Synthetic Village

No raspberries in the Torah

2012-01-15T22:10:00.000-08:00

Last week, during the rehearsal for our adult b'nai mitzvah next week, I had a panic attack while reading the Torah. I didn't realize it until the next day, when I said to someone, "When I was reading the Torah, I got all flushed and sweaty and couldn't breathe or think." I had thought it was some sort of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" God moment.

I had had the same experience last time I faced the Torah for the first time to chant a passage, last summer. I figured that this was a repeat, that something like a divine wind, a ruach, would rise from the Torah and strike me every time I approached it for a new reading. After the initial experience, the Torah turns back into a fairly normal awesome bit of parchment and ink, but those first experiences are spectacular floods of energy and adrenaline.

I'm kind of bummed that it's just a panic attack, since Raiders is one of my favorite movies.

This week, I had a different experience. I'd gone back and practiced with the Torah twice during the week, I'd been rehearsed by an expert friend of mine, and I was ready.

My portion is Va'era, specifically Exodus 7:19-25. There I was, chanting along, feeling really confident and relaxed. And then I got to the hardest word in the portion. You can see it here in typeface Hebrew, fully vowelled and cantillated.

Va-YAY-ha-fe-koo. Five syllables. Most Hebrew words are three or fewer, so this throws me off. I don't know Hebrew, so every syllable is unfamiliar. Looking it up, it means "and they were changed." It's approximately the middle word of my portion. It has a standalone trope, tvir. In the actual Torah I'm reading from, in calligraphy and with no vowels, it looks like this:

Easily confused with other words, right?

Last week, the rabbi spent some time with me after my panic attack, helping me with the places I was most stuck. This word. He told me to really rock the second syllable, YAY, to celebrate that I am embracing this challenging word.

This week, in my confidence I cruised right over the word. My mind told me it was a different word, and I chanted something else (still in tvir, however!). Because every word must be pronounced correctly, the rabbi, reading along with me, quietly corrected me.

And out came the raspberries. That word!

We were practicing with the sound system, so the incredibly obnoxious noise I made echoed throughout the sanctuary.

The rabbi turned to the three other b'nai mitzvah and said, "Now, we know that that is exactly what we are not supposed to do during the service when I correct you, right?"

I cruised through the rest of my portion, no issues, giggling all the way. No panic attack. I think I will be OK next week.

A Kindle for ???

2011-12-24T23:05:00.000-08:00

Happy Chanukah. Merry Christmas.

After a vacation with the family in Mexico, where I debated bringing a big, heavy hardback book (Clash of Kings) and instead brought a medium sized hardback library book (Someone to Run With), and everyone else brought Kindles, I decided I must have a Kindle. Sure, I have my iPad, which it becomes harder and harder to separate myself from, but an iPad screen is pretty bad for reading books.

Feeling under the weather, which made me want retail therapy as well as to climb into bed with a good Kindle, I braved Best Buy this afternoon. I was focused, asked for what I wanted, got what I needed, and got in line. While in line, I examined the impulse buys: a pink Hello Kitty iPhone case (I was tempted); a Star Wars license plate in a pack of gum (like baseball cards); various cases for things. Then I saw it: a gift bag. The perfect size for my Kindle, not Christmasy, white with purple and blue designs. I bought my impulse bag.

In line, I also second-guessed myself. Buy the Kindle on Amazon and pay no sales tax? Buy it at Target and save 5% with my Red Card? I forced myself to stay in line, calculating the value of my time and my need for instant gratification.

I went home, wrapped the Kindle in white tissue paper and put it in the bag, and thought it was the prettiest present ever.

Now what?

When you give yourself a gift and you know what it is, when do you open it?

When you are on Day 5 of a holiday that lasts eight days, on which day do you open it?

When it's Christmas eve, and it's fun to open presents on Christmas day, what do you do?

Most of all, when you're a grown-up and can eat Pop-Tarts for dinner if you so desire, what rules do you even need to follow?

Since it was so pretty, I decided to wait until after lighting the Chanukah candles tonight. I was going out to dinner at 6:00; the sun set at 4:something. Do I light the candles and open the Kindle before dinner? My nap until 5:00 answered that question.

I went out to a traditional dinner at a Chinese restaurant with friends; more friends walked in at the end, and I hung out with them; they invited me to their house, and I thought, "Cool, I'm really waiting to open that Kindle sitting at home." (Also that I loved all the friendly spontaneity of the evening.) I didn't end up going to their house, and I came home, lit Chanukah candles ... and opened my pretty gift bag to find my pretty little Kindle!

It's a little weird to have in my hands a portable device that has buttons and not a touch screen (I keep touching the screen), one that is not made by Apple, one where it's actually functional when it's disconnected from the internet. This will take some practice. Luckily, Clash of Kings, The Magicians, and Pirkei Avot are already loaded on it from my iPad adventures, so I can begin practicing right away.

The Slow Life?

2011-07-11T20:13:00.000-07:00

I came home, ran the water in the sink for a few minutes (literally: minutes) to get it to be hot. Went to the living room, hit the TV power, and while it was powering up I turned on my lamp, which has a CFL bulb and so takes a while to light fully.

Waiting for the water, the TV, the lamp. No instant gratification here.

The iPad arrives

2011-06-08T19:14:00.000-07:00

Once it hit Oakland, it moved quickly.

Interestingly, the return address on the box is Elk Grove, CA. Looking at the labels on it, there is very little evidence of its travels. However, on the FedEx mailing label, it has text that says "bill third party" (I assume the Shenzhen shipper was a FedEx affiliate), and, above the Elk Grove address, it says, "ORIG ID: SZOA" and a series of numbers. I googled this, and it stands for Shenzhen Optometric Association, a major glass manufacturer.

I haven't even opened the box yet. I'm way too interested in the packing labels!

The journey of an iPad

2011-06-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

My iPad is due to arrive tomorrow. Through the miracle of Fedex tracking, I've been watching its every move on this journey.

Like so many products, it seems to have been manufactured in Shenzhen, right near Hong Kong. And then it moved to Lantau Island -- home of the Big Buddha! It's a big island and is also the home of the Hong Kong airport, so that wasn't a surprise. The bigger surprise is that Shenzhen ships from Hong Kong. It makes sense, but there is an informal country barrier there. What did Shenzhen do before Hong Kong airport opened up for shipping?

It was a bit of a surprise to see that it sat on Lantau Island for so long. On June 3, 4, and 5, it checked in as "at the facility." As I tracked the iPad, as each of those days passed and it just sat there, I wanted to pick up the phone and call someone: Don't you know that my iPad is at your facility? Can you do something to change that status?

Chek Lap Kok was a new one for me. It's apparently the actual name of the Hong Kong International Airport.

I like the "local scan time." It arrived in Anchorage six and a half hours before it left Hong Kong.

Now it's in Anchorage. I've been watching for two days: why has it just been sitting there? For 26 hours? Fedex keeps telling me it's going to arrive on time tomorrow. It seems to be on a plane to somewhere now.... Will it go right to Oakland or to Fedex in Nebraska before being shipped to Oakland to Berkeley, to me?

I will be watching this and haunting the mailroom at work tomorrow.

iPad genius

2011-05-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

The iPad is far more revolutionary than it gets credit for.

Because it is wireless and has no disk drive, you can only get things like software, music, movies into it via the air. As a result, as an anti-piracy tool it is spectacular. No more handing someone else a CD and allowing them to make a copy. Piracy moves from the privacy of one's home, which is hard to police, to the ether, which, while still hard to police, is a far more public place.

Microsoft gets screwed. Or perhaps it is screwing itself. There are no Microsoft products available on the iPad. Suddenly, Pages and Keynote become not just the fabulous-but-I-use-Office-anyway apps, but become something we have to learn. And we will learn to love them. Until Microsoft builds its apps for an iPad, Apple has a head start in persuading its customers that there are alternatives.

Before putting this thought toward iPads, in a recent presentation (done with PowerPoint, although I'd also done a small presentation in Prezi), I talked about things I think will go away in five years. Mice, I said, because they were created to help us point at screens, and now we can touch our screens. Cables connecting things, definitely. Keyboards, potentially, although I just purchased an iPad keyboard (and I don't even have my iPad yet).

And, as reinforced by the iPad, local storage. Cloud computing and things like Dropbox (which I just signed up for, to serve my future iPad) means that we won't need a lot of disk space any more.

I like the idea of not using local storage. I am OK with learning the iWork suite. I sadly wave goodbye to friendly piracy.

Object of study

2011-05-06T21:28:00.000-07:00

As I was walking home up beautiful Doyle Street in Emeryville, I realized that I've gone to two teaching clinics today, both incredibly convenient.

This morning I picked up new glasses at the UC Berkeley Optometry Clinic, which is right next to my own building on campus. A nice young woman with long chestnut hair gave me my new glasses and adjusted them for me. Her demeanor was a little shy or unconfident, but she did a nice job.
This evening I had a massage at the National Holistic Institute, which is five blocks away from my home. A nice young woman with short spikey pink and platinum hair gave me a pretty good massage. Her demeanor was a little shy or unconfident, but she did a nice job.

So I have participated in the education of students today in two ways beyond my usual work.

Movie summary: "De-Lovely"

2011-04-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

Cole Porter marries Ashley Judd. Everyone speaks in clever sentences. She dotes on him with all her dimples. He is gay. She becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the marriage. He is gay. The music is good, and you play "Spot the famous musician." Everyone dies very slowly, pondering the sadness of it all as they go. Repeat and fade.

The country day and the city day

2011-01-10T01:07:00.000-08:00

A breathtakingly great day. My decompression last night seems to have given me a very robust second wind.

1.

I could see the escalator from my hotel room.

I met my colleague (now friend), Tom, at the lobby of Nomura in IFC (because we know all the bank lobbies!) for a trip to Lantau Island. I got to take the Mid-Levels Escalator down, a direction in which it only runs from 6:00 to 10:00 AM. Since I am actually in Central already, it was a very short ride. I was in IFC in four minutes. What an amazing location my hotel is in.

Grabbed a Greek yogurt (full fat, oops and yum) and a hot croissant at a cafe, then found Starbucks with comfy chairs and had my tea and breakfast. The stores of IFC were closed. It is a beautiful mall, and it was delightfully peaceful.

2.

MTR to Lantau Island and then gondola to the top of the mountain to see the largest outdoor seated Buddha in the world. Because it was hazy, the views of the South China Sea were not terrific. At the top, we stopped into a souvenir store, one that was not typical of the souvenir stores we'd seen, and we spent a while there asking a very nice young woman about the music and the paraphernalia. I bought a CD of someone who is apparently famous singing the Heart Sutra, which is the only CD they had that was in Chinese and not Sanskrit. I fell in love with the "wooden fish," which, she explained, is just the word for "wooden," but it is also the word for "fish" or something, although it doesn't look like a fish. It's a percussion instrument that you tap to focus your meditation.

At this store, they had the lots that I drew for my fortune yesterday. The young woman was impressed that I knew how to shake the jar. The lots come with a book that tells you your fortune based on the lot you draw. My fortune was good. The young woman said that you can do the lots once per day and that my fortune could be good today even if it wasn't yesterday. Yes, I hear that and feel optimistic -- what is that? I spent a long time thinking about buying a jar of lots, and I didn't, and I should have, but maybe I can find them (and the wooden fish) in San Francisco.

I appreciate that Tom is an endurance shopper. We both spent a long time at that store.

3.

We ate at the vegetarian restaurant at the Po Lin Monastery. We paid a little extra to sit in the "VIP Room" and theoretically had better food. The food was abundant and delicious.

4.
This was the experience that I did not have at the Wong Tai Sin temple yesterday, only without urban crowds. Lots of incense (of various sizes, to say the least), lots of places to burn them, people davening. For the big Buddha, the davening happens on a plaza well below it because it's so big that when you get close you can't take it all in. It was beautiful.

5.
Tom seems to dither on decisions as much as I do. So after the Buddha we debated hiking back down the mountain. We tried to gather information, which is my style of dithering, too. We looked at maps. We followed signs. We decided to visit the Wisdom Path and before making a decision.

The Wisdom Path is a magnificent infinity-symbol of wooden pillars with the Heart Sutra written on them. Beautiful and peaceful.

Then we looked at more maps, decided to hike in a little circle and then take the bus down. Halfway through the hike, dithering at a new map (and they reoriented the map at every hiking point, which was incredibly confusing), we chatted with two French guys, who asserted that this particular road would take us back to the subway. We followed their decisiveness and began walking down the path together.

They went on ahead; luckily, my guidebook had instructions about where to turn, and I believe they are still wandering the hills of Lantau right now, because there are some really obscure turns on that walk. We got to the bottom and discovered we were not near the subway station (because we could see the gondolas waaaayyyy in the distance) and kept walking. Near a massive apartment block structure, we saw creatures of some sort. Urban Tom and I weren't sure what they were. He said bulls (no udders; but also no bull anatomy); I said yaks. Either way, they were grazing by the side of a busy road with a bus stop nearby. We were afraid, and then a local woman just marched right between them, so I got close and took pictures. I am not sure I've ever been that close to horns.

Much more walking and wandering, and Tom asked for directions, and we found a group of local hikers who were walking back to the MTR station. All in all, several hours of walking.

6.
Back in Hong Kong, we met Tom's friend, Susannah, and we went to the Manchurian restaurant the rabbi had recommended, the one I had tried to go to last night but found that it was fully reserved. Another fantastic meal! Then I found that they were partiers, and we walked around Soho, stopped in a bar called Lotus for a drink (a black pepper-infused vodka pineapple martini -- the best drink I've ever had). It was 10:00 PM, and they were beginning their night of bar-hopping, and Tom knows some fairly well-hidden late night clubs. I had committed to myself to get a Shanghai pedicure, which I had googled that morning, so I took my leave of them.

Tom emailed me at 2 AM, when I was also still awake, to say that Hong Kong is dead on a Sunday night.

7.

I went to a reputable place for the Shanghai pedicure, Happy Foot. There is some strict accreditation around doing this kind of pedicure. The dead skin was very finely shaved off my feet with a scalpel. The guy even cut my toenails with a scalpel. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel here apparently offers this kind of pedicure, which is considered the best in the world.

Since my neck and shoulders had been spasming all week, giving me horrific headaches, I asked for a neck and shoulder massage. "Full body massage," the pedicurist said. Neck and shoulders, I gestured. He directed me to a room. "Full body massage," he indicated.

A full-body acupressure massage. What was I thinking? After hours of hiking in the cold, why wouldn't I want a full-body massage? At 10:30 at night. Fantastic.

I walked the three blocks back to my hotel and celebrated my day.

Why my brain is fried

2011-01-08T04:50:00.000-08:00

I am trying to have a peaceful, understimulating evening. I do love Hong Kong. I love the incredible variety of street activities, building ages, cultures, views, possibilities. And I love looking at Chinese characters.

I am fried because I can't stop trying to read the characters. My brain does pattern-matching. It just does, compulsively. I'm one of those people who kicks butt on the tests where you have to identify which shape is the same as another but at a different angle. I can find visual sameness. But I also can't stop doing it.

I know enough about Chinese characters that I can perceive them -- they aren't just a bunch of lines: they are a bunch of meanings. I am proud that I can break them down into their sections; I know a fair amount about stroke order (the system for writing them); I know some of the fundamental symbols. (For example, coming to this blog website I landed on the usual blogspot page but in Chinese rather than English. I knew which word was "sign in" because it had the character for "person.") I can glance at a character and know it refers to water: I did that this afternoon and then read in the English that is so always handy here as subtitles that it was the character for "lake." (Water characters, like lake and river, have three dots on the left. There, I've ruined your life, too.)

The character for "lake"

I look at the character for "lake," right, and I can see "water," "month," and "place" (more precisely, but I am not precise, "entrance"). I missed "ten," but it's there. I don't know why they are all there or what it means.

So when my eyes hit a character I break it down into its components; I consider stroke order; I match what I see to what I know of fundamentals; and I note things I don't know but that seem striking in case I come across it again. I prioritize: What do I know? What looks familiar? What looks new? Does it match any other sets nearby, such as elsewhere on the sign?

I love doing this. And because I compulsively do this whenever I see a characther I have overdone it, and now I have to hide in my hotel room and decompress.

There is no escape from reading.

Missed fortune

2011-01-08T02:30:00.000-08:00

At the suggestion of the rabbi, I went out to Wong Tai Sin temple.

My first problem was that I couldn't find the temple. It was supposed to be packed with people, and the streets were supposed to be packed with religious paraphernalia vendors. But it was kind of empty for Hong Kong. I followed a sign that said "to the temple," and I passed a bit of a creche with a few people doing what looked like davening; then I kept going through the fenced path; a woman handed me a new year's gold coin in a red envelope; and I found myself back at the subway station. So I did another loop, this time not following the sign to the temple. Not surprisingly, I got myself lost. I am really good at that.

I started to suspect that the temple was closed. Where were all the people?

I asked a woman who did not speak English where the temple was. That wasn't productive. Then I showed her my octopus card so she would at least direct me back to the subway. And back I went. I did another loop, this this time entering the soothsayer mall, and on the other side of it was the temple. Which was closed for the weekend.

Trying to scrape out a Chinese experience, I stopped at the soothsayer mall. Row after row of fortune tellers in little closets. Some napping, some on their laptops, most absent. I picked out an old man at the end of the hallway who claimed to speak English.

