The YouTube Awards, part 2: The Bad

I have a three day weekend, so I'm posting like crazy because otherwise I'd be cleaning.

A while back, I wrote a post about music videos I liked. I'd been meaning to do something like that again anyway, just because it's fun, and then I was reading Fark this morning and found this thread on bad song lyrics. First of all, you should read the thread. It's got some great examples of truly wretched poetic license, but the best parts are the posts where people explain just how angry they get when they hear some of this drivel.

This time around, the YouTube Awards looks through my music collection for the worst offenders of sub-par wordsmithy (yes, I'm being ironic by making up words), bad music, and bad everything, and links them to videos where ever possible. And last time, commenter Krista went above and beyond by submitting her own collections of YouTube nominations and it was awesome. So you should all do that.

Worst use of woefully incorrect speech pattern found in common parlance: Imogen Heap: Clear the Area

"But your eyes
Tell a whole nother story"

A whole nother? A whole nother? Are you kidding? That offends me on every level. That's right up there with irregardless*. And the sad thing is I really like the song. It's a gorgeous song. It's a beautiful song. It absolutely would not suffer at all if she sang "A whole other" instead. This isn't poetic license, this isn't flow, this is bad English at work. And even the people who transcribe the lyrics are annoyed, because they made the corrections themselves.

The video for this one is bad. The first verse is cut off and it's some guy with a camera at a concert so it sounds like it's being played through a tin can. Sorry.

*Pointless aside: In high school, I had a boyfriend who prided himself on being extremely smart, and most importantly, smarter than me. And then he used irregardless in a sentence one day. I called him on it, and he thought it was correct. And then I laughed at him. We don't speak anymore.

Worst pandering to the audience for undeserved applause: Art Garfunkel: A Heart In New York

Twice a week, I go to tumbling practice. My train starts underground, toils through the downtown stops, and then emerges victorious into the light in the Sunset district, where the first thing to greet my eyes is this. It's a really impressive mural, and I'd love it, except the artist decided to paint in a street sign referencing a nearby street. And it seems like every city mural I see does this. I hate this. There is no reason to put a street sign in this painting. None. And there are plenty of reasons no to. First of all, it's text. The eye is drawn to it, and away from the rest of the piece. Out of this whole painting spanning multiple hundreds of feet, the focal point is the single most boring bit. Also, it's a cheap, unskilled way to introduce context. It's like the artist is afraid that no one will recognize the area, even after all his hard work, so he puts in a street sign just to be sure. In this particular work, there is no danger of that. In a more general sense, if you're hiring a mural painter to do a context specific piece of work and he needs to put a street sign in so that people recognize the area, hire someone else. Because that guy has no business painting city murals.

The video I linked to is a clip from Simon & Garfunkel's Concert in the Park. This was a huge, landmark event. In Central Park. And they had the nerve to play this song, the lyrics of which are as follows:

New york, to that tall skyline I come, flyin in from london to your door
New york, lookin down on central park
Where they say you should not wander after dark

New york, like a scene from all those movies
But youre real enough to me, but theres a heart
A heart that lives in new york

A heart in new york, a rose on the street
I write my song to that city heartbeat
A heart in new york, love in her eye, an open door and a friend for the night

New york, you got money on your mind
And my words wont make a dimes worth a difference, so heres to you new york

There was no reason for this song to even have been written. Everyone writes songs about New York, and everyone has done it better than this. This looks like it belongs on a greeting card or a tombstone. That bolded bit is, predictably, where the audience bursts into applause. Why? Because it's about Central Park. Where the concert is. Where the audience is. It's not a good line. It looks like a filler line, actually. There is nothing in this song that hasn't been said thousands of times before, and if it's the instrumentation you're after, look no further than The Boxer. Same album, same concert, same general idea, but better.

Wikipedia says the blame for this waste of song writing effort belongs squarely at the door of Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle. Guys, what were you thinking?

Worst "the band has failed me" moment I've ever experienced as a fan: "Metallica": St. Anger

Metallica was the first metal band I was ever into. I was introduced to them when I was about thirteen, and I really loved them. I bought all their albums and I wore out one of their tapes (yes, tape) and then I bought it again on CD. I was all about Metallica in my teen years and so I know a bit of fan trivia that is relevant here.

Firstly, this band was getting steadily better with every album they put out. They got better and better recording engineers and as a consequence they had three albums which encapsulated collections of great songs with amazing recording quality. The sound was heavy but clean and it showcased some pretty decent musicianship. Then something went wrong and the band stopped writing songs. They released an album of covers of other stuff, and then they released an album of a concert they did with the San Francisco symphony which was basically them covering themselves, and then they stopped for a while.

Secondly, this band has issues with bassists. They've had the same vocalist and drummer since the beginning, they swapped out one guitarist (who went on to form Megadeth, so I'm not complaining) and they're on their fourth bassist, who was brought in from Ozzy Osbourne's band after that symphony album.

So, to reiterate, things I used to love about Metallica:

• lyrics. They were good. Not poetry quality, but they weren't always singing about women and I appreciated that. There was always a little bit of the Epic Metal writing in their work.
• Sound. Like I said, clean. Easy on the ears. I could hear singing. I could pick out separate instruments.
• Overall maturity. For a while it really was about the music. Not about putting fake heads on spikes for concerts or putting out albums just so they could say they were the loudest and fastest out there or (ahem) shooting an album in San Quentin prison just so they could look tough.
  

St. Anger was the first album they put out with the newest bassist, and I didn't buy it. I heard the title track and that was enough for me to give up on the band entirely. The song doesn't really have verses. It has three "choruses" that get repeated at random intervals for no particular reason. Oh, and those three bullet points up there? They're all gone. It sounds like people beating on garbage cans with baseball bats.

This is a band that I listened to nonstop for almost ten years. In that time I never got to see them live, and now I don't even want to. This isn't just bad music, this is flat out betrayal.

Worst unnecessary use of video animation to cover up band member aging: Dream Theater: Forsaken

I was recently asked what it would take for me to consider a guy gorgeous. And it's a pretty simple answer. For a guy to be gorgeous he needs to be generally good looking and at least as intelligent as I am. Looks aren't usually enough for me, but looks and brains are a lethal combination that will prompt me to do phenomenally stupid things like play Magic for 7 hours at a stretch just to watch someone else play and maybe have a chance to oppose him myself.

If we're going on looks alone, the bar gets set higher. I am firmly in the "tall, dark, and handsome" camp. I don't make any racial requirements, but long hair is a must. These traits are exemplified in this Dream Theater video by lead singer James LaBrie. (Sorry, I couldn't find photos). Sadly, this video shot in '92 or '93. Fifteen years later, James LaBrie looks like this, which isn't the same thing at all.

Now, about that Forsaken video. It's entirely animated, and the animation team decided to strip a good 4o or 50 pounds off James and give him a more lean muscled build than I ever saw him possess. What makes it really dumb, however, is that through the whole video, the James LaBrie character never speaks or sings along with the song. He doesn't open his mouth at all, other than to express a Keanu Reeves-esque confusion at life. I submit that there was no reason to make the main character resemble any member of the band. None. If they were looking for a dark, sickly figure, they might has well have modeled it off Trent Reznor, pre steriods.

Worst example of a band taking themselves far too seriously, allowing us to laugh at their expense: Kamelot: The Haunting

Good lord I wonder what this video design session sounded like.

