This week was a particularly arduous one for failing to meet the needs of a new generation of the “best” and the “brightest.”

I have in the past ranted about the youth I now hate as a stuffy, grouchy aging woman. It’s really the millenials with their T-ball trophy winning, helicopter parent indulging ways that cause me the only real pain as I strive to keep a paycheck coming.

Cursed as I am with a modicum of self-awareness, however, I have to think maybe I was an asshole once, too. After all, the family still remembers me for my pre-school “genius glasses,” as I insisted I was a genius and all geniuses must wear glasses. Now I realize not only that I’m an idiot, but I sit typing this post out with bifocals. Fucking bifocals. (OK, progressive lenses, because no one need know my eyes are indeed middle-aged and nerdy.)

It is my family that also reminds me of my compulsive need at the age of seven to announce to everyone who would listen (and many, many adults who were too busy to listen) in a sing-song voice, “I got a double promotion.”

Doubtless at my first job, I too, smarmily, smarty-pants-ian, proclaimed how all things good be done better if only my ideas were enacted. At least, I assume I acted like that, because I have the 20-somethings now telling me such things. Maybe it’s a universal?

If it is a universal, I am sorry. I am sorry if I ever said to any co-worker, “Oh, that’s just me, because I read books.” I understand now that telling people I read books, while implying I’m different from them, also implies that they don’t read and, by extension, are not as educated as me. To say you are used to talking with your friends and it’s a “rarefied” atmosphere is to suggest to the listener that their little, leaden world is earthbound and mundane. If I ever did that, I’m sorry.

If I ever suggested to someone 20 years my senior that our life experiences were on par and equal and really quite the same, please accept my apology. I minimized anything you may have done in that extra couple of decades by presuming my shorter existence included the same activities. I minimized your contribution by suggesting what I have learned from books is essential and identical to what you learned through living. I elevated myself and my meager contributions thus far to equal your demonstrable, documented successes, and I see now that I may have left some things out of my logic chain.

Further, I apologize for assuming that I was in a position to question how you live or offer advice on how you should change. For example, if I questioned the need for a man in your life to even need a suit, let alone two or a tailor-made one, because I had one suit since I graduated high school and found that it was enough, I’m sorry for my shortsightedness. Obviously, all sartorial choices should involve not just the age of the person, but the circumstances in which they live. I hadn’t thought of that when I told you your behavior was unnecessary, sorry.

If ever I cried, literally or figuratively, because I was so full of emotion, because no one was understanding my issues and my needs, please accept my sincere regrets for missing the larger picture. Older and wiser, I now can grok a universe in which everyone, literally everyone, has their own mountains to climb and shit-stream to swim. Crosses to bear abound. All people have emotional needs. I am not a special ray of sunshine who needs extra care and tending. And, if I am, frankly, I now realize it’s on my shoulders to get the care I need.

For unaware tears I shed, because I felt misunderstood, I apologize for ignoring your pain and misunderstanding your motives. More than that, I am sorry for the shallow tears, the tears of minor setbacks and small issues. In retrospect, death, tragedy, a broken heart, a troubled friend beyond hope or reach, paralysis, disease, illness, suffering, these are situations in which tears are earned and a needed balm. A hangnail or badly run meeting is not.

Today, sitting here and typing on a computer that wasn’t imagined in 1984, I have learned that often people’s actions are not intended as I think. Sometimes someone is brusk or unable to help solve my problems, because they need their brains and hearts to deal with their own junk. Or maybe beyond my vision, someone else’s need is greater than mine. Maybe there was a death in the family or a prolonged illness that has kept a co-worker from sharing completely my sense of urgency that my flight was delayed. For my inability to see your forest for my trees, please accept my humility and penance.

If ever I interrupted you or took more than my share unthinkingly, please know that I am sorry. In youthful exuberance, I no doubt shouted or spoke when it was not my turn. I probably conversed by over talking the other participants, because my ideas were bursting from me and so good and so well-formed. There was no reason to listen to other people speak, because what could they offer that I did not already know? More true if their voice was soft or they were too weak to be as assertive as me. If they mattered, they would speak up.

So, check. Rudeness, my bad. I’m sorry.

