Here’s something that I know from the web, Dot is angry. I also know that Larry is something like persecuted and delusional, maybe persecusional. Jeremy is out meta-ing David Winer, early blogger and early annoying, self-important blogger, on the topic of what else ‘blogging. Tim is defensive. Kyria is probably tired.

I know all of these things because of the world wide web. I know all these things, because I procrastinate like nobody’s business. I know all of these things, because somewhere deep down inside I like to torment myself with bouts of self-loathing, occasionally followed by forgiveness, and quickly segueing into feelings of inadequacy.

In other words, writing didn’t exactly go zippy today. Or at all, really. I did laundry. M. and I tossed a softball around the park down the street in preparation for company softball in April. I walked to my workplace with M. and picked up the scooter I had left over the weekend.

Finally, I cooked an expensive pork roast, pre-marinated and stuffed with apricot and pistachios by the local gourmet grocer. Here’s the new stage in M.’s and my relationship, I call it Ozzie and Harriet. Does anyone fucking remember Ozzie and Harriet, the heartwarming completely phony world of the Nelsons?

Take away the vaguely gender neutral, secretly drug-taking sons, and imagine me on a Sunday afternoon with an apron and pearls. We’ve been having the full meat and two veg monty of a traditional family dinner come a Sunday. We figured out gourmet meat and a little time is actually not a bad way to end the weekend. It’s a bit cheaper than our restaurant bills, and it’s way easier to get second or even third helpings.

Here’s a completely on topic but tangential fun fact — Pat HATED Ozzie Nelson. Apparently, back around a thousand years or go, give or take the 1950s, she spent a summer waitressing at a Jersey shore type of fancy rich folk getaway, kind of like the resort in Dirty Dancing, although that was all mountainous and shit, not ocean-y. Ozzie dropped by, acted like an imperious dick and than stiffed her on the tip. Ah, good old-fashioned, American family values.

So, we had the playing catch at the park, and we had the roasted animal flesh. And, our clean clothes smell rain-water fresh, better living through chemistry.

But, I fancy myself an artiste, a temperamental brooding thing with deep thoughts and ideas to be expressed. I do not fancy myself a suburbanite in Gap Khaki shorts and an old, college-branded sweatshirt. (Although, at the fucking least, I have not yet, even in a moment of deep ironic fancy, considered a sweatshirt with hand-painted kitties or swirling streaks of artful gold paint with flecks of glitter. My jeans lack an elastic waistband even though I’m in my 40s. As a straw to grasp, I have that.)

Artists, in my fantasy, write. They work on their memoirs. As a back up plan, apparently in my case, they read weblogs and taunt their friends.

The bitch is that if it wasn’t for the web and computers, I probably never would have thought about writing publicly. And, if it wasn’t for the contact and encouragement from friends, family and total strangers via the web, I wouldn’t keep plugging away. My solace is also my time-crushing complete jerk off activity. What the fuck, I guess, masturbation is like work sometimes, even if it’s all mental.

Thank god, I told my mentor type person I would have lunch with him a week from tomorrow. Time is at the moment on my side. Kind of.

Technorati Tags: computer, family, guilt, internet, life, weblog, writing

I recently bought a MacBook Pro. It’s a computer. I know that. It’s not a magical box that deserves the kind of attention puppies or even flowers get.

In other words, put a bullet through my head if I ever sound like this (and I’m not getting laid):

Technorati Tags: Apple, computer, fanboy

I wasn’t going to write anything, but now I’m taunting myself to write something.

So, here’s all I have. My brother has a pacemaker. My sister is in Africa. And, M. bought a couple of tickets to day two of the Oakland A’s season opening of their ballpark. They are playing none other than the World Champion Boston Red Sox. M. didn’t realize it’s a day game, but I’ve pretty much convinced him a day of hooky at a ball game ain’t half bad. If he skips work for baseball, I’d say he’s well past the citizenship quiz into being an American.

Technorati Tags: baseball, California, family, spring

Some days you just feel older. And, some days that’s not entirely a bad thing.

Today, I tried the Monday gym class at work. Monday is different from Thursday and Friday. It begins with an M for one thing. The gym class is also taught by a boy. A boy helping a room full of the women do cardio and calisthenics and stretches and other circuit training things. I’ll judge the workout by the level of pain I feel tomorrow.

