I’m awake in a hotel room. I never know what to do with myself in hotel rooms. Especially if it’s for work, for which, on this case, this isolated room in wine country is occupied right now. By me.

I drank some Napa wine. I did some Wii exercising. I did some whirlpooling in the bathtub. Then, I stayed up too late. Only it’s no later than I usually do. It’s just I can’t guage time in the hotel vortex.

I know how to handle free time alone at home. I cherish free time alone at home.

But, in hotel land, I don’t know what to do with myself. I thinks it’s because I have to use a different remote.

I finally have the iPhone weblogging through Wordpress thing working. That should have a link, but I don’t see that happening in my phone tests.

Last night, a big old Tuesday night, M. and I rarer than rare each had something to do. Something that didn’t involve the other one. Separate but equal.

While I had wine and cheese and salsa and chips and whatnot at a friend’s brand new shiney condo in which she was soliciting decorating ideas and sorting photos, M. was mad strategizing in corporate land. Planning and plotting through his increasingly elevated status in the workforce.

Consequently, we didn’t talk much after I got home, since it was getting late into snoozing time. He did tell me about a highway calamity he had steered himself through, but in his half asleep state it wasn’t a dramatic tale.

Now, in a cheesy 1970s mystery TV show moment, a Time-Life book series on extrasensory perception, I had a thought while driving last night. In the late dark, with only a tiny double dot of light in the distance ahead of me and blackness in my rearview mirror, I considered the empty fields and canyons and hills and wild spaces adjacent to the road on which I was driving too fast. I imagined any number or type of wild thing leaping out fromu the shadows.

This highway, 280, is smooth and fast and beautiful. It ranks highly as scenic. Driving it just feels like California looks like it should feel. Imagining a silhouette blocked in your headlights, stag horns and hooves isn’t a leap from reality.

Today I got the story from M. He drove the same 280, although I had been south heading north and he north to south.

During his drive, he watched a small deer clash and lose against an SUV. It was sent skyward and landed in the path if his car. With cars on either side and no where to swerve, he had to drive through.

M. said he could feel it under his tires and hear the crack of bone. His front bumper is stained with streaks of sticky-looking red with bits of dirt, hair and grass.

Still and all, I’m happy, we’re happy he, M. made it safely with his car still fine.

Man that he is, the man who chooses to live with me, he’s curious about eradicating the traces of blood and DNA, an important lesson. For my part, I want to know if the dudes at the carwash are required to ask you the nature of the blood and hair before they detail your vehicle.

I just hope we haven’t just entered the final chapter that guarantees my place as a victimized woman feature in a made for TV movie. Isn’t this how it all unravels?

I’m actually writing this completely horizontally on my iPhone. I should be sleeping.

By the way, like the big douche with disposable income I am, I did upgrade to the faster phone. It’s M.’s fault or maybe his company’s. They gave him the latest in corporate tethering, aka a Blackberry.

So, at the mall to buy a bag worthy to hold two cell phones, there was nary a line and about 15 minutes later we had new toys.

Anyway this picture if it comes out was on my walk to work. I couldn’t resist free apricots.

The other day I did something so deviant from how I grew up, what I learned, my sense of self, neighborhood, trust and community, that I fear California is seeping into my veins way too fucking deep.

My check engine light flashed on my dashboard, and knowing full well that it had been roughly 7,000 years since my last tune up, I figured my card could use a little servicing. Actually, I think we all could use a little servicing. I left the car in the work parking lot and walked home, knowing not much was to be done at 6 p.m. or so.

The next day, I called Goofy. For real, that’s the name the dude goes by, and his voicemail even says “Goofy’s auto repair,” or something like that. I knew of Goofy and had his digits, because a guy at work told me about him when he heard me pulling into the garage with the distinctive whistle of a worn belt. He either knows Goofy from around town, town being Redwood City, a neighboring community which is demographically and economically about 180 degrees from the vastly wealthy town where the old J.O.B. is located, or he knows him from high school, ibid on the demographic shift.

Apparently, Goofy is a great mechanic, who runs his own cash business doing repairs, and who can’t really work steadily on account of the occasional random stroke or seizure. Goofy is also willing to make house calls essentially.

