Monday, September 28, 2009
Strange Fungis, and other Weekend Adventures
Another long weekend of dating type activities with Elle, and here's a brief, very partial report.
Elle, the non-IG, drove up here Friday night, fairly late. I cooked a pizza and we talked and did the other sorts of things that young, healthy heterosexual members of the opposite sex do in the privacy of their own home(s). Said activities went on (as they are wont) for hours longer than initially anticipated, and as a result we weren't up and around until mid-day on Saturday. Thus were our plans for morning wine tastings scuttled!
We did get packed up and out the door in time to drive way north to Calistoga, for the newly-opened, largely-magnificent,
Castle di Amorosa. We had reservations for a tour in the afternoon, (which was wise, since it was all sold out) and it was quite nice. The castle is huge; far smaller than a real, functioning one built 700 years ago would have been, but for something built by a private individual as a dream home/business activity, it was gigantic. Far, far larger than any of the castle-type exhibits you'd see at Disneyland of
Harry Potter World or the like.
It's the centerpiece of an active winery, and on the tour you get to go down into underground tunnels that they dug for wine aging, but mostly because the owner loved castles and wanted his own with as much verisimilitude as he could afford. (Quite a bit of it, as it turned out.) Included deep within the vaults are lots of museum-type rooms with suits of armor, mounted weapons, and even a large and practically functional torture chamber/dungeon. Lots of photos of the property
can be found via google, and it's every bit as cool as it looks.
The tour includes a private wine tasting for your group in one of the custom-built tasting rooms deep below the castle surface, and while none of their wines are remarkable (the whole thing is still quite recent and the wine vines haven't had time to mature yet), it was a great wine tasting architectural faux-cultural experience. Made slightly more enjoyable by the fact that I knew more than the tour guide about most of the wine-related things of which he spoke.
For our evening activity we adjourned to the CIA. The Culinary Institute of America has a campus in norther Napa Valley, and besides occupying a fantastically gorgeous structure, they run
a professional gourmet restaurant, which, in partnership with the Wine Spectator magazine and most of the best vineyards in California, boasts an eye-boggling, 25-page wine list.
PDF link, but it loads fairly quickly, and it's worth it just to skim over the prices. Some affordable vintages can be found, but that's not the funny part. They've got numerous years of Opus One, whose Cab is generally the most expensive wine in America ($250+ a bottle), and those aren't even in the top 50 priciest they list. I'd never seen a $2000 bottle of wine before. And I still haven't, other than listed on their menu, but it was fun to see it there. If $500 for a glass of old grapes is out of your price range, they've got plenty of other limited edition vintages in the $500-1000 range.
We didn't get any wine, cause um... money. But we did get an amazing appetizer dish, and I got a pasta dish with mushrooms and spinach that was more or less exquisite. I don't have a good enough memory to list the best pasta dishes I've eaten in my life, but this one is definitely going into the top 5.
We ended up not staying overnight in the area, since nothing is affordable in Napa, and since the only reasonable hotel options were in Vallejo. Which is way south of Napa, and only about 40 miles from my apartment. And since we felt like we'd done enough wine stuff for the weekend, it seemed pointless to drop $70 on a hotel that was less than an hour from my apartment. So I drove us back here while Elle napped, which gave her energy for more active pursuits upon our return.
Sunday we got up a little earlier, and after brunching at a restaurant where I could obtain an order of my coveted
huevos rancheros, I drove us down to the Golden Gate Bridge. Elle has lived in the Bay Area her whole life, but she lives down on the peninsula, south of The City, and had somehow only been over the world famous GGB 2 or 3x in her life. (I've been dozens of times, almost all since moving to the North Bay 2.5 years ago.)
If you've not been in the Bay Area, it's not that unusual for locals to have never or seldom passed over
the Golden Gate Bridge. It's maybe the most famous bridge in the world, and is guaranteed to appear in any movie or TV show set in the area, but it's quite possible to never need to travel over it. I never did when I lived in the East Bay with Malaya, and had only seen it when doing tourist stuff when relatives visited. I have many times in the last 2.5 years since I've lived in the North Bay, but unless you're going from northern SF to the North Bay, or vice versa, taking the Bay Bridge is usually a better option. There's little population north of the city, Napa and Sonoma and Sacramento and other attractions are far inland/east, and reaching the GGB through downtown SF is usually hell, since there aren't any highways or freeways there. Just dozens and dozens of blocks of city streets.
As you can see, the GGB isn't even
Google's recommended route from San Rafael to San Mateo. Taking 101 over the GGB and through western SF is a shorter route, but 101/19th street is about 8 miles of fairly constant stop lights. I counted once, when taking that route to Elle's, and there were 30 or 31 stop lights over that 8 mile stretch of 25-35MPH road. It's not bad late at night, when I'm usually coming home from her place, since one can catch maybe 22 or 24 of the lights. But in the daytime it's crowded with other cars and you're lucky to make half the lights without slowing down or stopping. I'd rather drive 7 miles further on fast freeways than 7 mile less on city streets. But YMMV. (Do people use YKMV in those progressive nations infected with the Metric system? Or is the acronym translated without translation?)
Well, actually your mileage/kilometerage won't vary, but your tolerance for slow traffic and stop lights may.
At any rate, Elle didn't cross the GGB on Sunday either. It was a gorgeous, hot Sunday, so we had to park way up on the scenic hills above the bridge, where we walked around the old military gun fortifications, before descending to the bridge itself. We walked out along the bridge to the first huge tower, took lots of photos, looked over the edge at all the dropped hats and water bottles and such that land on girders just below the surface but out of reach of any sane mortal, and enjoyed the howlingly-gusty wind. Numerous pictures were taken then and all throughout the weekend, and may be posted at some point, though you'd probably be wise not to hold your breath for that.