Lesson #1: Old guys who are sitting in soothsayer booths do not speak English very well.

I drew lots for my fortune. The process was interesting: think of a question, shake a cup of sticks until one pops out (and one does -- I want to think about the physics of that), and the number on that stick is the number of the slip of pink paper he pulls out of a rack. The slip was covered in a matrix of characters. Then he asked me what my question was (finding the man, blah blah blah -- he wrote down "love," and I realized I had taken myself to the land of the unoriginal). He asked me my age, counted rows and columns, and said something about a man dreaming of a butterfly and flowers but it is just a dream. I managed to figure out that the answer meant: the love I am looking for is not coming this year.

Then I had him read my palm and my face. This is where things truly really went awry. I'd like to believe that I will have a long and healthy life, as he reported. But pretty much everything else was so far from accurate about me that I felt like he was the worst fortune-teller ever. Either that or that he got everything backwards and he was really good and just needed to say "not" in front of his comments.

He said that I have a strong mind and that when I make a decision I stick to it. Strong mind, yes; decisive, no. As I write this, I am going into a full hour of being paralized about where to go for dinner.

In reading my face, he told me the major phases of my life. Like:

Before I was 28, things were rocky.
When I was 28, things got better (OK, those two are right, except I was 27. But isn't life like that for everyone?).
When I was 34, I became happy (no: became very unhappy at 33).
When I was 41, I became unhappy (no: I started the happy phase).

The level of sophistication of his English was pretty much that.

Lesson #2: If you want to feel like you've had a meaningful experience getting your fortune read, find someone who can communicate not just in unaccented English but with a large vocabulary.

I think he said I should be careful driving when I'm 51. And, looking at my palm rather than at the pink slip, he said I'd find love within two years from today and that I would have three children, two boys and then a girl.

I then discovered I didn't have enough money to pay him fully and that there was no ATM nearby. I felt like I would be cursed by him. He let me pay what I had, though, which was almost enough.

So I left feeling entirely misunderstood and like I was a schmuck for not paying for it. I couldn't shake being bought into this whole thing even though I know it's crap. I spent the morning worshiping with my own faith: why am I caught up in this? Fortune-telling exploits something about our hopefulness.

Now my decisive mind has to figure out what to do for dinner. The rabbi suggested a Manchurian place nearby. Do I follow another suggestion, or will it lead me toward disaster?

Vacation and Shabbat

2011-01-07T02:19:00.000-08:00

The reason I am so bad at planning vacations is that I second guess myself. Maybe I should fly out this day ... what if my plans change ... what if the hotel isn't good.... One of my vacation days back home -- the entire day -- was spent researching Hong Kong hotels. It's not like I didn't already have hotel reservations. But just in case I was unhappy with the fact that I had to pay for wireless or didn't like the neighborhood, I had to research it all.

The hotel I stayed at this week, the Metropark in Wan Chai, was great. My second hotel, for the vacation phase of the trip, the Jia, was in Causeway Bay, and while I was excited to stay in a Philip Starck hotel (because design is cool), I realized I really don't want to stay in Causeway Bay, which is where I stayed last time. It's crowded, confusing, and too far from what I planned to do. I went to visit and found the hotel to be snooty and not homey.

So two days ago I opened my spreadsheet (generated from all that other research), started googling, and found a place that was not on my original list.

I canceled the Jia (and had to negotiate away the penalty) and made a reservation here. The Lang Kwai Fong Hotel (not to be confused with the Hotel at Lang Kwai Fong). A boutique hotel in SoHo (not in LKF, luckily, which is like North Beach). Walking distance from everything I want to do.

And it's so wonderful! The room is the size of a postage stamp and beautifully crafted to feel luxurious and cozy at the same time. I did have to spend 15 minutes figuring out where to put my suitcase once I unpacked it so I wouldn't have to step around it. (It wouldn't fit: behind the bathroom door; under the desk; next to the refrigerator. I figured out to put it in the closet on top of the safe. It just fits.)

The service is so gracious. And after puttering in my room, there was a knock at the door -- a plate of welcome fruit. More fruit than I eat in a week: a banana, grapes, an apple, a persimmon, and strawberries.

My view from this inexpensive, well-located, high touch service postage stamp is of Victoria Peak, many of the city's skyscrapers, and the harbor. I am on the 29th floor, which is quite high because we are partway up the mountain. The skyscrapers' lights are coming on now, and it's glittering outside my window. It's been cold and foggy, so there have been no good photo opportunities either from here or from the banks' offices.

And then I think, "Thank God for Jews" and, of course, laugh. I'm going to go to Shabbat services, as I sometimes do when I travel -- it's perfect for meeting people when traveling alone. I googled the UJC (United Jewish Congregation of Hong Kong), the shul I'm going to, and the rabbi is from San Francisco via Baton Rouge.

To get there, I get to take my favorite form of public transportation here, the Mid-Levels Escalator. Actually, I don't have to take it because the shul is two exits away -- and that means two blocks. With having to navigate to and from the escalator, it's probably four blocks away. But I'll take the escalator anyway with all the commuters. Since the escalator is one-way, I will walk home afterwards.

The walk will send me through LKF itself, which will make it particularly fun.

Fraud police strike again

2011-01-04T13:01:00.000-08:00

(Is it jet lag if I am awake in the middle of the night at exactly the same time I'd be up in my own time zone?)

Looking at my email, as I do, and should not do, in the middle of the night, I see that Zappos is thanking me for my order. However, I did not place an order for $398 worth of random fragrances. (Tommy Bahama, Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, Missoni, Carolina Herrera. Not my style, although they aren't disastrous fragrances.)

Continuing to look at my email, I see all these fragrances weren't charged to me. They were charged to an address in Kansas ... and shipped to "me" c/o someone else in Washington state. I called Zappos, and they are canceling the order and taking it off my account.

Then, through the creepiness of the internet, I reverse looked up the billing address in Kansas to find who might have been defrauded to let them know of it. I found a name and a phone number but no email address. The name belongs to someone who is 97.

I just gave her a call, as it's afternoon in Kansas at the moment. As would be someone of any age, she was very confused by my call. She had never heard of Zappos and is not expecting to receive her credit card information in the mail for another 10 days. I suggested she call her credit card company right away. I feel bad -- I gave her my home number, and I explained that I am traveling ... but I won't be home for a week if she tries to reach me because she doesn't understand what I meant. Maybe I will call her back tomorrow.

Anchored down in Anchorage … happy in Hong Kong

2011-01-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

You’d think that taking “No Jet Lag” plus flying to Hong Kong, where I don’t get jet lag, would mean I don’t have jet lag. And you’re right. However, arriving at a hotel at midnight with a first meeting at 8:45 AM means I’m going to be yawning all day not matter what time zone I’m in. And I’m awake before my alarm because I’m so excited to be here.

Unlike last time I flew to Hong Kong, I had enough to entertain me.

15 movies
Three books (two novels, one nonfiction)
Sudoku
Knitting
Laptop
iPhone stocked with games (but I am still Freecell free!), Hebrew flash cards, and the Tanakh.

I had enough food for two days.

I even slept a little, on purpose, early in the flight when it was technically the middle of the night in Hong Kong.

But then we heard moaning, which sounded like someone having sex, and the attendants kept asking if there were any doctors on this full 747, and then nurses, and then EMTs, and no one spoke up (I thought about offering to help – I’ve seen a doctor – they seemed desperate), and then the captain said we’re landing in Anchorage to take a sick passenger off the plane.

They did a good job in Anchorage, setting and meeting the expectation that we would be there for under an hour, but the detour added three hours to the 15-hour flight (with 10 of those hours after Anchorage). Shockingly, when I checked my email when I arrived here, I received a letter of apology from a named person in customer service referring to this specific incident.

Halfway through that second leg of the flight, jaw and neck started spasming, my right hip started spasming. I watched the wonderful “About a Boy,” and halfway through “The 25th Hour” (how aptly named) my laptop battery died. I switched to watching the airplane movies and saw (can’t remember name; will insert later) and then started playing Plants vs. Aliens on the iPhone, which I could do standing up to keep my legs stretched ... until that battery died, too.

Despite Hong Kong’s efficiency, I had to wait a half hour for my bag as they trickled onto the conveyor belt. Labor is so cheap here that customer service is excellent, but I kept thinking that they just had a lot of cheap labor carrying each bag one by one from the plane.

And then I ran into a student, and things turned around. An extrovert, my energy picked up. It was his first time to HK, so I showed him the ropes of ATM, Octopus Card, and train to central. I watched him become awed by the train; he helped me with my bleary eyes see that the taxi stand to the hotel was right in front of me. The warm, balmy air of midnight smelled like a nice urban vacation.

The hotel is great. I might change my mind and stay here the whole trip. The room is huge for HK standards (or for any major city). I have a bathtub, which is unusual in dense city. Everything seems brand new. I was so excited I couldn’t get into bed.

And then I cracked up. I’m observant, sure, but it had hit my blind spot. In this room that I think is so beautiful, all the accents are fuchsia. The soap is fuchsia. The water glasses have little flower petals floating within the edges. The shower curtain is bright pink. The hangers are pink. The phone is a set of big red plastic lips! They put me on the “SHE” floor! Targeted and limited to women travelers. (I think many a guy would have commented immediately on the feminine touches and said, “huh?”) I love it – I’d wanted one of these newly-renovated rooms, but I didn’t want to pay the higher room rate. I bet they don’t have fresh flowers on the “THEY” floor.

The sun is not yet up, and I’m awake before my alarm. No jet lag. I’m glad I’m near the source of the world's tea – this is going to be a heavy tea drinking day.

The bet's to you, Rabbi.

2010-10-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a retreat in northern Marin county, a weekend with people of all ages, organized by my synagogue. A fun weekend, like being at summer camp again. The most unexpected delight of the weekend, though, was Candyland Poker.

Our rabbi wanted to learn how to play poker so he could join a rabbis' game he knows about. So a group of us taught him how to play Texas Hold 'Em. (A bunch of guys and me. It was bizarre for me to be the most knowledgeable in the bunch.) Once we taught him the rules, we realized that without betting it wouldn't really be teaching him poker. But:

We had no chips
It was Shabbat, so we weren't supposed to be gambling with money.

Frustrated at this, the rabbi walked off and came back with a Candyland set from the child care area. Per his idea, we used the Candyland cards as chips, and the rabbi delighted in each bet. He was so excited about the Candyland cards that he wanted to value them differently based on color and number of squares, with special value for the "princess" cards: the candy cane princess, the ice cream princess, the gumdrop creature, etc. We talked him out of it; he insisted, though, that when we bet we turn the Candyland cards face up so that we could at least celebrate the colors and princesses.

There was something infectious about the fun of Candyland cards: if someone bet with a double color or a princess, we trash-talked about it -- "Oh, he must be feeling confident!"

The rabbi also suggested that we play what he called "kibbutz rules." Since we weren't playing with money, and we didn't have very many Candyland cards, the rule was that if you ran out of Candyland cards after a hand, the person with the biggest stack had to give you half. (There was a brief discussion of welfare policy: Should we tax all equally, or should donations to the cashless be voluntary from the group? Were we creating incentives to be lazy?)

The rabbi is fine with us calling him by his first name, but no one did in this scenario: it was too much fun to say, "Bet's to you, Rabbi."

A friend had brought his guitar and played and sang for us. How many people play poker to live music?

There was a lot of wine involved. We played for three hours. By the end, the rabbi was telling people to stop the chitchat and just bet -- he was totally hooked. (The second night we tried playing using candy from a huge bag as chips, but the phrase, "Pass me a Tootsie-Roll" quickly showed that to be a bad idea, and we returned to the Candyland card model.)

Three of us in the poker group, plus our guitar-playing troubadour, formed the Candyland Poker Band. During the adults' open mic night, we brought the house down (which had been listening to unbelievably lame jokes) by performing a couple of Beatles songs. Apparently, I can sing well.

The Candyland poker group is going to reconvene back in civilization. We may end up using chips and money. I hope that we can still hang on to the levity we found on Friday night.

Fear of commitment

2010-07-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I bought a kentia palm for my home. I know it's a kentia palm because I just looked at the label on the side of the pot. I bought it because it is an indoor plant; because it fit my image of what should go in that spot; and because OSH has a plant guarantee, and since I kill plants I'm going to need that.

Owning this plant is freaking me out. I don't own plants. I buy kitty grass for Sophie, she chews it, it dies, and I throw it out. I buy cut flowers. I don't remember the last plant I owned.

A plant is a live thing I need to care for. But it's not like having a cat. Most people would think that it would be harder to take care of a mammal because the stakes are higher. But it's easier when the thing interacts with you. I have no problem feeding a cat regularly and keeping the litter box clean and taking her to the vet when necessary. If I forget to feed Sophie, she sits on my lap and makes sure I don't do anything without thinking of her first.

It's not like having a person. With dating and relationships, you know when date night is. There's a routine. And if needs aren't being met, you can talk about it and sort it out. (Or not. But at least you can interact.)

A plant just sits there. It has fragility and needs to be maintained. It needs to be kept alive, but it doesn't tell you what it needs. How am I supposed to make this work?

I think I'm supposed to buy it a new pot. Something pretty. And I'm supposed to water it. It gets sunlight -- I'm pretty sure it's grown since I brought it home.

It might help to name it. I'm stuck on a name, though. I don't want to gender the plant: do I want a male plant or a female plant? I am not particularly enamored of having to water Bob.

And maybe I should have date night with it. Meaning, on Saturday nights I make sure it is watered.

I look at it and think, "So pretty." And then I think, "What am I supposed to do now?"

Turning over a new leaf

2010-07-10T17:55:00.000-07:00

I seem to be dealing with my breakup by eating a lot of pizza, toast, peanut butter, and ice cream. So today I went to Berkeley Bowl determined to turn my eating habits around. Here is the inventory:

Zucchini
Crookneck squash
Tofu
Tomatoes
Corn on the cob (midwestern comfort food -- just husking it makes me happy)

Bananas
Strawberries
Blueberries
Mango

Orange juice (for the screwdrivers)

I'm promising myself greens, salad fixings, and peaches in the future.

Not that I'm going to stop with the ice cream; I'll just have some healthy stuff in me first.

Chasing a buck

2010-07-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

As I was walking up the hill behind the stadium to my car today, I saw some burly college boys by the side of the road. Were they messing with my car? No. They'd noticed the deer that live on the steep hill above the road, and one of them was climbing the hill with a big pointy stick. They were goading each other on. I've seen a beautiful buck there (tried to take a picture, but with just an iPhone it's impossible -- they are camouflaged, you know?), and they'd seen it.

"That one has four points!" one said. It was like watching them become cave men: stick, animal, grunt.

I felt protective of the deer, my special buck whom I'd watched for several minutes the other day in a moment of peacefulness. Although at the same time I thought, "Steep hill, clumsy oafs -- that deer is going to vanish so fast they won't know what happened."

And yet the boys thought they could do this. Stick, animal, grunt.

As I came up the hill toward them, I glared. The presence of a woman? The presence of a mother figure? It was funny to watch them turn on each other now that the Other had arrived. One of them picked up his bag, and as he drifted away from the others he said to them, "Man, you came all the way up here just to chase a deer?"

The other two put on their helmets and together hopped on a single teeny tiny scooter and rode away.

Boys and their toys.

Green figs and wood

2010-06-08T22:42:00.000-07:00

I went on a bit of a shopping spree at Nordstrom tonight. I had a fairly unusual experience for Nordstrom lately: everyone wanted to help me. Not always the Nordstrom experience; perhaps they were grateful for a customer on a Tuesday night? And it's quite different from my experience at Saks a while back, when, on a Saturday, I was the only person in the store and all the salespeople still ignored me.

I went to the fragrance section to buy a new bottle of Un Jardin en Mediterrannee. (Has it really been two years since I found it? I never thought I'd finish a whole bottle.) The young saleswoman was moving very briskly, approaching me immediately to help me, not schmoozing me at all (it turns out that she was getting off of work in 10 minutes). She seemed to appreciate that I knew exactly what I wanted and snatched it for me from the locked cabinet. Then I said, "Is there anything else I should try since I like this one so much?" She thought quickly and said, "Annick Goutal's new fig fragrance." Perfect. Annick Goutal is always a good bet. She sprayed it on paper, I smelled it, I asked for a sample, she gave me a sample, I sprayed it on my arm, and I was out of there.

... high as a kite on this scent! It's called Ninfeo Mio, and I couldn't remove my wrist from my nose. It starts figgy, citrusy, green; the middle notes intrigued me, and all I could think of was some sort of exotic tropical citrus, like etrog or persimmon (?), plus perhaps some orange blossom; it ended powdery and yet somehow a little sour, figgy, citrusy, hint of floral, complex. So obviously far superior to the fragrances I'd explored at Sephora.

I read reviews of it as soon as I got home. It is indeed considered a spectacular fragrance. And I got the name of the perfumer: Isabelle Doyen. It's so good, I want to follow her career.

Other reviewers mention the floral, and they describe the fig as milky, which does begin to nail down this ineffable smell. The sourness I was perceiving comes from boxwood. And some of that citrus was actually mango! They also mention a lavender note, which I consciously missed but which must be why I found it so immediately appealing. My favorite review compares it directly to Un Jardin en Mediterrannee as well as to the sibling of my orange fragrance, Acqua di Parma's Fico di Amalfi fragrance. She says:

Both of those I would describe as fig fragrances with woody citrus, whereas Ninféo Mio I would describe as a woody citrus with fig, in case that makes any sense to anybody.

