hot, sweat just pours down your face and body It's so liberating."

Sounds oppressive to me. I have no aversion to heat, but I do have an aversion to things that make no sense. Even so I was curious, curious to see what hot yoga was like, how miserable/liberating it was. While in New York visiting Brown I tagged along with her to yoga on a Sunday morning to givce it a spin. We'd been eating lots of greasy and starchy food, and even though we'd been walking all over the place ("the New York workout"), I still had a big urge to excersise.

We have free weekly yoga sessions here at my work in California. I've gone to maybe half a donzen. They're very intro-level, held in this dark loft with no mirrors. I like the darness, the lack of mirros. Karen, the instructor, makes everyone feel comforatable and competent. Leaving work yoga, I feel these infusions of energy, like I want to go and run a 10K.

I stopped going to work yoga because it stays light out for longer, and I can't bear to be inside in this dismal loft when the sun is shining outside in the big world. I was making pretty okay progress, gradually getting familiar with the poses and such. I'm still a novice, but not a first-timer.

So I felt pretty okay trying out the hot yoga. I'm in good shape, I can take heat. Brown and I pulled on yoga clothes and walked the few blocks from her apartment to the studio. Brow said she liked the instructor and that it was a big reason she went to classes there.

$17 for a class. What kind of poopie is that? Dude, that's way too much for a yoga class. But that's wha tthey charged. Brown generousy paid for over half of it. I got myself all signed up. "We have a new instructor this morning," said the studio's owner.

Hmm. Whatever, maybe this new person would be really good. Brown and I took off our shoes and grabbed our towels (for the sweat, you see) and went into the hot room.

It felt like a dry jungle, maybe, or a large dry sauna. After rolling out my mat, I took the cue of a few folks in there already and lie down in corpse pose. That's one yoga pose I have down pat. It was nice, this soothing block of heat pressing down.

People kept on filtering in. Some girl put her mat right in front of mine, which completely blocked my view of the mirrors. I decided not to say anything, since I'd done yoga just fine with no mirros before.

The new instructor came in. He was wiry but buff, wearing just these little shorts. Some yoga men seem to be really up themselves about their bodies, like a yoga version of a musclehead. It's hot in the yoga room, though, so wearing nothing but little shorts was sort of a necessity. I made a mental note to remove my tank top if it got too searing in there for me.

The instructor introduced himself and asked people their names, if any of them had done hot yoga before. I raised my hand, and he pointed at me with this long finger. "I'm keeping my eye on you," he said.

We started with all of these poses. Boom!, just like that. Karen eases into things so gently, and she speaks out the subtlies of each pose so that you natually fall into it. This dude was doing no such thing. His words translated to no body movements that I could conjure up, except Twister. I recalled the first time I ever attempted to drive a stick shift, how one gear went to another and how I didn't understand it and wasn't able to make the car do it. That's the way my body was with the poses.

Plus there were all of those mirrors. I didn't like them reflecting me and everyone else. I wanted not to look at them, but they drew my eyes with their flickers of motion. The girl standing right in my line of vision was starting to bug me. The poses were starting to bug me. The intructor's lack of coherence was starting to bug me.

I asked the girl to move. I'm afraid I was kind of bitchy about it, but she scooted her mat over right away. And then I could see the mirros, but the instructor had us turn and face the windows and bend to the walls with no mirrors.

We went into triangle pose, something I may have done before. But at that moment the shape of a trianlge made no sense, the idea of an elbow meeting knee and palm facing...facing where? The instructor came over and placed his hands on my shoulders and arms, pressing gently the way yoga instructors do. He said something, but my ears only heard "wrong wrong wrong."

Next pose--same one, but other side. I still didn't have any idea what the hell we were doing. Everyone else did. I looked that them and hated their snobby yoga asses. Why could I do this in the dark at work and not in here, a real studio? Next pose, the instructor came over again and said and did stuff that was no help whatsoever.

I was getting pissed. I don't like having my mistakes micromanaged. By the fourth time the intructor came over, I'd had it. I saw him making his way to my area out of the corner of my eye, and I ran out of the room in a wordless huff. Fuck that dude.