The class today really pulled me back into the hellish vortex that was real, state-mandated, public-school, excessive cruelty for the non-athletic gym class of yore. Imagine, if you will, a modern gymnasium with weights and Nautilus-type equipments and mirrors and mats and heart-racing cardio tools. In it, were nine women, ranging from about 20 something to a definite top of 44 years young, and one cocky young man clearly digging his role as leader, trainer and head jock.

Already, as the dude quasi-flirted with the more vocal, more gym-enjoying chicks, I was a bit transported to, I don’t know, the 70s, when I never ever ever got into the athletic groove, even though I occasionally tried and sporadically didn’t fail. I wasn’t then and ain’t now someone who rolls with the thrill of athletic competition. (Putting aside the fun tossing, catching, batting practice M. and I put in yesterday afternoon at the field down the street in prep for the company softballing.)

The teenage mortification was revisited when, whilst jogging in place, I trotted on top of an errant dumbbell. Immediately, I twisted my ankle, over-flexed my toes trying to get off the ankle and dropped my ass to the mat. Ahhhhhh, grace.

I regained composure, more or less, from down on the floor. Macho as I can be in such a little moment of minor humiliation, I jumped back up to shake it off and rejoin the next exercise. I am indisputably a clod.

The beauty of this stupid moment is the difference between four decades of living versus a scant one or so decades. I don’t fucking care. Sure, I would have preferred not to fall down, and I could do without the ankle-twisting, but it really doesn’t fucking matter. And, even if the three chicks in the class who I think might be capable of a whisper and laugh at such unremitting awkwardness did, in fact, laugh, I wouldn’t fucking care. After all, unlike at 14 I can outline why my life will go on unscathed and probably measures up OK.

Now, you contrast that with the hell in about seventh grade, when I guess I would have been about 12. At 12, I had breastages, hips and the kind of uterus that was telling me every month that it was all ready with the egg-dropping action by sloughing off the neglected buggers, even though sex thoughts would be running behind a few years much later. I was already standing at about the height, 5′3″ or so, with which I seem to be sticking at this point. I outweighed almost everyone in my class, boy, girl and teacher.

Gymnastics was the unit in class way back when. Older girls, maybe from eighth grade, were the gym teacher’s assistants to help teach the moves and spot our class on the moves that needed spotting. We stood in a couple of lines with the accomplished older girls holding us up through the handstand lesson, one by one.

Think about an averaged-sized 13 year old. Think about an above-average grown-woman-sized 12 year old. Picture the momentum required to heft your ass over teakettle thrust your hips into the air and lithely balance your legs in inversion from where they usually stand. The older girl’s task was to grab my legs as a flew my feet up into the air and help me gain my balance.

Remember that momentum, I mentioned? I flipped myself onto my hands and that rascal momentum rocked me straight through the older girl’s grip flat onto my back. And with the thrust and hitting the planks, I knocked the wind completely out of my lungs, and in dignity terms, the wind right out of my sails. I lay on the hardwood floor making an eerie squeaking noise panic rising as I tried desperately to breathe. Gradually, air returned to me and I drew breath.

About the same time I regained my ability to breathe freely, the gym teacher had cleared the whole classroom, adjourning class early. She also sent an envoy next door to the boys’ gym to help us out. I narrowly avoided the indignity of getting lifted and carried out by two relatively burly boys brought in for the heavy lifting. I insisted on leaving the gym under my own motor.

My face still feels scarlet when I think of the emptying gym and my squeaking, panicked keen.

If only one had the 40+ years of not giving a shit perspective, it would have been a better day in seventh grade.

Of course, the flipside of gym class when you’re an old crone, is also that which makes you sound like a cranky old lady inside of your head. The other horror of taking the class is hitting the showers with the other women afterward.

Apparently, one of the crew had perspired enough to render her bra unwearable. (Side note, thank the powers that be for my genes. Even on a 90 degree day in August in the throes of passion, I glisten, I dew, but I do not drip rivulets of sweat, and I don’t stank.)

The locker room convo dealt with the dilemma and the overwrought worry and discussion of braless-ness. Behind the shower curtain, the cranky, old bag in me thought, “Jesus Christ, put your shirt on and relax. It ain’t like anyone’s going to ask you to do jumping jacks at your desk job, and they’re only tits.” Then again, I’m stupid enough to have stood on stage with nothing but a microphone and my mammaries flapping in the breeze.