Makes perfect sense to me.

I'm glad I have a sample. I don't think I could wear this fragrance regularly, but the way it excites and intrigues the olfactory parts of my brain makes me want to take this journey again.

A dayenu day

2010-05-27T21:38:00.000-07:00

I am in Mendocino with my boyfriend.

On the way home from walking around town (which took very little time, and even the shops that said they would open at 11:00 had not opened yet), we decided to stop into the Stevenswood Resort and Spa.

I'd heard of Stevenswood while listening to KQED. A station I choose to avoid in favor of KALW, but it was pledge drive time and I was navigating through it. KQED said, "If you donate $120, or $10 per month, we'll give you a $100 gift certificate to the Stevenswood Spa in Mendocino." Since B. and I had already decided to go to Mendocino, I reached for my laptop to look it up.

Whoa. The rooms cost $399 to $895 depending on demand. It's gorgeous. A bit too over the top for this stage of my relationship. I sent it to B. with a note saying, "Something to aspire to."

I considered the gift certificate. It would hardly make a dent.

Then KQED went to a "listener perspective." Reason #2 that I don't listen to KQED. (Reason #1 is either that their announcers sound like drunk old men or that their "news" is not news; it's prerecorded narratives that don't tell me anything I want to know when I listen to the radio in the morning.) The listener perspective was from an Silicon Valley engineer who went on about how MBAs are useless and ruining Silicon Valley, and he told a story about a young woman with whom he didn't work well. He generalized over this experience.

My reactions:

They've hit a new low.
I will not donate money.
They just alienated people who have money, which during a pledge drive, immediately after they asked for money, is even more stupid than I thought they were.

I went online and told them so.

Back to Mendocino. B. and I stopped into Stevenswood to check out the spa products and maybe the spa. We were met by Connie, who is the nicest, most wonderful person in the world. She gave us brochures, and when I commented that they even have a bar in the spa, she said, "Oh, we are having a free wine and olive oil tasting." So we joined in -- great wine, yummy olive oil on terrific bread.

If we had just had the wine and olive oil tasting, it would have been enough. Dayenu.

B. decided we should see a room (for future visits), and Connie gave us a tour. The rooms are great. Tempur-pedic beds. The tasting and the tour would have been enough. Dayenu.

We asked her if we could have massages immediately, and she said yes. Dayenu.

But before we have our massages, would we like to go sit in the hot tub? For as long as we'd like? She provided a set of bathrobes and flip flops, towels, and showed to the outdoor private hot tub, open to the sky and the trees, totally gorgeous. It drizzled in a beautiful way. Dayenu.

We sat in that hot tub saying, "Holy cow, what just happened?"

Prior to the massage, we rested in the waiting area on incredibly comfy chaise lounges with our heads supported by Tempur-pedic pillows. It would have been enough just to do that. Dayenu.

Hot stone deep tissue massage in the couples room. Dayenu.

"By the way," Connie said, "we have champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries for after you are done." Dayenu.

As we returned to the chaise lounges to have our champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries, they put down comforters over us so we could keep warm.

When we returned to our room, the sun had come out (contrary to all predictions), and it was warm. We sat on the deck in the sun and looked out at the ocean and said, "Dayenu."

One of those lists

2010-02-26T13:45:00.000-08:00

I'm home, sick today. Therefore, I think I'll find myself working through this. I know it's a good list because it has the sneezing panda cub on it.

The joy of women's hockey

2010-02-26T13:43:00.000-08:00

I am watching the women's hockey Olympic gold medal game.

After a few years of not watching hockey because I wasn't playing, I am starting up again. I went to a Sharks vs. Blackhawks game and couldn't believe how great it was to be back. And now in the Olympics I am watching not just great hockey and great hockey players (Hayley Wickenheiser is still playing!) but a different kind of women's hockey.

There are different rules for men and women, and they can be very obviously sexist. Women must wear full face protection (cage or full shield) to protect our faces. We could say that full facial protection is really smart, citing men who have lost their teeth or their eyesight, but if it's that smart, why do only women have to protect their faces? Men can wear full cages, too, but it's their option.

Men can check; women can't. It's against the rules for a woman to bodycheck another woman player. Because we're so delicate; because it's not ladylike. There can be no other reason. There is nothing about the differences between men's and women's anatomy that would cause checking to be unsafe for women but safe for men. The result is that women are denied a tool of the game. It's like saying women who play softball aren't allowed to tag a player to get an out.

In this game, however, the refs are letting the players be physical. They aren't calling checks. I'm seeing bodychecks, and the announcers are seeing them. In the second period, Caihow just checked a player ... and got a high sticking penalty. The game may get out of hand, as it does with men, if the physical play goes beyond what is safe (and to hockey players and viewers it is possible to see that point), and the refs do risk this if they don't start calling bodychecking, but please let these women play all-out.

I played in a game once where we started checking and the refs let it go. The game did not get out of hand. The experience was remarkable, having that extra tool. Not to mention that the endorphin high gets even higher.

Third period: The American defense looks sloppy; the Canadians are playing superbly. It's slightly less physical (I wonder if the teams were warned the teams during the intermission). The American offense is sloppy, too. They are losing too many faceoffs. And why aren't they cycling? They need to keep the puck moving in the offensive zone, keep the Canadian defense on their toes, keep the goalie moving. Instead they just pass it to an open person for a shot, but the entire Canadian team is in position and ready for it.

I'm rooting for a good game, and right now the score is apparently close -- only 2-0 Canada -- but the game seems tilted toward the Canadians. They seem to be comfortably in the lead. The nice thing about the US winning would be the boost to women's hockey's status in the US. I don't see the US coming back from 2-0, though.

The American defense is falling apart, chasing the puck. The American goalie is the only reason this game is close right now, and she is playing with incredibly cool poise. Both goalies are incredibly impressive.

The intensity of the final minute and Canadian win in the Vancouver arena is incredible. The body language of the defeated Americans reminds me of the Russians after the Miracle on Ice. I wish more people could appreciate this amazing sport. I wish I had more opportunities to watch women play at this level of skill.

A shot of adrenaline

2010-02-11T21:04:00.000-08:00

I got the cortisone shot! Now I lay low for two days, letting my hip heal, and then my mobility will return to normal.

It was like smelling the ice: old memories. I have seen so many orthopedists and have had so much physical therapy that I know the drill about how these exams work. The number of times I have had someone bend my knee and rotate my hip to see where the pain is is probably in the hundreds.

And I like my orthopedist. He showed me my x-rays, showed me some calcification on my hip joint that might at some point cause me discomfort. Calcification is normal and can happen any time. I bet I've had it forever: I calcify slowly. I know this because I had to be in a sling for 11 weeks after I broke my collarbone. It healed so slowly that I was scheduled for surgery.

And then he said that I needed a cortisone shot for my trochanteric bursitis. Music to my ears.

That he is competent and intelligent and has a decent personality and respects that I ask technical questions about physiology means that, after 10 years in the wilderness, I finally have found a good orthopedist.

My first orthopedist was Arthur Ting -- orthopedist to, among others, Barry Bonds. I went to him with my first hip injury because he was the Sharks' doctor, and I knew he wouldn't tell me I was crazy to be playing hockey. He was aggressive with treatment and had a relationship with the best physical therapists. Back then, he took insurance.

Then he switched to taking only cash, and I was adrift in orthopedic land. I lost the name of the doctor who gave me my first cortisone shot for trochanteric bursitis, but I had a crush on him. I had an evil doctor, Jeffrey Mann, when I blew out my knee. He was a bad physician (over-immobilized me, didn't let me start physical therapy early enough, didn't give me anything for the pain -- and didn't realize that the pain was coming from the fact that I was over-immobilized) as well as an asshole. As I sat in the waiting room listening to him berate either a patient or a member of his staff, I asked the receptionist if he was like that with everyone, and she gave me a terrified nod.

So now I have a doctor whom I trust, someone who will put me back together when I injure myself again. It's a sign. It's time to be an athlete again. I emailed a student from the doctor's office to say I might be late for a meeting because I was being seen for a skiing injury. Her response: "I just saw the doctor for a snowboarding injury." Athletic injuries give you instant credibility.

Two days of rest, and then I'm going to get a plan in place. Not hockey yet, but soon.

Adrenaline junkie, limping along

2010-02-10T21:40:00.000-08:00

I'm limping around now with my latest orthopedic injury. It's been a while since I've hurt myself being athletic, and it's fun to revisit the orthopedic stomping grounds, so to speak.

Skiing!
Last month, I went to Boulder for my brother's wedding reception, and eight of us piled into two cars and drove to Keystone.

Need I say it was great to be back in the snow? For five days, I had so much fun with this group of people, plus kids, that I didn't even have a second to consider writing my excitement down.

It's been many, many years since I've skied. Boots, poles, skis, gloves, jacket -- I love gear-based sports. I know myself, that I am like a newborn calf on the first three runs, totally unable to point my legs in the right direction, and then I'm fine.

At Keystone, it took me one run to remember how to turn. And turn I did ... into a maniac! I realized that (a) I am not in as bad shape as I thought I was, and (b) having become a reasonably good hockey player since I last skied, I have a much greater understanding of using my feet and legs to edge and turn. Oh, and (c) I am an adrenaline junkie.

I'd forgotten the last, but boy did that come back, too. Adrenaline is why I love hockey. It's probably why I love guys who are unreliable and keep me on, ahh, edge. Primarily, my adrenaline high comes off of speed: I love skiing really fast. So I found myself throwing myself down the mountain on just this side of control, lightheaded from altitude and asthma. I am a really aggressive skier.

I managed to get to the backside of Keystone, to the incomparable, endless Starfire run, which since I had last been there (and since last week, apparently) has turned from blue to black. In California there would be no question it's black. Starfire is where my legs started to burn. On the final, icy, steepist pitch I rested, saying aloud, "If I'm going to injure myself today, it's going to be right here." My cousin, Steve N., said, "You could take it slowly." Even now I laugh at that one.

I did take it slowly, take it to the bottom, and announce that it was my last run of the day. I may be an adrenaline junkie, but I also know when to stick a fork in me. Of course, to get off the mountain we had to go back up and then down the front. I chose a green run for the way down. A long way down. As I stopped to periodically rest my burning legs, I was so wiped I would just fall over sideways. On a nearly horizontal surface. Really a lame way to fall.

A hundred yards from the bottom, I looked ahead and saw my brother and cousin waiting. And ran over my ski pole. Also a lame way to fall, but a much more dramatic one.

While the east coast has been blanketed in snow, and California has had El Nino rain, this part of Colorado has been very cold and very dry. All day, we were skiing on hardpack with the occasional ice. So when I skied over my pole, I landed very, very hard. First on my butt, and then my head whacked the snow. Arms and legs and skis tangled up, sliding down the hill, trying to protect my knees as I managed to get my twisting skis below me. I lay there gaining my bearings and shouted "I'm all right" to the passing skiers.

Steve N. swooped down from above, did a perfect hockey stop, snowed me, and said, "Are you all right?" before realizing the person he had accidentally snowed was not a stranger. We had a great laugh at that moment.

My brother had made me wear a helmet, so my head was protected, although it really just felt like I'd hit my head on the inside of a helmet. I wondered aloud if I was going to pull a Natasha Richardson. I also wondered aloud if I'd broken my hip.

Injury!
Since I survived the following day, my head was in the clear, although I had quite a case of whiplash. It all comes back to the hip. While if I had actually broken my hip I would definitely be walking like a newborn calf, since that day I've been in pain. Last week, I took a long walk, and the next day I couldn't put weight on my leg. I have diagnosed myself with trochanteric bursitis, and I know what I need: a cortisone shot.

I love cortisone shots. I've had uncountable shots ... probably uncountable because if I did count them I'd be disappointed at how few I've had. Hip, knee, elbow ... knee more than once. I love them because they feel so good. Really, the part I like is the lidocaine they put in it. Because it would be incredibly painful to inject a bunch of fluid into an already fluid-filled, inflamed area, lidocaine is added to enable the shot to be self-numbing. You feel this pressure and this internal coolness -- and the pain goes away!

And then you have to take it easy for 48 hours, and you can feel smug, because professional athletes get cortisone shots all the time, and you've had to get one for an athletic injury.

I have a referral to an orthopedist. My primary care physician seemed to think that I might not get a cortisone shot. Certainly, for non-professional athletes doctors like to try gentler approaches first ... like months of physical therapy. I am going to fight for that shot. Adrenaline and corticosteroids: aren't they just two sides of the same coin?

Eating like a grown-up

2010-02-05T19:24:00.000-08:00

Being single, with no kids, I don't have to think about meals that please anyone but myself. The other night I had quite the feast. Out with a friend for a drink, we snacked on herbed fries and some sort of aioli, and I had a half pint of Red Tail Ale. That was really filling.

When I got home, I wasn't motivated to make dinner, and I didn't have much to work with that could have offset the carbo-grease of the first part of my meal, so I ate two Pop Tarts. In fact, my friend, A., called while I was working my way through the first one, and when I told her what I was doing she asked if I was OK. A. knows that Pop Tarts are my comfort food: a few weeks ago I sat on her couch, miserable, unable to eat anything but a box of Pop Tarts. Her favorite flavor is strawberry, so that's what I'd picked up then, and that's what I was eating the other night, albeit a fresh box.

Those Pop Tarts were really sweet. So I finished my meal with Annie's Cheddar Bunnies.

To recap, dinner was:

Beer and fries
Pop Tarts
Cheddar Bunnies.

I was so proud of myself. If kids only knew that when you grow up you can eat whatever you want.

[Pause to digest....]

The next day, I stopped at Whole Foods on the way home and picked up an apple-butternut squash soup, and I assembled a huge salad. I know we are supposed to eat a certain number of fruits and vegetables per day. Do we have to do it on a per day basis? That salad was probably a several days' worth of vegetables. Huge. Awesome.

Tonight, after having two servings of salad for lunch, I stopped to get another one. I call them super-protein salads. In addition to the lettuce (I love lettuce), tomatoes, celery, cucumbers, I add egg, tuna, garbanzo beans, kidney beans, edamame, and cheese.

Seriously, in the past two days I probably have eaten the recommended daily amount of vegetables for a whole week. Does that count?

That's why I call it eating like a grown-up. We can eat whatever we want. We can follow our cravings. And it's awesome when our cravings lead us to these massive salads.

Ricky Gervais quits Twitter

2010-01-15T20:49:00.000-08:00

From the Daily Dish: Ricky Gervais announced on his blog that he is quitting Twitter and instead will text friends if he wants to tell them what he ate for breakfast.

I'm tempted to post this on Facebook so we can maximize the number of social networking sites encompassed by this.

Life at UC Berkeley

2010-01-15T13:11:00.000-08:00

From an email from a colleague who is in touch with our facilities team:

As a side note, I asked about staff offices, and she said that trash from staff offices is emptied every 2 weeks based on a 4-week rotation. She is trying to pin down what that actual 4-week rotation is because it seems to change every month (again, it’s arranged by central campus).

The best way to skate

2010-01-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

This morning I skipped the first few hours back at work after a two week break ... to skate with disabled kids.

This is a grant-funded program in the San Mateo schools. Every Thursday in January, several classes of disabled kids come to the San Mateo ice rink and are escorted around by women hockey players. It's a coincidence that we are all women hockey players ... the call for volunteers goes out to the NCWHL, and we respond.

These kids have a variety of challenges. Some have mental/emotional issues, some have sensory issues, some have physical issues. Most have more than one. The therapy of being in the cold and moving so smoothly on the ice does wonders for them.

It takes the strong and nimble skating skills of hockey players to do this. With chairs, wheelchairs, and kids skating on their own, it's amazing we don't have collisions.

We help kids who hang onto the wall: my first kid, Angel (no real names here), went all the way around the rink with one hand on the wall and one arm supported by me. I closed the doors along the boards so he could cross the gaps. He whimpered in fear when I moved away from him by inches to pull the doors shut, although after the third he understood the drill. My feet were enormously cramped after that!

We push a lot of kids on chairs. This is my favorite part. I later took Angel around on a chair. With his limited communication skills, he laughed and expressed that he wanted to go faster, racing the other kids. We spin the chairs in circles, either by pulling the chair in a circle (variously with ourselves or the chair as an axis) or by tossing the chair forward with a spin and then catching it. Angel loved that one. After our first turn around the rink, as I checked in with him, he waved his hands with his fingers spread. I couldn't hear him, so I scooted to the front of him. "Five times!" he shouted gleefully. He'd counted: I'd spun him five times.

As I was resting, one of the teachers turned to me and said, "You'll take Charlie around, right?" I looked at Charlie: a 200-pound kid who was just staring forward, with no response to our words or the world around him. I said, "Sure." We maneuvered him into a chair, and I began pushing. It's actually not hard to push someone that big on the ice. I knew right away that he was smiling, and the teachers along the side told me so. His only reaction to his surroundings was that smile.

We push kids in wheelchairs: my first one was Debbie. She smiled her crooked smile and laughed the whole time. On a couple of occasions a teacher stepped onto the ice to take a picture, and we lined up the wheelchair kids. Debbie was the only one who responded with a huge smile. (I asked for a copy of the photo, but there are legal issues with releasing them.) Pushing Debbie, I practiced spinning a wheelchair on the ice. A skill I am still working on.