Most of all, I think my biggest crime might have been buzz kill. In my 20s, full of energy and life, full of opportunity, busting at the seams with determination and enthusiasm, I just assumed what you were doing was stupid. My choices in activities had depth and knowledge and were vetted by my superior mind, so clearly if you weren’t doing what I was doing, you were wasting your time. For eye rolls and sighs, let me bow my head, contemplative and contrite.

Now, today, in the here and now, I can see those kids over there enjoying a kickball game in the sun, or those adults high-fiving a solid base run in league softball, are just having fun. Yup, F U N.

My condescending attitude, my feigned, fake cheer, my “whatever” or “duh” isn’t fun. It’s not witty. It doesn’t further life’s dance, it slows it the fuck down. Who, I say looking back, who the fuck do I think I am or did I think I was?

If philately gets your pulse up, enjoy. If sports are your theater, play ball. If television, radio, video, YouTube, music, movies and mime all provide your window to the world, rave on. If sitting on a rock alone is your thing, let the world roll on by as you wish. Rock your Celine Dion, roll with your light contemporary jazz. May your boat float with whatever liquid keeps you aloft.

You don’t need my approval or my opinion or my permission. And, you certainly don’t need me bringing you down. For judgment, especially unsolicited, and for sucking the joy out of anyone else’s pleasure, for that and for my condescension, please accept my apologies.

Technorati Tags: age, youth, family, friends, life, work

THe thing about softball is it’s the ultimate regression. A can of beer on a picnic table is about every summer night (and every spring weekend) for so very many suburban kids all over the country. Now, I am a bit younger but closer to my mother’s age way back when.

The suburbs, to the best of my recollection, were about finding a place to go. At a certain age, your friends and you just wandered from empty park to parking lot to golf course to ball field. All you needed was a place to congregate and beer and weed were icing on the cake.

About a million three years ago, I bounced into homeroom come a Monday morning and the nerdish kids who were half of my school life confronted me. “I heard you got drunk and taken advantage of this weekend.”

What happened was roughly six kids and six bottles of Miller High Life and a town park. Some time during the evening, I allowed Dan to kiss me under the shadow of an old oak. I wore a sturdy cotton turtleneck and a merino wool “ski sweater” with the kind of stripes that said “racing” or “Brady Bunch” rerun. Somewhere in the kissing and the sipping beer, Dan may or may not have gotten his hand between the layers of cotton and wool. Buried below, protected by not just the fortress of turtleneck but appropriate undergarments, lay my breasts.

Those were the mysterious things that happened at parks.

Before that, though, there’s the game. I kind of wish I could have played Little League or some kind of non-school-related ball. Girls didn’t have that back in the dark ages, and gym class sucked. Not only do I get to occasionally throw and catch and swing and hit, but I get to yell things out like “the play’s at first.” Exciting stuff.

Tonight, the excitement mounted in two challenges. One, I left my bag with equipment, two balls, two gloves, two bats and a kickass whale hat I bought in Alaska, at the field. Very stupid. Stupider, there’s two pair of prescription sunglasses and a point and shoot camera at the bottom of the bag.

I realized my stupid forgetfulness while I was still in town, and I hadn’t yet headed on the wide open highway. Only problem was I remembered AFTER the local constable pulled me the fuck over. Apparently, not OK to go 43 in a 25-mile zone. Oops. Charming motherfucker that I am, I got a warning.

But, I wasn’t turning back on those same streets. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of Dodge and praise the gods that told me to hang back on drinking too many light beers in too few hours. Just like I earned so many, many years ago from Ms. Plotka, no shame in cradling a beer and sipping it slow over hours. Kind of like that half a Miller I drank thousands of centuries ago.

Technorati Tags: , beer, food, friends, suburbs, suburbs

I’m feeling not so much the day of the lord but a day of rest.

No whales to be seen today. I think they may have read the San Francisco Chronicle and realized floating shitheads abound. We did get to see a rather large pelican dive-bombing what I assume was a fish.

Sadly, I did see what I at first thought was a living seal bobbing close to shore. As it came closer and closer to the beach, it was clear that it was the corpse of young seal with a rather vicious chunk removed from its side.

I gotta say, I like the walking to the beach and doing nothing seaside, even if it meant seeing the down side of nature. The saddest part of the poor dead little guy was the cluster of girls that “discovered” it and then commenced with the throwing shit at it. Feebly, I walked by and told them to leave it alone. Why the fuck do little kids face death with stick and rock pelting?