Technorati Tags: energy, exercise, gym, life, self-esteem, teenage, women

Good god am I boring and apparently Jesus died for my right to be so. Clearly, my biggest sin is the dullness of dishwater, of the rambling, pointless and inane.

Actually, I don’t believe that Jesus died for my sins. It would take a rather mundane deity to give that much of a shit about such trivialities. I think he died so that the Discovery and History Channels could continually pump out stuff that M. can watch for hours while flipping channels. This week not only did I get to watch a bunch of Filipino dudes crucifying each other, but I read up on how the health ministry is looking to make sure the nails and the flaying apparatus are sterile. Clean whippings, who could say no to that?

We celebrated the resurrection and the light by eating too much at a fancy brunch. Nothing like complementary mimosas (made with a surprising percentage split of sparkling wine to OJ) and a wide variety of carbohydrates to make me feel good about the holiest of holy. Not to mention all the fresh fruit to make me regular in the name of the lord, the holy spirit and the only son.

It was kind of cute in a voyeuristic way to mingle among the breeders and watch the little girls and boys in their “Easter outfits” (apparently folks still do that) cozying up to the bunny-suited special guest and hunting around the patio. I’d be sounding all perverted and stuff watching them, except I didn’t want to kidnap any and bring them home. Au contraire.

I was too busy eating and drinking to beat them out of hunting for the plastic eggs. I know I could have slaughtered the rugrats in that game.

Even though it was an early, early (almost the earliest) Easter it could be, here we dined in the sun outside. Remind me again why people actually live in New England?

Technorati Tags: California, Easter, religion, weather

There are two things that North California Bay Area types are obnoxious about to the twelfth degree — fresh food and the weather.

Now the food thing is legitimate and all with farms and massive agribusiness a truck-ride away and wine country all cheek and jowl and all. But, every now and again the foodies act like they invented or discovered eating. I’m sure some cave barbecue back in the day with a Neanderthal chef and some barks and leaves tossed in the mix for flavor and aroma, because that’s essentially all that spices are, had our sense of freshness beat. And, by god, hunted meat beaten to the ground with a club sure as hell would beat “free range” for au naturel.

But, the weather, sometimes that is something on which fucking bragging rights are indisputable. Apart from walking around in t-shirt w/a jean jacket weather for the last week or so, admiring the flowering magnolia trees and cliched, Wadsworthian fields of daffodil, I realized the weather thang by calling Back East. (I so wish William Blake had written that poem, although he wouldn’t, because Blakean fields sounds way fucking hipper.)

When I was talking to a folk from home, the other end of the phone inquired about the weather. I said it was clearly become Spring time. They offered condolences about the cold and the rain and the mud and the wind and the misery. Of course, in Boston, in March, when there is still a chance for a late in the game dump of snow and the wind shifts from glorious kite-flying long days of sunshine to dismal bitter cold, and mud is the color of the ground, the consolation would be apropos.

Here, though, it is sunshine and flowers and seasonal allergies on full alert already. There is no muddy, cold shift of seasons. Nope. It’s fucking nice.

Weather like this makes me feel outdoorsy, even though my favorite outdoors have skyscrapers. I walked the neighborhood, running errands and imagined myself hiking in the wilderness, climbing boulders, surviving off the fat of the land. Free. Unencumbered. Walking into the woods in order to live deliberately, to suck life’s marrow and drive life into a corner. Like Thoreau, though, I would want to have the option of cutting over to Ralph Waldo’s house for a nice din-din of less Spartan proportions.

I’m kind of surprised that Thoreau never thought to mooch a ride off of someone like Mark Twain and go where the weather probably would have suited his simple living a bit more. And, I’m sure back in the 1800s, even with pirates and hookers and drunken Irish still having some good times in San Francisco, there would have been some snobbish epicurean folks to feed him a good supper.

In unrelated news, my sister is off to bike ride in South Africa. I’m not exactly sure who goes to Capetown for the bike tours. I’m even less sure who goes on such a trip via “Vermont Bike Tours.” ‘Cuz really what says biking and safari and Africa, like the land of cheddar and maple syrup.