After the GGB visit we drove a few miles north to Sausalito, site of one of my earlier, unsuccessful internet dating site first dates. This one went better, though Elle and I basically recreated past events. She kept asking what I'd done with that other woman and where we went, and since that previous Sausalito visit mostly consisted of walking along the boardwalk and ducking into the various art galleries and souvenir shops, it wasn't real hard or exciting to recreate it. The company was better this time though, and we had fun. We even hit
the same restaurant for dinner, though the one thing I'd had there that was great, a sort of apple pie dessert, was tragically sold out that day. That they were unable to make more, at 7pm on a Sunday, didn't speak well of their chefs, or their ability to make their own desserts rather than just ordering them in, pre-prepared and frozen at some distant processing location.
The clam chowder was awesome, though. I always like clam chowder, but most times there are these inedible, chewy, rubbery chunks of something all strewn through it. I assume they are there for flavoring, but they are just bowl-clogging dreck in most cases. This time there were slightly rubbery things in it, but in larger chunks and they were not difficult to masticate into a form that could be swallowed without danger of suffocation. Bonus points for that.
There was a lot more fun stuff over the weekend, but typing this update has already taken me well beyond the time I'm allocating for blogging these days, so you'll have to use your memory. Or go read one of the countless thousands of blogs that are run by people who actually deserve your patronage.
Don't feel too neglected, Sunday evening I caught a glimpse of a the TV in the restaurant bar, and realized that I was in the process of passing the first autumnal weekend in my adult life that didn't involve at least checking (and generally watching) quite some amount of college and/or professional football. Watching is out, since I've not had a TV in a couple of years, but even checking highlights wasn't a priority when I had Elle to do stuff with. And if I'd had an hour or two to of computer time during the weekend, I'd have spent it more productively than skimming espn.com for scores and highlights anyway. (Not that I'm perfectly able to avoid the siren seductions of football; I spent a couple of hours early Monday morning watching NFL highlights while I sipped a potent concoction and tried to let lethargy come over me.)
As for the weekend's other fungal growths, check out these pictures. They're from my garden, of a huge pot I've got a fairly-healthy Star Jasmine growing in. Last week a little cluster of mushrooms appeared, turned bright yellow and swelled up to about a hand in height. They soon withered and deflated, but were sort of replaced by another bunch of the same fungi, pushing up through the straggling remains of a once proud cluster of parsley. Now, just as those are withering, there's been an absolute explosion of new yellow growths. Dozens and dozens of them, pushing up out of the roots of the star jasmine all across the center of the large pot, like whiteheads from the face of a sugar-addicted teenager.
The photos don't really capture the three dimensional nature of these things, but they are almost scary in their inexorable, irresistible, Sorcerer's Apprentice-like advance. If even 10% of them carry on for another few days, the entire center of the plant will be solid with the swollen yellow growths, the jasmine and the other things growing in it choked and muffled like sticks in a bowl of swollen mushrooms.
I'll try to get a picture to preserve the moment.
All those yellow dots are incoming fungi.
Closer view of the current blooming crop as it practically pushes through the dying second wave. They're rather penis-y, eh?
Update: Appropriately, (she's a research scientist) Elle
hunted around online and
found information about
these growths. They're almost comically known as Yellow Houseplant Mushrooms, with a scientific name of
leucocoprinus birnbaumii (luke-o-kuh-PRY-niss burn-BAUM-eee-eye). As expected,
they are poisonous. No word on their hallucinogenic properties, but if I ate some I might see some interesting sights on the way to the emergency room?
Labels: elle, gardening
Saturday, September 19, 2009
What to do when drunk?
It's Friday night, well, very early Saturday morning, and I'm going down to see the new GF Elle Saturday evening. I'll stay over night with her, then we'll do fun stuff on Sunday, before I drive back up here Sunday evening. Elle's not much on sleeping late, and her bedroom isn't much on dark curtains, so it's fairly certain I'll be awake at the ungodly hour of 7am Sunday morning. Which is why I'm trying to get to bed semi-earlier tonight, and why I'll be setting my alarm to wake up @ 10 this morning, so I'll be tired earlier Saturday night, and can go to bed with her and not be dead on Sunday after waking up @ 8am. Or did I say 7am? Dunno.
The gist of all that is that I had a beer, and then a fairly (un)healthy splash of vodka in a cup of melted strawberry smoothie, in a so-far unsuccessful effort to make myself sleepy this late evening. And I'm typing this since I'm too buzzed to do any productive work, and since I couldn't think what else to do with myself for the next half hour until I do get sleepy enough to... sleep.
Hence the post title. And man I'm making a lot of typos. Peril of drunken typing. Going to wearout the backspace at this rate. Drunken emails I just let the typos fly, but here I'm trying to maintain some publishing standards. Which is ironic, sicne this is written more or less for a few hundred strangers online, while emails go to dear friends in RL, who I should, in theory, worry more about. More about their reception of my drunken ramblings.
Anyway, I was last buzzed enough to be borderline drunk on September 4th. 15 days ago. I know this since I remembered sending the IG a drunken email then, and I just went into my sent folder and searched on her (real) name, and there was the email. Sept 4th, 10:18pm. I got an earlier start that day since I was over at Elle's house the night before, and then after driving home in the early morning I had fasted all afternoon since I had to do so before giving blood (for a physical, not for charity). And after that was over it was nearly 6pm, thanks to various delays at the doctor's office. And when I came home I had a big glass of white wine with some chicken and rice, and with 18 hours of nothing in my system, it went right (the fuck) to my head.
