Mini Rant

what a difference 10 minutes makes. Yesterday I caught the 5:53 bus, and all was quiet and dark with the exception of one guy who had light, laptop, and cell phone on and got shushed by another passenger. This morning, however, I took the 6:03 bus, and lights were on everywhere, newspapers were rustling - and a dude sits down next to me and turns on the light to read, and the jerk behind me was snoring. I hate that!!

"Life is a cabaret old chum..."

Happy Birthday Kathleen!

'Twas a weeklong celebration of my sister's birthday (again, squeezing in all the last-minute fun before she leaves.) Friday night we went to see Cabaret at the local theatre. It was excellent! I had never seen it before (movie or play) and was quite pleasantly surprised. One of my sister's friends played Victor. It was lots of fun!

Saturday was the annual trip to the Sebastopol Celtic Music Festival. My sister and I now have a crush on John Doyle, the Irish singer and guitar player. He was rocking out with master fiddler Liz Carroll. We also the Battlefield Band and plenty of Scottish Highland dancing. But I was a little bummed because they didn't have the games this year. I was looking forward to seeing burly men in kilts flipping telephone poles.

On Sunday we took quick hotlap around the outdoor antique faire (it is always hot as blazes the day of the fair, and our interest waned quickly), quick stop at the Panini Grill, and then a quick trip to my brother's house to "see the baby."

Realization

I need to gather up my life. It has gotten away from me.

So it's been fun staying in The City, but the week flew by in a blur. It was like being on vacation, but as always happens when I am on vacation, I spend too much time doing nothing, and before I realize it, my time is up. Plus, I was also a little lonely.

Last night my sister came to down and we met our cousin and his partner for dinner at Taylor's in the Ferry Marketplace. I had a very good California Chicken Sandwich and yummy garlic fries. All these "one more time" dinners and outings with my sister are making me a little teary-eyed. We have gotten to be such good friends and we have such a good time together. The idea of her not being here to hang out with hasn't really hit me yet.

While "on vacation," I watched The Recruit and Bruce Almighty. Neither were very good.

Damn That Bubbly Elixir!

Friday night my sister and I met up with Elizabeth and had a lovely dinner at Aram's. You know those lovely dinners where the food is good, the atmosphere is good, and you linger long after the check comes because you are deep in conversation? After dinner, we moseyed down to the pub for a pint. And played a few songs on the jukebox. And had a grand ole time.

Went to a BBQ on Saturday. And since I was drunk by about 3:30 (champagne again, dammit!), most of the evening is kind of blurry. I know I ate some chicken and some corn on the cob, and I know I talked to some people for awhile, and there was a boxing match on the TV....

So Sunday I was not feeling too hot, but I managed to drag myself into the shower and into some clothes and I got myself up to the city to meet my parents, sister, and some family friends for lunch. We went to the Cliff House, which I don't think I'd ever been to before. Since I love the old-timey stuff, I had to look up the history of the place. The food was delicious, and after sipping a couple glasses of sprite I was feeling much better.


So I am staying at a friend's apartment this week - it is close enough for me to walk to work. Plus it's like I'm on vacation and staying at a hotel, except I don't have to pay for it!

The Swingingest

This evening during dinner I was listening to the Sweet and Lowdown soundtrack, which put the memory of that Looney Tunes cartoon about the Three Little Pigs set during the 1920's jazz scene into my head. For those of you who are interested:

"The Three Little Bops" is 8 minutes long and first aired in January 1957. It was directed by Friz Freleng, with vocals by Stan Freberg and music by Shorty Rogers.... "The big bad wolf, he learned the rule, Ya gotta get hot to play real cool!"

Did you know there was such a thing as a Big Cartoon Database? And here's a link for Looney Tunes lyrics. Ah, memories.

Quote of the Day
"Cockroaches and socialites are the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything."
--Herb Caen

And I just have to share this with everyone: My mom told me that her dad loved to tell people about the fraternity he was in back in his college days. You know the one. It's called "I Felta Thigh."