"Our sound isn't goth enough. Our street cred is in danger. What ever shall we do?!"
"Let's shoot it in a church."
"Ooooh. Church. What will we do in a church?"
"Just walk up and down the aisles. That should be good enough."
"Really? Are you sure?"
"Fine, we'll make it blurry."
"What are we wearing?"
"Vinyl bodysuits, duh. This is a goth video, remember? Oh and that female guest vocalist has red hair. Let's put her in red vinyl."
"Oooooh."
"By the way, how long is this song?"
"At least five minutes. You want the singer to just walk up and down a church for five minutes?"
"Hrmm... Let's put a swing in. And four costume changes for the sexay female singer."
"Uhhh..."
"Oh, and lots of face lip-sync closeups. YEAH! "
"That still doesn't get us anywhere near five minutes."
"Your girl is good looking, we'll just shoot her on a white background and she can vamp like an idiot for three of them. No one will ever notice."
"Ok, but the girl is a guest singer. How about some focus on *our* singer?"
"Fine, closeups of him too. But only if he shaves his beard like Paul Jr. from Orange County Choppers."
"But...but... won't he look like a scrawny motorcycle guy singing dumb lyrics in a vinyl body suit in a blurry church?"

Yes. Yes he will. Oh my god.

I do my housework in heels.

I have my reasons, and they're good ones. I should point out that when I say I do my housework in heels, I do mean just heels. No skirts and blouses and 1950's curled bob. Just heels, PJ bottoms, and a sweatshirt. But, the bottom line is that cleaning time is spent vacuuming in high heels, and I'm a bit disgusted with myself for it.

I don't actually wear high heels often. Never to work, and rarely out on Saturday nights. I'm not conditioned enough. Within two hours my feet are sore and I end up either limping with blisters or carrying my shoes while walking barefoot on the street. (I've decided that a great guy is one who, when I decide to forsake my shoes in favor of stocking feet in the rain, has nothing to say other than a concerned comment about how my pantyhose may not survive the night. I really didn't want to talk about how much my feet hurt. I just wanted to get where we were going.)

I didn't always do this. It all fell apart about two months ago. I sprained my ankle. Badly. There was crying and screaming and hysterics and shock, and then a lot of swelling and funny colors. It's still swollen and still weak and I desperately need to exercise it. So, along with the toe raises and the ice and the stretching and everything else, I've started putzing around the house in heels.

I mentioned this to The Coworker recently, and he immediately wanted pictures. He was envisioning me "all done up in Anne Taylor", Stepford-wife style, and he viewed it as photo-worthy. I explained about the PJs and sweats while at the same time doing an inner victory dance.

The Coworker couldn't have known this, but his comment hearkened back to high school, when I used to dress up in "normal" clothes for Halloween. I'd been worried lately that even with the carpet skates, I was viewed as mainstream and boring. Fortunately, those fears have now been allayed. No normal person in Anne Taylor is seen as a photo op. And these days, normal people probably don't clean their houses in high heels.

It's pronounced "wuddah"

It was unseasonably hot last week, hitting a high of 95 on Thursday. It is also the beginning of tourist season, and the area right near my office is packed with people all day. The combination of the Ferry Building, the farmer's market, and the ferry port itself create a huge tourist draw all day every day. The Ferry building is also a favorite lunch spot of the people who work in the area, and it has a gelato shop.

Gelato appears to be the primary defense against heat in this city, and this week there have been gelato trips after lunch, gelato imported into meetings, meetings in the Ferry Building by the gelato stand, and so on. It's still a relatively new thing for me. I can remember one gelato shop in the Exton mall which I never went to. I didn't have gelato until I went to Italy last summer, and then I got spoiled on the stuff.

By Thursday, I had had my fill of gelato for the week. It was too rich for that kind of heat. So...

"Hey team, are there any water-ice shops around here?"
"What?"
"Water-ice."
"What?"

There were actually two things going on here. The first is that apparently my accent gets completely out of control when I say "water-ice" and I'm hard to understand if my listeners aren't used to the short-voweled, blue collar sound.

"Oh, wah-ter ice. I heard wuddah ice."

And then, once we got past that hurdle...

"What's water-ice?"

With some difficulty, I refrained from making comments about the uncultured heathens of the west.

"It's sort of like a snow-cone, only softer. Softer than gelato, no cream."

"So it's like sorbet, then?"

"No, softer than that."

"Like a slushie?"

"No, definitely not like a slushie. The flavor is better, you eat it with a spoon, it's a less homogeneous texture..." A lightbulb goes on in my head. "Slush! It's exactly like the slush you get on roadways when it's almost melted but not quite." A sea of polite but confused eyes stares back. I can almost hear the inner monologues. We must humor the crazy woman. She is talking about eating 'slush' off the road. It's the heat. She's lost it. "...except you don't have slush here, so you have no idea what I'm talking about." Ignorant, uncultured heathens.

"It sounds like sorbet. That's not that exciting."

"It's different than sorbet."

"Well it sounds boring."

Ignorant uncultured dirty hippy tree-hugging foodie-wannabe heathen savages....

I've had a few of these East-West culture clashes, and they always leave me wondering if I'm really just crazy. Fortunately, I do have one ally: my PM, who grew up in New Jersey, and who happened to be walking by at the right time.

"PM, do you know what water-ice is?"

"What, Italian ice? Sure."

"Is there any to be had around here?"

"Hmm.... no."

So if you were just waiting for the opportunity to move west and make millions, you've got it right here. Just open a Rita's next to the ferry port on the bay. You'll have no competition from anyone.

Epilogue: The next day was better. I found a real, honest-to-god, cheese steak place behind my office. They use Amaroso rolls and Cheez Whiz.

In defense of the mess

I'm supposed to be in Vegas right now. I'm not there, and I won't be there in the foreseeable future, and there's a long story behind all of this which is too boring for words, but the point is that I was supposed to fly out tonight and not come back until Saturday and even though that is no longer in the cards, I still have tomorrow and Friday off.

I was also supposed to be taking motorcycle lessons next weekend. See that past tense back there? That insidious 'was', which until about 2pm today was an 'am'? Reader, you are smart and logical, and I have faith that you can see where this is going.

My parents, however, are still arriving a week from Saturday to visit me for a day or two before heading up to Yosemite. So it is, in fact, very good that all my plans for the next few weekends are wrecked and I have some unforeseen time off which will be spent at home cleaning in preparation for the arrival of my parents.

I have a bit of a history with cleaning, the way my dad has a bit of a history with Rubik's cubes and Oscar has a bit of a history with Felix (although my walls are spaghetti-free for the moment. Antipathy is a learned skill).

My room was never clean growing up. It just didn't seem like a useful way to spend my time. There was enough stuff in my room that even when it was clean, it was cluttered, and it never stayed clean anyway. On one particularly memorable occasion, a neighbor complimented me on the sculptural qualities of the clothing spilling out of my bureau. Occasionally, I'd reach the pile stage, in which the surface area of the stuff on the floor exceeded the surface area of the viable walking space. At this point, Words were exchanged.

I'm sure that my mom offered up more than a few arguments in favor of keeping my room clean, but the one that I remember was, "It's impossible to walk in here!" This was an interesting one because it wasn't entirely true. It was only impossible for anyone else to walk in my room. I managed it quite well because I always knew where everything was. Even at three in the morning in the dark, I could navigate quite well among the hazards that my bedroom floor held for the unwary.

(It occurs to me now that I should clarify the difference between messy, which I am, and dirty, which I am not. Mess equals clutter, and dirt equals life forms. There is no mildew in my bathroom and my kitchen is safe to cook in, although there might be a suspect tupperware in the fridge.)