Which doesn't explain why I felt compelled to send the IG an email, but she used to always enjoy my drunken emails, so I figured I'd send her one for old time's sake. My previous email to her was August 8th, and she hadn't replied to that one either, so doing that math, and all but taking off my shoes to do so, it's been 6 weeks since we've spoken. And I doubt we'll ever speaken again. During the 2 years we were good friends and hanging out constantly, she turned on 2 of her other friends, one an ex-boyfriend, and in both cases she decided she would never speak with them again. I think she did speak with both of them again eventually, but it was months and months before she did so. Her M.O. was to cut off people who troubled her entirely, and I suppose I troubled her when our bestie-ship ended.
The irony is that I really don't have anything to say to her. Reading the drunken email I sen her 2 weeks ago, it's just a rambling mess without any real point or content. And sure, you might expect that of a drunken email, but she always liked my drunken emails since they were very content rich. Most of my emails were, but in the rare drunken ones I dove right into some subject and got right to the heart of it, rather than beating around the busy with prolifically wordy effusions. You know, the kind that typify my usual blog posts.
Much like that last paragraph, actually. Was the email.
The other irony is that I don't really have anything to say to Elle, when I'm drunken. She hardly drinks and has never been drunken in her life, and we've got a very good and healthy, communicative relationship. Not a lot of hidden agendas and mixed messages and cock teasing, of the sort that typified my relationship with the IG. So with her drunken emails were useful, and almost necessary, since I could say things that weren't said otherwise. Cut to the chase, sorta.
With Elle there's not a need for that, at least not yet, which brings me back to the
raison d'etre of of this blog post. No one to email when drunk, not sleepy enough to sleep, nothing to say to the IG (ever again?), in no condition to do productive fiction or D3 site work, and yet restless and unable to sit still or just read things. So I wanted to type, and here I am. Typing.
Happily, the soporific action of fingers on keys seems to have soporoficed me, and now I'm going to brush my teeth and crash. Hope it was good for you too? Kbyethx.
Labels: drinking, elle, the I.G.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Econ 101 from Dr. Krugman
Long, thorough, informative, and I dare say
vital financial/economics article by recent Noble Laureate
Paul Krugman in the latest NYTimes Magazine. It's written for people like you and me, who have some financial knowledge but who don't exactly
study economics, but who want to know more. The piece is spurred by the ongoing worldwide recession and the various real estate and financial market bubbles that created it, but it's not really about that. It's more historical in nature, and that's what I found so valuable about it.
Krugman neatly summarizes the two prevalent schools of thought in modern economic theory (Keynesian vs. Freidman/Smith), and discusses how those are/were represented in American economic scholarship and instruction (freshwater vs. saltwater), and then analyzes the core issue, the (ir)rationality of investors and markets.
That's the part that I was most surprised by. I vaguely knew that Freidman's theories were ascendant during the economic boom of the mid-00s, and that they were worshipful of the invisible hand and of the wisdom of the market, but the way the freshwater Freidmanites simply disregarded real world evidence that didn't fit their idealized theory seems impossible to believe.
By 1970 or so, however, the study of financial markets seemed to have been taken over by Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, who insisted that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Discussion of investor irrationality, of bubbles, of destructive speculation had virtually disappeared from academic discourse. The field was dominated by the "efficient-market hypothesis," promulgated by Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago, which claims that financial markets price assets precisely at their intrinsic worth given all publicly available information. (The price of a company’s stock, for example, always accurately reflects the company's value given the information available on the company’s earnings, its business prospects and so on.) And by the 1980s, finance economists, notably Michael Jensen of the Harvard Business School, were arguing that because financial markets always get prices right, the best thing corporate chieftains can do, not just for themselves but for the sake of the economy, is to maximize their stock prices. In other words, finance economists believed that we should put the capital development of the nation in the hands of what Keynes had called a "casino."
That concept, that markets are rational and logical, so utterly contradicts everything I've ever observed about human psychology, especially mob behavior when motivated by greed, that it seems like a theory cooked up a really bright computer that has no subroutines to evaluate human behavior. I almost can not believe anyone seriously argued that. My conception of the "invisible hand" concept (a very Freidman-esque belief) is that most investors are irrational and foolish, but that on the whole their foolish irrationality averages out to something like a group wisdom. I thought the theory was that markets wee dumb, crazed beasts, but that they could generally be herded in the desired direction by clever financial policy. Reading that one of the leading economic theories argued that investors are always rational (admittedly it's Krugman's description, and he's profoundly Keynesian) is, for me, like reading that geologists were seriously debating flat vs. globe for the shape of the earth. I'm literally shocked to learn of it.
More jaw-dropping revelations from the article.
But there was something else going on: a general belief that bubbles just don't happen. What's striking, when you reread Greenspan's assurances, is that they weren't based on evidence -- they were based on the a priori assertion that there simply can't be a bubble in housing. And the finance theorists were even more adamant on this point. In a 2007 interview, Eugene Fama, the father of the efficient-market hypothesis, declared that "the word 'bubble' drives me nuts," and went on to explain why we can trust the housing market: "Housing markets are less liquid, but people are very careful when they buy houses. It's typically the biggest investment they're going to make, so they look around very carefully and they compare prices. The bidding process is very detailed."
What? Has that guy ever read a single post on the Irvine Housing Blog? During the bubble years of 2004-2007, there were countless reports about the utter laxity of lending standards, studies showing that virtually no one actually had the income to afford the payments on the houses they were buying (to flip), and plenty of warning in regular newspaper reporting. Remember all those articles about people camping out for days in advance to reserve their spot to buy condos in new housing developments, solely on the belief that the prices would skyrocket and they could resell in six months for a huge profit? Who thought that was sustainable, when housing prices were rising at 10x wages? (Not that wages were
actually rising at all, during the 00s/Bush years, except for the top 10%, who got so much richer than they skewed the average across the board.)
