Dear Blog

Dear Blog,

I still love you--I swear. I’ve had a whirlwind of a time as of late and, before I knew it, 6 months had passed. Are you mad?

Let me do my best to catch you up:

I had a tourist-themed birthday where all my pals dressed up like SF tourists and rode around on double decker sightseeing buses all day (see above pic). From fanny packs to Hawaiian print visors to an abusive consumption of our local Anchor Steam offering, it was everything you’d dream for a Friscotastic experience.

I went to a Roseanne Rosanna Danna wedding reception on Halloween (title: The Night of 1,000 Roseanna Rosanna Dannas!). The way it worked was that guests dressed in a Halloween costume that (kind of) rhymed with “Danna” and then added a big black wig to their costume to create a hybrid of awesomeness between their character and that of Roseanne Rosanna Danna from SNL (Gilda Radner).

For example: “Peter Panna Roseanne Rosanna Danna” “Daryl Hannah Roseanne Rosanna Danna” and “Joe Montanna Roseanne Rosanna Danna.” I could go on (and on) about the resulting magnificence, but I’ll let your mind run wild. Needless to say, the boys who had gotten married that day are pretty much my new heroes (if they weren’t already).

I learned how to Double Dutch!

Heather D. got engaged! This is exciting for many reasons, not least of which is getting to write and deliver the bachelorette roast speech that I have been planning for since the Great Mystery-Puke Caper of 1992. And that’s all I’ll say.

I visited Heb, James and the baby again in the O.C. Good God, this child is prescious, although his taste in music remains questionable as the ONLY song that keeps the little guy calm while confined to his car seat is Bing Crosby's "Chesnuts Roasting on an Open Fire." It's true. I learned this one morning while we were all driving to LA to have brunch at Heb's brother's new restaurant and she played the song a few times in a row. At first I thought she and James were just playin' things safe to avoid any remote chance of a mid-highway meltdown but learned not to doubt them the second the next song came on (by mistake) and screaming immediately ensued. So guess what we listened to the entire 1-hour drive...on repeat? Yep. "And sooooo I'm offering this simple phrase:" do not question sleep deprived parents.

My company closed down. Well, not MY company, but the one I had been working at for the past 2 years. True story: we came into the office one Thursday and were told to huddle up in the conference room. The unfortunate news of mass demise was delivered, orange juice and vodka were set up in the kitchen (in lieu of severance) and packing boxes were made available to facilitate an organized group exit. Next thing I knew, my coworker Ashley and I were drinking gin fizzes at Citizen Cake at high noon, earnestly calculating whether or not our EDD checks would cover biweekly pedicures. Post script: Um, they don’t.

Note: one thing that's kind of funny about this situation is that, not 2 months prior, we had a Depression Era themed holiday party where we gambled for "buttamilk." Hubris? I think...yes.

I became a de facto expert on city of Balt’mo. My new unemployed status afforded me ample opportunity to watch all five seasons of The Wire. Back to back. With great attention to detail…often involving in-depth wikipedia study and cross reference following a particularly rich episode. So if you have any questions about my peeps (you know, Omar, Brother Mouzone, Snoop, Bodie), hit me up with a clock face SMS and I’ll know just where to meet you.

I learned I have the same blood pressure as Lance Armstrong. Which is apparently so low that it's noteworthy. Not sure what to make of this other than I’m pretty much poised for athletic domination, hopefully in the double dutch arena.

And there you have it.

xoxoxo.

ps. You still mad?

Prego No More

As you all know, Heb has been prego since November. In July, I visited her and James in The OC to hang out one last time before they would become parents and have to exhibit example-setting behavior such as watching their language and sitting up straight. The countdown had begun!

Who knew that things like washing the baby’s first load of laundry (so he’d have fresh little onesies when he came home from the hospital) would be so emotional? I must have cried five times over the course of those two days. The mere site of a fully pregnant Heb buying her first bottle of baby aspirin put me over the edge—in Target, no less. Well maybe I’ll try to blame that tear storm on exceeding my superstore limit for the day. Ok, so 4 times. Which is still a lot.

Flash forward 2 weeks and my phone rang at work. It was Heb, calling from the hospital! The baby had come and everyone was healthy and happy. Heb was a mom! And I was a proud…emergency contact! More tears.

Last weekend I finally got to meet the baby (who will eventually be called Jamie once we get over our slew of embarassingly mushy nicknames for him). We had so much fun hanging out together. Being the 5-week-old that he is, he cried enough for both of us, which left me free to work on my posture.

Right now he’s in an amusing phase that Heb likes to refer to as “the absence of emotion regulation.” It goes a little something like this: (over the course of 2 minutes) smile, fuss, cry, smile, fuss, smile, fall asleep, wake up, fuss, consider smiling, cry. I like to call it “equal opportunity emotion selection.” That way he seems more like he’s in the driver’s seat.