The big difference between living in my parents' house and living in my own place is that I had basically one room back home. It was a constant wreck, but I kept the door closed, and I tried to keep my clutter out of the rest of the house. But now I've been allowed to spread out. I can't just close one door to hide my homemaking flaws, because all the stuff in this apartment belongs to me. It's all my mess.

In terms of severity, it's not at the pile stage. Not event close. Just cluttered. But you know how it is when the parents visit. You want to give them some sort of reassurance that you can take care of yourself at least adequately, if perhaps not as well as they did. So I will spend some of my long weekend with a vacuum and mop as I try to resolve my cleaning initiative with the other problem of living alone:

Strange noises.

Let me just say that I don't do well with the unknown. I give irrational, baseless fears a lot more credence than they really deserve and when it comes right down to it, I am absolutely spineless, especially in the dark. Strange noises at night will have me lying wide awake in bed, terrified of what might be going on just 2 rooms away. And getting up to go check on things is absolutely out of the question because I might find something. No good. I can tell myself all I want that that creak was just the house settling, or the random tapping is the bush being blown against the window, but I don't actually know this for sure because I just don't know the place well enough. And I live on a very quiet street. There isn't any ambient noise, so I hear everything. I've found the solution is, since my rational mind knows nothing is wrong, to put another pillow over my ears so that I stop hearing things and freaking myself out. But I'm pretty sure the only reason that works is because my apartment is cluttered enough that no actual trouble could happen without me knowing about it. It's like stacking cans in front of a door as an early warning alarm system, except that my defenses are *everywhere*. You might avoid crushing a game system or getting your ankles all tangled up in the laundry I was sorting in front of the TV, but that just means you'll stub your toe on the easel or go face first into my magic cards when you miss the step in the library.

In deference to my parents, and to any other guests who might show up, I'll clean this weekend. I'll do it well. Chemicals will be involved. But you best watch your step coming in the front door, because I probably left a shoe or three scattered around as a trap for the unwary.

That word... I do not think it means what you think it means

A few weekends ago, I got invited to a... get ready for it... tea party. No joke. A friend from work is a member of a gossip blog which was having a gathering for its San Francisco chapter. They decided to have their event at a combined polo shop and tea house near my apartment. J and I had never been and didn't quite know where it was, but fortunately the shop owners had placed a fake life sized horse outside the door. It was a bit of a tip-off.

The party was enjoyable. We were in an enclosed outdoor garden in back with sun umbrellas, tea, wine, and tea sandwiches for a good 4 hours. And I met quite a few interesting people. The vast majority of the attendees were women and I got to talking with one in particular. I never caught her name, so we'll call her SciFi Sally, because she and I share a lot of tastes in books, scifi and fantasy in particular.

Sally was probably 40ish, which encompasses the range from 35 to 55, because I'm a terrible judge of age. She seemed fairly normal, other than her taste in books. She was a professional of some sort, she dressed well, she spoke with eloquence, and she could discuss literature with more than a modicum of intelligence.

It turns out that I have no patience for people who try to impress me without doing some research. Sally made this mistake. We were talking about restaurants. I love going out to eat at high end restaurants. It's not about pretending to be important or rich for a night; it's about the food. There are very few more satisfying ways to end a work week than by going to Boulevard for some braised short ribs and good wine.

I guess this didn't come across to Sally though. Or maybe it was the rock and roll jeans I was wearing. Or maybe she is really just like this all the time and it wasn't about me at all. Her contribution to this conversation was: "Oh yes, I love going to nice restaurants. I love going with my subversive friends and just being subversive in the upscale places." And I gotta say, I had some trouble with this. Her thought process seemed to be along the lines of "Ooooh young person. Must impress the young person with how cool and hip I am."

I'm not averse to being impressed. I love being swept off my feet, and never more than when someone blows me away with how smart they are. Her statement begs the question, "So, when you say you're subversive, what does that mean?" Unfortunately, the answer was, "Oh, we're just there. Just the act of us being there is subversive." Oh really?

(You know how you get to a point in a conversation where you're so disenchanted with what the other person is saying that you start needling them out of sheer boredom? "I gotta say, I'm not really into the subversive thing anymore. I mean, it was cool once, but I've outgrown it. It's a little immature, don't you think?" Sorry Mom, Dad, and Miss Manners.)

That's not subversive.

Getting a good chunk of your coworkers to equip themselves with Carpet Slides? That's subversive.

I was surfing the net on Monday and found this article and video. They amused me. I sent them to a coworker, saying "We need these." I was half kidding. Only half kidding, but there was a definite joke element there. I got back a "HELL YES!!"

Long story short, the video went around the office, and we bought all of Amazon's stock (they had next day delivery, and we needed them RIGHT NOW). And now, we have carpet skates.

I know you're all waiting for a video, but the time line looks like this: Monday -- order carpet skates. Tuesday -- carpet skates arrive. Monday night -- sustain horrible ankle sprain, severely limiting my ability to test the carpet slides. I'm getting better though. Hopefully by next week, I'll have some tricks worked out.

Unfortunately, there were not enough pairs at Amazon to satisfy the needs of the office, and I think one of the guys who couldn't get a pair was jealous. He's started a tally of Carpet Skate WipeOuts. We're up to 4, the most spectacular of which occurred when a Carpet Skate newbie (even newer than the rest of us) decided that for his first jump, he'd try to clear a trash can. I think he was going for 360 degree rotation as well. The resulting crash was amazingly dramatic.

Up until now, you've been thinking, "Yes Hal, this is cool, but this is what software developers do anyway. It's not subversive. It's just sort of dumb and cute." Firstly, I entreat the naysayers to trust me just a little bit. You've seen some of the more dramatic tricks, but you haven't seen the subtleties of movement that these suckers offer. With barely a push off one toe, you can do a casual sideways slide for about 3 feet. Now, you don't just go to meetings, you arrive at meetings, Arthur Fonzarelli style. You are just that cool.

Secondly, y'all don't know about the pocket bikes and the crazy PM with the toolkit.

One of the other teams has a pair of what they call pocket bikes. They are electric motorcycles, probably 1/4 scale, and they're actually ride-able indoors. They don't emit exhaust, as far as I can tell. Occasionally you'll see people zipping up and down aisles on the bikes.

Except that right now, the bikes are both broken. One was working up until a few days ago when someone got all macho with the throttle and broke the handle.

Also, we have this PM, who is, for lack of a better descriptor, an experience. He's very upbeat and happy and likes to get his hands dirty. He looked at the Carpet Skates and looked at the pocket bikes and immediately envisioned a motocross/waterski scenario. Upon hearing that the bikes were out of commission, he immediately vowed to bring in his own toolkit to fix them personally so that we can have carpet skiing competitions.

The lesson to take away here, obviously, is that if you're going to talk to me about being subversive in restaurants, then I want to hear stories about you not only carpet skiing through the dining area, but then subsequently convincing the wait staff that all meals should arrive via carpet skiing waiter.

From Merriam Webster:

subvert (transitive verb): to overturn or overthrow from the foundation

Balance Beams: Composure-shattering floor substitute or convenient unit of measurement?

It was a big weekend in San Francisco for me. Yesterday I did battle on two fronts simultaneously, and I was victorious in both.

The first was the dreaded San Francisco driving. When it came time to find an apartment, my mom came out for a week and rented a car, and she and I spent a few days driving around all of San Francisco, visiting apartments and buying brooms and mops and a bed, and I very carefully refrained from posting about any of it.