Everyone I talked to about the flipping, including people who were doing it, agreed that it was a bubble and unsustainable. They just hoped they'd get rich quick while it was expanding, and be able to unload in time before it popped. (Most of them were delusional on both fronts.)
Krugman's conclusion seems so obvious that bothering to type it is almost belaboring the point, but clearly a great many economic experts disagree with it, and billions of dollars were lost by supposedly savvy investors who followed their disagreeing advice. So I guess it needs to be said.
So here's what I think economists have to do. First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they have to admit -- and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes -- that Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions. Third, they'll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics.
Many economists will find these changes deeply disturbing. It will be a long time, if ever, before the new, more realistic approaches to finance and macroeconomics offer the same kind of clarity, completeness and sheer beauty that characterizes the full neoclassical approach. To some economists that will be a reason to cling to neoclassicism, despite its utter failure to make sense of the greatest economic crisis in three generations. This seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible and wrong."
When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won't be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right.
Labels: economics
Relationship Stuff, and Career Aspirations
This was going to be a post with a few random notes, but as I started writing it became all about my recent and future dating activities. So it's kind of unified in theme, now. Funny how that worked. I even went back and changed the title.
It's the weekend. Late Friday night, at least. And I'm busy. Most of my weekends are busy, now that I have a new girlfriend. I'm either down at her place for a day and a half, or she's up here, and while the time is fun, it flies, and I'm certainly not online or even on the computer during that time. So when I get back on (the computer) late Sunday night, I'm going a million miles an hour to catch up on what I would usually have been doing all day Saturday and/or Sunday.
This weekend Elle's off to some family events all day Saturday, but she'd going to drive up here early Sunday morning, hopefully arriving in time to surprise me in bed. Later in the day we're doing a sorta double date with Malaya and her husband (they're approaching their first anniversary, so I suppose I should stop saying "new" husband?). Neither Malaya or her guy have met Elle, and since I've told each party a fair amount about the other, I think that curiosity is fairly high. (I knew Malaya's husband long before she ever met him, so there was never any such "first" meeting curiosity betwixt myself and he, when they were dating.) And I've not talked to the capricious young woman formerly known as the I.G. in weeks, so there's very little likelihood of Elle and she ever coming face to face.
One thing that's very odd (to me) with Elle is our mutual physical admiration. I don't just mean sex -- I mean that we are both fairly visual creatures, and we're both in better shape than any of each other's past boy/girl friends, so we tend to spend some amount of time in various states of undress, simply admiring each others physiques.
I'll spare you any overly eroticized descriptions, but she's a dancer and is fairly tall for a woman, so I'm forever getting lost tracing up and down the smooth lengths of her long, shapely legs. I'm also overly fond of her primary objects of human sexual dimorphism, as well as the curve of her upper thigh, where it tapers out at the hip and my hands naturally slide down over her smooth, flat stomach.
For her part, she is forever focusing on an unmentionable portion of my anatomy, but she also quite enamored of my shirtless upper body. And, as I said previously, she loves red hair and freckles, the later of which I have in abundance on my upper arms and shoulders.
It always amazes me that women like the male body, especially that they like body hair. It's become fairly trendy for men to shave themselves to look like overgrown altar boys, but I've yet to meet a woman who actually prefers a bare-chested man to one with body hair. And that includes the IG, who hated and waged constant war on her own body hair, and was 21 when we met; seemingly in the prime age range to believe the media hype about chest waxed metrosexuals.
Women even love hair on the legs; one of the funniest former sex stories Elle ever told me was about a guy she dated who had shaved his genitals. And not just the cock and balls, but several inches up his thighs and stomach. She said it was just a weird, deforested sight, and not at all erotic.
My experiences make me wonder who exactly is pushing the hairless man ideal? Homosexual fashion magazine photographers? (Except that gay men don't seem to dislike body hair either.) At any rate, I've not shaved my chest in years, since Malaya asked me to stop doing it since the stubble tickled her ear when she laid her head on my chest or stomach. And I'm certainly not going to start now, the way Elle loves to run her hands and finger tips over it.
Yes, that's me in a very recent photo, to the right. I thumbnailed it so anyone opposed to a topless man won't scar their beautiful eyes. Click it to see it larger. No, I don't know what's going on with my forehead there. It's an odd angle, and unforgiving bathroom lights overhead.
The picture stemmed from an amusing girlfriend interaction. I was giving my head a buzz, as I do every few weeks, and I texted Elle to tell her that she'd be seeing a bit less of me next time we met, she asked for a pic. That's what resulted, and since I may not continue to have pecs and abs forever, I figured I should immortalize the fitness moment on the blog. I'm not doing any special diet or physical training; just my usual 90 minutes 3 or 4x a week at the gym, with most of that spent on cardio. I imagine that if I concentrated more on lifting, and took some of those protein powders that are forever getting professional athletes suspended, I'd really see some upper body definition form. Perhaps someday...
I must be doing something right, since Elle is always raving about what a perfectly "manly" shape I have. The wider shoulders than waist, the muscular legs, the solid jaw and defined neck, etc. None of those are things I think of myself as a paragon of, but she certainly enjoys the visuals. Sometimes when we're lounging around she asks me to get up and walk around just so she can enjoy the view. I'm game, though it feels weird. I'm not self conscious, but I've always thought of myself as average to ugly in looks, and I was also the skinny kid. So why is this hot chick asking me to parade around for her eyes? She probably feels much the same strangeness when I ask her to parade around, bend over, pose with a saucy expression on her face, etc, for me, but she's done some modeling and has danced and sung on stage countless times, so it's less odd for her. Besides, men are usually the visual creatures in a relationship, so women are more used to being looked over and admired in private, not to mention their "every guy is looking at my boobs/ass" regular daily existence.