My last kid was Susie. During the wheelchair pictures, Susie appeared as a pile of purple jacket. She was curled in a fetal position in her chair covered by a hood, completely rolled up. A teacher tried to prop her up for the photo, but over she went.

I took over pushing her little chair. After a loop around, I stopped to chat with the teachers, and suddenly she turned around and gave me a brilliant smile. It turns out that she loves to be surrounded by conversation. I'd take her around again, and she'd flop forward; I'd talk to someone, and that smile would reemerge. Everyone celebrated that she'd come out of her frightened shell.

Then I discovered that she wasn't completely covering herself when she flopped forward: Susie was watching the ice go by beneath her chair. I knew just the snow and the grooves in the ice were enough for her, but I also took her around the painted center of the ice. I traced the circles, the blue lines, the red line, the dots, the crease. I followed the concrete lines showing through the paint. The brilliant smile, right at me, appeared several times. I don't know what she was experiencing, but I loved providing it for her.

Up in the Air

2009-12-25T22:52:00.001-08:00

As I recover from getting the wind knocked out of me by "Up in the Air," I realize that it sacked me just as it shows so many people being sacked. I was enjoying a wonderful romantic comedy plotline and laughing more than usual. I was feeling connected to the movie, to the person I was with. And then, wham, I'm cut loose, left alone, adrift. Wondering what the hell happened. Having proudly protected my independence for so long, I find myself deluded that I have become part of something and understand that I am just a parenthesis in someone else's life. Still isolated. It is a devastating feeling: a powerful movie, to inspire such loneliness.

Rebuttal the next morning:
Yes, what a powerful movie. But the difference between the George Clooney character and myself is that I have a home. I have a wonderful home with wonderful friends -- I have many longstanding connections with people where I am part of the narrative, not a parenthesis. My home is not isolating: it's not a special passcard, it's not a single seat on a plane. It's expansive and inclusive. His life was so isolated that meeting a (perfect) partner is a random and rare event. My life is grounded and is defined by a breadth of communities and affection.

Once again, a powerful movie, to bring us to such an experience of isolation.

The best Christmas ever.

2009-12-24T20:17:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas! I am having such a wonderful time at my own Christmas party. Just me. I've had an emotionally and logistically complex few days, and today I finally got some me time: time to spend in my own life and at my own pace.

So after a brunch in Burlingame this morning (hitting the road when it's empty and the sky is clear is a great way to start the day) I took a nap and was awakened to my first Christmas present: my phone was ringing. For the past four days my home phone has been out of service, causing me to have a variety of meltdowns while I wait on hold to ask again when it will be fixed. I finally emailed the CEO of the company (whom I know -- it's not AT&T!) as well as the head of customer service, and the latter called me back within the hour on my repaired line.

A cloud lifted.

I walked on this beautiful sunny day to the local Borders to do Christmas shopping for niece and nephew. I knew what I wanted to get nephew, but I forgot who the author was, and the self-service stations weren't spitting it out when I searched for it. It also appears that Borders blocks access to Amazon.com from iPhones. I was, however, able to easily get into Amazon if I googled a specific book. After an hour, I figured it out: Bad Kitty Gets a Bath. Perfect.

And now I'm listening to KFOG's 24 hours of Christmas, which is incredibly fun and diverse, and I made myself dinner -- for the first time in weeks, between eating out, eating at others', and eating crap here. Me time!
Tomorrow won't be so me, but it's filled with tradition:

Open the box of Christmas presents that my father and stepmother have sent
Stop at my sister's to exchange gifts
Party of Torah studiers in the afternoon
Chinese food and a movie in the evening

Then on to New Year's, which will be in Tahoe for the first time in memory and promises to be its own unique adventure!

Things I am taking to beat this cold

2009-12-11T10:35:00.000-08:00

Zicam
Robitussin
Sudafed
Advair
Ibuprofen
Ocean nasal spray
Gelsemium (homeopathic)
Chinese herbs (left over from last year's trip)
Chicken soup

I think I'm winning.

Sunday, gloomy Sunday

2009-11-22T14:38:00.000-08:00

Things to do on a Sunday afternoon when your mood matches the gray November weather:

Wrap yourself in a wool shawl.
Turn football on, then turn it off because you don't care about the teams. Repeat every 10 minutes.
Drink a cup of tea.
Read design magazines.
Pay bills.
Eat half a bag of chocolate chips. Whoops, they are white chocolate, which means they don't contain whatever in chocolate is supposed to be good for your mood.
Go online to check the temperature outdoors in case it's actually sunny and warm.

Student takeover of Wheeler Hall

2009-11-20T08:15:00.001-08:00

I just saw on the news that, continuing the university's long tradition of protest, UC Berkeley students have taken over Wheeler Hall.

The news reports that their demands are that the laid-off custodial staff be rehired and that the protestors receive amnesty for taking over Wheeler Hall. Whew -- if it hadn't been for the janitors, these students would be just protesting to demand amnesty for their protest.

Blue hand group

2009-11-18T21:54:00.000-08:00

I read somewhere that to get paint off your hands you should use vegetable oil. I think it is just a way to reduce the pain as you try to scrape the paint-infused top layer of skin off your hands with your fingernails.

I just finished my bathroom painting project! All that is left is hammering the top of the can and taking off the tape. I'm taking a brief break because now that my hands are only spattered, rather than covered, with blue, I want to feel clean for a few minutes before I walk into the bathroom and find paint all over myself again.

What is it with this color: Benjamin Moore's Slate Teal? It's a magnificent color, the color I dreamed of painting this bathroom even before I bought this place. I finally found it. And it caused me to lose my mind or something. I am pretty experienced at painting my walls now: I've painted 24, by my count, since I moved in (some of those are the same walls twice). Seven of those are other bathrooms' walls. I always use crazy saturated colors, so one in the blue realm should not have been a stretch for me.

But this color is somehow out of control. On this project, which has taken me a surprising three days (no other room has taken more than one), I have been klutzier than usual. It's like this paint has put me off balance. I've kicked over the can, tripped over the roller, whacked the brush against a door. At the same time, I spent a lot of time standing balanced on the sink painting behind the light fixture (which was swathed in plastic wrap) -- with the voice of my grandmother in my head screaming that I was going to fall and kill myself.

I didn't even paint the room in a methodical way, which is one reason it took extra days. I would get irritated at how the paint was not covering a wall well (two coats required), so I'd move to a different part of the room; I'd get tired of standing on a stepladder so move to a different section.... It was so haphazard, I am pretty sure I have ended up doing three coats.

Oh, look, teal paint on my forearm. I am sure it will transfer to this white MacBook any second.

The bathroom is breathtaking.

Three hands

2009-11-14T12:30:00.000-08:00

With lots of kids around me, I'm always holding someone's little hand. Crossing the street is a treat for me, and I keep wondering how long my niece is going to let me take her hand to do it. Sadly, we grow out of holding hands.

Which means that the weekend has been particularly special, as my hands seem to have become activated, turned on, ignited. In one short day I had three different handholding experiences not with children but with three different adults.

- Hands held in affection
- Hands held to say, "Don't leave, I'll be right with you"
- Hands held to warm another's up.

Right before the last, I was holding R's knitting, showing her how to cast off, and even while showing her just two stitches my hands felt so alive. It's hard to describe -- it's a heart chakra thing -- but when I am living through my hands I am often living at my fullest.

Later in the day, I was sitting on the floor with a happy one-year-old, and she looked at me like she wanted to take my plate. I said to her, "You can't take my plate, but you can take my hand, and I'll help you stand up," and she gave me a look that said, "OK." I put out my hand; she grabbed it and popped up and merrily toddled away.

There is so much caring and connection that comes through the hands.

Torah study: VaYera

2009-11-07T17:04:00.000-08:00

My favorite moment from Torah study this morning occurred when we were hanging out afterward drinking coffee. D. was really annoyed at the God in this week's portion, who does things like enabling the exile and almost death of Ishmael, telling Abraham to kill Isaac, and destroying Sodom and Gemorrah even though there were probably good people there. "Isn't God supposed to be about forgiveness?" D. asked. Together, 70-year-old M. and I looked at him and, in a tone that implied "you're crazy," said, "No."

I gently suggested to yeshiva-trained D. that his ideas about forgiveness and turn-the-other-cheek stuff come from a different religion. Sure, we have Yom Kippur, when we atone for our sins, but that's about ourselves, not others. While I'm certain there is something somewhere about forgiveness in the Torah, it's not one of the ten commandments, it's not a mitzvah, and it's not part of the endless dietary and cleanliness laws. To have God be forgiving, to have God say that we have to be forgiving of others, and then for us to obey is too easy. To me, it is better that this petulant, vindictive, error-prone, laws-obsessed God is leaving room for us to choose how we all behave toward each other. Forgiving is something we do out of our own free will, not because we have been told to do so.

Mmmm ... cured meat.....

2009-11-03T22:07:00.001-08:00

I'm on another cured meat kick. A while ago, it was prosciutto: I ate it with my fingers, I cooked with it, I couldn't get enough of it. Kind of an expensive habit. Now I'm on to salumi, which I think sounds pretentious, so I say, "salami-like things."

For lunch today, I had my Fra' Mani sopressata and Vermont cheddar sandwich. I eat this almost every day. I don't like sandwiches, generally, so when I find one I like that I can make at home and save myself some lunchtime angst and bucks, I do. This is an awesome sandwich. I don't know what sopressata is (I don't know if I want to know), but it's good. The Market Hall people sure know how to recommend salami-like things.

This evening I went to a friend's surprise birthday party at Adesso on Piedmont Avenue. Delightful to be returning to my old neighborhood, particularly to visit an eatery that I hadn't been to before. Adesso is new, in the new Il Piemonte building, a building I longed to live in because of its Piedmont location and palazzo exterior, but I didn't like it enough.

I did not know this until I got there: Adesso is a salumi bar. I opened the menu and saw more salumi-like things listed than I could count (the reviews say that there are more than 30). And I was there with a great group of people who like salumi as much as I do. We were pleasantly overwhelmed at the selection. So we ordered a chef's salumi platter, some cheeses -- and the cheeses were superb and a superb mix (and I am a cheesie) -- and then some panini, which also involved cured meats. The sausage panino was to die for. We were in heaven. And then they brought out the Baskin Robbins mint chocolate chip birthday cake, and we all got quiet as we ate it, focusing intently on the exquisiteness of our individual nostalgia trips.

As Joey would say, here come the meat sweats.

D'var Torah class

2009-10-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight I sat for two hours in my first d'var Torah class, a class to learn how to provide an analysis of a Torah portion, or parasha. I've been looking forward to this for so long. The analysis of the Torah portion is always my favorite part of a service. I sometimes go to Torah study, where a member of the congregation explicates that week's portion (last week, Bereshit, when God creates the universe, was explicated by a Berkeley astrophysicist who pulled in the prophet Einstein and tried to teach us about 11 dimensions, among other things).

It is said that, since there were 600,000 people at Mount Sinai when Moses received the Torah, there are exactly 600,000 interpretations of it. Or of each passage. Or of each word. Or mark. I couldn't help but think of physics analogies: those 11 dimensions, all rolled up so we can't see them; fractals, which retain their complexity no matter how close you get to them. Jews have been analyzing Torah, and then analyzing the analysis, for more than two millennia. And yet there are always new approaches: apparently there was an instant classic analysis done at Torah study this past year when someone took a passage in Deuteronomy where someone got stoned and analyzed it in the context of pot, ending with Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35." That counts as one of the 600,000. We are also going to learn how to recognize when we've found 600,001st, the one that is wrong.

And I am so humbled. One man in the class had three translations in front of him. Another would suggest sort of historical analysis that the rabbi said needed to be tabled because of their complexity. One woman could read the marks on the letters and chant the passages correctly. I think the purpose of the session tonight was to give us a framework for understanding how to approach a Torah portion. But the content of every sentence was so full of new information for me that I took a ton of notes and feel like I know nothing.

Not to mention how to take notes in English and Hebrew when they are written in opposite directions. I really wanted to write a "bet" (the first letter of Bereshit, a letter that is written larger than the others and that certainly has had 11 dimensions worth of analysis), and I couldn't for the life of me, even staring at the printed letter itself, resolve how it should show up on my paper.

The class itself was enchanting. We jumped back and forth through Genesis and Exodus, taking apart passages and pieces of passages and names of passages and diacritical marks on passages ("Abraham | Abraham" versus "Moses Moses"). At one point, the rabbi decided we needed to look at the real sefer Torah, so he reached into the ark and pulled it out; we rolled it out on a tallis. (It was startlingly casual. Where was the standing and singing and praying?) He wanted to show us that there are gaps, like paragraph breaks, in the Torah and that they are so important that they are indicated in the book form of the Torah we are using.

I've got degrees in literary studies. I can take apart any text using a variety of methodologies (Marxist being my favorite). I've been doing this my whole life. But to analyze the Torah is an entirely different process.

It reminded me of when I started playing hockey a few years ago. With absolutely no athletic experience talent, I knew from day one that I was in over my head. I knew I was pretty bad. I immediately made plans for extra practice -- I had to work three times as hard as my teammates just to keep up with them. Saturday morning 6:15 practices, stick time, skating clinics, hockey camp. And I did succeed in keeping up respectably in beginner's hockey.

So I asked the rabbi for extra work so I can start feeling like I have traction. He was kind enough not to say, "Learn Hebrew," but I will at least brush up on my numbers so I can follow the verse numbers (hah -- I know how to count to one) and my writing (which is screwy because I can write in script and not print, but even most of my script letters are gone). He gave me the name of a book to read and an online Torah to take a look at. This is like starting from scratch. I do not often feel this far from understanding what can be understood.

What I love is that it is a central principle of Judaism that it is all connected. Everything in the Torah has purpose and meaning. Our job is to work to understand it.

Dental musings

2009-09-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

Because I know I am not alone in this, I am not ashamed to say that tend not to listen to my dentist. Years and years of hedging about flossing! But I like my dentist and my hygienist, and I've decided to see what happens if I do what they say.

Step one for me was using a rinse. I read the directions and saw, "Pour 20 ml into the cap." And, rather than trying to find the 20 ml line in the cap, I wondered how on earth they came up with that measurement.

Is it because there needs to be a certain ratio of liquid to tooth surface area? Not everyone has the same number of teeth. And what about my six or so crowns -- do they count toward surface area when they aren't true enamel? What if someone had only six teeth: should they use less mouthwash?
Since you have to swish it, wouldn't it be better to calculate the volume based on mouth size, since a larger mouth will be more able to forcefully swish 20 ml than a smaller mouth? Should they recommend people calibrate their usage based on jaw size and number of teeth?
Then my mind goes to high efficiency front loading washers. You have to use special, more concentrated detergent in them because they use less water (but can often wash more clothes in that water). How is the 20 ml impacted by the saliva content of the mouth? Perhaps they could market different products based on mouth pH, or perhaps everyone should be required to spit a certain number of times before using it so that everyone starts with a baseline dry mouth.
Here's another one: A different mouthwash I own has you use 10 ml, and the directions say, "Do not pour past 10 ml line." OK, then what happens? Is it a structural issue for the cap? Would it be too overwhelming for the average user to swish 11 ml? What about someone with a bigger mouth?

I don't measure: I just use however much I want, which is certainly less than they suggest. I assume the makers of mouthwash will be annoyed that it takes me longer to go through one of their bottles, and I feel self-righteous as I swish away.

Then there's the two-minute toothbrush. I have a sonic one, and it has a 30-second timer on it to make sure that you brush your teeth for a full two minutes. Boy, does that get boring. I would stand over the sink and reread the mouthwash instructions, spending my two minutes coming up with more questions about their 20 ml measurement. So I decided to take those two minutes back and catch up on my New Yorkers.

The problem is, I am one of those people who can't walk around while brushing her teeth. I need to be standing over the sink, preferably with a bib on.

So there I am leaning over the sink trying to read the New Yorker, getting it soaking wet. And sometimes I finish the page before my two minutes are up, and then I either have to spend more time on the mouthwash instructions or figure out how to manage a spraying sonic toothbrush while trying to flop a wet magazine to the next page.

Today I solved the problem: I bought a cookbook stand for my bathroom. It allows me to look at a full spread of two New Yorker pages at once. I can turn the page with two fingers. It props up the magazine so it doesn't lie in a puddle of water and get dripped on.

I am pleased with the greater reading opportunities afforded me by my new dental program.

Talkin' baseball

2009-08-23T21:52:00.000-07:00

I am still not really watching baseball. This year, I've missed two rare events, the kinds of things I'd gleefully call everyone to say I'd seen:

An unassisted triple play (15th in major league baseball history)
A perfect game -- by one of my favorite pitchers, Mark Buerhle. Eighteenth in MLB history. Every year, I dream of seeing a perfect game. I missed this one.

Southwest's compass bearing

2009-08-04T21:45:00.000-07:00

I seem to have a new puzzle interest that has been sparked by Southwest Airlines. Flying last weekend, trying to kill time during takeoff, I flipped through the magazine to see the puzzles in the back. I love sudoku, so I did those. The next page had something called shinro. It took me a while to figure out how to do these puzzles, and then I fell for them. I ripped the page out of the magazine so I could remember the name of this game.