"you knocked the piss outta the man who knocked the piss outta me"

So I was flipping around on TV last night, and came across the movie Monument Avenue, which I'd heard of but never seen. Everyone and their grandfather is in that movie: Denis Leary, Ian Hart, Billy Crudup, Martin Sheen, that guy from Beautiful Girls and Frequency, the cute Irish guy from Titanic, and Colm Meaney. I swear, I see Colm Meaney in so many movies, you'd think he's made 100 of them. But he's only made 55 (according to IMDb). And I love all the ones I've seen him in: The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van (collectively known as the Barrytown trilogy), Far and Away (from which the title quote comes), the pilot movie for Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, The War of the Buttons, This is My Father, The Boys from County Clare.... the list goes on.

Meanwhile, as my sister and I were surfing IMDb (and MuggleNet) last night, I came up with a short list of some older movies I have been wanting to see:
*The Dead
*Last of the High Kings
*The Hi Lo Country
*Charlotte Gray

Elaboration of the previous post

Let me explain about the 5 glasses of champagne.... It was my good friend's birthday yesterday. (We actually started the birthday celebration Saturday evening with movie night in the park - they showed Sandlot, which is one of our all time favorites.) And then Sunday was the not-so-secret outing that seemed to require a lot of staging that wasn't really necessary. So my roommate and I picked up our friend around 10:30 and we went out to a (new?) restaurant for champagne brunch. Well, my roommate was under the impression that because it was a buffet and all you could eat, that it was all you can drink as well. Oh no, my friend. One glass of champagne was included with the brunch. The other 4 glasses (each!) we had to pay for. So not only was I drunk, but I didn't have enough money to pay for it!! But the food was delicious and we lingered for a long time, wearing our leis and being rude and rowdy. Our next stop was the miniature golf course for some drunken antics. It reminded me of grade school birthday parties, except for the drunkeness. After we had worked up a good sweat, we headed back home and stopped at the new martini bar downtown. The place was empty but we chatted up the manager. By this point I was so full and headachy that I could barely choke down my lemon drop. These are sure signs that I am getting weak in my old age, and I do not like it!

I'm Tired

Even though I didn't really do too much, it was an exhausting weekend. After the trauma with the ants (I am still on edge - keeping a close lookout) and then 5 glasses of champagne quickly followed by a headache yesterday, and then a creepy episode of Six Feet Under, I felt pretty strung out by the time I went to bed last night.

Surreal Serenade
This morning, there was a guy singing and playing the guitar in the Bart station. There was something odd about listening to an acoustic version of The Carpenters' "Close to You" as I slowling ascended the escalator up to the street.

Movies and Trauma

Movies
I watched an excellent movie last night - Goodbye Lenin! It takes place in East Germany in late 1989/early 1990. Alex's mother is devoted Socialist, who falls into a coma, and "sleeps through" the fall of the Berlin wall. She wakes up 8 months later and the doctor says any kind of shock could kill her, so Alex puts together an elaborate scheme to keep the mother in the dark and let her believe she is still living in a Socialist society. There are so many great moments: the friend doing the fake news broadcasts was hilarious, as was Alex's desperate search for Spreewald pickles and triumphant discovery of Mokkafix instant coffee. It turned a little serious in the final third of the movie as these foreign comedies tend to do (I'm thinking of Muriel's Wedding), but it was still very well acted and fun to watch.

And then The Man in the Moon was on TV this morning. I remember renting this when it first came out and loving it right away. The girl who plays the older sister was in the TV show "Rags to Riches" and Reese Witherspoon was suddenly my new favorite actress. I love it just as much today, although the overly poignant coming of age theme is a little more obvious this time around.