Within an hour or so of my calling him, he swung by our work parking lot, hooked up a sensor and told me not to worry about the check engine light and to throw some water into my cooling system. He also said he could come back tomorrow, and he would take my car and give it a proper tune up.

Sure enough, he called me in the morning, and again about an hour later, I was standing in the work parking lot with Goofy. I handed over my keys and let him drive off into the day with little Beetle. The only collateral was a handshake and my having his mobile phone number.

I think I can state absolutely, unequivocally that when I lived in Cambridge it would be most unlikely I would toss a veritable stranger my keys and leave it at that. Here, with the sun smiling down on the ambrosia of mild summer days and fresh fruit, I waved at Goofy as he drove away. And, guess what? He came back and my car sounds great. Not only that, but the local papers haven’t been listing a sky blue VW convertible as a getaway car for an afternoon crime binge.

Fucking California.

Technorati Tags: California, life, technology, VW

Here’s a line I didn’t join this weekend. It’s the Apple Store in Palo Alto at about 8 p.m. Friday night.
Sure I hung out at the mall with my laptop and free Starbucks samples for the first iPhone. But this time around, I’ve updated the software on the “old” iPhone and will continue to ponder the upgrade.
Inside sources tell me the Pandora.com app, which rocks on my current phone, rocks harder on 3G. Ain’t sure if supporting great websites is reason enough.

I toil and sweat in a place that it quasi-academic. Or the halls are filled with the pitter patter of little academic feet from those career changing, shifting and developing of folks in and out and in again the hallowed, ivy halls. (Or is ivy halls just an East Coast image?)

In the hazy days of summer, as dry grass and trees blaze on hillsides and canyons around the state, the hallways of my personal salt mines burn with the enthusiasm of eager young minds. Summer interns, the best and the brightest, roam the building traveling individually and sometimes in packs. They inquire and engage and all sorts of other meaningful action words. They are a force. An army.

Mostly, they talk. In that talk, they talk about themselves. A lot. When, of course, they are not asking lots of questions and not waiting for the answers or interjecting what they cleverly surmise the answer would be. You know, because they are the best and the brightest. At least that’s what they have been told since the first time their mommies whiffed a fart, cleaned them up and powdered their asses. Better, faster, stronger. The elite. The swarm of the Millenials.

At the end of the day, I am left truly in awe. My stunned silence isn’t an intellectual unworthy awe. Nope. It’s a quieter, less grandiose reflection. It’s the quiet of confirming my central faith — No one in their 20s, save perhaps victims of enormous tragedy or armed combatants or youthful career criminals, have anything interesting to say.

Sadder than my bitterness and possession of this faith is my surety that were they gifted with time travel, among their countless gifts, their mature selves would likely hear them now and agree.

Technorati Tags: elite, Millenials, interns, work

Gadget freak I am. As in, “Hello, my name is Dee, and I have a problem.”

Concerned about my growing middle, spreading ass, and flush with disposable income in the heart of Silicon Valley, so, naturally, I turned to the Japanese. Man, them Nintendo game-makers is slick.

Now me and a stupid looking cartoon me, or as they say, Mii, which for some perverse, ingenious reason I found myself trying to customize to look like me even as my brain said it’s stupid and doesn’t fucking matter and thought about making myself a little Indian dude, but the mind control of the the programmers is insidious, any way the cartoon Mii and me are doing up the yoga and the balance games and “rhythm boxing.” I’m standing on a high-tech, sensory perceiving hunk of plastic and getting an old fashioned calisthenic swerve on. Because I can, because it’s the new millennium, and, while we don’t have flying cars, we have using your real body to balance a fake bubble down a cartoon river.

As they say in California, it’s hella cool. And, the good noise is, according to the technology, I’m still a hair under officially obese by BMI standards.

NOT MY CHART, since it’s clearly a fit, young person.

If you ever get a chance to golf 9 holes, bowl a string or snowboard on a Wii, take it. Seriously, life changing. I may give up food and sex and work to spend more time with my Wii. The little talking cartoon representative of the Wii balance board and I have set up a weight loss lifestyle goal. I will fail, but damn if my virtual golfing won’t improve.