The thing is, driving as a whole didn't go so well that week. Stop signs and traffic lights came out of nowhere. There was a lot to pay attention to, and a lot of new dynamics, such as cable cars and bicycle lanes, that just aren't part of driving in Malvern. San Franciscans also have a terrifying propensity for double parking, often for hours at a time. It took 2 of us paying full attention to everything in order to drive safely. We didn't get into any accidents but it was thrilling nevertheless.

The only reason I'm willing to bring this into the public light now is because it turns out it's not just us. A few months ago, an old housemate (who grew up in the Northeast) was out in SF for a few weeks, and he and his girlfriend and Chris and I spent a day in his Zipcar doing a scenic drive around the city. And it was like house hunting all over again. Stop signs were missed, wrong turns were made, and I'm pretty sure we went down at least one one-way street the wrong way.

All of this had me scared enough that I had no desire to drive in the city whatsoever. I didn't think I'd be able to do it. But Zipcar memberships are free, and oddly enough, I felt slightly more confident about my abilities after reflecting on the housemate driving experience. Because, from my vantage point in the back seat, I'd seen all the stoplights and signs miles away, even though no one else did.

This all brings us to yesterday, when I got invited to a party in Mountain View, which is about 40 - 50 minutes south by car, or 2 hours by public transit. I decided it was time to try out my Zipcar membership and dig up my navigation skills and drive down to the party rather than suffer through the public transit commute.

I am both old fashioned and minimalist when it comes to navigating while driving. I glare with disdain upon GPS navigation systems, and I have a well honed take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards maps if I'm not going more than an hour away. Armed with nothing more than a scrap of written directions, I set out.

(The car review: I was in a Mazda 3 automatic with that fake manual "Tiptronic" transmission, should I desire to shift "manually". Great car, corners beautifully, fast acceleration in automatic mode. However, the driver's seat is low and it did absolutely nothing for my back, and it doesn't have the anti-rollback feature that some automatics do. It started sliding backwards when I started from a stop sign on a steep hill, and then I gunned it and then there was tire screeching, but that only happened once. Also, it's really really quiet. Overall, quite a pleasant little sporty sedan.)

And the trip down was uneventful. After I'd gotten used to driving in general (it's been a while) and driving in SF (didn't take as long as I feared) I made it to the party with only one wrong turn and subsequent phone call to the host. I proclaimed victory over driving and enjoyed the party, until it came time to leave.

One of the other people at this party joked that Zipcar is an especially wonderful thing when visiting the in-laws, because the driver has a deadline by which the car must be returned, on penalty of $50/hr late fees and a membership suspension that could last months. "Oh we're so sorry, but we just can't stay any longer. Our Zipcar reservation is about to end." etc. So I had diligently studied the trip time and set my phone alarm accordingly.

The trip down only took about an hour, door to door, but I gave myself a luxurious 3 hours to make it back because I realized that right near the party location was...an IKEA. With bookshelves.

A short recap of the bookshelf scenario: when I moved out here, I brought all my books along with 2 sets of shelves to hold them all. I didn't have any extra shelf space, but it worked. Then one set of shelves collapsed, and then I went to a used book sale and went nuts and bought 30 books. I was in serious bookshelf debt, and it was getting slowly worse (well I'm not going to let a little thing like lack of storage space stop me from buying books. That would be wrong). Anyway, the problem has been growing since September, and yesterday I figured that as long as I had a car and I was going to be near the IKEA, I should really do something about it.

I knew exactly the shelf unit I wanted before I ever walked in. I'd had my eye on it for months. So many months that since I first glimpsed it, the price has dropped 20 percent. It's real wood, not particle board, and it's dark and masculine and gorgeous (and it looks like this: Markor).

I arrived at IKEA, wandered down to the self service furniture section, pulled the box onto my cart, and headed for the check out. And then I froze. I thought of the books lining the walls of my library. I'd put them in a neat little line against the baseboards when the rebellious shelving unit had collapsed. And then I thought of the box full of books in the library. I'd pulled some of the volumes that don't get read as often off the remaining functional shelves so I'd have room for some new additions. The anxiety steadily mounting, I recalled the books under my TV (which arrived after the big book sale). And when, finally, a vision, unbidden, arose of the pile of books next to my bed, which threatened to dwarf the bedside table*, I was faced with a heart stopping, rictus-of-terror inducing prospect: What is one set of shelves isn't enough?

I stood motionless with indecision for a full 5 minutes, contemplating the possibilities. I wasn't averse to owning more shelves, but buying more shelves was a little different. That was a far more expensive proposition, to say nothing of the dicey-ness of getting both sets of shelves in the car. I wasn't even positive the first would fit. And the more astute readers might have noticed that the unit I'd picked out came in a single 87 lb. box which would have to somehow be transported up a full flight of stairs to get to my apartment. (I'd known this going in. And I'd tried to recruit some grunt help at the last minute, but it didn't happen. I was trying to remember if I'd ever attempted to carry something so heavy. "Hmm... 87 pounds... Balance beams! I used to carry those around the gym, they're about that weight. Oooh, and canoes. Canoes are what, 75 pounds? I can handle those without too many problems. I'm tough, I can do it. RAR!" Yes, girls too can do the macho shithead thing when pressed.) Even the macho shithead in me wasn't at all jazzed about having to do the stair climb twice.

The economist in me wasn't too keen on dropping another 40 or 50 bucks to rent another Zipcar and drive back down to IKEA for another set of shelves if it could be avoided, however. So, figuring there was no real way I'd get these beasts in my car, but willing to try anyway, I grabbed the second set, checked out, and headed for the car.

Amazingly enough, both sets fit without problems. Even more astonishingly, my body lived up to my bravado and I got the stupid things up the stupid stairs and in through the stupid door with minimal issue.

I assembled one set last night and the other this morning. And yes, I needed both. There were only two hiccups in the shelf experience. One is that I haven't had to use a screw driver on real wood in years, and I'd forgotten how much more resistance solid birch offers than particle board. And these shelves have a ridiculous number of screws. At the end of the first set, my whole right arm below the elbow was sore. And now that I've done the second set, I'm worried I'll have blisters on my hands.

The other issue is that I'm missing a shelf. One of the sets was short a piece of wood that would normally form the bottom shelf in one of the shelf compartments. Fortunately, installing those is the last step of the shelves so when the replacement gets here in about a week, it will be easy enough to fix. I won't have to take apart the whole thing to do it.

The whole bookshelf experience gives me cause to reflect on living alone. It's strange, not being able to yell up the stairs for assembly assistance. And I was really concerned that I wouldn't be able to actually get the things in the house and put together without help. But I did nevertheless, and since I can't go out and kill a buffalo barehanded, this will have to stand as my testament to my ability to take care of myself. Be warned: my ego is back.

*My bedside table is cooler than yours. It is a Mongolian chafing dish, I think. I found it in a furniture store while I was solving the problem of the dining room table. It's copper and beautiful and it has gorgeous and ornate handles. So there.

He Never Returned

I never did the bar thing in college. I couldn't stand them. I didn't like beer and I didn't like trying to have conversations that sounded like shouting matches. And the cigarette smoke. I really REALLY didn't like the smoke.

However, I am no longer in college. I can order non-beer drinks. San Francisco has a smoking ban. And last weekend, my fashion consultant taught me how to get around the volume problem.

I call her the Fashion Consultant because she makes me look good. She owns a consignment shop near my house, and I go in on the weekends and play dress-up, and she gives good advice. So I buy my clothes from her, and occasionally we go out.

Last weekend, we were bored. We were both in our own separate funks and sick of winter and restless. We decided to solve the problem with dinner at a mediterranean grill down the street. And then the Fashion Consultant suggested we go to a bar in the Castro. But not just any bar. A piano bar.