On my flight back, it had become August. I got on the plane and grabbed the Southwest magazine, eager to get new Shinro puzzles. Alas, they had a whole different set of puzzles. No Shinro.

So here I am with a crumpled piece of paper pulled from the Southwest magazine, googling "shinro." And I found this:

I came across a new kind of puzzle called shinro that can be found in Southwest Airline magazines. According to the magazine, shinro is Japanese for “compass bearing.” The puzzle involves finding holes in a square grid. Like battleship puzzles, the number of holes in each row and column are indicated. In addition, there are a number of arrows in the grid that point to at least one hole.
waa hoo! i found myself looking up shinro after flying southwest airlines, as well! thanks for the link. great puzzle!
Yeah! I was just on Southwest last night and solved 4 shinro puzzles. Thanks for the info
Me too! Southwest flight! landed, thirsty for more.
I also flew on Southwest Airlines and was hooked!!! I Love IT!!!!
Just discovered the Shinro puzzles on a flight on Southwest and am hooked.

Google has just four references to the paper-based game shinro on its first page of results, and all mention Southwest. (After that, it references either shinro iPhone apps -- yay! -- or Shinro Ohtake the artist.) My favorite is this:

If you're visiting this site, we probably have something in common... Most likely, you recently flew on Southwest Airlines and passed some of the time by working on the Shinro puzzles in an issue of Spirit Magazine. Like me, you later searched the internet looking for additional puzzles to work on and found little or nothing in the way of Shinro puzzles.

That person is creating the puzzles, so he or she is my new hero.

Who knew that something in an inflight magazine could inspire such passion?

The banana pancake mystery

2009-07-25T17:41:00.000-07:00

Brunch is pretty much my favorite meal. Carbs, sugar, salt (e.g., waffle, syrup, bacon). Like eating dessert with a little bit of dinner thrown in.

I'm not a great cook, but I'm pretty good at brunch basics. The first meal I hosted here was a brunch: two families, with kids. Chocolate chip pancakes and whipped cream, and plain pancakes and syrup for the more conservative. It was a hit. Everyone loved these pancakes.

My next meal was just with a few friends. Banana pancakes, blueberries, strawberries, two kinds of chocolate chips, whipped cream, and syrup. (I always serve bacon, too, to please the remaining taste buds.) Another hit. They said they were the best pancakes they'd had and encouraged me to invite them over next time I was using up an overripe banana.

One day I had a very ripe banana, and no one was coming over, so I made pancakes for myself. I like to make a full batch of pancakes and then save the leftovers to pop in the toaster oven later. I used the same recipe I've used my whole life, the "Griddlecakes" recipe from the Fanny Farmer cookbook. My cookbook opens to this page. (If I flip the pages, it also opens to the page for blueberry pie.) It was the same recipe I used for my hugely successful chocolate chip and banana pancake brunches.

The pancakes were awful. They tasted salty, bitter. I threw the entire batch out.

I double checked the recipe and decided I must have left out the salt, so the baking powder didn't rise or process or whatever baking powder does, so I figured I must have been tasting baking powder.

Next overripe banana: same recipe. I focused on adding the salt. And ... the pancakes were terrible. I was hungry, and they were perhaps somehow less bitter than the last time, so I doused them in syrup and ate them anyway.

This was a total mystery. How had the Fanny Farmer recipe stopped working? What was I missing? Do bananas mess with pancake batter, somehow, chemically? I had taken the short cut of not mixing the dry ingredients before adding them to the wet ingredients, figuring they all get mixed together in the end. Is that what broke it? I've made these pancakes a gazillion times, and I'm pretty sure I don't always (rarely, in fact) mix the dry ingredients first.

Next overripe banana: I carefully assembled the dry ingredients. And ... mystery solved.

The recipe calls for baking powder. Baking powder, as we all know, comes in a canister. Baking soda, on the other hand, comes in a box. Well, when I had gone to Trader Joe's to buy baking powder, I had grabbed the canister, had used the canister, had used the canister in all the pancakes I've made since I moved in ... and it turns out that Trader Joe's puts its baking soda in canisters. I'd been using backing soda all along. Pfffttthhh.

I made banana pancakes again this morning, this time with a new canister of baking powder. They were terrific, and, not surprisingly, were very different, with a lighter texture than all those other pancakes. The new mystery is: did the chocolate chips and whipped creams and berries and chocolate and syrup really mask the terrible flavor of those early pancakes? Did all of those people really not notice the bitter, salty, baking soda-flavored pancakes?

A Handful of Missing Commas

2009-07-13T16:39:00.001-07:00

I like the phrase (just made it up while copyediting a friend's story). Is it the name of a band? A snack food? A chapter title in a historical mystery where a the murder hinges on typesetting?

Other ideas?

Perhaps I've been watching too much Harry Potter (Harry Potter weekend on ABC Family!), but somehow I imagine these commas as animated, like the licorice snaps in Dumbledore's office that Harry takes by the handful.

Portrait of indecision

2009-05-22T19:09:00.000-07:00

I am having a lot of trouble deciding what color to paint my front hallway.

Cleaning up the horses

2009-05-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

As one of his many housewarming gifts, my father sent me a set of six replica Tang horses. They're small: about six inches tall. Apparently they are recognizable as Tang because of the medallions or tassels on the sides of their saddles.

They're magnificent. The golden brown one is my favorite, perhaps because it does remind me of museum horses. As I unpacked each one, I lined it up with the others along the center of my dining room table. These will be in my life for a long time.

But the horses arrived coated in clay. I couldn't decide if I'd received poorly cleaned figurines or if it was intentional. Clay was flaking off of them.

I called the store to see if they had a quality issue with the supplier, and they said it was supposed to be that way. To make them look "real." Although a real Tang horse would be carefully cleaned and preserved. They said I could wash them if I didn't like it.

So I spent the evening cleaning the six of them. I soaked and gently scrubbed them, and they looked great until they dried. This is some sort of special gray clay, probably fired onto them in some way, that won't come off. I may try to exchange the black horse, which I've washed many times but which still looks like unglazed gray dirt. It's the third from the left -- from the catalogue picture of some pretty clean horses.

I did have to wash them anyway. To soak the large "Made in China" stickers off of the tops of the bases. These horses were replicas, but they were trying really hard to be authentic.

But when will I get to London?

2009-05-19T20:31:00.000-07:00

I really, really want to see this:

"Godot" in London. So hard to get to from the west coast!

Time to wake up

2009-05-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

The universe has been shouting at me since that last post: Stop dreaming! "I dream of being active." Get over it! Get out of the house and go work out! Rejoin a hockey league -- you can do it midseason.

And, while I miss hockey, I am certain that if I started playing now I'd injure myself immediately. I mean, I play recreational hockey, but I'm not even at a recreational level of fitness. And that's the problem. I really don't like all that fitness stuff, except for how it makes me feel afterwards. I can walk for hours, given something to look at or listen to, but going to the gym? Sweating? I don't think so.

Things I can do instead of working out:

Read
Nap
Watch my latest Netflix video
Do a crossword puzzle
Do a sudoku
Knit
Nap
Paint my walls
Go online to play with paint colors on fictitious walls
Unpack boxes in my extra bedroom
Clean something
Write something
Get together with friends and sit around and talk
Get together with friends and sit around a table and play poker or some other game.

All that time I was working out with a trainer and going to yoga: it was because

I was bored, and
I had an appointment, had paid money, and appreciated having someone make decisions about what I was going to do next.

I'm shaking my fist at the universe right now, shouting, "Um ... well, yeah, you! I ... um...."

Dream of the Blue Jersey

2009-05-15T22:25:00.001-07:00

It's summer, and I dream of being athletic.

Specifically, I dream of playing hockey.

I dream I'm skating. The other night I dreamed I spoke to a woman who said she played in a league in San Francisco. I was thrilled when she said her league was fun and that it was at Yerba Buena. It all came back to me: where to park, carrying my bag in, the visual of being on the ice. I think maybe I've been back once since I broke my collarbone there.

It's summer, and I can't believe how long it's been since I was athletic. Before I started my current job, I was unemployed, working with a trainer, doing yoga, going to hockey camp. Since then, I keep setting a goal of being active, but it just hasn't happened. I took a break from hockey almost two years ago to recover from an unrelated injury, and I keep telling myself I'm going back. I am going back.

Summer is a great time to return because of the longer days, not having to leave in the dark for a late afternoon game. But I dread the idea of playing in Belmont, the rink where my league has so many games. A rink that is super-small and so poorly insulated that the ice doesn't freeze on warm days. So the puck comes to a dead, stuck stop when it hits a puddle. Where you have to lace your skates loosely because your feet swell as soon as you put them on, where you wish you didn't have to wear shoulder pads or a helmet because it's just too hot.

I miss the smell of the ice. I miss my regular pre- and post-game routines, including hydrating and handwashing before and then afterwards drinking Gatorade, eating a recovery hot dog, and laying out my sweaty gear to dry. I miss carrying my sticks, and I miss the sound and use of hockey tape. (There aren't really a lot of uses for it outside of hockey, unfortunately.) I step over low fences and other objects as often as possible to relive those many exciting times I stepped over the boards to get on the ice. (I do not haul myself over fences and other objects to relive the paralysis of utter exhaustion that accompanies getting off the ice.)

I'm a good hockey player. Not a great player; not even a very good player. Maroon #15 does not have a lot of presence in the record books, or even on the crumpled, damp scoresheets that live in the bottoms of captains' bags. I probably have had one or two penalties, and I can't even remember them. I've had very few goals but a few more assists. I'm most proud of my assists -- I love setting up plays and passing the puck to someone who can do something great with it. I miss freaking out the other team's defense (and surprising myself) with a threading-the-needle pass from behind the net through several players' legs and sticks to the blade of my waiting teammate (who usually has several people hanging off of her and can't get the shot off, but, hey, the pass was pretty). Mostly, I have been a smart teammate who can read a play and know where to be.

If I could, I'd be a full-time coach. People sometimes come up to me and thank me for coaching them, which sends me to the moon, even if I don't remember who they are. I love seeing my former players run a play that I taught them, which more often than not they're doing against my own team (while I'm sitting, helpless, on the bench, knowing they're going to do it).

But I can't just be a coach -- because it's too agonizing. Because no matter how slowly or poorly my body reacts to my brain's quick commands, I need to be physically in the game, not just thinking about it. It's also why I like to play forward positions: playing defense gives me way too much time in my head.

I do love having a two day weekend, not dealing with hydrating and carbo loading and traffic, having Sundays to nap or paint or do whatever else comes up, not being worthless on Monday morning. But I so dream of being on the ice again. I need to find a decent pick-up game. I need to get my skates sharpened. My hockey bag sits in my large powder room near the front door, waiting to be taken out again, falsely announcing to visitors that I am an athlete. I am not ready to retire. I need to be active again.

Rekindling an old flame

2009-04-15T22:17:00.001-07:00

Sunday morning I flipped on the radio and caught the opening strums of "A Dying Cubs Fan's Last Request." One of the truly great baseball songs. I can exile myself from the sport, but it will always be a part of me, and I think it's time for me to allow myself to love it again.

I took last year off to protest the A's plans to move to Fremont -- to a location that BART does not reach. Also because they traded Marco Scutaro. Billy Beane keeps trading my favorites, and I was just tired of it.

My love of baseball is both recent and inevitable. Being from Cleveland, I grew up a football fan. But in 1995 the Browns were stolen and taken to Baltimore, so I boycotted football. I was in a job where I was working late, waiting for the traffic to clear and crunching numbers, so I turned on the radio, and out came baseball. Ernie Harwell calling the Yankees-Mariners wild card series. What an introduction to the game! I didn't know from Ernie Harwell or any players, but that was a series for the ages, and I was riveted. What a privilege to have had that as my introduction to the game.

The next year, I went to the Indians games when they visited Oakland, and I discovered the joy of live baseball. I went to more A's games, eventually switching my primary allegiance to the boys I could see every day. I got to see the A's in the McGwire-Giambi era, the Hudson-Mulder-Zito era. I took pride in my own #15 hockey jersey number because it was the same number that Hudson wore. (I think I had an option for #75, but I thought it was too fawning and flashy.) Zito's hammer curve was the sexiest thing in baseball. I have my scorecard from his first major league game, when he struck out the heart of the Angels order after loading the bases. Someday, I will get him to sign it for me.

I've been on the Jumbotron doing the macarena. I almost caught a Giambi pop foul that was coming right at me, but I freaked out and ducked. I've been to the All-Star Game (in Cleveland), where I ran into a very youthful Alex Rodriguez in the airport and took my picture with him. I saw McGwire hit the Budweiser sign at Jacob's Field with a home run, about which catcher Sandy Alomar said that if the sign hadn't been there the ball would have gone around the world and hit Sandy in the back of the head.

I have yet to score a perfect game or even a no-hitter, but I've scored a lot of games that have come close. I sat mezzanine-level behind home plate at the A's-Braves interleague game when Hudson got to complete against his idol, Greg Maddux. The ground-ball-fest was all it promised to be. Ground ball outs: my favorite part of the game.

I love baseball because you can look around the ballpark and see that women of all ages are fans. My great-grandmother was a Cubs fan, and she used to go to Ladies' Day. My grandmother was a Cubs fan; later, having moved north with my grandfather, she became a Milwaukee Braves fan. My grandfather went to New York to watch the Braves (featuring a young Hank Aaron) open against the Yankees in the 1957 World Series (which the Braves won). When the Braves left for Atlanta, they became Milwaukee Brewers fans. My grandfather wanted to be buried in the cemetary across from Milwaukee County Stadium so he could keep an eye on his boys. When the White Sox won the World Series in 2005, my grandmother was happy because at least some Chicago team had won.

Last summer, I went to my first Cubs game. With my friend, D., we looked to buy tickets from a scalper and were approached by a guy selling bleacher seats at face value. A virtual miracle, apparently. So I sat in the right field bleachers on a warm summer night, drank beer and had a hot dog, and hung out with Cubs fans. While I'm entirely certain that my great-grandmother never sat in the bleachers (my imagination won't deny her the beer and the dog, though), it was like returning to the mother ship.

The butter holiday

2009-04-13T22:28:00.001-07:00

Most people think of Passover as the time of year when we eat matzah. And I love matzah: matzah brei, matzah ball soup, charoset on matzah. But, really, it's the butter holiday.

Growing up, it was the one time of year I was allowed to have butter, and my mother served Land O' Lakes sweet unsalted whipped butter in a tub. The rest of the year, we had margarine. But the corn oil in margarine isn't kosher for an Ashkenazic Jew. So we had that special treat of sweet butter.

On matzah. I became expert at perfectly evenly glazing a matzah with this butter. Amazingly thinly, too, because if I was caught eating too much of the butter I'd get in trouble. And then: the salt. My second favorite food, after butter. I'd coat the thin matzah with the thin layer of butter, then with a thin layer of salt. It was art. And I ate as much of it as I could.

In a perfect Hallmark moment, my oldest friend K. and I had a long phone conversation this weekend. While we spoke, she was cooking for her family in Philadelphia, and I was painting a wall of my condo here in Emeryville. (Boy, have we come a long way since second grade in Cleveland!) We took turns putting each other on speakerphone. She told me about her memory of my mother providing sweet unsalted whipped butter. (I will be making K.'s recipe for matzah kugel tomorrow. At her recommendation, I won't use the full 1/4 pound of butter it calls for.)

Several years ago I finally broke from sentiment and bought sweet salted whipped butter. I don't really know why my mother bought us the unsalted version. I got tired of the art involved, and now I just slather it on.

My Insolence certainly is.

2009-04-05T20:04:00.000-07:00

I've moved on from fragrance obsession to many others, including my current obsession with interior paint colors. But today I was at Sephora and thought I'd explore a few fragrances. Bulgari (left forearm) because I didn't think I'd tried it, YSL's Paris (right wrist) because a colleague said she liked it and I know it got four stars, and Guerlain's My Insolence (left wrist) because it's Guerlain and they were showing it in a cute little travel size.

I usually have a pretty high tolerance for perfumes, but they've knocked me over. When I got home an hour later I ran to the sink and scrubbed like a surgeon. No luck. I feel nauseated and I have a headache. The My Insolence and Paris are duking it out -- I don't think I ever smelled the Bulgari. Standing in front of a window trying to breathe fresh air. Then I sprayed my own Arancia di Capri, which is pretty strong, all over my arms to try to cover the others, which only added to the problem. Advil and lots of water (orally). Heading towards a migraine.

So I googled "how to get rid of a perfume smell." And it's amazing what people have tried -- the laugh I got out of Perfumista's discussion almost redeems this situation. Acetone, Clorox bleach pens, Magic Eraser, witch hazel, Chapstick, baking soda, Mr. Clean sponge, baby wipes, a saw. I'm going to go for the original recommendation: unscented deoderant and Tide.
Update:
Paris and Bvlgari are gone! It took two rounds of deoderant and Tide to get My Insolence to a very faint level. I still reek of Arancia di Capri, probably because I sprayed it all over myself in my panic. I don't mind: so my sheets will smell of oranges tonight. Better than having nightmares of suffocating in butterscotch.

And now I find that My Insolence is only a two-star fragrance! Many expletives deleted. The upside is that I did identify its component scents.... From The Guide:

How could the brand that has made L'Heure Bleue to spec for a hundred years put out this cynical, trendy, hastily-cobbled-together cherry-almond sugary oriental? It's as if Hermes decided to sell a glitter-vinyl shoe with a lucite platform heel.