And then, we went to the park tonight to watch The Sandlot. Can I just say the movie in the park thing is the best idea ever!! And can I also say, I love The Sandlot! We of course talked along with the dialogue - "I've swum here every summer of my adult life. And every summer there she is, lotioning, oiling, oiling, lotioning, smiling. Smiling! I can't take this anymore!" I love Squints!

and Trauma
Ants on/in my car - all over the place... such a nightmare! Ok, I am exaggerating a bit. But when you freak out about bugs as much as I do, such a nuisance does become a nightmare. I must have parked right on an ant hill on Friday, because when I opened the hood Saturday morning, they were all over the inside. I went crazy with the bug spray and the Windex, and have been on edge ever since because there were at least 10 or 15 that got inside the car too. And that just creeps me out!

Is It Thursday Already?

My, how time flies during a short work week.

I didn't take a shower this morning and I didn't comb my hair. And I still have marker on my fingers from last night's coloring projects. Basically, I'm a mess. One of these days I will pull myself together and act like a grown up.

In case you were wondering just how hot it really is, it is so hot that the deodorant that is inside my toiletry bag in my bedroom melted. That's right, my bedroom became so hot yesterday that my deodorant melted. And I am supposed to sleep in that room?? I think not.

I got the veggie delight sandwich from Subway for lunch - it's pretty good. Plus, the nice man behind the counter didn't charge me for the chocolate chip cookie! Wasn't that nice?

Have I mentioned the best part about this new job? The free stuff. Yup, the discard pile over by the mailboxes where people dump stuff they don't want any more. Like magazines. Lots and lots of magazines. Mmmm, magazines.....

Hardly Laboring

[It is actually Friday 10/15, and I am trying to remember this mini-road trip we took over Labor Day weekend.]
We left Friday evening and our first stop was Monterey. We started the evening sitting in the quaint patio of the Quality Inn, drinking a few beers and checking out the big dipper. Sever beers later, we'd moved the party into the motel room, and had received the "we've had a complaint" phone call from the front desk. So piled into the car and headed downtown. We ended up back at Cibo - my sister had never been there of course, and we waxed nostalgic about our first time there. It was pretty crowded. There was a great band playing reggae music, and we moved and grooved in the corner until a booth opened up, and there we sprawled for the rest of the evening.

On Saturday we arrived in San Simeon, and our evening out consisted of driving into Cambria for dinner at JB's Pizza place, a hot lap of window shopping, and a visit to the ice cream parlor. And then upon returning to our motel room, we popped over to the convenience store and drank beer by the ocean.

After breakfast Sunday morning in the motel restaurant, we packed up and headed home. It was a very quick trip, the majority of which was spent in the car, but it was a good getaway nevertheless. Of course, the most exciting thing was finding out Friday evening that my new nephew had been born. Sean Matthew, of the squishy cheeks.

We certainly didn't labor too much on Monday. In the afternoon, we drove up to the city. We had a late lunch at the Citrus Club on Haight, then drove through Golden Gate Park and along Ocean Beach. We stopped at Fort Funston and hung out there for awhile, watching the dudes and their remote control gliders.

The Trouble with People

Is hate too strong of a word? I hesitate to say that I hate people, because I worry that such a statment will come back to bite me in the ass. But, you can understand why I would feel that way. Here is the latest evidence to back me up. A woman I have never met sent an email to another woman that I have never met, and she copied me on the email, which included this:

"....the bad news [is that the contract] was not included in package. could you please have runamok send one ASAP?"

Hey bitch!! Why don't you ask me directly?! God!! Why are people so annoying?!

Three Things

1) I just tortured myself by going into Utrecht and gazing at all the lovely items for sale. Alas, poor me. I had to restrict myself to looking and not touching. Ok, I touched a little.

2) For the past several days I have been using a coffee mug to get water from the spiggot. First of all, it feels a little weird to drink water out of a coffee mug. But more importantly, every time I see the water in the mug, I think of the movie Nadia, and the scene when Nadia filled up a coffee mug with some "juice" (which was clear for some reason) and she set that mug down on the table next to the mug that was filled with bleach (she was doing her laundry) and ended up drinking the bleach on accident. Nadia is one of my all time cult favorites.

