okay, it's the day before the Nike Women's Half Marathon, which I have done the last three years with Suzy. This year she is unavailable due to pregnancy and general laziness, and the person who was supposed to take over her entry bailed on me last week, so I am in principle going alone. I haven't done a training run since May and I'm about fifteen pounds heavier than I was last time I ran. Is this a terrible idea?

Negatives of running:
I'm kind of out of shape for it.
I have a broken left big toe (broken about six weeks ago, but doesn't seem to have healed properly; I've run a block or two and been fine but it does still hurt sometimes and doesn't really bend)
I have to wake up at 5:30 tomorrow morning to do it.
I will probably cramp up massively at some point.
I don't really like running alone and I haven't gotten around to finding an iPod or something, although I'm sure I can if I need to.
I can probably still sell my entry for something close to the $90 entry fee.

Positives of running:
I can prove to myself that I can still run a half marathon without training, which implies that I'm not in as bad shape as I could be.
Tradition.
I would be kind of embarrassed if I wussed out at this point.

so now what?

Last Wednesday, I took my car to the train to the plane to another plane to a car to a train to another train to a bus to a trolley, and at the end of that I was on a Swiss Alp. Now I am home. I'll write more about the trip later, probably, but here are the pictures:

Switzerland

whee!

I live in what is supposedly one of the greatest loci of intelligent people in the world, in the center of Silicon Valley, where the brilliant inventors converge to develop the ideas that will carry us into the future.

So sometimes it's good to go into the Palo Alto Safeway and see a little reminder that there are dumb people everywhere:

Dad and Andi came out and looked at condos with me.  We decided that nothing that we saw was quite perfect for my needs, and rather than feeling rushed to find something I would rent for a little while and check again in a few months when maybe I'd have more money saved up or know more about what my life status would be.  I was trying to find something that was big enough that I could have someone live with me if I wanted to without feeling cramped, in a decent neighborhood, and semi-affordable, and I think that's just unreasonable to try to find right now.  Rent in SF is kind of crazy, especially if I'm trying to rent in the areas that I want to live in, but I may have found a decent option.  More news as it develops.

oh yeah, I never wrote this up.

I ended up staying up until about 2:30 on Thursday night talking to Aaron.  He's like an older, bitterer, cynicaler, funnier version of me.  We had a lot in common to talk about.  He had some useful advice to contribute which involves looking at the world in a somewhat less magical but more efficient way than I usually do.  Not sure how well I can use it, but it was interesting to think about.

Anyway, I was exhausted the next morning and got downstairs a bit late.  I apparently missed whatever minor unpleasantness resulted from the various misunderstandings from dinner Thursday night and defended Priscilla's honor in re how easy it was to go down the street the wrong way with the lights off.  Then the entire group went off to a house to do a bit of yardwork all together.  I got to help knock down an old collapsing fence with a sledgehammer.  I felt quite manly.  Then I spent the rest of the morning carrying branches and clippings and grass to the truck for disposal.  We finished around lunch and a couple people went to the dump to unload the truck; the rest of us went back to camp to shower and change clothes.

At lunch, I got another reminder that I wasn't hanging out with my usual social group.  Julia (an Asian girl from San Jose) was telling us about how she'd gone to the dump and wanted to take pictures of the group at work, and the dump manager came out and yelled at her saying "No cameras!"  Even after she explained that she was just with our volunteer organization and just wanted pictures of us, he kept saying "no cameras" and wouldn't let her do it.  At the end of the story, I leaned over and said "you know, I think 'cameras' might be slang for 'Asians'."  She looked at me, shocked, and said "you really think so?"  I sighed and said "no... no, I don't."  And she looked at me like I was the asshole!  How unfair.