Love that rotten city

2009-03-25T20:20:00.001-07:00

I had a surge of love for my little city tonight. I got home from work late thinking, "I want pizza for dinner." My choice was frozen Trader Joe's ... or Rotten City Pizza up the street. Until now, believe it or not, aside from driving by the Emeryville Public Market for a box of grease one night, I have not gone out to dinner after work. In my former home, I would make a quick take-out call and stroll down the street to pick it up. Here, not so many take-out opportunities. Plus ever since I've moved in it's been winter, and therefore dark when I get home, decreasing my desire to go for a stroll.

Well, it was dark tonight, too, but maybe not totally dark, and it had been light out recently. I strolled the block-and-a-half to Rotten City PIzza, enjoying the warm night (warm -- maybe that's why I hadn't gone out in the evening -- was it too cold?). As I approached, the door swung shut.

They were so sweet. The guy let me in, led me into the kitchen where they'd piled up the leftover cold pizza slices, and gave me a tour of the pile. He let me take my pick (one mozzarella/ricotta/pesto/arugula, one mushroom), packed it in a bag, and handed it to me at no charge. OK, you can think of all the reasons why he might not have charged me, but it was a very small town-feeling experience.

Private Property No Fishing Allowed

2009-02-11T13:58:00.000-08:00

Associated Press headline today: "Calif. fraud fugitive caught with $70,000 in shoes."

I looked at it, thinking, which of my friends was it? That's a lot of shoes. She must have committed fraud just to get them. Or maybe she stole them in addition to stealing people's money, like, she'll just steal anything. Did she get them all at once from like Nordstrom, or did she collect them slowly? I visualized her trying to cross the border with tons of shoes in the back of her station wagon, being stopped by a customs official or agriculture inspector.

It all depends on what "in" means.

[For the Electric Company-deprived, it goes like this:
Private Property. No fishing allowed.
Private Property? No, fishing allowed.]

Plenary indulgences are back

2009-02-10T21:14:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times article:

There is a limit of one plenary indulgence per sinner per day.

I'm glad God has a rationing system. To make it fair.

I would love to get a plenary indulgence just to have it. What does one look like? Can I hang it on the wall?

Westminster again

2009-02-10T20:49:00.001-08:00

I try not to watch the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, I really do, but it's structured to be addicting: pretty dogs, shown quickly. Time just flies by.

I also watch it because it makes me feel smug. I have no idea what the judge is experiencing, but I do tend to pick the winners. Yesterday, the Scottish deerhound (who, I'll say here, I'll pick for Best in Show), and today the Sussex spaniel in the sporting dog group. I picked the English setter to come in first, actually, but it came in third. (I'm a sucker for the dogs with the shiny, flowing coats -- like last year's flatcoat retriever -- and for the short, lumbering dogs, like the clumber and Sussex spaniels.)

I picked the deerhound because of the spring in its step. A huge dog, it seemed to be floating as it paraded. I picked the Sussex because when they showed a closeup of its face you could see presence and intelligence, not an empty gaze. And then it looked at the judge, and the judge looked at it, and they held each other's gaze. The announcers didn't comment on it, but it seemed like they did for a long time. I knew then that the judge was going to give this dog high marks.

I've picked Best in Show a couple of times. Not last year, though.

---------------

(2 minutes later:) "Son of a bitch!" I just shouted, appropriately, to myself. We are three hours behind New York. Forgetting that, I just went to the front page of the New York Times to look up the plenary indulgences article so I could write about that, and the center photo and article is of the Sussex having already won the dog show. Good for my feeling of smugness at picking winners, but now there's no need to watch the rest. I'm a little sad about the deerhound.

Depends on what you think heaven is like

2009-01-20T20:56:00.000-08:00

From Rick Warren's invocation at the inauguration: "Dr. King and a great cloud of witnesses are shouting in heaven."

From C-SPAN's closed captioning: "Dr. King and a great cloud of witnesses are shopping in heaven."

Those gloves

2009-01-20T20:21:00.000-08:00

I love Michelle Obama. And I love her gloves. I'm late to getting online and reading about them ... to find out that they're from J. Crew. I could have those gloves.

I can't even get to that part of their website now.

I wonder how much they are going for on eBay.

Duck

2009-01-17T18:52:00.000-08:00

I ate a lot of duck in China. Two kinds:

1. The kind that looks like a duck. Beijing Duck -- so good, but they make sure to provide the duck's head in order to prove it's duck. I made sure the lazy susan was spun the other way as often as possible.

2. The kind that is called pig. While I didn't actually see any heads or discernable features, the Theodore H. White story stuck with me:

After a year of growing friendship, Chou Enlai invited me to a banquet in my honor. We went to the finest restaurant in Chungking, the Kuan Sun Yuan, to dine—Chou, the Communist headquarters staff and myself, the only Westerner.

The reader must remember now how far I had come from my Jewish home. I knew I had been for months eating nonkosher food, but always tried to delude myself that the meats I ate were lamb, beef, or chicken. I was still so pinned to Jewish tradition that to eat pig outright seemed a profanation. At Chou Enlai's banquet, however, the main course was unmistakably pig, a golden-brown, crackle-skinned roast suckling pig.

"Ch 'ing, ch 'ing," said Chou Enlai, the host. "Please, please," gesturing with his chopsticks at the pig, inviting the guest to break the crackle first. For a moment I held on to my past. I put my chopsticks down and explained as best I could in Chinese that I was Jewish and that Jews were not allowed to eat any kind of pig meat. The group, all friends of mine by then, sat downcast and silent, for I was their guest, and they had done wrong.

Then Chou himself took over. He lifted his chopsticks once more, repeated, "ch 'ing, ch 'ing," pointed the chopsticks at the suckling pig and, grinning, explained—"Teddy," he said, "this is China. Look again. See. Look. It looks to you like pig. But in China, this is not a pig —this is a duck." I burst out laughing, for I could not help it; he laughed, the table laughed, I plunged my chopsticks in, broke the, crackle, ate my first mouthful of certified pig, and have eaten of pig ever since, for which I hope my ancestors will forgive me.

Culture shock

2009-01-17T18:18:00.001-08:00

Things I miss about China:

Elevator "door close" buttons that actually close the doors right away.
The pork chop noodle soup from the massage place.
Toothpicks provided with every meal.
More substantial packets of sugar. Packets here seem to have less and less sugar every year.
Prices. The 90 minute massage plus the above pork chop noodle soup plus any other food and drink I wanted at the spa, including on-the-spot squeezed apple-cucumber juice ... cost $15.

Things that are really different here:

Carbs: Aside from rice noodles, we ate very few carbs. "Chinese food" is not served with rice there. Walking through the grocery store today, I was amazed at how many flour products we have.
Litigation. A number of us noted as we walked through the Forbidden City that there were many ways to trip and hurt yourself on the irregularly-paved surface. That in the US the surface would have been fixed or the intentional variation (such as grooves in the surface) would have been cordoned off so that no one would get hurt. Instead, we had to watch our steps. Kind of liberating.
News. The Kelloggs salmonella recall has been an eye opener. My first thought was actually, "So American. In China there is so much central control that there were no things like food recalls." My second thought was, "Ah, right, control of the news."
Inauguration burnout. While I was there, sick in bed, I watched hours of the BBC and CNN. Loving every bit of American political news. But once I returned it took me less than 24 hours to feel that the inauguration preparation is overhyped.
Traffic. I feel like I have PTSD from the Chinese traffic. It was remarkably bad. Like nothing I've experienced here, even as a rush-hour commuter. In Shanghai, a three-lane freeway has four lanes because people are trying to take advantage of every spare inch to get ahead. And it's not four lanes of forward motion: it's four lanes of weaving (at one mile an hour), taking advantage of that every inch. A friend rightly pointed out that the traffic would move just fine if people stopped changing lanes. Here, I was driving down San Pablo and was behind about four cars that weren't moving. Perhaps there was a stoplight. My anxiety level went through the roof as I suddenly believed I would be stuck there for hours.

Homesick

2009-01-14T03:53:00.001-08:00

Maybe it's because I'm sick-sick, but I feel homesick. My only outing for the day was to the American embassy for a meeting with various economic and security staff. Recognizing from a distance the seal ("The Great Seal of the United States") on the side of the building, the glimmer of familiarity of that bald eagle felt good. When I walked up to the equivalent of the ticket window, the guy behind it said, "Hey, how's it going?" in an informal way and with such a good American accent that provided a rush of comfort. (I'm sure that's a staged thing, but it felt good anyway.) Not that it was any different from Chinese soil, but it felt good to be back on American soil, in a place where rules are unambigious. (At least, to me. At the corner near the American embassy, two busy streets intersect -- and there are no traffic controls. And yet you wouldn't know unless you tried to cross the street and started looking for a stoplight: the traffic looks like that in every other intersection here.)

I don't even bother carrying a camera or a notepad any more. Beijing is a beautiful city, but I'm done and hope to come back to truly experience it as a tourist.

No need for a pig humidifier (which was really an ox, for year of the ox, but it was round and had a nose like a pig): apparently the hotel provides humidifiers, and I could have had one all this time. Perhaps it would have saved my lungs.

Escaping the cameras

2009-01-13T04:25:00.000-08:00

I'm free! I feel like Truman in "The The Truman Show" when he escapes the cameras. Like in the spy movies when they manage to sneak through the cracks in observation.

The Shanghai/Beijing part of this trip has felt like I'm traveling in a Communist country. Oh, wait. But I mean that it has felt very orchestrated. Not because we are a threat but because the organizers were very ambitious and crammed the schedule, allowing no room for spontaneity or independence. We actually surprised them when we visited a river/canal town near Shanghai, Zhujiajiao. They thought we wanted to see something historic, and we did, but then we MBAs went mad over the shopping and negotiating process. After the extraordinary massiveness of Shanghai, Zhujiajiao has a scale that is small and cozy and the familiarity and freedom of instant-gratification shopping (until then, our shopping had been at the LVMH flagship store in the huge mall). We bought a lot of crap. I don't think they expected us to go so nuts over the tourist souvenirs, but the shopping bug took over for all of us. We all needed that freedom.

I thought Beijing would provide more free time, but no. The problem with these cities, versus my beloved Hong Kong, is that they are so big and we take a bus everywhere, so every trip takes 30 to 90 minutes. In Hong Kong, everything was under 15 minutes away, and travel was not passive: you had to consciously get on the right train or walk down the right street.

But now I have a really bad cold. Yesterday the organizer, who was also getting sick, and I went to a Chinese medical facility and got Chinese meds. I had no voice, laryngitis, at the time. The pills they gave me immediately restored it. Cool.

I felt so crummy as we began tonight's 40-person pizza dinner that I bagged out entirely. And I think even the freedom is causing me to feel better. I walked into the hotel and immediately asked the concierge where I could find a pharmacy, because no matter what eastern meds I'm taking, I need Robitussin. He pointed across the street to the big sign that said, "Supermarket."

Crossing a dajie, a big Beijing street, at night in the cold, all by myself! No American voices next to me. Going into the supermarket, it had the familiar smell of fresh vegetables. I found the pharmacy, which looked just like the place I'd visited yesterday. That particular pharmacy did have a western section with several flavors or Robitussin. I mimed coughing (actually, I coughed), and they pointed me to the right counter. I thought, how do I see where the Robitussin is? Then I noticed the large advertisement for it on the counter and pointed to it. Whoo-hoo!

I ended up talking to a very nice pharmacist via his medical complaint translation book. He gave me another med as well. I have bought meds on my own at a Chinese pharmacy where they don't speak English!

Then, after super-strongly considering buying a green pig-shaped humidifier (I still might have to do that -- my hesitation is that the instructions are not in English and look complicated ... but, after all, it's just a humidifier so I could probably figure it out) for $15, I bought some apple juice and re-crossed the street. No caucasians around! I joined a small group, including a woman holding a very ugly shih-tsu in a sweater, that was doing the pedestrian-inch-across-the-street-in-traffic-before-the-light-changes thing. Such a free feeling.

And now my chicken soup has arrived from room service. Who knew that having a cold could be so liberating?

Clockwise with Robitussin at the center: asthma chewables (red box), syrup to treat runny nose and sore throat, sore throat lozenges, immune strengthener tea, voice restorer pills, something else for throat tea.

Greetings from Beijing

2009-01-11T19:04:00.000-08:00

Shanghai was as jam-packed as I anticipated, and since I was being driven around on a bus from meeting to meeting I saw very little of it. Beijing is awesome. I'm off to a Beijing duck lunch.

Taken in below-freezing weather as we embarked on more than two hours at the Forbidden City:

Photo of the night

2009-01-06T07:45:00.000-08:00

That "sa" is the same character as in "Li-sa."

I like Goldman's view better

2009-01-06T07:39:00.001-08:00

Views from more skyscrapers:
UBS:

Citi:

Photo of the day

2009-01-05T06:46:00.001-08:00

The henchwoman wasn't blonde

2009-01-05T05:47:00.000-08:00

Before our Goldman Sachs meeting, I strolled over to the window with my iPhone to try to calmly and discreetly take a photo of their totally spectacular view.

I heard a voice with a mysterious accent at my shoulder: "It's quite a view, isn't it." I was caught in the act.

It was the blonde henchwoman from "The Incredibles." I swear it was. Except she had dark hair. Her accent was a combination of Australian and Chinese. She was the head of recruiting at Goldman Sachs.

"UBS has an even better view," she murmured.

... and more

2009-01-05T05:35:00.001-08:00

Today:

A double decker bus to Stanley Market (top level)
A minibus from Stanley Market (why don't more people take these?)
The Mid-Level Escalator (all the way to the top this time, then walking down)
A few taxis.

All I have left is a red minibus (not sure if I can figure those out) and an electronic trolley (tomorrow morning?).

I am a transportation geek.

Hong Kong, high and low

2009-01-04T05:38:00.001-08:00

I took four forms of transportation today:
1. The subway
2. The ferry (Star Ferry)
3. The funicular (Peak Tram)
4. The Mid-Levels Escalator

Bidet giggles

2009-01-04T04:13:00.001-08:00

Four forms of communication (Chinese, English, braille, and pictures), plus rows of lights, and yet how to turn it off once you've started pushing buttons is still unclear.

(If they hadn't written "ladies" on this, would people have washed their faces with it?)

Liveblog from flight to Hong Kong

2009-01-03T18:15:00.001-08:00

[It took me a while to figure out how to post this -- my first encounter with Google China -- all the links were in Chinese.]

My biggest fear: the weight of my suitcase. It weighed 48.4 pounds. Whew!

On a packed plane to Hong Kong, the seat next to my window seat (which is at some sort of structural point, so there is no actual window) is empty. The guy in the aisle seat, Gary (my made up name for him, although I would think his name is Ryan), and I look at each other and decide we’re the luckiest people on the plane.

If there had been someone sitting next to me, and me with no window, just a blank wall, I would have gone insane with claustrophobia.

As we’re served our food, United shows an hourlong Discovery Planet special. It’s on lions. And, over and over, it shows lions killing and eating a variety of animals. Oh, and then they show some sort of ceremonial bleeding of a cow. Really appetizing. Plus I feel for the mother of the four-year-old girl in the first row, right under the movie screen.

I am so grateful to M&M for sharing their Bose noise-canceling headphones with me. I took them off at one point – how deafeningly loud planes are. Cordless, I can even wear them walking around the plane. Why don’t people just wear these all the time? We can converse with them on, so why not cancel out everything else? Why don’t airplanes just use the technology to fly more quietly?

Further playing with my airplane toys, I just dropped an Airborne into my latest cup of water. Wow, that stuff looks nuclear.

10:30 AM HKT
After I looked out of my half-window and saw the spectacular mountains of an Aleutian island, the second movie, “Ghost Town,” with Ricky Gervais (loved it, cried) played. Then I check my watch and am shocked at how much longer this plane ride is. The in-flight map comes on, and I see that we are over the Bering Strait, barely past the “Great State of Alaska,” still flying over the Aleutians, and WE ARE NOT EVEN HALFWAY THERE?? I have eaten pretty much all of my snacks – all I have left is a Special K bar and half of a really destroyed peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I can’t find my the two packs of gum I packed. These fabulous headphones are weighing heavily on me. Normally I pack too heavily for the plane and end up with too many snacks when I land. This time, I did not bring enough variety of food and entertainment.

If there had been someone in the middle seat, I would have had to jump out of the plane.

I’ve been Freecell-sober for almost 10 years, but now being able to play solitaire for 10 hours straight seems like it would be a functional skill. However, I seem to have deleted all games of all sorts from this damn laptop!

OK, in my widgets I have a tile game. This will last me about 30 seconds. Where is my Tetris????

12:10 PM HKT
Cried through another movie, “Nights in Rodanthe.” Good thing I had Kleenex within reach: just as I thought I had my eyes under control, my nose started dripping. With Bill’s death this week, I can’t handle all this dying in movies. Next up is “The Duchess.” Hopefully it’s just about manipulative people and there is no poignant dying. Meanwhile, there are more than six hours left to the flight. What are they going to do about entertainment? We only have one more movie on tap. Then four hours of TV? Hopefully no more lion shows.

I’m so bored!

I want another cup of water so I can make another Airborne radioactive drink.