We walked in and it was pretty great. There was a grand piano covered in brass plate metal, with chairs all around it. The pianist was taking requests, and occasionally a spectator would sing. And this was not karaoke bar drunken warbling. This was practiced, well honed beauty.

The thing that sealed it for me though was the song being performed when we arrived. It's a song I hadn't heard in at least 20 years. I don't know who wrote it or who performed it or what the instrumentation was. I do know it's possibly called "MTA" and my dad used to sing me to sleep with it.

I will never be famous

One of the best compliments I ever got was when I was about 18, in high school. A guy whom I sort of knew from classes was, for reasons I can no longer remember, motivated to say to me, "Someday, you're going to be famous and I'm going to be able to say I knew you." The compliment itself is pretty great, but what made it even more meaningful to me was the fact that it came from a guy who was pretty popular at the time. Because I definitely wasn't. I'm not going to get into specifics here, but I was not interested in earning the adulation of my classmates and made no effort to better my image in their eyes. I have no patience for drug-addled, empty-headed twits so it was unfortunate that they comprised most of my senior class. This guy Jay may or may not have been into weekend chemistry, but he certainly wasn't empty-headed.

So it is with great sadness that I must now make the following announcement. Jay, I'm sorry, but I will never be famous. Ever.

This is not a fear or a prediction. It is a vow.

The back story (yes there's a story, of course there's a story) goes like this. Last week, an outdoor ice skating rink opened right across the street from my office. It's great. It's about 60 degrees outside, which makes it perfect skating weather. I've been spending every possible lunch hour skating since it opened.

Either no one has figured out that it's open, or San Franciscans just don't skate because my blade-footed compatriots have topped out at a grand total of 5. There's nothing quite like having a rink pretty much all to myself to mess around in. It spoils me to no end, and I can't get enough of it.

The pesky downside of all this is that this rink is situated in a small park, next to a bunch of lunch spots and outdoor tables. And wouldn't you know it, my lunch hour coincides with everyone else's lunch hour. My skating time is a floor show for a bunch of tie-strangled yuppies shoveling bad pizza and worse teriyaki into their mouths in a manner reminiscent of a shop-vac attacking a pile of compost.

And they are not alone. Not even close. They are joined by the Dreaded Photo Students.

Let's back up a bit and lay down some small but crucial background information. I don't like being stared at. It makes me really uncomfortable, because for one thing, I never know why it happens. If I notice that I'm attracting undue attention, I'll do the usual inventory of teeth-checking and hair smoothing and clothes-examination and then I'll still have no answers. Of course the only reasonable response on my part is to delve deep into the bowels of the human psyche in a vaguely directed attempt to figure out what mental process would trigger this sort of unabashed ocular vulgarity, and that never leads anywhere good. My understanding of the human condition as it applies to the rest of the population is, at best, one step removed from popular consensus. (in a rare and ultimately doomed attempt to explain my outlook on life to one of my friends, I once said, "It's a real trip, being me." Basically, I meant that fairly often, and we're talking several times a day here, I'll reflect on something I've just said or done and go What the f...? Who DOES this? Like the time I hiked to the top of the really big and really sandy hill on Ocean Beach in my new black velvet trench coat. Or for that matter, the fact that I own a black velvet trench coat with a leopard print lining. What the f...?) Anyway. The point is that I start trying to deconstruct the mental states of random crazy people and that never goes anywhere good. I don't come up with healthy, normal lines of reasoning like, for example, the fact that I might be attractive to at least some of them. Or now, with the short and blue zebra striped hair, a bit distinctive. Oh no. No, I conjure up such searingly sensible hypotheses as...actually, no I don't. I never actually come up with a reason. I just wonder. And it creeps me out.

And now, back to the Dreaded Photo Students, whom, you'll recall, prompted this whole train of thought in the first place. As bad as the staring is, it is sickeningly amplified in conjunction with a telephoto camera lens. Because people with cameras pan. Panning, for those less literate in the intricacies of photography, is a technique employed in the photographing of a moving subject. If part of the frame are moving sufficiently fast, they will blur when captured on film. If you hold the camera still, your subject will blur. And this is no good. You will end up with a beautifully exposed background and a big smudge in the middle. So the alternative is to follow the subject with your camera, and you will get the opposite effect: your background will blur but your subject will be in focus.

Returning from the world of photo theory to real life, this means when I am skating, there are a bunch of very obvious camera lenses following my every move. And, let us not forget that I am a Student Of Art. (Real life was fun, wasn't it? Leave it behind, as you are about to violently catapulted into the World Of Art.) In case you have been negligent in your art theory studies in recent years, the current trend is to attribute a phallic subtext to everything. And not just everything in art. Nonono, absolutely everything. Neckties, the Washington Monument, umbrellas, wine bottles... clearly, clearly, these are artifacts of a misogynistic male-dominated society in which the number one aesthetic priority is to constantly assert the superiority and ubiquitousness of the male apparatus. Now, armed with your new knowledge of the number one guiding principle of product design for the last 300 years, reconsider my experience of being obviously panned by something like twenty very long and sizable camera lenses. Got it? Yeah. It's a real trip being me.

And this is just my experience. Now imagine what it must be like to be, say, Nancy Kerrigan. The camera lenses must number in the thousands. Celebrity is for other people. People who are more equipped to handle thousands of phallic camera lenses.

Shameless Gloating About My Friday Night

Friday night, a coworker and I went out to see a movie after work. (Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Excellent stuff. I highly recommend it.) And after the movie, despite resolutions made earlier in the day of getting sleep that night, we went to a bar.

This particular coworker grew up in California, went to college at Berkeley, and as far as I know, except for a brief stint in New York, has stayed there since. He knows the area quite well, he's got a list of his favorite haunts a mile long, (and these are good haunts, by the way. Not the local-bowling-alley-that-everyone-knows-about type haunts, but the "go in and blow straight past the hostess and head down a small nondescript hallway to the left to the secret elevator which you take to the r0of to get to the rooftop restaurant with an unparalleled view of the city and by the way it's 68 degrees and there's just enough fog to make everything spectacularly beautiful and to top it all off you got there early enough to get a table and can mercilessly mock everyone who has to stand" type haunts.) and we share some interests. This puts him at the top of my List Of People To Get To Know For The Purposes Of Learning New Things.

I'm not completely without a conscience. First of all, like I said, The Coworker and I are into a lot of the same things. We do legitimately have fun when we hang out. So I'm pretty sure I'm not imposing an undue burden on him. And I've got something he wants. Bargaining chips, as it were. In this case, my desirable assets are my books, movies, music, and the people skills necessary to figure him out enough that I can introduce him to my multimedia paradise in a way that makes sense and will be enjoyable (if you have ever tried to get someone else hooked on Tool, you know how hard this can be).

The end result is that I spend a fair amount of time scheming ways to get him to show me more of the city. Though after Friday, I might just let events run their natural course.

Friday we went to a bar of The Coworker's choosing. And The Coworker has a flair for the dramatic, because all of the places we go involve navigating through secret entrances or back alleys and generally escaping the beaten path. This particular bar involved the requisite back alley in the middle of the financial district with the added bonus of carefully threading our way through a collection of large dumpsters and vehicles scattered all over the road and the sidewalk. So I honestly had no idea where we were headed, which meant that I was totally unprepared for what I saw when we actually arrived.

We turned a corner and I was in Greece. The bar was all lit up with outdoor tables and lights everywhere and full of people. It might even have been on a cobblestone side street, although I think I'm making that up. I've seen many such places in Greece and Italy and France, and never in the States. I couldn't believe it.

