Apparently, there was an earthquake last night. We felt exactly nothing. Based on the time, we would have been walking home after dinner. Oblivious.

My first California earthquake, and I missed it. (It wos closer to Nick’s old place than to where we live now. Maybe Nick’s house fell down boom.) I was already for the first quake. I was planning my tears, my shaking, my blaming M. for making my life dangerous and unsafe.

No drama. My earth did not move.

My central sadness today is about the joylessness of the holidays.

I like Halloween. Sadly, I work in an office that celebrates holidays with the fervor and fiesta wildness of a golf clap. The only tangible nod to today’s holidays was this plate in the lunch room.

Cute. But lacking somehow. No costumes, no frivolity, no decorations.

Meanwhile, M. taunted me throughout the day with the announcements from his office land. The IT department had sound affects and other elaborate decorations. M. had a vampire’s shrine with himself as the dark lord’s visage. Folks brought their kids in to trick or treat the offices and departments. They had lunch and party beverages and cake. He showed me pictures of his coworkers, witches and sorcerers and whatnot.

My coworkers were all dressed like office workers. I spotted one decoration, really. It was a cutesy wood carved “Happy Halloween” with a silhouette of a cat discreetly lying on a cubicle rim.

To catch some join of the season, I fled work a bit early with some spreadsheets in my virtual hand. I figured, what I missed during the day would come in the evening with little costumed kids begging at the door.

They didn’t show. So, we walked the streets. Here’s what I saw.

Desolation row.

Not sure whether the terrorists have won. Or maybe the good-old-fashioned-middle-class fear of pedophiles was keeping the streets clear.

We did see one wandering band. Tight knit and definitely together, maybe four adults and six kids. Costumes, revelery and then they were gone.

Wrong to my vision of the holiday, we did come across streets full of kids with their parents last Saturday. They were trick or treating their way done the main street begging at the doors of the local merchants, who had participating Halloween welcome signs in their windows.

I wonder what it means, but I only saw one kid who had bothered to wear something that wasn’t store-bought, polyester, pre-fab costuming. He wore overalls, work gloves, a bandana in his back pocket and a tractor or seed company on his cap. He drove his little sister around in a wooden wagon behind his tractor-like trike. Excellent farmer feel. Everyone else on the street was wearing a branded, commercialized, technicolor unit. Snow White, Cinderella, Tommy the Tank Engine, and way more princesses than one could count.

Deja vu on game four with a Red Sox win of the World Series of baseball. The games weren’t nearly as interesting, mostly with the curse being gone and all. But apart from staying anxiety-stricken during the second game, the Rockies didn’t exactly catch fire.

In 2004, I remember drinking and watching with Liz and then walking up and down Mass Ave. watching people go berserk. At the time, I had already lost my job, had plenty of time to cheer baseball and was spending my days shredding papers and what not for the great move west. Cambridge circa three years ago:

I thought I had somewhere pictures of folks dancing and jumping on the top of the Harvard Square T station.

This year, we went to a sports bar to watch the win. The tables were pretty fully, but definitely not standing room only, with maybe a ration of eight Red Sox cheering sections to one table of Rockies fans. When it was over, we cheered, a lot of people clapped and cheered, we hugged and we went out into the almost completely empty streets of Palo Alto. No horns honked. No one was screaming. All calm in a mild Cali evening.

Ahh, I remember Fenway.

Technorati Tags: American_League_Champions, baseball, Boston, California, New England, Red_Sox, Silicon valley, World_Series

It was cool in 2004, wandering the streets of Boston, thinking about my plan to move to California in early 2005 and watching the Sox take the series. My grandfather’s team. The team where every summer it seemed we got a chance to run up and down the bleachers at Fenway.

Better yet in 2004, I got a chance to run up and down the bleachers at Fenway in the middle of the night as a paid extra for “Fever Pitch,” just hours after the real, non-faked games finished up, when the local papers had already printed their block headlines of sports hope. I actually got to go inside the men’s room in the middle of the night and see the trough-like urinal I had heard about from my brothers.

Maybe because of my grandfather, maybe because of Little League games, maybe because it was the one sport where Pat new the rules and could read a box score or maybe because it’s the one sport where slow pans on TV and the long gaps, the conversations on the mounds, the hand signals, the dugout all provide enough time for you to feel like you know the players. Maybe it’s all of it, but every summer baseball is there in the back of my head and in fall I start paying better attention.

Of course, this year we saw this same team play in Oakland (and lose with flair in many extra innings) back in June.

So, there it is. Back of the mind subconscious part of my make up. And, I’m having fun. I like watching the games. I like assuring a sleepy friend in Boston that Game 2 could go on without her worrying and losing sleep. I liked wearing my socks of a red color to work.