Why there are Christmas trees

2008-12-24T17:59:00.000-08:00

Christmas is a messy holiday. I'm sure there are zillions of blogs about the paper waste it produces. But before it's waste, it's presents. And if you don't have a tree, then your place is just full of presents, for yourself, for others, just piled around. It looks like you left a bunch of stuff on your floor. If you have a tree, you have a place on the floor where it's legitimate to stash them.

I see stand-up in his future

2008-12-13T18:19:00.000-08:00

The setting: a three-year-old is climbing into his carseat. He reaches into the seat and pulls out a crumb.

"Look, Lisa! It's my sprinkle!

"A sprinkle from my doughnut!

"I don't know which doughnut...."

Is Mercury retrograde?

2008-12-02T21:24:00.000-08:00

Today I struggled with technology.

I changed the message of the day on our intranet. After I did, the front page changed entirely -- to a warped version of the page I last saw three years ago in beta and that we never implemented.

I tried to get on a Google group. I was told I was part of it. I couldn't find it and got lost within that part of the Google universe.

I was directed by a colleague in very specific terms to a particular website about our travel policy. I just could not find it.

When I got to the gym, there was only one elliptical machine open. I was at this point absolutely certain it was broken. It wasn't ... yet.

While working out, I went to play a podcast on my iPod, and it crashed. Big time. Normally I can reset my iPod when this happens, but no luck. I worked out to the nearby spin class' music and hoped the iPod would wake up. Fifteen minutes later, I managed to reset it.

After my workout, I waited for the "workout summary" data to show up on the little display on the elliptical. I find it satisfying to see how ... uh, little or much ... work I've done. Instead of showing me the details, it just said, "workout summary ... workout summary ... workout summary...." No data.

Which makes Sophie crazier: Madonna or the window?

2008-11-24T08:34:00.000-08:00

My cat, Sophie, spent yesterday afternoon and evening near the top of the stairs where the first floor ceiling crosses the stairs so she could "hide." She stared out the window (mostly the one near the kitchen) intently. She would not come downstairs. She was definitely hallucinating something. When I tried to pet her, she scooted up a stair and poked her head under the ceiling so she could keep an eye on her hallucination.

I tried to figure out what had sparked this. When had it begun? I think it was while I was putting together my Ikea furniture. Was it the drill? But I'd used it the day before. I'd put Madonna on my iPod stereo to lighten up the Ikea construction process. Could dislike of Madonna's music have driven Sophie upstairs? This was seriously my theory for a while.

My latest theory is that she was having a reaction to my opening the window. I was warm, so I had briefly opened the casement window near the kitchen and stood in it. Until I have screens put in, I have to keep the windows shut because I can't prevent Sophie from jumping or falling out of one (and I can't count on her judgment). Sophie has already demonstrated confusion when I open a window. I briefly opened the one behind the sofa one day, and after I closed it she jumped on the back of the sofa to examine the situation. You could almost see smoke coming out of her ears as her tiny brain tried to interpret the acoustic event she'd experienced in that vicinity.

Friday night I briefly opened a different window. After I shut it she once again came over and looked out, trying to figure out what happened.

So my theory is that opening a window yesterday freaked her out. I'm counting on her little brain to forget this happened.

Arguing with lawyers

2008-11-12T22:15:00.000-08:00

I found a new cool Emeryville spot, spending the evening at a wine tasting at my local winery (walking distance!). Met a guy there and we chatted, debated, argued. I found out early on that he's a lawyer, so I debated with him the way it happens with my lawyer friends. He thought I was really neat. Sigh. I know because he called me a lot of names (socialist, naive), believing I could take it. I could, but now I'm really tired and don't want to be called names. I want to watch "Gilmore Girls." I think he doesn't understand that the first half hour of such discussion is fun because it's playful, but beyond that it's just taking things too seriously (45 minutes of discussion of how it's important to be able to defend yourself with a gun if someone breaks into your home?). Laughter is good, too, and it's just as impressive as intelligence.

Fly wrangling

2008-10-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

I got home to find a lot of flies in my apartment. I'm not a bug squisher, so I wanted to eliminate the flies without handling them. Hoping they would kill themselves in my halogen torchiere was a bit too passive, and my cat had tired of chasing them around. So, of course, I went online.

I found a great discussion of home remedies for houseflies. I decided it was too late for the water-and-a-penny solution, so I went for the milk-vinegar-and-corn-oil solution. They warn that it shouldn't coagulate, and mine did. And the flies ignored it.

Then two thoughts occurred to me:

Take off the (faulty) window screens and let them fly free, and
Use that information you might have learned if you paid attention to that article about how flies anticipate being swatted.

The result is my own, personal, patent pending new home remedy for houseflies:

Make sure there are no flies in your bedroom.
Put the cat in the bedroom and shut the door. (This is to make sure the cat doesn't follow a fly out of a window and to try to preserve any last bits of respect your cat may have for you.)
Open all your windows wide.
Pick a window with a fly on it and pop the screen out, being careful not to allow the screens to fall three stories to the ground.
If the fly(ies) decide not to fly out the window, use swatting knowledge to guide them there.
Repeat until you or the flies surrender.
Replace the screens, which will inevitably be on the western side of the room, enabling you to be blinded as you try to fit them into the frame.

So I spent about a half hour running around my apartment waving my arms trying to guide flies out windows. It's actually rather satisfying: they look so right and graceful and innocent zooming in an s-curve off into the open air. And you can think, "Ah, one less fly!" For me, at least.

Food for all those spiders I capture and put on the fire escape.

It's a decision!

2008-10-15T19:12:00.001-07:00

Liveblog from the debate:

John McCain said that abortion is a difficult decision for a woman. Decison! Barack, call him on it!

Damn, he didn't. Oh, such a missed opportunity.

I'm going to throw up at this discussion.

That's Emery-village to you

2008-10-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

Writing from Oakland Airport. I walked by a newstand, the standard fare with piles of t-shirts in front, and saw one that said, “Oakland, est. 1850.” Cool: Oakland asserts its history. I felt that tug of acquisitiveness. “Mine,” I thought.

And then reality pulled me back. Oakland isn’t going to be mine any more.

I’ve been a devout Oaklander for 15 years. When I was (joyfully) unemployed before my current job, I watched Oakland city council TV. I like the city’s big messiness. It reminds me of Cleveland, where I grew up: some great old neighborhoods that outsiders aren’t aware of; a decent stab at culture; and a large, troubled African-American population. To me it is undervalued, an underdog, a place where good is just dying to happen and lives are ready to be changed, and I wanted to be part of turning it around.

In defining my condo search, Oakland was the only place I wanted to live. In fact, I wanted to live specifically in the downtown or uptown areas of Oakland, where there is lots of new construction and definite evidence of an evolving neighborhood. I didn’t mind being a pioneer: I knew that commerce would follow. Single professional women are a target market for these areas.

When I didn’t find anything I liked, another area I found was Temescal. Just blocks from my current neighborhood, Temescal is supposed to be The Next Rockridge. Since I’d love to live in Rockridge, why not be in the next one?

I read all of Temescal’s and Macarthur BART’s development plans. I contacted Jane Brunner, the city councilmember for the area (also my current councilmember), who was, predictably, entirely unresponsive.

(I had really been hoping to move out of her district anyway. My alternative was to put myself on course to run against her for her seat.)

Another red flag: the development plans are dated 2005. I could be an optimist who thinks that they’re due, that the time is about to come to execute them; or I could listen to my friend, J., who says that even if Oakland begins to execute these plans, they’ll screw something up. Certainly Jane Brunner’s unresponsiveness made me feel like I wouldn’t be a part of the success of even this neighborhood.

I made an offer on a place in lower Temescal, a condo that my father and stepmother and niece and brother and his girlfriend all visited. On the one day that month two people in California were buying condos, and I was outbid.

An unexpected swing of emotions. And when my great broker contacted me to go back out to see condos the following weekend, I was uninterested, but I indulged her. Grumpy. The last place she showed me was in Emeryville, and it was great. On Hollis, which is one of my favorite streets there. After a very traumatic detour into almost buying another place in Temescal, I bought the condo in Emeryville.

And then my car was broken into in front of my Oakland apartment. A sign?

Every change brings loss. Changing my identity from being an Oaklander to an Emeryvillager is going to take some practice. Changing from a city whose symbol is an oak (and I’ve wanted one of those oak pins that city councilmembers wear) to one whose symbol is … Ikea? … Best Buy? … Bay Street? … the Powell Street onramp? is not something I can get excited about.

I am excited about living in a well-run city, an aspirational city that executes is plans. Emeryville knows what it wants to be, and it’s not hesitating in heading there. And if it strays I only have to work with 8,000 people to help return it to success.

Turning over a new leaf

2008-10-15T00:46:00.000-07:00

Today, in Seattle, I pity people who grew up in California. At least, my part of California and south. And other places that don’t have autumn.

Like with snow, you can visit it, but being surrounded by it on a daily, routine basis is an entirely different experience.

I looked out of the cab window and saw the beautiful density and variety of trees – you can’t see individual trees – it’s just mounds of trees. With spashes of color. You get an almost tactile feeling of a paintbrush having swatted at them.

Do people who grow up without mounds of deciduous trees even know the expression “The leaves are starting to turn”? I said it to the cab driver, and it was like an ancient, familiar phrase in my mouth. Like the name of a best friend you haven’t talked about in many years.

Someone from California, someone who hasn’t lived through fall afer fall, might think these splashes of gold and red and orange among the rich green is what fall colors are. Even as a midwesterner I used to celebrate the arrival of the colors, thinking fall is here. Forgetting it’s just the beginning. It’s not when leaves are splashed with color: it’s when leaves are doused in color, bright golds and flaming reds completely replacing most of the green, that fall is at its most awesome.

Master of non-improvisation

2008-10-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite videos of this woman from one of my favorite websites, 23/6.

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

Ordinary people suddenly get good deals on mortgages

2008-10-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

I'm a first time homebuyer, and the ride is a blast. It's an adventure, an exploration, a learning experience.

I locked in my mortgage rate today, and I am feeling so proud of myself. And, since this is such a tiny bit of good news in the economic disaster we're living in, I haven't seen headlines of "Ordinary people suddenly get good deals on mortgages." So you heard it hear first.

I'm no economist -- I'm more of an intuitionist -- and I've never paid much attention to the details of how financial systems work (despite the evidence of my education). So the mastery of the art of mortgage prediction I gained over the past week has me feeling really smug.

This is what makes mortgage rates go down: bad news. I'm sorry to say that when the terrible jobless rate came out last week I jumped up and down. Heartless of me, I know. But I work in career services, so maybe I can atone for that one.

When the stock market fell I nodded in sympathy with others and then ran to my computer to see if mortgage rates had budged.

But the rates didn't drop. In fact, last Tuesday they went up and then didn't move. Banks still weren't lending money. No credit action, no mortgage rate change. So I waited until the House signed the bailout package. That could improve confidence and increase liquidity ... but it didn't. With my own good credit, I could get a decent rate on Friday, and I was tempted to take it, allowing me to take another step to closing on my new home ... and then I decided to wait.

When I saw the news that California was going to have to ask for a government bailout because of its inability to get short term credit, I knew that the end (to my mortgage rate wait) was near. Something had to move. And this morning the stock market crashed again, and the Federal Reserve indicated that it would considering using its new powers (from the bailout bill) to relieve the credit crunch. And Bank of America indicated it would find a way out of the Countrywide mess for people who were going to lose their homes, so someone was going to get mortgage relief.

I checked the mortgage rates practically hourly, and then, bam! at 9:30 AM PT today they dropped. A lot. I called my mortgage broker. I couldn't get through for hours because apparently he had five clients move to lock in rates today. But I did it! I didn't even take the lowest rate I could get (because of the fun and funky incentives I'm being offered by Pulte Homes). And rates fell a fraction after I locked. But I got a good one, a doozy, lower than I ever thought I could get on Friday.

I feel lonely. Despite my lack of interest in economics and finance, I love spreadsheets, and I've built all sorts of models over the last several months to help my decision-making and keep myself fact-based. Today it all came together, and I can't really share the great news, the great numbers. I know people who've bought in the past several months, and I know my rate is lower than theirs, so I can't celebrate with them. And people who are deep into homeownership aren't going to think it's so cool. But it's my first time, and I think I did a damn good job of it.

Is there any way we can just get Tina Fey to do it?

2008-10-05T10:13:00.001-07:00

(#1 from David Letterman's Top 10 Things Overheard at Palin Debate Camp)

And here's Tina Fey in the debate:

The Biden parts are fantastic, especially the Scranton section. And Palin's Israel comment made my day.

I love Israel so much, bless its heart. There's a special place for Israel in heaven. And I know that some people are gonna say I'm only sayin' that to pander to Florida voters, but from a very young age my two greatest loves were always Jews and Cuban food.

Joe Biden's restraint

2008-10-02T19:44:00.001-07:00

The context: tonight's debate, when Biden and Palin were discussing Israel.

BIDEN: Gwen, no one in the United States Senate has been a better friend to Israel than Joe Biden....

PALIN: ... But I'm so encouraged to know that we both love Israel, and I think that is a good thing to get to agree on, Senator Biden. I respect your position on that.

(What he should have said:)
BIDEN: Governor, my position is not yours to respect. I have been working for my entire political career to support and protect Israel, and that means I've been doing this since you were eight years old. You can say you are a friend to Israel, but that's like saying you're a friend to the author of your favorite bedtime story. You've never been to Israel, you've never worked on policy related to Israel, you've never acted to ensure Israel receives United States support. I have actually impacted the existence of Israel. Your respect is an insult.

Why I like games

2008-09-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

I love my job, and I think that most of the time it brings out the best of me, but it's been wearing me down.

During September and October, I have to be more of a manager than a leader. Leadership is my comfort zone: I'm good at listening, bringing people together, solving problems, breaking down siloes, working with ideas, helping people connect to things that are bigger than their day-to-day jobs. Being a leader is such a big part of who I am that I tend to walk around on that same skin at other times, including in my social life.

But in September and October each year, I have to be more of a manager because there is no time for the bigger ideas: it's about execution. So the past few weeks have been really hard. As a manager in this period of high stress, the team has to rely on each other. In terms of any measure of personality type, I have one of the most diverse groups you can find. But they're the same in that everyone is a perfectionist. There is very little room for forgiveness, and at this time of year we forget to forgive. So I have to behave myself and hide my own frustration with individuals or dynamics; I have to mediate disputes and take in complaints with as straight a face as I can, not encouraging second-guessing or whining, when I just want to scream with the same frustration as everyone else.

Playing games with friends is the antidote to this.

Some people use alcohol to unwind and take off their psychological business suits. And, yes, it does unwind me, too. But put me around a table with good friends -- or even strangers! -- and let me play a game of poker or a board game or anything where it's me against them, and I become my true self. I can be competitive, creative, resentful, playful, silly. I don't have to contribute ideas, I don't have to listen, I don't have to solve other people's disputes with each other, because the cards do that. I might second guess myself on a hand, but because a game of poker has hand after hand or a board game has round after round, I revel in the learning curve. (OK, I will still remember the two kings I folded, still thinking about the size of the pot, so I'm not perfect there.) But I do love playing again and again, always trying anew. (I guess I'll blog separately about how poker is like baseball.)

Helping people and community and team always do better is why I love my work. Being a part of a group of people playing cards, an impromptu community, but not having to lead it, is the best way for me to unwind.

I'll be talking about Obama now

2008-09-15T21:48:00.000-07:00

I went to hear Jon Carroll interview Anne Lamott this evening, and she read to us her just-published Salon article.

It's a nice way to think about how to get out through this and to focus again on solutions.

The Palin Hypocrisy List

2008-09-01T22:25:00.000-07:00

I'll be adding to this as I come across more. Not meant to be comprehensive. I can't expect to document them all, there are so many.

Emphases are all mine.

From a statement issued on Monday Sarah and Todd Palin:

“We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby...."

Bristol can make this choice even with legalized abortion.

Rick Scarborough, a pastor and the founder of the conservative advocacy group Vision America:“From what I see this family is dealing with it honorably. They are going to carry this baby to a full term as a further testimony of their commitment to life.” NYT 9/1/08. If abortion were illegal, they would not have the choice to be "honorable" and "testify" to their "commitment to life."

James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family ... commended her for “not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.” NYT 9/1/08. So candidates should do more than just talk about their values: they should demonstrate them by having family members get pregnant and not have abortions?

Palin's Daughter Pregnant, Campaign Announces

2008-09-01T10:03:00.001-07:00

"Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said. ..."

Embedded in this is that this 17-year-old had a decision. McCain/Palin oppose allowing women to make decisions for themselves about their pregnancies -- and, I'm sure, oppose choice for minors. They express pride that Bristol Palin made the decision they approve of ... but they don't want other girls to show the same courage by making that choice themselves.

Sarah Palin's choice to continue her pregnancy after she found out her child would have Down's syndrome is also touted as an act of courage. It was the first thing many of us learned about her. However, once again, she is being praised for the courage to make a decision she doesn't want others to make. The Republicans have to decide: are Bristol and Sarah Palin courageous women for the choices they make? If so, they should support the right of all women -- and girls -- to make the same choice.
About Sarah Palin
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Word of the day

2008-08-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Sarah Palin:

Pandering

Runners up:

Creepy
Evil
Scary
Embarrassing
Exploitative of her Downs Syndrome infant
Same number of electoral votes as Delaware!