Anyway, this little guy is seriously adorable. No really. Check him out.

Hitting a Stride

Heather was my very first real-life roommate (not counting those few depressing winter months following college graduation that I spent living with some buddies in Portland, OR...before I realized I don’t seem to thrive in sun-starved locations. Read: wake up every day to the sound of MORE rain and fight back tears while wondering if my shoes had dried from the day before).

As I was leaving the Pacific Northwest—soaking wet in an all too familiar mix of cold rain and hot tears—and moving down to San Francisco where I had scored my first real job, a friend of mine put me in touch with Heather. Someone had moved out of her group house in the Haight and she needed to fill the room. A few days later, I moved into a cheery Victorian on Belvedere Street…and my shoes dried out for good.

Heather was a girl who had hit her stride as a young, single woman. Freshly out of a relationship with her high school sweetheart who was off to med school, she was fabulously busy every night meeting up with friends, attending work-related social events or staying in to entertain all sorts of people with dinner parties, movie nights, you name it.

One grade ahead of me in school, Heather had been livin’ the San Francisco city life for almost a year at that point. As far as I was concerned, she was an expert on all things SF as evidenced by her command of the public transportation system (wholly impressive to me at the time), recommendations for affordable ethnic take-out (very worldly, I remember thinking) and fun ideas for weekend trips. She was the perfect person to show me the ropes. And that she did.

We had all sorts of adventures living together in that house, which somehow became a revolving door for curious short-stay tenants. We sat back and watched these people come and go—everyone from a 7 foot 1 (no joke) semi-pro basketball player who subsisted singularly on hot dogs to an electronica DJ who mysteriously made ends meet by selling wood jewelry that he carved between the hours of 3am and 5am. At one point, we decided it would be a good idea to rent out my room for a month or two and have me stay with Heather in her room…in her bed. Why not? Then we split her rent and “made” $250 each for the month! We were practically rich!

Heather and I wound up moving together to a new house and staying in good touch after she eventually left San Francisco for grad school. After years of trading hilarious—and not so hilarious—dating stories, Heather met Pete. And that was that. In July, they got married up in Yosemite—the perfect spot for Ms. Envirofab and Mr. Ourdoorsman to come together.

My friend Heather set another example for me that day, almost 10 years later. She moved into her next phase of life with a remarkable focus and the utmost confidence. And I watched from beneath a canopy of redwoods, in dry shoes.

Guerilla Drive-in

A few months ago, one of my friends tipped me off to the Guerilla Drive-in, a real drive-in movie "organized over the internet, [that] appears for a short time in a random location, and disappears just as quickly as it came." In July, they set up shop on Treasure Island, offering viewers the opportunity to re-live the big screen splendor of Ghostbusters, feeding the souls of my immediate cohort—the same kids who ate dozens of Happy Meals with the hope of getting a crappy little Slimer toy and who practiced the “no ghost” symbol again and again on our spiral notebooks.

About an hour before sunset, 20 or so carfuls of us independently made our way to the secret location—a parking lot alongside a 2-story warehouse with a smooth white wall. (Note: I have mixed feelings about watching a drive-in movie from a fancy hybrid, a frontier boldly explored by two girls sporting skinny jeans. Sacreligous or environmentally sensitive? You be the judge.) After an impromptu tailgate with fellow movie-goers, we returned to our respective vehicles and snuggled in with our car-mates.

We all turned our radios to the designated frequency and as the opening credits rolled, the song we all once knew and loved crackled through our car radios. “When there’s something bad. In the neighborhood. Who ya gonna call?” As I sang along, I slipped right back into 1984.

Suddenly, I was a little gymnast again, warming up on the floor mat with my teammates. We’d meet eyes while upside down in backbends and mouth “I ain’t afraid of no ghost!” hoping our coach wouldn’t catch us playing around. (OK, so I was 9 and had nothing better to mouth such as hilarious client-bashing commentary during painful team conference calls.)

Now watching the movie in my 30s, I was amused to discover just how saucy it is. I remember the Gatekeeper/Keymaster relationship as a few vague interactions having something to do with the troublesome Zuul situation. Well, now I see that vague they were not! The scene where Sigourney Weaver is hovering above her bed in a revealing silk negligee (an awsomely jagged off-the-shoulder number tremendously capturing 1984) while possessed by the demon, begging Bill Murray to “take her!” is nothing short of naughty.

It's funny to consider what my 9-year-old self thought was going ON there? My guess is that I was too focused on how many Milk Duds remained in the box and what might happen to the great city of New York if the Ghostbusters accidentally...crossed the streams.