Other than the wonders of nature, the weekend was all about rocking the wonders of technology. Clearly, Steve Jobs is working some serious voodoo. I purposefully ignored the new specs for Apple’s new line of MacBooks; No reason to consider when I was happily using last year’s model. In some kind of fucked up cosmic fate, on Friday, I closed my laptop lid as I groggily headed to bed only to wake up on Saturday to a shattered screen fanning out from what looked like a mini-bullet hole. Methinks I clammed onto some kind of boulder or something.

Worse yet, in the voodoo department, I already had an appointment set for a telephone call with Apple support and a visit to the local Genius bar. Mysteriously, the same fateful Friday my iPhone had stopped wanting to connect to 3G. As the Genius pulled open the box for a fresh phone to replace the ailing one, it was hard ignore the shiniest replacements for my cracked screen.

(As a side note, here’s the thing about Apple. Not only did the Genius replace my phone (in turn giving me another 90 days warranty even though the phone was due to end its year-long protection in three weeks), he gave me the business card for a third-party repair place down the street that beats Apple’s boutique pricing in case I wanted to fix the screen. I know folks bitch about the Cult of Mac, but that’s some pretty good customer service mojo offering up the lower priced advice.)

(Also, as another check on fandom for fandom’s sake, I have a long history of buying smart phones, especially if you at the old, olden days, when I had a Handspring Visor and modem module. I kept that next to my horseless carriage and victrola. In every phase of bleeding edge technology, I’ve had issues with hardware both of my own and the manufacturer’s making. Only with the iPhone have I gotten shiny new replacements when things went awry, although I remember Handspring as a relic of good hardware.)

Steve, and his Jedi mind tricks, wanted me to stay in the fold, so I obliged with a shinier, newer, faster MacBook with the sweet little SD card reader in the side that means I don’t have to find my cheap plastic card reader every time I take a photo.

The benefit of the cracked screen is M. is really all about the size of the display and prefers a desktop computer. In all the years I’ve ever seen him with a laptop, it’s been no where near a lap. A quick trip to Fry’s, some extra RAM and a 25-inch HD monitor later, and he has a sweet little system. You can’t see the crack if you don’t use the screen.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple_genuius, beach, iPhone, Pacifica, whales

Beyond kick-ass pictures of the real-live wilderness and a T-shirt with Tlingit-like art of stylized hummingbirds, I brought back a kick-ass rhinovirus. Jesus do I hate a cold.

Beyond the usual hatefulness of a stuffed head, aches and booger production, this episode includes a hacking cough, immune to rivers and vats of cough syrup and guaifenesin and dextromethorphan, time-release, immediate release, slugged and pounded in pill form. Sleeping is consequently a distant fantasy of something I once enjoyed uninterrupted. A couple more days of this bullshit and I might have to go beg some opiates off of a medical doctor with the special joy that is codeine.

Still and all, I managed to hunker back down at work and get caught up in post-vacation malaise. I also weeded my pathetic garden and trimmed hedges that had grown in some kind of suburban Murphy’s law of getting well beyond head high shrubbery, because we weren’t there to will it smaller.

Speaking of the pathetic garden. The chamomile thrives and the tomato plant has flowers, but all else is anemic. And, clearly some kind of something enjoys the basil such that I may never get more than a speck of a hole-riddled leaf myself. It lives, though, partially because we had the next-door 10-year-old boy keep an eye out an water in exchange for cash money. We actually only alluded to payment, as his mother volunteered that it would be no problem for him.

Note to other no-kids neighbors out there. If you’re a couple of folks who piss money away regularly (e.g. we bought an original artwork on a cruise ship), you’re apt to throw, say, $50 in a Chinese red money envelope. If you do so, it’s entirely possible mom might walk you up to the front steps to return most of it, or at least half as “too much.” Maybe I’m wrong, maybe he thought it, too, but either way it was a fun retro moment in modern suburbia.

My only real fear is our lack of fiscal restraint is misinterpreted as something nefarious. I figure your average pedophile probably is generous to a fault, you know, ‘cuz it helps in duping and encouraging young minds.