3) On a sixth degree of separation, I looked up Talia Balsam who played Marta Karolyi in Nadia, and it turns out she is married to John Slattery, who I first saw in one of my all time favorite (and much too short-lived) TV shows, Homefront.

(Title Here)

My boss is not in the office today, so I have done a little more web surfing than usual. It's actually pretty quiet around here - it being the Friday before a 3-day weekend and all, and I am sure most people will not be working too hard. All I want to do right now is snack, and I need to resist that urge.

I really don't like being anxious about money. I have been using a spreadsheet to crunch the numbers - if apartment A includes utilities but will cost x much more for x, and apartment B doesn't inlcude utilities but has x and x, which one is the better deal for me? Woah, flashback to those fun-filled word problems in algebra class. It's nothing but headaches all around.

The whole "I don't know what I'm doing with my life" thing is starting to get on my nerves. Yes, I said it: I am getting on my own nerves. I keep reminding myself of one of my favorite quotes (by Mary Oliver):

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

I would love to be able to tell people, years from now, that I was sitting in my cubicle on an ordinary Friday morning, performing idle tasks, and generally zoning out, when I had an epipany, a moment of utter clarity. And I realized that this is not where I should be, this is not how I want to spend my life. And I knew in an instant exactly what I should be doing. So I stood up, knocked down a few walls (a la Office Space), and stormed out of the office, instantly embarking on my meaninful journey......

I wonder if they have peanut M&Ms in the vending machine upstairs.

If Not Movies, What?

If I had more money than I knew what to do with, I would go to the movies at least once a day. I know I fairly recently posted a "List of Upcoming Movies I Want to See," but I just picked up the Fall Preview issue of Premiere magazine, and a few more titles caught my eye:

*Silver City - the new John Sayles movie, starring Chris Cooper - I love him!
*Mean Creek - with the cute Culkin boy. No the other one. But I think they made this movie already. It's called Bully.
*Enduring Love - don't even really know what the plot is, but it stars Rhys Ifans (I love him!) and Samantha Morton (I love her!).
*Undertow - starring Billy Elliot's Jamie Bell as a Southern boy running away from home.
*A Very Long Engagement - WW1 story with Audrey Tautou (I love her!).
* Sideways - with Paul Giamatti and Thomas Hayden Church and lots and lots of wine.
*The Woodsman - with Kevin Bacon as a paroled child molester trying to start over. I think he'll be great in that role - and I mean that as a compliement (such as in Sleepers).
*Birth - with Nicole Kidman and the kid from that awful Godsend movie. Hey, speaking of reincarnation movies, who here has seen Chances Are with Robert Downey Jr, Cybill Shepherd, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Ryan O'Neal? I don't know why, but I have a thing for that movie. I watch it every time they show it on Channel 36.
*I (heart) Huckabees - starring all kinds of random people. Could be fun.
*The Incredibles - the latest from Pixar. Enough said.

And I see they're filming a new Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightly as Elizabeth Bennett. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Of course, I am biased, because nothing will ever please me as much as the A&E version with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth (9.2 stars on IMDb!). I am suspicious that Keira will be a little too "bad ass" for this role. But I am intrigued by the fact that Jena Malone is playing trampy youngest sister Lydia. That will be fun to see.

IMO

This morning the alarm radio woke me up to the sound of Ah-nold chanting "four more years!", which I was not happy about. Seriously, I really did not need to hear that. Ok, I know it's pretty much a given that Republicans vote Republican and non-Republicans vote for anything non-Republican, but who in their right mind is really going to vote for Bush? Am I totally naive to think that most people are fed up with this guy and seek a fresh start? I know I haven't been paying much attention to the news and the current affaris, and so I don't even really know what I am talking about. But regardless of politics and war and the deficit, the bottom line is the dude is a punchline. Why in the world would we purposely elect someone who has been reduced to an "ism"?