Today, I realized that baseball trivia lived deep within me.

Two folks at the place of giving me a paycheck were talking Sox in the lunchroom standing next to the food. It was a serious fan conversation out of my league (no pun), but it was definitely not about baseball in general it was about the Boston Red Sox. I interjected with a little “Go Sox” admission of eavesdropping and asked if there was a Boston connection.

Turns out, I work every day in the same building, breathing the same energy-efficient, naturally lighted air, as Hall-of-Famer Jim Lonborg’s sister. Without even thinking, I spoke, and I told them of my little, little, little kid love of Tony Conigliaro (or maybe just saying his name). Somewhere in the lizard recesses of my gray-matter creases, I was channeling the ’67 Sox and spontaneously coming up with references in conversation. I would have been three year’s old. What the fuck?

Technorati Tags: baseball, Boston, California, Jim_Lonborg, Tony Conigliaro, World_Series, Red_Sox

I got a few inquiries today from places that aren’t here. The questions about fire.

We’re no where near the part of California that’s burning. We’re safely north of it waiting for an earthquake.

Technorati Tags: California, fire

Sox won the American League Pennant.

Right after, I texted a couple of fellow California-based ex-pats. My sis texted me. I emailed my cuz that I thought Papelbon was a fine name for a soon-to-be baby boy.

This weekend I was feeling kind of Boston. Autumn is the single best thing about New England. Trees, leaves, crisp breezes, crisp apples, Coco Crisp throwing himself against the outfield wall. Crisp.

Maybe the end of summer, the shortening days make me a little homesick. Not that I’d feel like coming back. More a whimsical little melancholy. Really, though, it was more likely traumatic memories brought on my the dialogue in “Gone Baby Gone.” I never made it a habit to hang out for long periods of time in Dot bars, but Ben Affleck caught the feel of places I’ve been.

‘Course, Ben ain’t even from Boston. But, my old neighbor Jimmy, occasional crack-smoker, “Hey, D., can I borough a cup of tequila, I’m jonesing, just a cup and I’ll get out of your way,” historian of all things townie in Cambridge, assured me he and his brother and their friends kicked the theater-fag asses of Matt Damon and Ben. So, maybe he’s from the wrong side of the river, but I have no doubt he knew folks like he threw into his movie.

Best side-note trivia is the friend character, Dottie, unfortunately not played by the local actress Dottie, and who was obviously proud to be in a real live movie in her “Dot Rat” T-shirt, never made it to the movie’s opening. I guess she got a little incarcerated. The source is Fox, though, and they need a fact checker. In a movie where Dorchester is referred to about every other minute, they say the flick takes place in East Boston, same as Mystic River. Probably, because the two scenes involving bridges go no where near the actual Mystic River.

Anyway, I should have bought Pat that parish T-shirt before she was gone.

Technorati Tags: American_League_Champions, Boston, California, Cambridge, Gone_Baby_Gone, homesick, movie, New England, Red_Sox

Here’s the thing I want to write about, but I’m a-scared of writing about. Not scared of writing, or words, although I’ve often thought it fun to have a psychosis that would make me absolutely phobic about words. Nope. Just worried about the closeness to the one taboo in the weblogging bullshit world I seem to have broken in the past life on the East. Common sense would say steer clear of anything in the old-9-to-5, paying the bills, hive of drones and income, aka work.

It ain’t really about work, though. It’s about what happened to me, and work is a geographical location. Maybe a catalyst. Definitely a reason I was in the situation but a bit player.

In a highly fucked up moment of aural voyeurism (is that even possible, since voyeur implies viewing?), I got to listen to a car accident. It wasn’t like a fun campaign-ending fender bender, it was a full-on smash up. (By the way, if you search Massachusetts and political stuff and car accidents, the number one answer with a bullet is “Chappaquidick.”)

My boss often calls from a Blackberry (using a handsfree headset, I might add) in the morning, as she races from appointments and figures out her day’s game plan. The other morning was no different than many others, and so I was on the phone with her as she gave me her estimated time of arrival and we ran down making a few changes to the day. The first meeting was an all-hands training for everyone in my group. She had made it mandatory and, so’s not to get fragged, had to show up herself. Our telephone conversation was mundane, banal, unexciting, verbal checking of a boring to-do list.

Then, I heard a scream. My boss screamed. But, there was a Doppler effect of the sound getting distant, she hadn’t screamed right into the microphone.

Fucking shit, um what? Shit. Pretty much those were my exact thoughts.

I waited. I called her name a few times. I could hear some cell-phone background rustling, like when a pocket calls the last number by mistake and the recipient gets a voicemail message of ambient sounds. I called her name again. I waited.