At any rate, her constant comments on my desirability influenced the above photo. Also, I sent it to Malaya's cell and asked her if I'd ever been in that sort of shape when I was with her. I wasn't trolling for compliments, and in fact I rather expected snark and sarcasm. But I was genuinely curious what she'd say, since she hasn't seen me without a shirt in years. (She said surprisingly nice things, and confirmed that I'd never been that muscular when in her acquaintance.)
It's hard to keep track of one's own bodily changes. I see myself every day, and muscles grow very slowly, so I can't really remember if I was bigger or smaller 4 or 5 years ago. I suppose most men around my age experience a similar transformation, though it's usually going the other way on the fitness meter. And that's probably where I'd be going, if I hadn't been single and childless and trying to date 22 y/o's over the past couple of years.
The muscles and six pack never quite got me through the door with the IG, but they certainly helped win Elle over. Or more accurately, they didn't really affect her "I like him a lot" judgment, but they did make her enjoy the "getting to know him in a physical way" process more than she might otherwise have. It's funny, since she's much more discerning in her partner selection than the (secretly slutty) IG was (that's one of the little details that came out when we argued as our friendship apparently came to an end earlier this summer). Elle has dated a lot of guys, especially in the month+ she was doing online dating before we met, but most of them were just one or two dates and not so much as a peck on the cheek. She's very often marveled at how attracted she was to me, and how the things we've been doing together are different than her usual behavior with a new boyfriend.
The irony is that the IG, while much younger and having dated far fewer guys than Elle, had sex with substantially more men, though most of them were very short term relationships she almost invariably regretted afterwards. It's ironic since she knew me much longer than most guys she went down on, and she liked me a great deal more, and often told me how much more attractive/built I was than most of her exes. (And non-exes she concealed during our time together. She just came to think of me as a friend and a big brother, rather than a boyfriend, and she liked me too much to ruin our relationship with sex. And she was right, since that would have ruined it, especially since she would have cheated on me, as she had (and will continue to do) with every other guy she's slept with. And I'm very monogamous, so we would have fought and it would have been ugly and then we'd not have been friends anymore.
Instead of that we didn't have sex, and ended up fighting about the non-sex, and it was ugly, and now we're not friends anymore. Great success!
I digress. Not that this post ever had a central theme to digress from.
Next weekend I'm going down to Elle's place on Saturday night and staying over through Sunday, and the weekend after that we're looking at some sort of getaway. Up to wine country for an overnight, down to Monterey, etc. She's got a real job doing scientific lab stuff, and she needs to tend ongoing experiments and projects almost every day (frequently including weekends) so she can't just take off a Friday and/or Monday and be gone for 4 days without a lot of advance planning, which slightly limits our ability to dash off for romantic weekends away.
I'm interested in enjoying some of those with her, though I've had to do some soul searching to feel accommodating about that sort of activity. Much less encouraging. Who doesn't like a vacation? Me, that's who. I came to this realization some months ago, and probably blogged about it then. Though I certainly can't expect anyone reading this to remember that, since I didn't, and I (theoretically) wrote it. At any rate, the realization was that most people enjoy travel and getaway activities on weekends or holidays since they work all week, and whether they love or hate their jobs, when they leave work on Friday evening, they want to not think about it until Monday morning.
That's a perfectly natural concept, it's just not one I've ever really experienced, since I've never had a M-F, 9-5 type job. I'm always working on some freelance editing project, or a website, or writing fiction, or at least I should be. So I don't have a regular schedule, which means I don't really have any regular vacations. When I'm not at home I'm always thinking about the work I should/could be doing, and since I enjoy my work and since it's got to be kept up on constantly, I usually do some hours of it every day.
In a larger sense, most people don't have anything personal tied up in their jobs or careers. They do them for the money and maybe the satisfaction, but it's not really anything personal. They're just a cog in a wheel, and if they weren't doing what they do, someone else would, with no real difference to the company or the world at large.
That's not meant as an insult; it's just the way of things. Sure, some teachers are really good and memorable to their students, and some doctors save lives, etc. But the vast majority of people are fairly faceless and highly fungible, in their careers. Usually by choice; it's certainly easier and safer to go to work and just do what you're assigned than it is to strike out on your own and take all the risks/rewards/initiative.
I'm rambling here, but my point is that I feel a more personal connection to my work than most people do. Not so much the website stuff; true, if I didn't do it much of it wouldn't get done, on my site or any other, but if a few tens of thousands of Diablo 3 fans had slightly less game info and news to read, it wouldn't really change their lives in any significant fashion. Not much more so than if their usual barrista were eaten by Shamu, and the new guy put too much/little cream in their mochachino.
On the fiction though, as terribly as I've (so far) underachieved my potential, I am the only one who can do it. True, the fantasy/horror/mystery readers of the world aren't exactly living lives of quite desperation, deprivation, and misery due to the fact that I've written about a dozen fewer books than I should have, to this point in my life. But the books/movies I have in my head aren't going to be written by anyone else, and if/when I write them, they'll be something permanent, a literary legacy, for better or for worse. And to that I feel some amount of responsibility (though not enough to do more than 1/10th as much writing as I fucking well should be doing), which makes me want/need to work on them. Even on weekends.