After lunch, Tom and Jules invited me to stay with them and Ernie in their room in the city overnight instead of staying at Camp Hope, which sounded like a lot more fun.  I packed and drove up with Priscilla.  I dropped my luggage off at the Marriott and went with her to her hotel.  She went to take a nap and I went exploring in the French Quarter.  I finally took my first real injury of the week -- I banged my hand on the handle of the shower door at the spa at the Ritz-Carlton after my massage.  I also found a good liquor store and bought a case of Catdaddy Carolina Moonshine (smells like eggnog, tastes like burning) to bring home.  Then I walked the mile or so to the jazz club where we were meeting up that night.  I got dinner by myself at a little diner (my first real jambalaya of the trip) and then hung out with various other people while they ate.  It was nice to spend a couple hours by myself.  The jazz club was dark and loud and fun.  The trombone player/singer got me to buy a CD but then told me to put it away; I eventually figured out that he'd sold me one of his albums and was keeping the money rather than selling me one of the band's CDs.  After a while we wandered off to explore Bourbon Street, which was about as expected but with less flashing.  I was getting very tired and headed home to the hotel around midnight and dozed until Tom and Jules came back, then went to bed.

Saturday was just bouncing through various airports trying to fly standby.  I got home around 9:30, got a ride back to my car, then promptly turned around and headed back to SF to go to another jazz club (apparently I hadn't had enough of that).  Whee.

at some point I'll write the day 5 update, but right now is not that time. it's been a long week.

but I got all my pictures together and organized and captioned. they are at http://picasaweb.google.com/wilykatenator/OneBrickNewOrleans02.

I haven't forgotten about the blog, but I'm finally feeling like I have enough energy that I can go out at night and I have found a bunch of entertaining people to do it with.

It's 1am and in theory I have to be up at 6:45 tomorrow but enh, I'll write.

day 3: They didn't learn from how quickly we painted the first place (it's a three-day job and we did it in two) and assigned us another house for which we just had to paint the attic. It wasn't nearly as hot as the last one and I spent most of the time in the rafters, some of which was lying down across a couple beams and painting behind my head. We were done by lunch. Went to lunch at a little fresh seafood place where I had a hot sausage and a crab-stuffed artichoke and some people had some huge crabs. Then they didn't have another job for us that wouldn't either involve teaching us a new task (which would take a while) or that we could complete without running way over our normal stopping time, so we went home and showered and headed out to be tourists. We drove around New Orleans a bit and visited the Musician's Village, which is a housing development being built by Habitat for Humanity along with Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis to house some of the displaced musicians who would weaken the culture of the city if they left. It's very pretty. Then we walked around a shopping area and chatted and eventually went to dinner at a bar that had mediocre food and apparently good drinks. We talked a lot (people think my stories are amusing, which is nice) and then seven of us went across the street and jumped the fence into the cemetery and walked around for a while. Charlotte cleverly noticed that there was an open gate much farther down, which was useful.

In other news, right about the time that Mom sent me an email warning me that I was allergic to mold, I noticed an allergic outbreak across my upper back. It doesn't seem to have spread and it's not that annoying -- it looks like a bunch of pimples or water blisters or something, and they don't really hurt -- but it was bad enough that on day 4 when we were supposed to do actual mold removal, I begged off.

day 4: I originally got switched to the team that was collecting trash from various houses and taking it to the dump, but then I got moved to one of the teams doing "mudding", which is putting some sort of mud-like spackle (I think) on drywall. Rather than teaching me a lot of new technique, they had me covering screws, which was tedious. And for some reason, this was the first time I got really tired. I kind of slacked. Many other people did, it turns out, although not at my site. At lunch we met up with most of the rest of the crew and two of the other teams campaigned to get me switched to theirs, and I ended up going to the other team that was theoretically doing mudding, but again I got a different job. I re-set a handful of screws that were done poorly, and then I gutted a bathroom with a crowbar. Good times. I felt very powerful and covered in drywall dust. Then I cleaned a lot. Afterward, we went home and showered and got dressed up all pretty and the cool kids went off to New Orleans to a fancy restaurant. We went to a restaurant called "Cochon" and I had fried alligator and ham hock and champagne and they were all good. Then we went to Cafe Du Monde and had coffee and beignets. On the way home, our driver did a poor job of noticing that her lights weren't on and was distracted by the GPS that apparently sent her the wrong way down a one-way street, and at the end of that street (which fortunately nobody else came down) a cop was waiting. We threw enough stuff at the wall (lost, rental car, rebuilding, etc) that the cop actually let us go with a warning. And now I am home and I am going to be very tired tomorrow.