The thing that I’m not writing about, because the cough has zapped my strength, is teamwork, team playing and team sports. I’m having fun with the whole sadness that is my playing softball after work. Philosophically, I have all sorts of wasted bullshit to impart, kind of like wisdom, but it will have to wait for another day.

The pity is I seldom had fun playing organized ball in the traditional ball-playing years of youth.

In other news, we can see whales from shore at the beach near our house.

My joy was almost uncontainable on Friday evening. After a long, hard week of working for a living, I crested the hill and rolled down the highway toward the Pacific Coast Highway and our home. On Friday’s run I saw the lights of a Ferris Wheel rotating in the sky. A cheap, local carnival in the parking lot of the Sea Bowl, a local bowling area directly across the street from the next beach up to ours, the rock classically named Rockaway Beach. I didn’t hesitate to convince M. to change our plans for grilling up dinner to a walk over to the fair. Nothing I like better than a traveling carnival and losing money for low-quality plush toys.

Before the sunset, as we walked up the hill to the fair with a panoramic view of the ocean, we noticed the unmistakable spouts of water we had just paid out big money to witness in Juneau. By Saturday, I had a more powerful pair of binoculars and sat on the beach for hours watching the spots and dives of migrating gray whales head north for the summer.

Technorati Tags: Alaska, Bay_Area, beach, California, garden, gardening, Pacifica, whales

I should write long and in depth, but yet exhaustion trumps all other emotions. M. and I have arrived back from the honest to fucking god wilderness. We both have head colds, although mine, of course, may turn to something dramatic that will send me into a consumptive stupor.

But, evidence there is of where we have been.

Technorati Tags: Alaska, travel

Today was yet another special election in California. Another opportunity for we the people to fuck with the mechanisms of a representative democracy, spite our legislators and generally make California a rather hard to manage, not exactly thriving state economy.

I voted. It didn’t matter. But the Governator was asking for our help, as were various committees of legislators and a lot of shouting special interest groups, and our budget is fucked about 12 ways to Sunday. I voted some yeses and some nos and found it all confusing. Most of the other voters, the few of us who cared, voted some solid fuck you nos to the powers that be.

The highlight for me was the realization that straight across the street from my neighborhood polling place, which, of course, is in my very won neighborhood more or less, was a pair of llamas chilling on the front lawn of an old barn house. The photos don’t do llama justice, but they caught the almost fading into sunset sky.

[qt:http://dee-rob.com/movies/Surferdude.mov 640 480]

For Christmas, I gave M. a two-day surf lesson down the street from our house. These are pictures from lesson 1. Here’s a ton more: Surfer Dude album.

Here’s the same video suitable for playing on an iPhone (I think): http://dee-rob.com/movies/Surfer-iPhone.m4v

So, here’s the story of what happened at Napa that had me seeing red, not of the earthy varietal with pepper notes kind. Frighteningly, the trip to Napa also seemed to highlight how much of a smug Northern Californian I seem to be channeling.

Here’s the scene: Quaint, like oozing quaint, wood and jewel tones and overstuffed furniture in the living room hard buy a winding wooden staircase, little inn right in the heart of town. It’s a fine little bed and breakfast that prides itself on “old world” Victorian touches, although it’s old world interpreted to the very new world of the turn of last century West. In the dining room there is a sturdy mahogany (or other deep-toned, antique-y, substantive capital “d” Dining Table wood) with high ladder-back chairs surrounded by full cupboards and side boards proffering about eight kinds of tea, three kinds of coffee and various delicious, chocolate-encrusted snacks and fruits.

It is this table where the inn’s guests are meant to dine on souffles and scones communally.

Dutifully, M. and I arose for breakfast and joined the others. As we pondered our fruit cups and allowed coffee to do it’s necessary business we got acquainted with the vacationers around us. One possibly mismatched couple was a bubbly, currently blonde who hailed from southern Florida and seemed to enjoy the areas wine for it’s obvious effects, and a fastidious looking dude in a dress shirt on a Saturday morning who described his extensive research and note-taking on the wine enjoyment front. Apparently, he arrived ready for bear with files, notes, long lists and a number of must-try vineyards and vintages.