No doubt, these sounds and the absence of responses all happened real time in under a minute. Of course, my brain calculated otherwise.

She got back on the phone. The voice had an audible tremor and a chunk of the back of the throat, clenched kind of squeak we all control under extreme stress. That voice that lets you know the person speaking isn’t what you would call “all set.” She said the obvious, she’d just been in an accident.

Before the cell-phone haters tsk, she was rear-ended. So, talking, singing to the radio, brushing her teeth wouldn’t have changed anything. A truck ran up her ass in a hurry to make it through the green light and maybe didn’t see the car in front of it just starting up again from standing at the red.

All I knew at the time was “accident,” “bad,” “windows smashed.” But, she was talking. I hung up and left approximately 312 messages on her husband’s cell phone. I tried calling her back. I got nothing.

Finally, again, probably minutes, but mentally hours, she called me back. She had called 911, the cops were just arriving, no one would let her get out of the car, because the ambulance hadn’t arrived. My mental bargain was, “Hey, must be OK if she was able to call 911.” But, the pessimist in me knew why no one would let her out of the car, shit can break inside.

It was my job to make an announcement to the team meeting and to find senior management and let them know. I was basically tasked with letting people know “bad thing,” and that was all the information I had. I didn’t yet know if she were truly OK, I didn’t know “truck,” I didn’t know exactly where, I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why. To say I was shaken would be an understatement.

Here’s where the reality of how much I don’t care for the human race started to kick in. I got heckled making the announcement. One dickhead made a joke about the meeting being mandatory. Another person opined on cell phones being dangerous.

My inside my head voice thought, “FUCK YOU. Listen to yourselves.” Seriously, there should be a business, professional phrase one could evoke that clearly expresses “Shut the fuck up, what is wrong with you, have you no sense of appropriateness.” Alas, our language is so lacking.

I gave the hecklers a sense of time and a place for lighthearted banter, and this time not being it, and I left the room. I wasn’t in the mood to sit through the training. And, I still didn’t know if her husband had gotten in touch with her.

The one person who was 15 minutes late for the training and therefore missed my announcement, who one might characterize a bit more than a tad self-involved and self-important, if only for showing up 15 minutes late, required my repeating all that I knew which wasn’t much. She proceeded to grill me for information, providing her commentary, making assumptions and, I feel, generally giving me the impression I had completely failed to sate her need for gossipy detail. Bring back the hecklers, I thought, they were easier.

A couple of hours later, I heard from her husband, who this time had that faint tremor that telegraphed worry and general not-goodness. The car was totaled, I found out, and they were keeping her on a back board in the ER for X-rays.

Throughout the day, there was a clear professional split. Half of the people checking in at my desk expressed concern, caring. The other half wanted answers on how their work, their schedules would be affected. They remembered at the tail end to ask about the person. Like, “oh yeah, by the way, any word?”

In the end, she’s overall fine. Nothing broken anyway. But, what a colossally sucky day for her. And, what a mildly sucky day for me as emissary. And what a wonderful reminder that only about 50% of us give a rat’s ass about other people.

Last couple of nights I’m been meaning to write about a shitty thing that happened and the shittiness of people, but I’m still annoyed. Pretty much I’d just whine, and lord all fucking mighty there is enough to whine about with the human race.

In lieu of writing, I screwed around with Photoshop. M. is on a serious Halloween jag these days. He’s decorating his office at work and buying candy and tossing around fake spiderwebs like creepy fairy dust in his wake.

As a tribute, I worked on his undead self through his soulless existence.

A couple of weeks ago there was a thing announced at work to name something. I work in Silicon Valley for an organization that’s pretty much asshole deep in the history of the tech part of the region.

When they were making the announcement, I leaned over and said the first thing that popped into my head. LAter on I mentioned it to someone else, and they were like “yeah, you should submit that.” I did. The workplace voted. I won. I’m a C-note richer.

Here’s why I feel like a loser, which of course I am, not the good old, cheery, cheer worker bee. Clearly, I can string a word or two enough to come up with an idea. Maybe you’d call that creative. One word, and I’m a fucking giant of making shit up. One word.

Try stringing one into two into three into ten into 40 into 10,000, and I am way the fuck out of my element. I’d give me a full sentence max before creation peters the fuck out.

Actually, the best part is my little journey of self discovery. I can’t fucking believe it, but when I got up to accept my winnings in front of the workplace, and they asked me to explain my one word, my hands were shaking. I haven’t felt that kind of public-speaking nerves for quite some time. Nice remember of how far I have not come.

Not my pic, but a garage somewhere in the valley made of silicon chips, which is where I live.

Technorati Tags: California, comedy, Silicon valley, technology, work