It was an amusing look into my childhood/early adult insecurities that my primary thoughts about dinner were (a) "This was a lot of fun" and (b) "I'm out with the cool kids! This never happens!" and I'm not sure which was stronger. But it was really fun. Three of them live in SF and I will see them again.

I'm sure I am overlooking stuff but tired. Night!

overslept a little, got a quick breakfast, and headed out to the work site for day 2. We were a little ahead of schedule and thought we might get done today. Most of the remaining work was in the rafters/attic or at the tops of the walls, so I spent most of the day with my arm above my head and/or on a ladder. My shoulder is tired. Also I got paint in the corner of my eye and it's sort of irritated but I seem to have avoided any major problems. The attic was over 120 degrees for most of the day. Tom sweats more than anyone I know except maybe Alex Werner. There was a puddle on the ground beneath where he was working in the attic and you could see drops of dirty water getting ready to drip off the rafter he was sitting on. Ugh. I had a little more sympathy for him once I spent some time up there, but... not much. We got finished around 4:15 and cleaned up and took pictures, after which I noticed a few bars that hadn't been painted, but we were apparently quite done. I know I was. There wasn't enough time for frozen custard before going home and showering for dinner.

Using the scientific method, I determined by experimental evidence that the maximum number of times I am willing to get paint in my beard is one. So I am clean-shaven for the rest of the week.

Dinner was cooked for us by some locals who have a huge dinner for all the volunteers once a month at the Knights of Columbus. The food here is ridiculously good, even things I wouldn't have thought I would like. Grilled pork roast, string bean and artichoke casserole, and "camp beans" which were incredible. I got the email address of the guy who made the beans to get the recipe, although he said that he doesn't use a recipe and the only thing that exists is a record made by someone who watched him and tried to write down what he did. We had a "king cake" for dessert, which many people got excited about (Nada: "Why are people cheering? What's king cake?" Charlotte: "It's cake, who cares?") (it's a Mardi Gras tradition and it's very heavily spiced cake and it is good) and then watched a video made by the guy who was running the dinner.

It's amazing to me that of all the people we've talked to who were displaced by Katrina, some of whom will never be able to go home because of the massive oil spill that rendered a lot of St. Bernard Parish uninhabitable (although this has never really been publicized, it was the largest domestic oil spill in US history), none of them have had a bad thing to say about the experience or about the government response or anything. They are all completely preoccupied with how thankful they are that so many people have come to help. I will write more about this later in the week, but what he was saying was that although it is nice and definitely helpful if you contribute money to the Red Cross or the St. Bernard Project or put a few dollars in the collection plate at church or whatever, it makes a tremendously bigger difference to come in person and remind these people that they haven't been forgotten and that people care about them.

Somebody (one of the other locals, I think) asked why he was wearing the same shirt in so many of the pictures. His wife explained that you could tell all the refugees because they had been told to pack three days' worth of clothes and then lived in them for a month.

After dinner I went to a daiquiri place with the team leader and three of the younger girls from the team. One of them is in her mid-20s and is a public school teacher and is very normal (she's from a suburb near where I grew up and made a big deal about where I went to high school), the other two are 19 and 24 and are from a very different social experience than mine. It was... interesting. I had maybe 2/3 of a daiquiri (they come premixed in big Slurpee machines) and didn't feel anything from it. Go fig.

Woke up a bit early because I couldn't get on a computer last night and the wireless dropped a couple minutes after I got on and I wanted to write. Breakfast now. I'm not sure where we're being sent today, but there's a threat of actually doing real mold work. Ugh.

playing Taboo, and I gave the clue "The 'blank' Falcon, Star Wars." My entire team just stared at me and then started guessing random colors. I couldn't think of another hint other than "You can't be serious."

lesson 1: The problem with using "hot as a dog's balls" to describe the weather on Sunday at 5pm is that it does not leave you room to escalate when you are painting an attic with sealant at 1pm on Monday. It was 100 degrees at 4pm when we left the work site, and the attic was probably 10-20 degrees hotter than the main floor. The last step of the mold remediation process involves repainting all of the wood in the house with sealant. My left arm hurts from holding the paint tray all day, I have a blister on my finger, my feet hurt, and there are some pictures of me being bright red from the heat.