The bar is actually an Irish bar with...get ready for it... a confessional. They ripped it out of a church and put it in the bar with a few benches and a small table. It's the best place to sit because it's quite comfortable for 2 people and it isolates you from the rest of the bar, so you can actually hold a conversation and not worry about some idiot wildly gesturing into your drink.

But wait, it gets better.

At this point, it's probably about midnight. We're in the confessional, talking about random stuff, and we start talking about food and cooking and...something. I don't remember what something was. It might have been my cooking or a restaurant I'd been to or something else, but whatever it was, it wasn't as good as Alice Waters, and I said so.

"[something] isn't as good as Alice Waters, but it's passable."

"Alice...who?" And he asked this not as if he hadn't heard, but as if he hadn't quite believed what he'd heard.

"Alice Waters."

"You know who Alice Waters is?"

Yes, I do know who Alice Waters is. She's a very famous chef and restaurant owner who has been getting a lot of press lately. She's all about quality food, fresh and local, and I have read nothing but good things about her. She recently figured prominently in an interesting article in the New York Times, and so she's been on my mind a bit, which is probably why I picked her as my basis of comparison to whatever it was I was talking about about. Good thing I did.

I was running all this through my head, trying to figure out why it might be so important, why The Coworker would also know about Alice Waters, etc. And then it hit me. Her restaurant. Chez Panisse. It's in Berkeley. Where The Coworker currently resides.

Long story short, he's also into food in a big way. We're so going to Chez Panisse.

Will the Man With the Green Aliens Please Stand Up?

As some of you are aware, I have a prints account on deviantArt. It's a blissful thing. A few years ago I paid a one time fee to start an account. In return, they handle every aspect of selling prints, from printing to shipping to collecting payment. I just sit back and wait for the money to come rolling in.

I've been waiting since 2004 with nothing much to show. I've sold a print here and there, but the profit margins are pretty low, so I haven't earned much. And I haven't actually been paid anything because dA will not mail you a check until you've earned at least $20. Like I said, the profit margins are slim.

Well that all changed today. I got an email saying that my check has been mailed. It turns out someone, or a few someones, bought prints recently, pushing my profits up to a check-mailing level.

This wouldn't be a blog post if that were the end of the story. The point here is that I am a moron. I forgot to update my mailing address when I moved. It didn't even cross my mind. So some CMU kid is going to get my check in his SMC. I have emailed dA so hopefully now that they have the correct address they will resend the check.

P.S. If you happened to be one of the buyers that triggered today's events, first of all, thanks! And secondly, please please please tell me how the print looks when it arrives. The prints that sold most recently are ones that I haven't seen before, so I want to know if they look good. If not, let me know and I'll make it right.

Glee!

If the library post wasn't enough of a tip off, I have a problem with books. I like them too much. Bookstores make me weak in the knees. All sense is abandoned the moment I enter one. I buy books the way fashion victims buy ugly clothes. I like to think that my books are more meaningful than a polyester bubble skirt, but this is small consolation.

Compounding the problem is the bookshelf dilemma of which I've already spoken. I simply do not have the space to store books.

One might hope that, under the circumstances, I'd take appropriate precautions to avoid exacerbating either situation. And normally it's not hard. I don't live near any book stores. There are a few near work but they're not close enough to pose any real threat. I always forget they exist. Since I've moved here, my main monetary temptation has been not books at all, but the consignment shop that set itself down between my apartment and my bus stop.

However, today it all went wrong. I went to a book sale. And not just any book sale. It was The Big Book Sale, held annually in a gigantic warehouse by Fisherman's Wharf. The posters advertised upwards of 300,000 books to be sold. It was a three day sale and today was the last day, so all the books were less than $1.

The proprietors are smart. They don't mess around with baskets or bags for their patrons. You walk in and deck yourself out with a shopping cart. I suppose there's some sense in that. The warehouse was twice the size of my local grocery store. And the products were cheaper.

Having optimistically foregone even a backpack for transporting these suckers home, I tried to limit myself. I attempted a bit of triage. But the problem is simply that if you shove a book in my hands, almost any book, and ask me if I'd buy it for a dollar, the answer is probably yes. My friend J found this out today as she started shoving books into my arms which I absolutely had to read. She was forgiven for this; they look like good books, and she brought a car and was willing to drive me home.

I learned today that I do some strange things when books are available on the cheap. I've discovered that I am capable of homesick book acquisition syndrome: I buy books because they were in my parents' house. I offer up the following for your consideration:

The New York Times Cook Book - Having been an avid Times reader for quite some time, I am quite confident that the recipes contained herein are wonderful. I'm sure they're full of merit and no doubt will bring me much pleasure should I ever try to execute one. However, I have absolutely no idea what's in this book. I didn't even crack it open before I bought it. It landed in the cart because for as long as I can remember, it has occupied a coveted spot next to The Joy of Cooking in my parents' house. That spot is desirable not for its company but for the fact that it is in the kitchen, ready to be whipped out at a moment's notice if needed. My parents have plenty of cookbooks, and most of them sit pristine in the living room waiting to intimidate less culinarily inclined guests, 2 rooms away. I would suspect a certain quiet smugness on the part of my parents for this except that our neighbors all cook excellently as well (they have a club expressly for this purpose) and while three books of Indian cooking technique might bring terror to the hearts of mere mortals, the members of the Stonehenge Gourmet are not so easily unnerved*.

The New New Thing - This has been consistently lying around our house for the last few years. Or months. Whatever. It was published recently, and I know my dad has been talking about it to other people. I don't remember what my dad says about the book, or to whom he says it, but if it starts that many conversations, it's worth a read. My dad likes to read current writing on various industries of interest to him, such as the news industry or the tech sector. More often than not, our living room coffee tables** are covered with volumes delving into anything from the history of cryptography and code breaking to the study of internet search.

Martha Stewart's Christmas - Let it be noted that this book was published in 1989, well before Ms. Stewart became the embodiment of vilified perfection she is today (though I believe, even then, she was publicly hated and privately envied for her disgustingly perfect homemaking). For quite some time, this book also basked in limelight above the microwave. I think it has been relegated to the dark cabinets in the study with the cookie cutters, but it is reliably reintroduced to the glory of the kitchen every Christmas for The Great Gingerbread Event (which deserves its own post, so look for that closer to the holidays). I was quite excited to find it and I was gaily reliving many past Christmases as I showed J the Gingerbread House To End All Gingerbread Houses with the gold leafed roof. A woman next to me overheard this conversation and promptly started in with the typical Martha comments: "She probably mined the gold herself." etc. Ms. Stewart would be quite disappointed I'm sure, to hear that this woman was unaware that there is, in fact, more than one cook book by Martha Stewart. For though there were no others at the book sale, I know that in our house, the gingerbread undertaking requires not just Martha Stewart's Christmas, but Martha Stewart's Pies & Tarts as well. For whatever reason, the gingerbread formulas in each are different, and over the years my mom has added various footnotes and post-its with to both with invaluable information. So the yearly gingerbread ritual begins with the Retrieval Of The Recipes, followed immediately by the Deciphering Of The Margin Notes, occasionally accompanied by the Scraping Off Of The Old Gingerbread Dough, and finally the Argument About Which Recipe To Use. I think my mom actually has a set favorite, but I can never remember which one it is.

The photos above represent my haul. They also represent $31. So from a monetary perspective, I did more than alright. I just don't know where I'm going to put them.