Coincidentally, I got the paperwork to apply for my visa to Uganda on the same day she was off flying to Johannesburg by way of Washington, DC. I’m not making the arrangements, and I’m going with a group of a completely different sort than Vermont Bike Tours. They completed the reason for the trip on the forms, as “journalists for fact-finding.” How fucking cool and legit-sounding is that.

I’m going to be rubbing shoulders with editors from across the U.S. and rumor has it meeting Uganda’s president. What a path that led me here, but here I am.

Technorati Tags: California, travel, weather, vindication, work

For the last few nights, rather than writing or doing anything at all (gathering receipts for my medical “flex spending” account comes to mind), I’ve promptly post-dinner dozed on the couch.

It’s probably the headache I’ve had all day, or maybe the fresh, clean, springtime pollen that’s inflating my histamine count and sinus tissue. I am just damn sluggish. Even getting up to go to bed now, because I’d have to rise from the couch, feels like work.

Ah well. Perhaps tomorrow I will have energy. Perhaps tomorrow, I can hypochondriacally search out information on pacemaker devices. I’m not allowing myself to worry that we’ll soon have a part-cyborg in the family, a la Dick Cheney. I hope he doesn’t decide to invade another country post-operatively. Although I did recommend drinking the blood of Iraqi children afterwards, because clearly there’s some black magic that keeps the VP’s fragile heart ticking and humming along.

In other words, pacemakers and heart surgery are scary. But, with technology, possibly powered by M.’s company, there are ample reasons for hope.

Technorati Tags: energy, life, pacemakers, music

On or about every March 15, I suppose I’ll have a little mix of angry, sad, resigned and resolved all in one, rattling my brain, for possibly forever.

Had Pat lived, she would have been a well-ripened 79. But, she never made it that far. Nope, she gave up the ghost, as the cliche runs, a while back. She didn’t even make it to 73, but she came close.

It makes me angry, and probably always will, because it seemed so avoidable. Maybe it wasn’t, though. Maybe she was sick deep in her body, which was telling her an inevitable truth that she was due to pass from the living. Or, maybe, she had stopped taking care of herself and generally giving a fuck so hadn’t bothered to take proper care.

I don’t understand why, but I wish a professional had made the call, not Pat herself. Even if it ended the same way, somehow there’d be a greater sense of closure. An epilogue, a coda to a life that was lived. In a teeny walled off corner of the neurons in my thinking brain space, I kind of regret we didn’t pursue an autopsy. Then again, I realize it makes no practical difference, and how I feel six years later is not how I felt then.

The sadness is just the uninteresting, inevitable, old-as-time-itself human longing for those who have gone. If Pat were here, I could introduce her to M. Maybe she’d notice we laugh and smile together and be happy.

If Pat were here, she could laughingly disapprove of my California life, my checkered employment, my hair, my weight, my clothes, my writing, my comedy, my world travels. She would worry about me, and maybe, secretly celebrate the things I have done, the woman that I am.

But the resignation and the resolve, actually have a strange brightness. They are what makes me try and do what I do now. I keep plugging at a life in which people compliment me or comment that I haven’t thrown in the towel to age. I can still get a little hope, a charge, complete and childish fun from stupid shit. Sheer unbridled goofiness is the antidote I have and the concession I won’t make in my own mortality.

At 44, I pimped my new ride with reflective stickers and scoot around town shouting “Whee” in my head at a whopping 15 miles/hour or less.

The funny thing is I learned that kind of play from Pat herself. She could throw her back into child-like fun, and she had that irrepressibly non-conformist streak that I came by genetically. Only, somewhere after being forced to retire, and some time after her life’s sorrows just made her life heavy and hard, Pat forgot about having fun. She still had a wicked wit and wore a crazy bright hat to warm her head, but she stopped saying “Wheeeeeee.”

So, this weekend, this week, have yourself a little Pat moment. Tell a joke. Tell a story. Play a prank. Make something fun. Paddle a ball. Laugh. And, most of all don’t not do something in order to avoid looking foolish. Go ahead. Look foolish. Rent Harold and Maude. Thumb your nose at hypocrites and modern-day Pharisees. Persevere with wit and elan.

Somewhere in the universe, an energy field still holds the Parkside Avenue paddle ball record. Everyone should leave behind such a memory.

Technorati Tags: comedy, death, life, Pat, women

Gym class day two today. Upper body to balance out yesterday’s lower body. Color me fucking relieved for the weekend.