The people here are really nice. There are two people who work for Accenture doing installation of insurance software. I bitched at them about their lawsuit, which neither of them had ever heard of. One trend has been that everybody thinks everybody else is younger than they are. Two people guessed I was in my mid 20s. This feels implausible, although I was off by 5-10 years on two of the other people, so who knows. And I don't even have my fantastic new haircut at full power.

The fucking-up-the-sleep-schedule plan worked well; I fell asleep around 10 last night and woke up a couple minutes before my alarm went off at 6:45. We met up, got water and stuff, and headed to an orientation by the guy who runs the St. Bernard Project (apparently we're not actually working for Habitat for Humanity like I thought). It was kind of depressing, unsurprisingly. He was telling us about the guy who owned the building we were in, who thought the water wasn't going to make it up to the level of his second-floor apartment, but when it got close he had to wave a flag out the window and get rescued by some people in a boat, but they wouldn't let him take his dog or his birds. And they left him on the roof of a bank and said "wait." They thought they'd be picked up in three days. The Canadian military showed up in six days, the US showed up a day after that. Every home in this parish was rendered unlivable, and three years later there are still 1800 families living in trailers which are going to be removed by FEMA at the beginning of 2009; in March FEMA is going to stop paying rent for people who are living in apartments while they wait for their houses to be rebuilt. There's going to be massive homelessness here. The project head talked to some of the people after the project had spent a month here and asked what they wanted the project to tell the rest of the country, and they said "tell them not to forget us, and tell them that we don't want handouts, we just want to go home." The area had 4% unemployment and 75% home ownership before the flood.

We were sent to a house in Violet and went to work applying the aforementioned sealant. We got a break for lunch and went to some little diner and had a ton of food, then went back to work. An ice cream truck showed up a little before we broke at 4, and we stopped and got frozen custard on the way home, but I was still uncomfortably hot. That was some amazing strawberry/malted milk ball/vanilla frozen custard though. Tasted like astronaut ice cream.

Brief dinner, and now I'm just relaxing until we have a camp orientation meeting at 8, then maybe going out. Whee.

Things I should have brought: gym shoes (I brought nice shoes in case we went somewhere fancy and my work boots, but I'm not really needing the work boots right now), a comb, Advil.

More pictures going up shortly. I am tired.

this place has wireless access but it doesn't seem to work in our room, although my laptop has four bars of signal strength (or so it claims) it won't connect, and if I leave my room to connect it dies when I go back in. But there's a computer cluster here.

the fuck-up-my-sleep-schedule plan has worked nicely so far. I even got up a little before my alarm. And that pleasantly cool air conditioning in the room is fucking cold at night. I may take a blanket from the oversupply here in addition to the one I brought.

also also: I had a first date right before I left with someone surprisingly awesome and who seems to be as interested in me as I am in her. more on that when I have time. I've never dated someone who had a wikipedia page before.

I decided that it would be easier if I stayed up until 4 and then headed to the airport rather than trying to get packed and get a couple hours sleep. That worked, but my sleep on the airplanes wasn't all that great, as you would expect. And the second flight was delayed for maybe an hour or so because the "tail bar" fell off while we were taxiing and hit a "nose" something or other -- I wasn't all that coherent so I probably have some names wrong, I can't figure out why a tail thing would hit a nose thing on the same plane, but the tail part is definitely correct. So we went back to the gate and some people hammered on the plane for a while and decided we were good to go. That was nice. Oh, also, when I got to the airport the check-in computer thought I wanted an upgrade, which I think I did ask for when I bought the ticket, but now that the time had come it wouldn't take no for an answer -- when I said "I changed my mind" it broke rather than moving on and I had to get in a very long line to get processed. And when I called United to try to get them to take the upgrade off over the phone so I wouldn't have to wait in the line, it asked me for my frequent flier number and I said "I don't know it" and it moved on, then it asked for my reservation number and I said "I don't know it" and it said "did you say U-R-R-G-R-A?" and I gave up on United. But that was, in fact, pretty much what I was saying by then.