Water that makes you forget?

2008-08-21T18:44:00.001-07:00

I bought some Trader Joe's "brand" "vitamin" "water," "Dragonfruit" "flavor" (is there anything about this that is authentic?) because I was in TJs and I was thirsty and they don't sell anything normal to drink. It's the first time I've tasted any kind of "vitamin" "water." How on earth did this stuff become popular?

The evolution on its "flavor" on your tongue goes from worse to bad. My first reaction was to spit it out, and then it developed a horrible aftertaste, like the taste of metal and sweat. It's kind of like Gatorade with a metallic additive and without personality. I wanted desperately to get the "flavor" off of my tongue. Then, a few seconds later, I conveniently forgot how awful it tasted and felt so thirsty that I craved and took another swig. Phthhh, pththhh. After four rounds of this, I wondered what kind of odd control this drink had over me. Is there something in it that makes me so thirsty and amnesiac that it makes me want more?

The account saga continues ...

2008-07-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

Only in a recommendation: if someone buys iTunes gift certificates on your credit card, just redeem them back to yourself!

Apple support suggested I open a new iTunes store account, said that I could keep it from being associated with a credit card by buying myself a gift certificate.

And then I thought: what a shame: to buy another gift certificate after punkyusa bought five on my credit card. In fact, I had already built a spreadsheet with the recipients' names and email addresses. Which I got off iTunes when I examined the electronic copies of the gift certificates. Duh!

I changed the recipient email address on the five gift certificates to my own and resent them to myself. (Although the automatically-generated email says that they were from Albert McNutt.) Thanks, Apple for the "resend" feature! Three of punkyusa's friends had not redeemed theirs yet (and now they never will, bwah-hahahahaha). Punkyusa and deathemperor had. I have called my bank (which already refunded my money) to tell them I got $200 back on my own.

I figure I can spend the $200 on gift certificates for people I know, since I don't think I'll ever spend it all on myself.

Mr. McNutt, check your credit card!

2008-07-28T20:30:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I checked my iTunes account again. I found that my account payment source had been changed to that of Mr. Albert L. McNutt in Columbus, TX, and that $23 more had been spent. The last four digits of the credit card listed were not mine, and my bank account showed no payments, so Albert McNutt was being defrauded this time.

I removed his credit card information from my account.

Then I looked up Albert McNutt in Columbus, TX, on whitepages.com and called him. I left a message explaining that he should check his credit card statement for a $23 charge. I also suggested to Apple that they contact him, but they said they didn't know how to.

Phished or cracked?

2008-07-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

The scary part is that I just received a personal email from the person who took over my accounts last night and from whom I finally retrieved them just now.

Very Good, Lisa! You have try to get your protection, but that's useless. Anyway, this account is your property then I don't wanna have it. I just make a astonished and will make up a loss to you.

Ominous. Hannibal Lecter, anyone?

Last night I received a note from iTunes thanking me for my purchase. But I hadn't made one. So I went to the iTunes store and discovered that there had been $546 worth of purchases from my iTunes account in the past week. The first $500 was in the form of some very hefty gift certificates. I checked my bank account, and indeed there had been purchases, so I called my bank and reported it. And I reported it to Apple and changed my password.

I made a spreadsheet of the people who received the gift certificates, since I had their names and email addresses from my iTunes account record. One went by Deathemperor. Punkyusa was the one who received the biggest gift certificate, $200.

Somehow, I thought I should check my Yahoo account. Things became a blur here because they happened so quickly and confusingly. It was an unreal experience. I figured out that punkyusa was actually online and in my accounts, since I was receiving email notifications of my own account settings changing even as I logged into them myself. I found that punkyusa had made him/herself an alternate email address for my Yahoo account -- and that, for some reason, I couldn't delete that. It meant that punkyusa would receive notifications of my own password and account changes. I suspected that I hadn't received a note from iTunes for the first $500 in purchases because punkyusa was going into my account and deleting those emails.

And suddenly my Google account was no longer available to me. That was the freakiest part (well, until tonight's note). One minute I was reading an email from an ex-boyfriend, and the next I was trying to log in and couldn't get in. Punkyusa had changed my password. I imagine it was in retaliation for my, just prior to that, changing the Yahoo password and locking him/her out. It would have been a very dramatic movie with a soundtrack and quick cutting between me and punky.

My brother was on the phone, also using my logins to see how far we could get -- dividing and conquering. You'd think this whole experience would have taken like five minutes, but when you don't know what is happening it takes longer. ("Is my caps lock on? Do I know my password?") I spent a lot of time interrupting myself trying to figure out what was happening (like putting together a spreadsheet) rather than how to stop it. My natural inclination: gather more information. I googled Deathemperor and found some 2005 discussion groups where he's looking for discarded website domains on the cheap. I was up for hours.

Punkyusa has laid down his/her arms. Well, except for offering me a link to a free laptop "just for me." So not really laying down arms. But I'm not done. I know these email addresses are probably quickly used and discarded, and no one is really going to want to hunt these people down, but I am still going to report them to their domain hosts and to my bank. Punkyusa is "domain keys verified" on gmail and has sent me an actual email. Shouldn't that be enough of a trail?

Resistance is futile.

2008-07-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

I've been handsfree on my phones for a jillion years. It just hasn't made sense to me that our ability to type or wash dishes or clean our offices should be impaired by a silly phone handset. But for most of that time I was landline handsfree. Cellular phone handsfree is an different animal: you're out there in public. I remember the first time I saw someone walking in San Francisco on a handfree hookup to his cellphone. On Market Street, passing the homeless people, I saw a well-dressed man talking to himself. The convergence of mental illnesses.

I'm so into handsfree that I can't wait until they implant something in our heads that allows us to connect with people. I believe this will happen in my lifetime.

I'm somewhat suspicious of California's handsfree cellphone law. The state is trying to be business-friendly, and, instead of doing it by changing the business tax structure or something, it's just forcing everyone to buy handsfree kits. Bluetooth headsets abound.

I arrived at a dreaded meeting called by someone who is rather arrogant and certainly interpersonally tone-deaf. He arrived with a Jawbone on his ear. A Jawbone is the one of the flashiest and most expensive of the bluetooth headsets. And he doesn't have much hair, so it wasn't at all subtle.

How do you react to that kind of thing? Was he expecting to receive a phone call in the middle of our meeting? -- How disrespectful! Was he just wearing it to show it off?

As the initial chitchat progressed, I said, "Hey, are you expecting a phone call?" He said no, he wasn't, and kept going. Didn't even take it off. So at this point it's just so he can feel important. To himself, because I've expressed through my question that it's not impressing me.

Yesterday my own bluetooth headset arrived from Amazon ($30 cheaper than Best Buy). I decided that, while I'm happy with my corded handsfree, a wireless headset would get me closer to the brain implant solution. It's tiny, a Motorola M680. (Motorola even makes a women's version of this with pretty vine squiggles!) It's so small that it's not really visible in my hair. (It is also the perfect cat toy: small and shiny with a sproingy plastic curved piece reaching out to goad.) My goal is never to be like this guy in the meeting, wearing a headset because I'm about to talk to someone more important than you.

Woe is me

2008-07-11T19:46:00.000-07:00

I started exploring Facebook today, setting up an account and all that.

I love how warmly I was welcomed:

A commentary on how isolated modern society can feel?

Strawberry season

2008-06-17T22:03:00.000-07:00

Today's snacks:

Strawberry Special K bar for breakfast
Strawberry yogurt-covered pretzels
Fresh strawberries (on their own)
Strawberry yogurt
Fresh strawberries (in a fruit salad)

I do love strawberries.

Framing the discussion

2008-06-07T08:38:00.000-07:00

I have so many Hillary topics, but I wanted to write them as analytical, not elegiac. So some brief thoughts before her speech today.

I think, and hope, that Democratic Obama-supporters will finally believe what I have believed, that Hillary is not a vicious, self-interested party-splitter. In the March 17 issue of Time, David Plouffe of the Obama campaign said, "The Clinton campaign strategy is simply going to be to try to run a scorched-earth campaign, which would be catastrophic for the party." I will honor how smart this was: Obama's team demonized Hillary by addressing process rather than content (or by nitpicking). They hoped in fact that the fear of dividing the party would cause voters to choose Obama (because he wasn't the party-divider, Hillary was). And I'm sure in many ways it worked. Certainly this idea was parroted by pundits in the media and in coffee shops.

Once again: I think this was clever. And ironic. In a year when the Democratic candidates rewrote the history books not just on gender and race but on process, Obama's campaign, a campaign whose content invoked hope, figured out how to get the dimension of fear into voter's minds. We Democrats feared that this particular break in process would cause Democrats to lose in November. Even very intelligent Democrats were so frightened that they didn't see the hope embedded in the dual campaign.

Hillary's process has not feared having two candidates who command powerful loyalty. As far as I know, she never accused Obama of splitting the party. (Ironically, and to her detriment, she in fact invoked fear in more traditional ways.) We should never sell her short: Hillary can and will take the loyalty she commands and use it for good. (And I have no doubt, had results gone the other way, that Obama would have used it for good as well.)

I'm sad that Democrats who repeated this fear began to write off Hillary. Listening to her speech to AIPAC on June 4 (in tears), I was reminded that she is a powerful and effective speaker who will absolutely support the party. And, once we hear her speech today (in tears), I look forward to Obama finding another way to run an inspiring campaign on hope and still find any way possible, including fear, to win in November.

Hillary Clinton, Part 1: She can do it.

2008-05-26T14:06:00.001-07:00

A proud confession: I am a Hillary Clinton supporter. Which doesn't mean I'm anti-Barack Obama: I adore him. But I think Hillary is an extraordinarily talented and admirable woman. I'm proud that she didn't sit down and shut up in this campaign. I think she would make an incredible president -- and I still think she would be a better one than Barack.

The reason I think this is not because of her campaign, which undeniably has had many flaws. Beginning not with anything that came out of her mouth (or out of Bill's) but with her assumption about how to manage a campaign: she was blindsided by the creativity of Obama, by how he reached out to new voters for votes and for funds. Get with the program, Hillary: (1) The internet is nothing new, and we are living in a digital world, and (2) We've lost the past two presidential elections doing things the old way and need to think out of the box, make the pie bigger, to win this one. And she hasn't -- she's tried campaign the old way, only more perfectly -- which I have found disappointing.

The reason I put campaign blunders aside and support Hillary is that she is a superb politician. "Politician" in its uncharged sense, as someone who is adept at navigating politics. She entered the Senate and immediately became effective. She overcame resistence based on the perceptions of her (just a wife, just a carpetbagger, pushy, frankly partisan) to become someone who could work collegially with anyone on either side of the aisle. She has in fact not been frankly partisan: she is someone who knows how to work relationships and how to compromise to get things done.

Barack may be able to free us from partisanship through his vision and how he expresses it, but Hillary has shown she can do it through her actions.

Which is, I think, one of the two major flaws in her ability to become president: you can't run for a party nomination by showing how effective you are at working with the other party. All the Republican Senators who appreciate and respect Hillary are campaigning for the other party. So she has had to draw on her experiences as a former First Lady. To me this is not as persuasive as what she's accomplished as an elected official.

The bipartisanship argument is something to observe with John McCain, who wants to convince Democratic voters that his bipartisanship earns him their vote. What if Clinton and McCain ran against each other: would they debate who was more bipartisan? That's where actual values come in.

The great Democratic plan

2008-05-26T13:26:00.000-07:00

For everyone who is frustrated with the Democratic primaries, who is worried that the party is damaging itself by having two candidates to continue to duke it out, keep in mind the following:

Americans love a competition. By taking the campaign to all 50 states, the Democrats are taking the motivation to participate to all 50 states.
If the Democrats get out the vote, they win. There are more Democrats in this country than Republicans. In Texas, on March 4, almost three million Democrats turned out to vote, to the Republicans' 1.4 million. And this was when it was still a race: Mike Huckabee did not drop out of the race until that evening.
The longer we have a Democratic competition, the more likely we are to have Democratic voter turnout in the red states of Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Idaho, and, if this keeps going, Puerto Rico, Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska; as well as in the perceived battleground states of Pennsylvania, Oregon, and New Mexico.
If people vote in primaries, they are more likely to vote in the general election.
The rhetoric between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama reflects that they know this, and that in this home stretch they are going to work for party unity as they continue to compete.
Airing Democratic candidates' dirty laundry early enables the clothesline to be clear in time to focus on McCain's dirty laundry in the general election.
Enlisting new Democratic voters for this election could have effects that reach far beyond 2008.

I am very excited that the Democratic candidates continue to campaign, and I am optimistic about the process and the results.

Phoenix Mars redux

2008-05-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

Back in college, I took planetary geology from Peter Schultz. Peter is a crater man. We spent something like the first three weeks (two or three days per week) talking about impact craters. He was also a researcher at JPL/Ames, and he told us all about all the things he would shoot through the Ames Gun into a special bowl of whatever at whatever angle at whatever speed. Like: shooting an egg into sand at a ninety-degree angle verses a forty-five degree angle and examining the splatter. At that stage of my life, empirical research meant nothing to me: I was a historian who looked at people and political theory to see how ideas connected, almost like the study of intellectual gossip, and I didn't yet look at tangible objects and wonder how they got that way. And certainly the nuances of crater splatter were boring to me. I wanted to study the volcanos on Io (and did). I was interested in Mars and the possibility of water and weather. I wanted to learn more about the present before asking how it got that way.

Now it all seems so obvious, and perhaps I needed three weeks of crater study to get it: planets are made of things mashed together, and craters are the evidence of that. Duh. Just as when you look at light that comes from very distant objects, which takes many millions of light years to get here, you are actually looking back in time, unpeeling impact craters is also a way to look back in time.

Peter also taught me to turn the picture upside down if a crater in a photo looked like a bump to me.

Much as I found all that crater stuff somewhat irrelevant, the time was exactly right to be studying it, and to be studying it with Peter, and I'd like to believe I knew that. In 1980, Alvarez and Alvarez published the theory that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a meteor impact. So impact crater theory was really hot stuff in the scheme of things. And this theory was very much in play. I thought it was a good one (having been raised on the theory of Nuclear Winter) and decided for myself that the meteor was what created Hudson Bay. What a privilege, a unique life experience, to study a theory before it became widely accepted. (The search since 1990 has been for the crater or crater patterns which caused the K-T Event. Hudson Bay is not in consideration.)

How many people remember an exam question from 25 years ago? I think the only one I remember was on Peter's final exam. He asked us how we would determine if Mars has or had water on it. I'm sure there were people in the class who wanted to use mass spectrometry or something to determine this from a distance, but my solution was to send a probe to one of the poles and reach out an arm or something and poke it. I suggested there might not be surface water, but there might be evidence of water below the surface.

So the Phoenix Mars project is particularly exciting to me.

A day at Tomales Bay

2008-05-25T22:28:00.000-07:00

Today my favorite place in California is Tomales Bay.

A classmate has a long term rental of a great house there and invited a bunch of us to a day at the beach. Potluck. With a vague idea of when to show up, knowing this was potluck but not sure how many hours we'd be there, with a forecast of cold, overcast, and rainy, we left in a caravan, grumpy.

Instead, the day was sunny and warm. Duck Cove turned out to involve seven hours of hanging out, throwing rocks into the water, boating, hot tub, and lots of eating. J brought sangria, which we slurped and munched; I brought enough snacks to ruin our appetites for real food, which included tri tip, grilled asparagus and other vegetables, sausages, and hamburgers.

The boating was kicked off by seven children and three adults piling into our host's tiny Boston Whaler to go across the bay for oysters. As they returned, we on the shore thought they looked like refugees, absolutely packed into the boat. Either that or the scene from "The Sound of Music" when the von Trapps kids joyfully swamp their boat as they greet their father.

Fresh oysters on the grill -- even the kids were eating them.

I have a thing about water. Whenever I am near it, I must go in. J and I were reminiscing about a trip we took up the coast years ago with a crowd of classmates. We stopped at a rocky beach, the kind with huge eruptions of surf as the waves hit the rocks. I got closer and closer, loving the smell and the spray. Dragged J with me, and one of the waves totally soaked us. (I really believe someone has a picture of this moment. We must dig it up.) I was wearing jeans and learned that getting wet in jeans is no fun; since that day, I bring a change of clothes if I think I will be anywhere near water.

Until today. Today I sat by the picnic tables and hung out and had random sangria-filled conversations and took pictures, working up the nerve to ask our host if I could be next in the sea kayak. I know how to canoe, but I'd never sea kayaked. I'm a convert! It's a hull of plastic like you'd buy at Toys R Us, and you just fly with little effort. Much easier than a canoe. I anticipated being so lame at kayaking that I said I'd just toodle around near the shore, but once I figured out how spectacularly simple it is to kayak I was off and running. Not even noticing that I was dripping water all over myself as I paddled out into the bay. It was like flying, like dancing. Others of our party were out there in a pedal kayak, and I hung out with them on the water, sprinting off, moving in all directions, letting myself drift in the sun.

By the time I got out, which involved grounding the kayak on the shore and then kind of falling out into the water (not the most graceful landing), I was definitely soggy. And in jeans.

Nothing drinking more sangria, sitting in a hot tub overlooking the bay (as the fog rolled in), and eating oysters off the grill (throwing the shells off the cliff), and having more great conversation can't fix. Today we ate 100 oysters.