I have new respect for those folks who are comatose for months or years and manage to get up, stretch their atrophied limbs and regain locomotion. Me, I’d just go back to bed. I wouldn’t want all that rebuilding of muscle mass and strengthening. Not unless it came with a morphine drip.

One day of working out differently and I have one emotion - pain. I blame the lunges. Clearly, I have not been lunging enough in my regular existence, as my lunge muscles are beyond atrophied. You know the concept of “muscle memory?” I got the lunge amnesia.

When I tried to get shoes out of my closet to wear before exiting my apartment, I squatted as one might do to snag a shoe. I dropped instinctively to a kneel to dull the shootingpain and for a second considered I’d have to live out the day on my knees unable to leave the closet. Eventually, I crawled up to a standing position.

After upper body day today, I imagine tomorrow morning I shall awake unable to lift my arms over my head.

I now believe two things — maybe I wouldn’t look that bad at 250 pounds and Advil is a vitamin.

Technorati Tags: lunges, exercise, pain

First off, oh, Geraldine, how could you? I wrote out a thing last night about the ’80s and Ferraro and being young and female. But, my computer jammed up whilst I nodded my head onto the keyboard and drooled into the couch pillows.

But, yeah, Geraldine Ferraro got a little carried away with her bad self. And, maybe it wasn’t “racist” in the sense of angry hatred keeping a man down and all that. But, fucking hell, what it was was patently absurd and so fucking stupid. Yeah, the privilege of being Obama and his half-black self. Maybe that would have slid on by until Gerry said “Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?”

Um, what? What did you just say white lady? Talking about feet in mouths. Not to mention the attention whoring herself on the cable news frenzy channels, including a horrible turn to FOX News where the erstwhile, history-making historical VP candidate, got a sympathetic ear for all that bad, reverse racist mojo, and lost any respect she could have had. Gerry, Gerry, Gerry.

As a side note, how did she end up working on Hillary’s funding? Isn’t this the same Ferraro who raised questions on her tax forms back when she was had Mondale’s running mate, maybe got investigated for campaign financing (definitely part of the wave that lead to reform) and had a couple of failed Senate races marred by the lack of effective fundraising. I guess past performance wasn’t part of the hiring for the current gig, which she just quit.

Anyway, enough of writing about cranky, older women and their angry taunts.

What’s really on my mind is gym class. My place of toil has it’s own gym. On Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays at lunchtime, it also hires on a trainer to give a circuit training/cardio class in that self-same gym space.

It’s free. It’s small. I know everyone in the class. And, it’s free. What’s not to like?

I tried it today. Thankfully, none of the other girls in the glass called me names, made me cry, ostracized me, beat me or, as I was fearing all morning as noon approached, threw me in a shower and whipped tampons at me. Maybe, because as one of my co-workers pointed out, I hadn’t had my period for the first time today.

Running around a gym doing calisthenics was a horrible nostalgic onslaught. I muddled through it, because I’m fighting off the aging and the fattening. Plus, did I mention it’s free.

I’m giving myself two weeks to lose 70 pounds just by showing up in the gym and sweating until I’m red-faced, which in my case involves sloth-like movement of any kind. If I don’t lose that much weight, or if any of the girls threaten me with their youth and whatever young people do these days to bully the chubby, slow girl in gym class, I’ll have to reconsider. But, for now, I’m planning a Spring and Summer of scootering, maybe some bike riding and gym-ing it up.

Strangely, signing up for a gym class where you basically just exercise en masse intimidates the hell out of me and conjures all of the old-fashioned Phys. Ed class angst. Even though, it’s absolutely not competitive, and there won’t be team picking. However, I signed up to play softball after work. I looked at the roster, i might not be the oldest player.

Sure, at some point, I’ll have to don a glove or grab a bat, and I will likely suck madly. Still and all, unlike gym class, beer and snacks likely will ease the fear. And a sign up sheet of 20-25 for an 8-person team kind of dissipates my ever being a key player. Plus M. will be there, and he grew up with cricket.

Finally, it’s not quite the day for the wearing of the green. In the holiday’s honor, I’ve exploited some ancestors of the sod.

Technorati Tags: 2008_Campaign, Barack_Obama, campaign, Campaign 2008, elections, exercise, FOX_news, Geraldine_Ferraro, gym, Hillary_Clinton, Politics, primaries, race, self-esteem