Arrived around 3, met up with someone else who'd been on my flight and we picked up a rental car and drove to the site. She somehow got all of her stuff into one smallish suitcase and a backpack, where I have a smallish suitcase, a huge duffel bag, and a backpack. I think she brought way fewer clothes than I did. I brought nine shirts, six pairs of pants, and two pairs of shorts for the week, which may be overkill but I figured we might go out somewhere nice some evenings and I wanted to be prepared. My driving partner is a 45-year-old Asian lady who drives like a 45-year-old Asian lady. It was a long trip. We arrived, met up with a couple other people from our group, went exploring a bit, came back for dinner (very good fried catfish), and had our orientation meeting. Then I think some people went out but I am damn tired and will be getting up at 4:30 California time for the rest of the week so I'm kind of winding down.

Other notes:

One of the guys on this trip is deaf. He seems to be pretty good at reading lips though. And the guy I was wandering around with earlier today is decent at sign language and there's someone else who is very good. I watched them have a conversation earlier and it was impressive. Maybe I should learn that. Also the guy I wandered around with, if he had a thicker beard, would look and sound a lot like Kevin Smith.

The dorm room has decent air conditioning. It is hot as a dog's balls out here. I have no idea if that is a real phrase but it should be, assuming that they are actually hot, which I don't know. We're in an old elementary school that got 25 feet of water (!) and also the area was wiped out enough that there aren't enough kids here now to reopen the school, so we're living in a classroom.

Pictures of the trip are gradually going up at http://eddiehawkins.blogspot.com. I may move some of them into here at some point but not soon. The first picture from the trip is the "It's been a long day" one; for some reason you can only fit three pictures per page so you may have to go back a little.

I am either not a sandal person or not a $7 Target sandal person. These are uncomfortable, although in a different way than the hiking boots.

At dinner, a guy named Steve introduced himself to us. He's an old guy who lives around here and volunteers at Camp Hope doing some cooking and other stuff, and he's starting a community center, and he lost all of his possessions and his wife in Katrina. He's a very nice and touching guy. I hope we can help this week. I am still not sure what the hell I'm going to be doing if they don't need me to make a coat rack or something out of pipe cleaners.

The only thing I forgot, which wasn't on any of my lists but was recommended at work and I should have written it down, is a face mask for mold etc. Maybe I'll find one somewhere in the city if I'm going to be working on that sort of thing.

getting ready to leave for New Orleans. Things I still need: some throwaway twin bedsheets, a light blanket, a pillow, a water bottle, a lock, and another bag to put all this stuff in. I can probably get the water bottle from Kim and Jason when I go over there to borrow some of their other supplies. I'm looking forward to the trip, although I'm a little nervous about sucking at whatever I'm assigned to. Also I am still kind of philosophically curious about why I'm doing this. I think there are four components and I'm not sure how they balance out:

• looking like a "good guy" to other people (social value)
• being able to think of myself as a person who would do this (improved self-image)
• actually wanting to do it
• feeling like I don't have a good excuse not to do it, since I can get the time off work and I don't have a good reason not to go

Things that aren't on the list, about which I'm not sure what I think:

• Concern for the people of New Orleans (i.e. why am I doing this instead of just going to the food bank or homeless shelter around here?  I'm not sure)
• interest in being able to put this on my resume (my theory about why I got rejected from business school a couple years ago was that I didn't have a lot of socially positive extracurricular activities.  I thought about doing some charity work primarily so I could strengthen my case, but it wasn't a consideration this time around for some reason.  I think I'm glad that I'm definitely not doing this just because I have a purely self-concerned reason)

I am breaking in my new hiking boots.  They are some kind of heavy and sweaty.  I'm already tired of wearing them.
other news:  Dating is still active if not always entirely fun.  I'm getting kind of tired of the "you seem really nice and I liked spending time with you but I didn't feel that 'spark' so... see ya" but I'm not quite sure what to do about it.  My normal tendencies are not to try to do anything really aggressively romantic on a first date, instead focusing on just making sure we like each other, but perhaps that isn't the right thing to be doing.