He didn’t say where he was from, and I, enjoying a good backstory, created theirs for them in my head. It involved their meeting up at the inn from different places. Perhaps a modern-day internet hookup. Perhaps something more fitting of the Old World Inn that included correspondence on heavy rag stationery and quotes from the Brownings or Shelley. My evidence was their separate flight plans, as the note-taking man with the neatly tucked in shirt couldn’t fly a red eye and would leave at dawn instead. Or was it the blonde who couldn’t sleep on a plane?

Another couple was the heart of the heartland, arriving in the strange wonderland of California from Michigan. Polite and personable and together on a week’s getaway to wine country, away from their children left at home. They are the ones who made me realize I’ve become a foodie food snob.

Napa is a fascistically a food-lovers destination. The area is home to the fabled and famous French Laundry with its 9-course fixe price dinner that’ll cost you above a couple of c-notes just for walking in the door, assuming you can get reservations. Even the downtown Napa brew pub features rosemary polenta and organic salmon. Still and all, so-called “California cuisine,” is all about regular, available, fresh, seasonal food done well and often fairly simply. It’s all about the food.

Therefore, I could not imagine at all what the hell could it possibly mean that the Michigan couple couldn’t find food they liked. They were self-described, simple meat and potato people, and they simply couldn’t find any food they recognized on the menus.

All I could figure out is it must be a language gap — “golden yukon” “a potato gratin featuring a medley of red, blue and purple” or “a side of fingerlings” may not have shouted their earthy, tuberous identity. Salads tend to have strange leaves like spinach, arugula, butter blends and mixed field greens. Meat is often listed by cut and cooking method. But, most assuredly, since moving here and dining at some of the pedigreed California-style restaurants, and despite my own meat and potato roots, I can both find something good and know what the hell I’m eating.

Finally, there was the older couple from Texas, San Antonio to be specific. The woman was one of those older women of a certain size and blondness that always remind me of Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde,” which makes me feel incredibly guilty and judgmental. A good old, well put together gal, still wearing nice things and keeping her hair an acceptable level of big. Her man was a dapper but leathered dude in the Texas sense of “dude,” with a mustache that could have come from the ranch or a Provincetown or Castro men’s only cowboy bar.

We actually met them the night before when we arrived, and they explained the ropes of the self-serve snacks and beverages. As it turned out, way back when the Texan roomed with a fellow cadet from Randolph, MA back at Westpoint. There was much hilarity over his story of the honor system and the need to mark absences, and how no one could understand the boy from Massachusetts who would ask people to “mahk his cahd” when they were heading out. The Texan was definitely the kind of guy who knew a little about a lot of things and wasn’t even a wee bit shy about sharing his vast knowledge.

For example, after a week in Napa he knew how wine was made, the plumbing systems used to vat and un-vat the wine, which wineries were modernized, the best tours, the best vintners. Or, so one would believe from his didactic approach to light breakfast conversation.

Cue me, newly born California food snob. Right about the moment I heard about the wine nerds notes and the Texan’s journeys up and down Route 29, I realized that locals don’t actually tour that many vineyards. Actually, they do. The difference seems to be that if you live around here, you might hit a handful in a day meandering a bit away from the crowds or to the ones you know have wines you like. The tourists were all touring up big numbers, though, dozens in the weekend, miles driven, tours taken, or quick zips in and out to check off that you saw where Francis Ford Coppola hangs out.

I was way more interested in trying to find out where they had eaten or the wines they tried or the styles they liked. I got data more than conversation, and I mentioned that I knew about some of the local restaurants, if anyone was interested, because I had planned a work meeting in the wine ‘hood. And, the woman from Michigan politely enquired as to what I did for said living that had me planning meetings.

Ahhhhh. Sadly, I answered her question. My answer involved non-profits and economic development, and, the horror, the horror, I mentioned Africa.

The Texan came alive. His first offensive attack — “There’s plenty of poor people right here in America that need helping.” Yeah, I acknowledge, there are indeed. However, between the reality of my coworkers who do stuff right here at home, and the economic shithole that is living on under a dollar a day, personally I don’t think it’s enough to just say “Fuck it, I have problems of my own.”