These thoughts came about chiefly from reading many of the online dating profiles (not Elle's, though) where the women (men too, but I seldom read those) were so gleefully up front about their desires to party and go crazy every minute of every weekend, and to get out of the city/state/country the minute their vacations arrived. I had subliminal annoyance/confusion about that for a while, until I finally realized why it bothered me. It was due to what I said above; that I feel a need/urge/responsibility to do some work every day, and it seems very weird to me that a person (most people) are the complete opposite. When they're not at work they're not working or thinking about working. In fact, they're working hard to not think about working. That's the whole point of weekend getaways and vacations and drunken nights out for most people!
Which is fine. Whatever gets them (you) through. If I had a job I didn't like and only did for the $, I'm sure I'd feel much the same way. (Though I'd probably spend those weekends and nights diving into my fiction writing as an escape. Which might actually result in more writing productivity, ironically.) But it took me a while to come to this realization, and for months I was mildly annoyed at all the dating personals written by people who wanted nothing but party/fun on weekends. "Sit down, stay home, and accomplish something with your life!" I found myself muttering. And while that reaction is perfectly rational for me, or when applied to my life, it's utterly irrelevant and misplaced when aimed at the lives of most people, who work at work, and try to have fun and forget about work when they're not at work. They're not going to write novels, or even maintain websites, and there's no benefit to them sitting home at their computers at nights. They might as well party, or travel. In fact, those are probably much more wholesome and enriching behaviors than the gaming, watching TV, reading-the-paper-and-yelling-at-their-kids alternatives.
Not that many of the women whose profiles I was viewing had papers to read or kids to yell at, but you get my drift.
Fortunately, Elle agrees and understands my psychology on this. She has a job she loves, but it's not one she can do much on when she's not in the lab. She can read scientific journals and work on grants and proposals and articles and such, but even those largely require her to be in the lab for tech work, computer access, etc. Plus she mostly does that stuff at work, to keep herself busy while she's running experiments on this and that. When away from work, shes' not a party animal (just a dancing machine), and she loves to read and engage in other quiet and solitary pursuits in her free time. So she's quite happy to set aside a couple/few hours during our planned weekends together, when she'll read, or take a walk, or window shop while I hunch over my laptop and attempt to further my literary aspirations.
That's the plan, anyway. Thus far it exists entirely in the theoretical, since we've not had any whole weekends to spend together, and when we are in each others company for a day, we can't help but interact for hours on end, often without the aid of verbal utterances. And it's not like we're eager to put a halt to that, but all things in good time, and since she's been spending virtually all of her free time in some sort of socialization, with her family, friends, or me, Elle's probably happy to plan some free time to herself, for reading or just thinking, while I'm tapping away.
Not that we'll be putting that to the test this weekend, with her early morning arrival, lunch with my friends, and then a few more precious evening hours together before she's got to drive back home to get some sleep before Monday morning work. Personally, I'm looking forward to it.
Also, I've not Twittered in weeks, but that's since I changed my phone upload over to the @Diii.net Twitter account, so I could tweet updates directly from Blizzcon. I did, about five times, during the Blizzard HQ tour on the Thursday before Blizzcon. I then completely forgot about the twitter distraction once BlizzCon began. I was on my laptop constantly at the show, usually in the press room, but I was writing content, posting news, jumping into the live chat, etc. Not burping up 140 character non sequiturs for an audience a fraction the size of that which was viewing the forums and the D3 main page. (I did text a fair amount over my phone, but those were mostly to Malaya, who was also at BlizzCon, or to Elle, who was as almost as horny and missing me as I was horny and missing her.)
After Blizzcon I remembered that any tweets sent from my phone would go to
@Diii.net rahter than
@BlackChampagne, but I only remembered that far enough to stop myself from sending any tweets, rather than as motivation to go into the account and change the settings back. Thus when I've thought occasionally about tweeting during the past 2.5 weeks I've just not done it, since said tweet would have gone up to the @Diii.net, where posts about my mercantile misadventures, cats, garden, and prophylactic purchases would have been out of place. At best.
I just switched my phone tweets back to BC though, so for both of you who sometimes thought about checking there, you can think about it again. It's almost sure not to entertain. If it had been working today, I'd have made two posts in the evening. Which I shall now recreate. With better grammar and punctuation than my thumbs would have provided, and likely character overflows as well.
# I'm enjoying the irony of browsing the birth control aisle in Target while women wheel screaming babies past.
# They say not to shop for food when you're hungry because you'll indulge cravings. By that metric when could I ever rationally buy these intimate items?
Labels: dating, elle, twitter, work, writing
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
I think I said this last time, but...
...I've just been too busy to blog. Tons of work on the D3 site with still all the post-Blizzcon content going up, plus ongoing news of all sorts. Plus I'm working what spare hours I can find on the ongoing wine/mystery novel with Dad. And the new girlfriend, who may or may not continue to be dubbed "Elle," continues to (quite pleasantly) occupy much of my free time. (As I noted previously, this Elle is an online alias for a woman who has no connection of any sort to the Elly I've worked with on the Diablo site for more than a decade.)
I drove down to her home (some distance south of San Francisco) Saturday afternoon, enduring somewhat amazing traffic in the process (thanks to the
Bay Bridge's closure), and got there just in time for the tail end of a big family party in a local park, celebrating her niece's seventh b-day. I was only there long enough to help clean up and have my first, slightly surreal encounter with Elle's identical twin sister, and then we were off. Elle and I had planned to go out to dinner that evening, but the party at the park went late and she'd saved me/us a bunch of leftovers, so we just went back to her house and heated up chicken, ravioli, pasta salad, and had that with some of the huge crop of tomatoes I'd brought down. And then ensued private diversions of which I shall not speak publicly. (Unlike in the old days.)