I discovered a weird incompatibility somewhere in between JDate and GMail.  JDate has three different levels of expressing interest: there's the "send an email" level, which is the only one that I ever use because the others are cowardly, there's the "send a flirt" level, which sends a one-line canned email and makes the other person think you can't be bothered to put any time into it until you see if the other person is interested, which is fine I guess but I wouldn't be impressed with it, and there's this thing where you can just click a button next to the person's profile that says "yes", "no", or "maybe".  If you click "yes", the site sends an email to the person with five profiles on it saying "would you click with any of these people?"  I thought this was just an occasional mailing but eventually I noticed that it came irregularly and I am pretty sure that you only get the email if one of the people it shows you actually did the clicking-yes thing.  The email has some html code in it so that you can actually click through to the profiles from the email and you can actually do the yes/no/maybe clicking in the email.  At some point, something got fucked up and the formatting doesn't come through correctly, so I can't actually see the buttons in the email, and frequently one of the profile pictures doesn't appear in the email.  The last time I got one of these, I noticed that one of the people it was showing me was somebody who'd looked at my profile recently, and coincidentally that was the person whose profile picture didn't come through properly...  After a bit of review, it looks like there is a definite correlation between "broken picture" and "clicked yes".  I have no idea how this happens but it amuses me.

Dad and Andi will be out here the day after I get back from the trip to look at real estate with me.  Whee!

I'll post more tonight but in case I don't get around to it: things are good, residence hunting is good (I think I've settled on one or two options, but I need to go up and spend more time in the neighborhood, as I've gotten a lot of conflicting opinions about the area -- that said, most of the negative opinions have been from single women who probably have different feelings about safety than I do), I went to see Point Break Live and it was excellent, and I have my air tickets to go to New Orleans and build houses from July 21st to the 25th. You should go with me.

I'm sure I've skipped over three or four things I meant to write about. More later. Off to the city again!

I could really use one aspect of my life to be stable for a little while. I considered taking a vacation but I can't realistically afford it if I'm thinking about this house thing and anyway work is the most peaceful and non-stressful part of my day.

Last week: saw a Barenaked Ladies concert promoting Snacktime, their new kids' album. It was in a Barnes and Noble. I was about fifteen feet away from them. They're very funny in their between-song banter. They played four or five songs from the new album, "One Week", and "If I Had a Million Dollars". It was a lot of fun. I've been listening to the CD the last couple of days. There are a handful of songs on it that wouldn't feel out of place on a normal album of theirs.

Sunday: saw "OSS 117" at an art theater in SF. French subtitled spy movie parody (here's a review). Some of it was hilarious, some of it was just medium funny, but it was almost all good. I hope somebody else I know sees it someday so I can reuse some of the jokes and have someone get them. I don't think it's coming to the peninsula though, so we may have to wait for the DVD in late September.

This coming Saturday: Point Break Live, a theatrical version of the Keanu Reeves movie. Should be very silly.

I will probably see something serious again at some point but I have no real plans to do so. Considering rescheduling my Friday date to go see Brad Paisley, but I probably won't.

where do I want to live next?

options:

South Peninsula (somewhere between Mountain View and Santa Clara)
Pros: near most of my friends, not too bad a commute and I can use carpool lane for almost all of it, nicest neighborhoods, I can probably afford something in the 1200-1400 sqft range which would mean that I wouldn't have to move again if I wanted to live with someone, decent amount of new construction townhouses

Cons: not a great commute either, not a very interesting area, far enough from SF to make going up there a real hassle and I seem to be doing that a lot, the non-new construction places look really dated and not my style

North Peninsula (somewhere between Redwood City and San Mateo)
Pros: near Jason and Kim, very close to work, centrally located between other friends and SF, I can afford a pretty big place (like 1200-1500 sqft depending on where)

Cons: the newer, more modern looking places are out in Redwood Shores, which was fine to live in but feels really suburban and precludes, say, walking to the grocery store, which I got to like while I lived in SF. places in San Mateo and San Carlos are older buildings and look even more dated, which I could throw money at and fix, but... also San Mateo isn't really that nice a place to live, although the downtown area isn't bad

San Francisco (somewhere on the east side, Potrero Hill or SoMa)
Pros: I like SF a lot, near the ballpark, about 90% of the people I've been dating live in SF or Oakland or Berkeley, some of these places are just gorgeous and non-cookie-cutterish and I could really see being happy with them (cf. 741 Natoma, 63 Lafayette, 2068 3rd although that may be a little out of my price range, but it's not that much out and it's way bigger than the other places I'm looking at), I like lofts and they don't really exist on the peninsula (although I could get just a normal multi-story place -- somehow, having internal stairs makes it feel more real and grown-up), probably better long-term appreciation potential, and I want to live there.