For the pragmatists out there, if you really need the good old U. S. of A. or G8 reason why it’s self-preserving and personally beneficial to help the world’s poorest — Belly full, healthy folks in a prosperous society don’t sign up for terrorism so much. The Somali pirates didn’t take to the sea for a love of salt spray in their sails and a buccaneer’s adventure. It’s a desperate, unhappy choice of men without an excess of choices.

I didn’t get into that second point too deep about the poorest of the poor and never got a chance to talk about security. The Texan piped up, and I am not lying, exaggerating or otherwise teeming with artistic license. The man said, opening of course with the universal prologue that means nothing good is coming, “I mean no offense but…” He said, “I mean no offense but those people, they breed, pardon the expression, like rats.”

He continued on to tell us stories of Africa and what his hunting guide Cecil told him and showed him around Botswana. He said, the men there, they just can’t help themselves, they are tribal, they are primitives, they’ll just walk up to any woman any time and if they could get away with it they’d just take her right there in the streets. Cecil told him and showed him. And, historian the Texan was, because he told me that this behavior was centuries and centuries old, they have not changed a bit from the tribes, it’s how they have always been. Implication: Savage, uncivilized, animal.

I’m not really sure about this hundreds and hundreds of years of history he claims. The whole planet is layered with stories of imperialism and colonialism and trade and wandering and blending. There is no modern story in any country that does not reflect outside influence. Hell, Britain has Roman walls and the march of various Caesars taking what they had, and much of modern Africa is a story of European colonial greed. So, who are these pure folks with evil appetites, and how does the Texan know it is how they have always been?

Not to mention, there’re real live statistics to back up the rat-breeding essence that discriminate against no one, race, creed, color or nation of origin. Where there’s extreme poverty there are babies being born. Lots of them. Every poor and beleaguered group has had their day of overpopulated, “uncivilized” breeding, whether it’s ghettos in New York overflowing with fresh with faces from Ellis Island, Muslims in Mumbai today or Hindus in past centuries. Faces, tones and religions change but the economics stay the same. Family planning comes to those with the resources to plan ahead, educate their kids and not just scramble for a meager daily existence.

Of course, I didn’t get all that out. Nope. We all then head to hear the Texan’s lecture about his days in Botswana. About AIDS. About poverty. About crops growing on little built up hillocks (which totally reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s description of what the missionaries failed to do in The Poisonwood Bible), and blue tarps covering bodies dying too fast from disease for a proper burial.

Somewhere along the line with the blood pulsing in my temples and my agony over whether to rip his throat open with my butter knife or continue a civilized meal delicately sipping my fresh-squeezed orange juice and french-pressed coffee, I looked over at M. I was pretty sure if he was a praying man, he was praying I wasn’t soon locked up for assault. I completely missed that the Texan’s wife got up and left the room. (The beauty of being in a committed partnership, is you have a partner to fill in those kind of details later that same day.)

I got through it. I got through listening to his monologue. I got through his arrogance, his insistence that the only way out was with the help of leaders like the head of Botswana and Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who went to Harvard. Only I don’t think the Botswana president is a Harvard grad, as he claimed, since there’s a stronger Oxford streak in that particular neck of the leadership woods. I could agree on education, without having to agree that our country’s Ivy League was the only hope.

In the end, he put his hand gently on my shoulder in a paternal gesture, looked me in the face and sincerely asked whether we were leaving that night or if we’d see more of each other. He seemed honest and genuine when he indicated that he hoped we could talk more.

I think everyone was happy to see both the Texan and M. and me leave.

Meanwhile, I, of course, spent the day ranting and obsessing. If I pardon the “those people breed like rats” line and the racist and paternalistic and just plain godawful ignorant discussion of the geopolitical landscape, I was still incensed. Livid, as Pat would say. Any way you look at it, he broke the social contract that is a morning at a bed and breakfast. First off, and right out of the gate, you never, ever, ever challenge someone when they answer what they do for a living. OK, maybe if they’re the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, you’re allowed leeway beyond the polite nod, but for everyone else it’s a smile and a “that’s interesting.”

For fuck’s sake, can’t a girl get some eggs and a cup of joe without listening to inane bullshit? And, why, oh, why must it be that right-wing older men seem oddly drawn to me? I think they think that with a few cogent arguments I will be drawn to the light that is their politics. I think they are very wrong.

Technorati Tags: America, Africa, racism, California, food, Napa, wine