Almost as fun as the Wii Fit itself was watching M. get all take charge about getting one. We were eating out (not in the fun sexing way, but at a restaurant), while I had alerts programmed through the web if it became available at a retailer near me. Damn unlikely. So, I surfed on over to Craig’s List and found out a kid in the same town in which we sat and ate was getting rid of his at a non-completely ridiculous, hyper-inflated price. M. dialed him up, chatted and convinced him to come to us, instead of the usual way around.

Later that night, I was good to go. M. didn’t exercise, he just basked in the glow of his can-do style.

Technorati Tags: exercise, games, Nintendo, Nintendo_Wii, sports, technology, Wii

A couple of days late, but I hope y’all in the U.S. of A. enjoyed your salmons and snow peas (that alleged New England 7/4 tradition I ain’t never witnessed).

Here in the lovely Bay Area neighborhood of the city by the bay, which has a lot of nicknames, like SF, douchey-sounding ‘Frisco (which I’ve only heard from the mouth of a douche), the City, the City by the Bay, San Fran and the fucking apt as all get out, Fog City, they do up the usual city fireworks over the ocean thing that city’s on the ocean do. BUt, did I mention it’s called Fog fucking City?

Driving into town, we saw the clouds rolling in over the airport and South San Francisco.

M. had gotten us a couple of tickets on the San Francisco Belle floating out of the Hornblower fleet. As we walked along Embarcadero, the Transamerica Tower pretty much was hidden. The giant nozzle that’s the Coit Tower, which sits on a huge fucking hill, was the only visible landmark.

Walking against the crowds to our dock, rather than the dock where mere landlubbers would be watching, we thought maybe there was a chance of a wind shift and clear skies. Yah, not in San Francisco.

Nope, we froze our asses after a buffet dinner and some free wine and beer. Look at how chilly my boy-o looks.

And the fireworks, they were mystically beautiful, I sensed but couldn’t see. Here’s the best of my actual attempts at fireworks.

And here is beautifully colored fog.

I had fun. Felt bad for the Brits behind us, who were also cheering on the color-changing fog.

Technorati Tags: America, California, fireworks, fog, San_Francisco, United_States

Stephen Colbert, as his TV persona, likes to say that he sees no color; he’s colorblind on race issues. He likes to say it as a precursor to saying something that comes from a position of white, male privilege or when speaking with someone who studies, politics around or otherwise identifies around race lines. Preferably both.

With all necessary caveats about my own white privilege, liberal white guilt, political awareness and unawareness, I’m a bit like Stephen Colbert. Without the suit or success. I suspect it’s because at the end of the day, I’m hopelessly reductionist. For me, all people reduce to families, a thing which I have passing familiarity.

I finally got my hair cut yesterday. It’s been a long time in coming, but I discovered the place down the street can be booked by email. I love doing shit like booking an appointment without actually having real, human contact. Then I don’t have to feign interest in something on the telephone.

In truth, I’m a fickle, whorish hair care customer. I’ll walk in anywhere and demand immediate service and keep walking until I get a taker. Sometimes I go back, sometimes I look for another quick and easy hookup. Sometimes I let myself go, unkempt and uncaring.

However, Shirin down the street trims my bangs for free. Better yet, she’s not annoyingly banal in her haircutting chatter, like many the bubblegum rock listening salonistas wielding scissors. She’s either quiet or interesting and funny. In fact, the salon in general isn’t all about blasting pop music I hate or incessant blathering.

Somewhere in talking about her holiday weekend in Seattle and seeing family, my remembrances of July 4ths spent in Boston, history in Europe versus U.S. Colonial history versus California’s lack of extensive, long-term history, as well as my hair and what I wanted done with it, while she layered tin foil and coloring chemicals onto my tresses, I mentioned that my long hair is a reaction to Pat’s unfortunate hair loss. For reasons unknown, Pat passed from this dimension with near as anyone could tell, a smooth cue ball dome.

When Pat started buying hats to hide the falling hair, I started growing mine out with a vengeance. If I suffer hair loss at 70, I’ll remember at 40 I was rocking rock-star locks.