Cons: Much worse deals. For what I could pay for a 1300 sq ft place in a nice-ish community in Mountain View, I can get a 900 sq ft place in a kind of industrial area in the city that has occasional homeless people walking around. I could maybe reasonably have someone move in with me, as long as they didn't have too many clothes or we built another closet, but it would be a little tight sometimes, at least in most of the places I'm looking at. Far from my friends, although the area I'm looking at has good highway access, and I do have a couple friends in the city now. If I actually change jobs and end up working in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, very long commute.

as should be obvious from the above, I kind of know what I want the answer to be, but I'm not convinced that it's the most sensible thing to do, and this feels like something I really ought to try to be sensible about. And I could buy something big on the peninsula for what I'd pay in the city and then remodel it to look more like what I want. I like glass and brushed steel and hardwood floors and huge windows and semi-industrial looking, and everything on the peninsula feels all carpeted and plush and enh. Of course, I don't actually need 1400 square feet right now, but I will someday, I hope. So... what do I want?

I got a book out of the library a week or so ago. I finally started reading it a few days ago, and early on, a business card fell out of the book. I assume the previous reader was using it as a bookmark, but the card is for a person named "Sunshine", and there's a note written on the back saying "Now you won't forget to bring them home!" with a smiley face and signed "Lori". I gave this far too much thought.

Last night, I sent Sunshine this email:

I checked a book out of the San Mateo library and, a hundred or so pages in, found your business card. It has a note handwritten on the back: "Now you won't forget to bring them home!" and it's signed "Lori". Now, it seems like other people must use business cards as bookmarks on occasion, and it's rather improbable that I've never run across this before, and yet here I am and here we are. And I've never been much for fate -- the few times I've thought life was spinning the way it was intended, some minor perturbation has come along to confuse the matter enough to dissuade me from that faith. But on the other hand, I am trying to make a bit more of an effort to live in the moment and follow up on my minor curiosities, such as they are.

So, Sunshine, you of the fanciful name: Who are you? How did you get that name? Was it peace-loving parents or a decision you made for yourself? Was this note written to you, or did some strange person scoop up one of your business cards when they needed to dash off a few words to someone else entirely? Do you know if the unspecified recipient did forget to bring home whatever they were? And is it too much to think that fate explains a business card in a library book? Lord knows I could stock the new releases shelf with an entire box of unused business cards of my own and wait for the few people with this curiosity to follow up, but that seems rather like cheating, and if I have little faith in fate, I have even less faith in the idea of trying to channel fate into a path like a small boy dragging a stick through wet sand at the beach.

- Mike

She responded and was amused by it. Apparently she checked it out and she recommended some other books for me to try, and I told her about Danny Wallace and she was interested in him, and the name was given to her by hippie parents. And she thought I sounded like a writer, which I think is just a reflection of how overly wordy and lyrical I get when I write late at night, but whatever.

In summary, I am pleased with myself far more than I have any right to be. I'm getting much better at not caring if other people think I'm being silly or dumb, which for whatever reason makes me happy.

(in other news, the hunt for a new residence continues apace, dating is fun, I went to that benefit breakfast at the SF farmer's market and it was good, and "A Trip to the Stars" by Nicholas Christopher, which I mentioned in an earlier post, is really very good.)

(oh, also, she led her response with noting that she was married so it wasn't that kind of fate, which is fine by me; I'm just happy that I went ahead and asked instead of wondering about this card. But I thought it was interesting that she felt obligated to point that out early on.)

how many times have I watched the Swingin' on a Star scene (which I finally bought, wee) without noticing that they make a big point of the song being five minutes and 32 seconds, but the song only takes them a little over two minutes to sing?

I mean really.

I was walking across campus the other day and found this. (click the pictures to see larger versions)





There's a basketball court outside near the corner of Mayfield and Campus Drive. Somebody with very good handwriting and impressive devotion to their task has inscribed the court with what looks like the entirety of Dante's Inferno. I didn't want to see if I could rub out the letters in case I actually could; I couldn't tell if this was recent work in chalk or if it was done somehow that lasted through basketball games.

There's something very Stanford about this. It makes me happy to have gone there.