I sat down in the changing area, which seemed frigid after the drowsy heat of the studio. The heat I'd actually liked--I wanted to see how it felt to stay in there for an hour and a half, to work up a good sweat. But no way was I going back in there. I couldn't face that guy and the whole room of yoga snobs. I thought about putting on my shoes and going on a nice long run--running is something I can do the right way--but I sat, immobilized.

I thought about all of the times in my life when I'd been wrong in front of a bunch of people. High school marching band, crew practices, math classes, gym classes, cooking school fiascos...all places that my flaws became so very painfully apparent. That stuff was years ago, but the sting can emerge at any instant--decades-old hurt that suddenly feels so new and fresh. I'd forgotten how I spent half of my youth trying to overcome feeling ugly, clumsy, graceless, awkward, inept, and stupid. I fogot that because now I don't feel that way too often. You get older and figure out what you are good at and stick with it. I'm good at writing and hiking and cooking. I'm pretty okay at sewing. I can clean things really well. I am good at doing the same thing for several hours--hiking, jogging, making cookies, getting a grove down. I don't venture out of my comfort zone a lot. Perhaps that's the right you earn as an adult.

Still, you can't grow if you don't venture out of those cozy areas. I used to suck at rowing, but I did it for four years and then got reallly good, and I'm glad. I sucked at band, and I eventually quit, but I did learn a lot about myself (like that quitting can be a good idea) during my band years.

I stayed in the room on a bench, stuck. I wondered why Brown didn't come to check on me--I was her guest, after all. I could easliy get back to the apartment on my own and have soneone buzz me up, but I didn't want to just leave her. We'd come together, and plus my mat was still in the studio. No way was I going back in there.

So I sat and sat and sat, testing myself and my friend. I started to think she was upset with me for causing a scene. I wished I had the book I'd been reading. I forgasve the intructor, who I knew all along only wanted to be helpful but had been doing a terrible job of it. I sat there for a fucking hour and more than that, listening to peoples' footsteps on the floor above and the creakeing and shutting of the door below.

Finally the class let out. The intructor came over and apologized to me. That was cool, we both learned from it and whatever. Brown came out and we gathered our stuff (including a refund for my class fee) and left. I was still upset a bit, but not with her. Just with everything.

I'm going to do yoga here at work next week, just so I can say that I didn't give up. But I still think that yoga is not for me. Another friend of mine worked for a short time at Yoga Journal before getting laid off. They'd hired him to work in the ad department, and then they decided to outsource the ads. So he got laid off. A few days after his layoff, we got an envelope from Yoga Journal. Inside was a series of collages amde from yoga retreat brochures, the main one a paste-up of letters reading YOGA BLOWS. Tony, I agree with you. Yoga can blow.

California All the Way

I just got back from New York. I was there for six days. Already I miss it. I want to move there at some point, a point I used to think dangled vaguely in the future, like a misty carrot (god, that's a terrible analogy). Anyhow, the carrot is now very close and tanglible and clear. I think about moving all of the time--to different places, but mostly to New York. I lived there once, kinda (communted from Long Island to the city) and I hated it. HATED it. One of the worst phases of my life. So why do I want to go back there now? Eventually I developed this fantasy image of New York as a grizzled Emerald City of style and creativity, a crowded playground for writers and musicians and artists. Like if I go there I'll effortlessly become enveloped in their ranks. My life here in California is already like that, in its way. I am close with a whole bunch of creative people who encourage me and inspire me. I respect and value them all, but it's like in my head there's this imaginary group of more popular creative people that I am willing to dump my creative friends here for. California is a great place. New York you have love/hate relationships with--it's all part of the allure. California I have a love/perplexment relationship with. I think this is the right place for me to be now. Someday I will look back on the years that are happening as I write this. I'll smile and peer at them through this lens of perfected memory, and always think of this time as those golden years. I get upset withy myslef for not being able to enjoy them as they happen, in the moment. Joe missed me while I was away. He bought a foil tray of six junk food cinnamon rolls, like Enteman's-type. They are a fake cream color, doughy and cottony with this plastic-y blanket of white icing. I ate one just now and regret it. That's the kind of thing you do when someone you love goes away: buy gross food that you like but really don't like. I do that with Spagetti-Os.