*I had great hopes and dreams for the end of that sentence, but their realization relied on the presence of another book: The Smart People's Thesaurus. I discovered it hidden away on my bookshelves as I was packing to move. It was a gift to me years ago, and I had foolishly forgotten about it, instead spending many frustrated hours in the following years paging through other less exalted sources of synonyms. Its rediscovery a few months ago led to great rejoicing on my part and a fearsome vow to never let this unparalleled volume go neglected again. Well, now I can't find it. It's here somewhere because I remember packing it, but it must be in hiding to spite me.

**Yes, coffee tableS, plural. And they're all covered in books. Not coffee table books, but meaty, intelligent pieces of writing that will make you smarter for having read them. And that doesn't begin to address the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that cover one wall. I think the ceiling is twenty feet. The shelves aren't quite that high, but they're close. And there are plenty of overstuffed pieces of furniture and a working fireplace. I miss the living room.

Best. Bookcover. Ever

I have made it a point to do at least one fun and adventurous thing every weekend. These aren't hugely exciting moments, but I'm new here and low level characters can't go around tackling turasks. We have to be content with field mice and rabid bats until we level up a few times.

Saturday's goal was the library. And, as an aside, in my world it is pronounced 'liiiiiiiiiiii-berry!' with all the kid-in-a-candy-store inflection implied in an impending visit to a 6 story monument to Free Books For All! I love libraries.

I had never been to the San Francisco Library, but I was running out of DVDs to watch and until I wise up enough to put the "Books" line item in my monthly budget, the library is much safer than Barnes and Noble. Also, as you may remember, I am already in bookshelf debt, and I'm fast running out of interim storage space on my floor. So I set off in search of free books and obscure art documentaries.

I grew up in a suburb. Our library was three rooms of books over the local police station. I remember going in there every few days and talking to the same librarian every time. Most of my elementary school existence was in the library. It was probably about a mile and a half from our house, and I'd walk down there armed with a backpack to carry the eight or twelve books I'd eventually check out. I went back last winter in anticipation of a 4 day beach New Year's, and my librarian is still there. And she looks exactly the same as she did fifteen years ago. Big glasses, gray hair, and pink sparkle lipstick.

I was completely unprepared for the monolith I arrived at when I got off the subway. The lobby reminded me of the Louvre. After a lengthy library card acquisition process, I headed up to the fourth(!) floor to browse the DVD selection. I've been avoiding Blockbuster and Netflix thus far, and after watching an amazing cuban guitar concert (Nights of Fire, by Benise. Check it out) I decided I was in the mood for some art documentaries. The library coughed up a fascinating Andy Goldsworthy video and a Cirque du Soleil performance.

As I was leaving, I noticed a small alcove just inside the door, filled with books. For Sale. The library was selling books, and like a fool, I bought one. I take comfort in the fact that it was only one. I left the physics book on the shelf, along with a lot of cookbooks and an astonishing assortment of trashy beach novels.

The book that came home with me is a collection of travel essays, a genre of writing that has lately become fascinating to me. And this particular volume has, in addition to great essays, the single best cover photograph I have ever seen. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do it justice, but nevertheless, I give you I Should Have Stayed Home.

My new arch nemesis: book shelves

First of all, this is really embarrassing. My arch nemesis is a class of inanimate objects. I've gone from being justifiably feared to being bested by ply wood. It's ignominious.

The book shelf conflict extends back as far as I remember, but it is only recently that the enemy has started actively fighting back.

Book shelves started out as nothing more than a hard problem. In middle school, I started reading a lot. I bought books. Other people bought books for me. And since I enjoy rereading novels, I didn't get rid of any. They started to accumulate. It was a gradual thing, and equally gradually, I started appropriating other sets of shelves in the house, as the ones in my room were inadequate.

Cut to college. I had a new problem, although I didn't realize it for years. My book collection had, up until college, been mostly limited to paperback novels. College text books are generally not paperback sized. Mostly, they're large, hardback beasts weighing multiple pounds. They're massive enough that carrying more than one at a time in a backpack is decidedly unpleasant. And by the end of my fourth year in college, I'd collected a lot of them. In addition, I'd also been slowly building up a respectable showing of art books. Art books showcase the work of particular artists or styles or movements, so they have to be large and full color.

I was justifiably proud of my book case by senior year (pt 1). It was small, but it boasted the texts of not one but two majors. The giantish presences of Dali and Raphael stood in company with the foundations of computer science. It was, in point of fact, a source of great pride.

The enemy must have sensed this, for it struck with calculated vengeance. It could not have picked a more inopportune time: this was the last night of my stay in Pittsburgh. Chris' parents and another housemate and his family had come up for graduation. Having abandoned all hope of eating at a restaurant, the college students were trying to coordinate the culinary efforts of two families in order to get dinner on the table. We did it, and I was relaxing after a good meal when I was prompted to grab something out of my room.

My room was a disaster zone. And for those of you who have seen my bedroom on a regular basis, I must stress that it was a lot worse than you're imagining. My book shelves had, in point of fact, collapsed. The shelving itself had been violently ripped off the legs and the whole unit had fallen forward, vomiting the masters of the Italian Renaissance across the room like so much bad Sri Lankan chicken. Some of the less hardy volumes were being irreparably mangled under the weight of their colossal counterparts.

You'll recall that this was the night before I had to leave, and we had company. The best I could do was to neatly pile the books and forget about it for the summer. When I returned in the fall, I went to Ikea and brought back a new set of shelves which have served me well ever since.

...until Yesterday. I noticed that Something Was Wrong. The books were not vertical, the shelves were far from horizontal, and the sides had come unpegged from everything. At this point, it was fixable. Ikea's famous peg system is fairly forgiving. I started removing the books with the intention of fitting the shelves back together. However, plywood was never meant to be a structural building material. The screws got torqued and ripped it to shreds, rendering the shelves useless.

So now, I must once again admit defeat. And furthermore, I am in the market for new shelves. And this time, they'll be made of real wood.

Oh, the shame

For the last year or so, I've had an on-and-off online pen-pal. He's exotic and German. I can tell you're all jealous. Well you should be, because of that exotic German business.

I like this international pen-pal thing. I get to learn. I get to learn about Germany, about Europe, about the rest of the world across the pond. I'm learning about the German education system, and how everyone must go through job training before starting work, whether they're a computer scientist or a baker. I'm learning that German college is a real bargain at 500 Euros a semester, but you have to go to a specific type of high school to get in, and if you don't finish your last year, you have to repeat the final three to be eligible for college.

One of the most valuable part of this is getting a sense of what some of the rest of the world thinks of Americans and this country. Granted, my source is a bit too rational, and concedes that while many Germans protest the U.S. and everything it stands for, a lot of these same people leave protests and go home and listen to Eminem and other fine, upstanding pillars of our society. Regardless...

It turns out that we can't keep too many secrets from our German friends. I found out one other disturbing disturbing fact today: Germany knows about Fox News. Our national dirty underwear is a bastion of neo conservative alarmists with only a passing acquaintance with fact and the world knows about it. I'm getting hit with hard questions like, "It's so obviously false. None of this is true. I can't believe anyone would ever believe any of this. They don't, do they?"

It's time to step it up. The world is watching, people.

Find the Humans!

No great thoughts today... just an AMAZING website that gives you the phone codes you need to get to an actual human being without navigating the automated menus. Here it is!

LiveJournal, You Suck

A few days ago, completely by accident, I found out that this blog is being syndicated on LiveJournal, and people over there are leaving comments on the syndication. This is great. Pretty much anything can be syndicated through LJ and I know it makes many people's lives easier if they only have to worry about one RSS collection rather than paging through 12 different sites. Fine.