Distractions

This is the part where I admit that it’s been 2 months and 3 weeks since I last wrote. Rather than offer excuses about wildly distracting, sparkly things including a brand new baby that have caught my eye and captured my attention as of late, I’ll just catch you right up and we can pretend this little lapse never happened, shall we? Good, then.

¡Ole For Mole!

After a mostly uneventful visit to a small city called Puebla, Marisa and I arrived in Oaxaca. Following the recommendation of my friend, Greg, we stayed at a cute little place not far from the center of town. As part of his master´s in Linguistics program, Greg lived in Oaxaca for a short while working to preserve one of the dialects of the indigenous Zapateco langauge. Yes, Greg is THAT cool. We hoped we were staying in the same room as he did.


A word on Greg: he also does a mean karoake version of some New Order song that´s now escaping me. Oh, AND he likes to sew coverings for his and Wayne´s household ítems such as teapot cozys and printer covers. Wayne says that if he stood still long enough, Greg would sew him a cozy. Oh, how I love those sweet boys! I could go on an on…

(Deep inhale). Ok, so Oaxaca was everything we dreamed it would be. There was a crowded market where women in traditional dress walk by with baskets of chili peppers on their heads; a lively town center where dine-in carts selling Mexican food (that would rivel even the best Mission taquerías) mark every corner; and hard-working men discussing local politics over a couple of hearty cafe con leches. And everyone just seemed so happy…

We ate spicey enchilada dishes, witnessed the Mexican chocolate-making process, hung out in the zocalo (town plaza), learned all about Benito Juarez, sampled 20 different flavors of cremed mezcale (kind of like Bailey´s), appreciated the local graphite, and had drinks with two precious local boys one night who insisted upon walking us all the way home since, afterall, they were caballeros verdaderos (real gentlemen).

Like good little tourists, we checked out the local museum and the impressive city church. Note: I accidentally thought of a Jesus joke that I heard recently and had to excuse myself from the church as it didn´t seem appropriate to have such things on my mind given everyone´s seriousness and all. (Joke appears below if you think Jesus jokes are funny.)

And of course, we sampled the local mole dishes…and they did not let us down. ¡No, señor! Sitting at a beautiful restaurant looking out on the Zocalo, we each ordered a different type of chicken mole, passing our plates back and forth. No wonder everyone looks so happy here…
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Joke: Why did Jesus die on the cross? Answer: he forgot his safe word. Hahahahaha

Mariachis To Go

On our second night in Cuernavaca, we decided to take it easy as Marite was a little worn out from the party she hosted the night before.

Sidenote: at said party I finally figured out that it´s really lame to say “encantada” when you meet someone (in Spanish). Every time I introduced myself to one of her sassy friends with my little greeting, they would muffle a giggle and shake my hand, flashing a huge smile. I finally asked Marite what the story was and she told me the term is comprobable to saying “enchanted to make your acquaintance” in English. OMG, I was "that girl.”

That´s what I get for learning my Spanish salutations from a high school text book circa 1991. Damn! I can still picture the lesson:

Esteban*: Hola, Carmen. Me llamo Esteban.
Carmen: ¡Encantada, Esteban! Me llamo Carmen.

*Esteban´s little cartoon body was always kind of pudgy. And he didn't grow out of it in the Spanish II book, either. Pobrecito.

Anyway, the three of us drove down the mountain to the center of town in pursuit of a quick taco dinner. As we were pulling into the parking garage, I noticed a gathering of men hanging out under the overpass. They were dressed in elaborate Mexican costumes and carrying an assortment of guitars. Marite explained that these guys were Mariachi performers that the locals would pick up and bring to their impromptu house parties. What fun!

I thought to myself how, back home, our last-minute party purchases consist of a few extra bottles of tonic water, a couple of lemons and maybe an overpriced candle for your kitchen table. The idea of pulling up next to a group of strange men in the dark and hoping they´ll get into your car so that they can entertain your friends at your house later that night isn´t really our thing.**

Well not in Mexico! You just head down to the bridge, stop your car and as many men as possible pile in. I love to imagine a Mexican wife´s to-do list as she checks off the final ítems for her fiesta prep:

__ purchase [insert shockingly large number] bottles of tequila
__ pick up men in costume from under bridge

The rest will take care of itself...

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**How funny would it be if we COULD pick up bands on the side of the road to bring to our parties? Depending on the mood you wanted to set, you could pick up an angry punk band, a sensitive indierock band or maybe a more refined jazz band. Then if they sucked, you could just invite them to join the party and send someone out to get a new band. It would be your own, drunk version of American Idol! (excuse overuse of footnotes as I’m currently reading Consider The Lobster and can’t help myself)