Monday we enjoyed the holiday and after I cooked her/us waffles for breakfast, we spent some time exploring the different rooms of her home, before finally heading out to get lunch at the restaurant we'd planned to dine at the previous night. We then explored some around her town, visiting the big central park and watching people play soccer and do other park-like activities. I cooked us a pasta dinner at her place, and we also made cornbread muffins and had toasted sesame loaf and I made a surprisingly tasty little tomato salad with romas and yellow cherries from my garden, splashed with olive oil, balsamic, with rosemary and basil (dried) for seasonings. It was really good to dip the bread into also.
We adjourned the evening at a reasonable hour since she had to get up early for work on Tuesday and I had to get back here early/conscious enough to do a few hours of catch up work on the D3 site.
Okay, one quick identical twin story. While we were cleaning up after the party, I was carrying things from the park area down to the parking area. On one trip I brought down a few decorations and some plates of extra food, walked up beside my GF, and said, "I think these are yours?" She looked at me and smiled and said, "No, those are for Elle." (Well, she said Elle's actual name, but you know what I mean.)
At this I simply paused and blinked. There was another woman at the party with the same (real) name as Elle, but she'd already left and I didn't think there was any way the items could be hers. Plus I'd been told they were for Elle, the one I'm dating.
It wasn't for another few seconds before I realized that I was talking to Elle's sister, not to Elle herself. And then I was like,
"Well, good thing I didn't walk up and pat her on the ass, or give her a kiss."They're nearly identical in bodily proportions, and they have the same hair. I can tell them apart facially, looking side by side, and they were wearing different colored clothing, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that I hadn't thought, "There are 2 women here who are 99% identical and one of them I'm dating and the other I just met." I'd just been on autopilot while carrying items to the parking lot, and had naturally walked up to the woman who looked just like my girlfriend (from the side), and addressed her as though I knew who she was, without pausing to think, "Is that Elle, or her sister?"
I'd guess that happens fairly often to people who are newly around identical twins. As humans we're used to recognizing things by quick glances and just by knowing who or what we expect to be there. And it's not often in our experience that 2 individuals literally can't be discerned between without careful inspection. Especially not when one of them is an individual with whom you are intimately familiar. I've spent dozens of hours with Elle over the past six weeks, and this was the first 15 minutes I'd ever spent in the company of her sister. So naturally, I assume a woman who looks just like Elle is Elle. And clearly, I'll need to keep the fact that there are 2 of them conscious in my mind, during any future encounters. Next time I'll remember that, and make some concrete note in my thoughts of what color top each is wearing, or something along those lines.
One odd thing I'd wondered about proved not to be a factor. I'd asked Elle fairly early on if she ever felt weird meeting one of her sister's boyfriends, since they knew what she looked like naked. Not that knowing what someone looks like naked is the be-all-end-all of human interaction (not even from the male PoV), but it is something that men tend to think about when they interface with attractive, shapely females. And the fact is that identical twins... are identical. So if you've seen one, you've seen both, at least in theory.
I'd asked Elle early on if she'd be embarrassed if her twin did a nude photo shoot, or had a sex tape leaked to the internet. Not just embarrassed since it was her twin/best friend, but on a more personal level, since for all 99% of viewers could tell, it might as well be her instead of her sister. She laughed at the question, and wasn't sure how she'd feel. It was too bizarre a situation for her to imagine, since neither she nor her sister are the type of women who are ever likely to wind up in that scenario.
Furthermore, while it was fascinating to meet her sister, who is a very nice and interesting person in her own right, I had zero thoughts about, "I know what this woman looks like naked." when we met. It wasn't until much later that night that I even remembered my initial and hypothetical, "But her BF knows what you look like naked?" question, and thinking about it now, it doesn't have any frisson to me. I suppose that yes, I know what Elle's sister's body looks like, but that's not the same. Since she's a different person.
I've never met a woman who I'd previously seen naked from photos or a movie, but I suppose that's sort of the same thing. If you meet Pam Anderson, sure you know what she looks like naked, but that's not at all the same thing as actually seeing her naked with your own eyes. Especially not in an intimate setting. (Whether you want to or not isn't the point; I'm just addressing the hypothetical.) I didn't think about Elle's sister in that way, and I haven't since. I'm interested in the psychology of the whole matter, but I'm not personally burdened with any twin fantasies. And while I'm aware that some men have crazy threesome fantasies about twins and/or sisters, does that really apply to identical twins?
I can envision it being pretty sexy to get 2 women into the same bed, especially if they were both very attractive, and perhaps it would be something of a boost if they were similar in appearance. But identical? Wouldn't that be weird, like you were with two androids from the same assembly line? (Leaving aside, for now, the issue of men who actually have fetishes/fantasies about identical androids.) Or surreal, like you were drunk enough to see/hallucinate double?
Not that any of this exists other than as a hypothetical amusement, since I've never wanted to bring another woman into an existing relationship, and even if I did Elle wouldn't, and even if we both did, there's no way it would be her sister. Wait, how did I even get onto this topic? I think I'm just trying to head off lecherous comments before they're even made.
At any rate, it was a very nice weekend, as was the weekend before, and it's hard for me to believe that I've been back from my San Diego/Anaheim/BlizzCon work trip/vacation for 2 weeks, the way the time has flown. Hopefully time will continue to fly, since I want to replace the long hours I've spent on D3 stuff with long hours spent on novel stuff, and I want to continue to spend long hours on social interactions with my new girlfriend. I'm not sure where blogging time fits into that, but I suppose BC will remain something of the red-headed stepchild of my temporal affections. And that's a grim promise spoken by an actual red-headed stepchild.