However. There is a problem with LJ's syndication. Only LJ members can leave comments on the syndicated posts. No one can log in anonymously, or with OpenID (which blogger doesn't support anyway). Fine, whatever, I'll create an account and log in so I can post comments. But wait, what's this? UserID meleemistress has been taken?! By whom?

Can you guess?

My userID here, 'meleemistress', was used as the owner of the LJ syndication. So now, I can't create that user because technically I already have it, but I can't log in using that name because it's a syndication account and therefore has no password. I honestly don't care how cool LJ is, or how many features it has. If they can't figure out that, regardless of where it's being printed, I might want control over my own damn content, they need to start over. This is just basic respect for the author of the blog. I know it would be hard to prove that I'm me, and I don't really care. That's their problem.

I sucked it up and made a different LJ account, so here's the pertinent info:

syndicated LJ feed: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/meleemistress/
my new userID: AttackTheGazebo *

I will not be actually posting entries with this account, just comments. So if you see anything under that name, it's me.

*And for those who don't get the reference, or who just want to reread for amusement value, I give you, straight from the annals of gamer legend, Eric and the Gazebo.

The Sofa Saga

I've lived quite a few places since I started college. I had 3 different incarnations of college housing, as well as 2 places in Sri Lanka, and now I'm here in San Francisco. Every time I move, I have to spend time figuring out all the little intricacies of the new place, or I risk stumbling upon them by accident. The second place in Sri Lanka, for example, possessed the quaint little feature of a water tank on top of the building which had to be filled by pump every night. It also had a toilet that would, if not supervised, run indefinitely. The combination of these two factors caused me to run out of water in the middle of a shower, producing an explosion of profanity and incoherent yelling rivaled only when I stepped on a colony of fire ants a few days later.

Or take my most recent house in Pittsburgh which had cheap caulk around the shower. Fortunately we knew immediately when it had rotted through, because we'd discover a stream of water coming through the kitchen light fixture.

The lease started Sunday, and so far there really haven't been any issues. The space is huge, it was just remodeled, everything is new and in pristine condition. So there really haven't been any issues...except for one: the front door.

If you'll allow me to digress a bit, I'd like to talk about a job I had a few years ago as the chair of a campus production organization. We supplied lighting and sound for on campus concerts, fashion shows, culture nights, and anything else that other student organizations could dream up. As long as we had the time and the man power and no one felt the need to pulverize the potential client with the clue bat, we took the gigs. They were all over campus, and some locations off campus, and they ranged in size from a 1 hour long karaoke night with 1 speaker to a multi day multistage carnival involving all our gear, a good amount of rental gear, and all of the help we could scrape out of the alumni. If we were lucky, the alumni doubled the size of our crew and if we weren't so lucky, things didn't go so well.

As chair, my main job was to talk to potential clients and figure out if and how we could make their events happen. Because we work in so many places, we need to think of a lot of different things to make this all work. We need to make sure that the space has enough power, that we have enough set up and tear down time, that we have crew, that we can get the gear there and back, that we have food for the crew if the event is really long.... etc etc etc. Basically, we need to think of everything, because our clients rarely do. It is our job to know what we need, to figure out what the client needs, and how best to combine the two. Let me say that again. It is our job to figure out what we need to know and we must take direct responsibility for any oversights.

Now, I only held that position for a year, which wasn't really enough time to get good at it. Just when I felt like I was really starting to get the hang of things, it was time to elect the next people. But for all that, the chairs generally do a pretty good job of getting things done. So who the hell let an architect design a house that was so close to the adjacent structure that I now can't get any furniture into my apartment?!

This, folks, has been my discovery, and it is a sobering one. My main door (35 inches wide) opens into a narrow little alleyway (30 inches wide). Any furniture I bring in needs to fit both the alley and the door without turning, because there's no room to rotate anything.

I discovered all of this when the sofa delivery men showed up on Sunday to deliver a sofa, and they couldn't get it into the apartment. So, for now, I have 2 dining room chairs, a dining room table, a coffee table, and a bed. Fortunately, the chairs are fairly comfortable, because otherwise I'd have nowhere to type this.

Architects, this is your job. It is your stated duty to ensure, when designing a structure, that it will be usable by its inhabitants. And it is imperative that you get it right, because once the structure is built, it is not likely to be changed. This is a failure on your part, which is a shame because the rest of the unit is so nice. But for now, it will be nice and empty, until I find something that fits through the door.

(not) Driving in San Francisco

My first draft of the Inquirer article included a segment regarding the standard Sri Lankan driving practices, which seemed to me to be mostly a motley collection of lawless vagaries committed in the spirit of artificially advancing entropy. The editor rejected that version on the basis of the fact that driving styles are inherently regional, and complaints on the matter make for uninteresting copy. It is therefore with some trepidation that I attempt to tackle the same subject matter a second time, albeit for different reasons.

I have been in San Francisco since Tuesday night. It is now Monday afternoon, and I have resolved never to own a car here. There are the expected differences in automotive piloting tradition, such as a disturbing tendency of the locals to double park anyone, anywhere, anytime, but those can be learned. The reasoning behind this decision comes from a condition that I have never before seen in any city, which is that private transportation is the lowest priority of the the local government.

Inklings of such a state appeared the moment my mom and I started driving. The parking fees, in particular, we felt to be particularly egregious. 25 cents buys 10 minutes on a good day. Various sidewalk colors indicated loading zones, drop off/pick up areas, and others, all of which equal no parking. Of course, this is all still just a system and therefore can be learned with a large investment of small change. My rebellion against the San Francisco driving institution was not cemented until two days ago, when I read an article in the local paper.

Driving discontent is not at all limited to out-of-towners. Not in the least. San Francisco locals are completely fed up with the lack of parking, the meter rates, and the high fines for breaking the rules. And it gets better. Discussions are in the works for meter rates and fees to be raised *again* for the purposes of....wait for it....subsidizing the public transit system here. Now, for all I know, it's the practice of every city to use parking money to support public transportation infrastructure. But here, I definitely get the feeling that drivers are being punished for driving.

The sentiment expressed in this newspaper article regarding subsidized public transit was mostly negative. Those interviewed felt that public transit should be self-sustaining, and if money is a problem, raise the ticket rates. Now that I've found out that a monthly MUNI pass is $45, I can understand the sentiment. That being said, I'm glad MUNI rates are cheap, and I'm glad I'm not driving.

A Divergence

I swear, I promise, I make an oath that I will write about Europe soon. I am, however, in the middle of moving to San Francisco (I fly out tomorrow) and the blog posts are not high priorities at the moment.

The more immediate news is that finally, after years of trying, I feel like I can really talk shop with my guy friends. Before Wednesday, I hadn't felt that I was particularly weak in the skill of being "one of the guys" but I see now that I was completely misinformed and that certain areas of manhood were closed to me.

Wednesday, it all changed. The catalyst was a rather drastic hair cut resulting in a 14 inch donation to Locks of Love, a funky new hair style, and a morning routine that now requires a hair dryer and 2 styling products.

...It turns out that a lot of my male friends spend some of their morning preening in front of the mirror with wax or gel or some other sinister sculpting product. And now I do too, so we can talk about the benefits of a certain type of wax, or what alcohol-free products will still stand up to the "driving with the window open" test. This is all sorts of fun, and I can't talk to my girlfriends about it, because none of them use the sheer volume of junk required to make my hair look the way I want.

I have returned!

I flew into Dulles on Saturday night and my dad picked me up from Chris' house Sunday morning. Over the next few posts, I'll recount various elements of the trip, because it was fun and it might even make interesting reading.