After I mentioned my mother and her unfortunate, inexplicably early for her family, death, I found out Shirin’s mom had just died about a month ago at the age of 90. Shirin’s probably in her 50s, has at least one son and lives around here (obviously). As it turns out, she is also the youngest of a family of six (one more than my own) and her dad died when she was little, so her mom raised the family on her own.

Shirin’s mom, before the Alzheimer’s set in, was apparently sharp-tongued and sarcastic. Her youngest daughter was the one who would talk and joke back, challenging her, and ended up doing a lot of the routine care taking in the end. She had a running gag with her mother in better days that she was so opinionated and bossy with her kids, she would come back as a mosquito to continue to annoy them into the next life.

Familiar, no?

We swapped stories about the different reactions and the different family politics, birth order, family skirmishes and how huge losing your mother is in the scale of life’s losses. I think I made her feel better about some of the inevitable arguments and bad feelings. Pretty much down the line of siblings and ourselves, we had parallel stories, including some terrible conversations that left us feeling that either we were losing our minds or someone else was acting dead-on crazy.

I told her our family’s lawyer said we were surprisingly non-contentious, even with the contentiousness that was. She said that hearing about other people fighting was good, because maybe she was just normal.

Yup. I assured her. And we laughed a lot. And somewhere, as we compared notes and laughed, we figured out a Persian widow with six kids, who ended up going from Iran to London to California, and a Catholic(ish), Boston Irish widow with five kids, who never really left Massachusetts, were kind of the same. And those 11 children are kind of the same, too.

Technorati Tags: Boston, California, death, hair, family, Pat

Softball is over. We fucking lost. Badly. I struck out our last out of the last inning of the end of the season. The only thing different from now and junior high is I can afford the beer and I make the salary that makes me realize it doesn’t fucking matter.

You know that shit about your permanent record and the president’s fitness test and measurement and standardized and fitting in and all of that shit. Not true. Doesn’t fucking matter. At the end of the day a pitcher of fermented hops and barley is like $10, $20 tops. I have a significant multiple of that in the bank.

So, who the fuck cares, right? Still and all, would have loved not to strike out the final at bat, the final inning of the final game. Color me losing.

One of the dudes at work is all Mexican and shit. In fact, when I lose my job for being a racist Bostonian, it will be because of one of the dudes who teases me for being all Mexican and shit and knowing he can tease me. Only someone who doesn’t know will overhear us and I will be all unemployed.

Well, one of his brother’s he hangs out. Turns out, he may have, in fact, have witnessed my shame three years ago when I was the drunkest I have ever been in this state, the state of California. Seriously, tequila drunk. Tequila drunk, honey will you pick me up, I’m sorry that I can no longer form words drunk. He remembers, like three years ago, he might have met me.

Shame.

And we lost at softball.

But, on the bright side, here’s the major difference between Mass. and Cali. I’m at a bar, softball players are drinking pitchers of cheap beer. Yeah, that’s the same. Only then, folks are swapping stories about learning how to shoot guns. BB guns, air rifles, like Red Ryders. Skeet shooting with 12 gauge and 24 gauge rifles. Hand guns, pistols, rifles, weaponry in general. The difference between trap and skeet shooting (I think maybe up and down versus side to side). Shooting lizards, hunting partridge, dove, ducks (apparently the coldest and wettest), shooting cans and targets and seagulls.

Here’s my point of comparison, one among hundreds of kids growing up in my ‘hood might have had a BB gun. I know, but I can’t place the details, that at least one little boy in my childhood universe got buckshot or BBs embedded in a body part. And, that’s where it ends. Except for maybe boys, like my brothers, launching amphibians in space on bottle rockets and rocket kits or blowing them to kingdom come with M80s. Here they had lizards and fire power.

The suburbs here are suburbia written large and cliched. Think Brady Bunch, Partridge Family and Eight is Enough rolled into one with CHiPs patrolling everyone all safely. Only here, Marcia might have been taken hunting alongside Tracy and Adam Rich (or one of the other girl characters). Everyone here, it would seem, has shot guns.

And now, I’ve drunken beers with them and been scared. Maybe I should rethink Singapore.

Technorati Tags: Bay_Area, Boston, California, competition, race, San_Francisco, satire, softball, sports, travel, worry