As a parting gift, I offer you this. The LoLcat I've laughed hardest at in recent months.
Labels: elle, lolcats, personal, psychology
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
We've all been tempted...
To do
just what this man did.
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. -- Police say a 61-year-old man annoyed with a crying 2-year-old girl at a Walmart slapped the child several times after warning the toddler's mother to keep her quiet.
A police report says after the stranger hit the girl at least four times, he said: "See, I told you I would shut her up."
Roger Stephens of Stone Mountain is charged with felony cruelty to children. It was unclear if he had an attorney and a telephone call to his home Wednesday was unanswered.
Authorities say the girl and her mother were shopping Monday when the toddler began crying. The police report says Stephens approached the mother and said, "If you don't shut that baby up, I will shut her up for you."
Authorities say after Stephens slapped the girl, she began screaming.
That last line is the best part. Though I'm sure the man derived intense short term satisfaction from finally taking action against some squalling brat, it didn't even work! On second thought, I think the mug shot is the best part. Just the perfect angry old man face/expression. If you'd read the headline, and had 10 possible mug shots to pick from, this guy would surely have been your choice.
I'm tempted to cross reference the fact that this took place in a Walmart out in the country, and get all arm chair sociologist with recklessly speculative and classist remarks that the mom was probably some negligent, Britney Spear-sesque white trash hillbilly, talking on her cell phone and browsing the hair care aisle while ignoring her screaming brat... but there's zero info about that in the news item, so I'll refrain.
Also, lest I seem too endorsing of a felony act... it's dumb, and stupid. Blaming a crying child for crying is like blaming a barking dog for barking; it's not the animal's fault, it's the owner's for not properly controlling it, or at least removing it from ear shot if it can't be controlled for whatever reason. If the old man were so pissed at the noise, he should have gotten up in the mother's ear, and either driven her to stop the baby, or made her so uncomfortable she left the store. Or he could have slapped her; that would still have been illegal, but at least she's not a defenseless baby, and she's responsible for her actions, and those of her living baggage.
As for the title of this post, okay, maybe we're not all tempted to slap a noisy baby/child, but we all want them to stop crying, or go away. Or both, ideally. But mostly we (adults who have no children of our own) want the parents to make it stop. Which is, of course, exactly what the parents most desperately want, and most of the time they're trying hard to make that happen, and are mortified that they can't impose their will/discipline/love on the grubby, decibel-generating creature they're tethered to for 16 or 17 more years.
Are there any laws about that sort of thing? Are parents legally obligated to try to keep their children from screaming? Or to remove them from the public sphere if they can't? If an adult were standing somewhere screaming, "disturbing the peace," then police could be called to deal with it. Or more likely, some bigger guy would do what stern fathers do to sniveling children, and "give him something to cry about."
Normal adults have a sense of the needs of others, experience embarrassment, or at least hold a concept of self preservation that keeps them from making a nuisance of themselves the same way children do. No one's going to arrest a baby for crying, but do parents have a responsibility to consider the noise pollution they're inflicting upon everyone else? Ethically, yes. Legally? I dunno.
I was wondering about this very issue a couple of months ago. I was in a Home Depot, and a nicely-dressed Chinese couple, in their 40s, were shopping while their son, who was about 7, ran around like a maniac. He was hyper, utterly oblivious to others, and very noisy. Every few steps he would stop and utter this shrieking cry, very high pitched. Bird-like, really. And he did this constantly, for at least 15 minutes, without either parent ever saying a word to him or even acknowledging his behavior.
I first saw them in the garden section, where I thought it was an actual bird, and wanted someone to shotgun it. Eventually the noise came towards me, and I was surprised to see this shrieking kid. Clearly not distressed; he was smiling and running around like the store was his private playground. And sort of circling his utterly oblivious and unconcerned parents, as they walked with their cart and talked together in low voices.
They moved off into the main part of the store, and even though they were a long way away, I could still hear the kid. Which means everyone else in the store could hear him too. Eventually I went into the store to pay, and he was still at it. Aisles away, this shrieking caw kept going up, and as I walked to the front he came racing along the main aisle, screaming some Cantonese version of "Mama mama mama mama!" After 4 or 5 aisles he saw their cart (they never made a sound, perhaps hoping they'd lost him?) and ran up towards it, again making the happy cawing shriek sound.
They came back past me while I was in line, the parents still utterly absorbed in each other and the blueprint or shopping list they were holding on their cart, the kid trailing along behind making his fire alarm sound effect. I tried to catch his eye and made a "shhh" expression with my finger to my lips, but he didn't register any sort of eye contact with me, and just kept up the racket until I got through the self check and mercifully escaped the store and the noise.
Admittedly, there are a lot of variables in this one. I don't know if the kid had autism or other disorder that kept him from behaving in civilized fashion. It might even have been something of a cultural thing, since Chinese (at least in China) are often dotingly devoted to children (especially sons) and spoil them with unreserved non-discipline. But the fact that the kid was fairly old, certainly of school age, and the fact that the parents made zero effort to shush him, and hardly even seemed to know he was there, made it very weird.
And made me wonder, at the time and afterwards, what amount of noise and disruption strangers are expected to tolerate from someone else's child before they step in? Would someone have been out of line to confront the parents, tell them their child's behavior was unacceptable, and that if they didn't stop him they'd have to leave the store immediately? What if another customer (like me) had done that? What if the store manager had done that? Obviously you can't just slap the kid, or carry him bodily out of the store, but don't parents have some reasonable obligation to control, or at least make an effort to control, their offspring?
I imagine Roger Stephens, or his attorney, is pondering questions of that nature at this very minute.
Labels: babies, odd social interactions
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