feather2pixels

God dammit, I totally lost a blog post. The gist of it was that I had the most action-packed weekend in recent memory.

Critical Mass wasn’t quite rained out on Friday, but I would say that the mass wasn’t quite critical enough. I got there (The Ferry Building at 18:30 on the final Friday of each month) late and joined a group of maybe twenty other stragglers for a subcritical mass. Subcritical Mass was in some ways more fun but noteably more dangerous than real Critical Mass–there aren’t enough bodies to stop traffic and at one point a Honda Prelude came within a foot of hitting me head on at forty-five miles per hour as we biked the wrong way down Folsom Street. We finally found the main group, but it didn’t really have enough people to form a collective conscious. Instead we were a bunch of indecisive assholes, tentative at every intersection, and I biked home to work on feather2pixels.com.

So: feather2pixels.com: check it out. I guess this is my best stab at a first draft. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Not that anyone needs any of this crap. I feel good about the modest format, though even this laughably little took me months to program. I can’t escape computers.

So after blowing $10 on a misloaded film cartridge, the old Polish dude at Action Camera in West Portal showed me how to properly load my new Polaroid on Saturday morning. After producing a few successful shots, I say “I can’t believe I waited till I was twenty-seven to pick one of these up.” Every frame looks like it was taken in in 1976!

That night, after finding my favorite Dylan album on vinyl, I made it back to the Exploratorium for a sound festival, which was a little disappointing by Exploratorium standards, but I saw some old friends and I felt very cool to be known at the greatest science museum in the world. A pepperoni and mushroom pizza with a pitcher of Bud was enjoyed afterwards at Vincent’s.

Sunday started with a surprisingly solid breakfast in North Beach followed by a hike in the Marin Headlands. I’ve never actually hiked there, but the hills smelled strongly of Calfornia and the Pacific was sparkly from the summit. There are endless clusters of abandoned forts up there, decaying in the caustic fog sixty years after the Japanese didn’t invade. A murder of crows kept their eyes on us as we climbed through the ruins and wished that I had bothered to bring along my new camera.

This is Sarah:

After three unsuccessful attempts to find Rocky II at area video stores, I met Krisitin at the Sunset Baskin Robbins. We settled for the original, which wasn’t really a bad thing. And there you go: an exhausting, exhilarating, perfect week. A model for what I want out of life.

New York City:

  

Christmas Eve. The most boring night of the year. I couldn’t even find an open grocery store, so instead of running an errand for my family I listened to Joanna Newsom’s new album the way it was meant to be heard: in a dark corner of the Super Fresh parking lot locked in my mom’s brand new SUV.

Joe and Anna announced their engagement at Rich’s Other Place on Friday, which is as good a place to tell your friends you are getting married as it is a place to cut high school. She wore black gloves until the unveiling and I am glad to report that Rich’s grilled corn muffins are back to the excellent standards of ten years ago. It was actually the first time I met Anna. Even if I didn’t like her, I would obviously never trash talk her on the internet, but she was friendly and I took to her right away. A smart woman makes her fiance’s best friends feel welcome. I can see what Joe sees in her.

After breakfast, Joe and I bowled a three game series and played six games of air hockey. He bowls with his dad’s old eighteen pound ball, heaving it in to the air as high as possible so that it lands with a left hook. When hit just right, it detonates the pins with a furious explosion to hell. Any other time it splits them. On Friday, though, he was rusty and I beat him with a reliable 13 pound house ball that apparently used to belong to a Chun C. Chung. Back at my house, we realized that Joe never signed my senior yearbook and so I handed him a pen and he got his big chance. I had almost forgot what it felt like to have friends who know the way to your house without directions. (Not to downplay the significance of Ben, who probably still needs a map for his own special reasons).

That night, Shal and Ammora joined us for drinks at the nation’s second largest mall, where she works (and had just personally completed $33,000 in home theater sales). Our server has a thick, juicy Philadelphia accent but there was an unsettling lack of smoke in the bar. Side note: apparently in Philadelphia proper, there is now an official smoking ban. I went down there last night with my cousin Rebecca to investigate and I am happy to report that at the Locust Bar–on tenth at Locust, where The Rascal and I used to get loaded when she was still nineteen–there is not only smoking, but an ashtray at each table.

Well, feather2pixel tip-riders, it’s vacation time. Thank god for that. Actually, the party kind of started on Friday. I gave every member of the Instrumentation class a pop quiz stapled to a $1 scratcher (or as Dirty Jay calls them: Vallejo City Bonds) and we were off to the races. This was question number two:

Given an instantaneous, sustained Vin that occurs at t=3 in the form ΔV(t)=2cos(ωt), please sketch a portrait of the instructor below:

Click here for a collage of the highly disturbing results.

I will come clean and admit that it’s actually Sunday night–the party’s been on for quite a while. If you want to call it that. Mostly, I have been catching up on some much-needed rest. I don’t remember the last time I slept in.

Some mildly interesting things happened this weekend. The most unexpected of them happened yesterday in the middle of the night. I was stumbling down Valencia street and who did I run into on the corner of 22nd, but Williams the Border Collie. Williams was a co-worker of mine at the Exploratorium for a year and a half. She was the warmhearted Field Trip Explainer. We rode bikes together and generally got on well. After the work year ended, though, nobody ever heard a peep from her, despite several months of voicemails. After a while, I didn’t know what to think and kind of gave up. I was a little pissed.

But there she was before my eyes. It’s extremely hard to get Williams’ attention, but when you do, you get a lot. I don’t think I have ever met a more compassionate person.   Her face lit up and she walked home with me. We sat on my porch, talking for a while and it made me feel a little crestfallen to think that so much has changed for both of us since we last spoke. The world of Field Trip Explaining feels like a long lost childhood.  We walked to a cab at the corner of Mission and I told her I missed her. I do. Right before getting in, she gave me a big hug and you know what? It’s been a long time since I got a real hug.  It’s something I don’t think about that much.  I think really needed it. Thanks Williams.

My roomates three want to hire a maid. A maid! Don’t they understand that I already work a semi-professional job, commute to work, and have a retirement account–any closer to the precipice of middle class hypocrisy and I’ll fall right in.

But there is dust in the corners and I’ve been the least active member of the autonomous cleaning plan. I am not in a position to make a big fuss. To be fair, though, I always clean up after myself and there’s been no formal system for anything beyond that. So we are getting maid.

On the plus side, this will double the number of Latino people I interact with in the Mission since right now it’s just the guy that rolls my burrito at El Farolito. True, this could start to get weird. Luckily, there is plenty of Noam Chomsky in the living room bookshelf. If I start feeling like the politics of my own life are a little off, it will be easy to remind myself where the real problems are situated: with those individuals not associated with the American progressive movement. Can’t do shit about that, can I?

It freaks me out how long you can go before you catch on to people. Especially when you want them to turn out to be a certain way. How exactly does one determine that somebody is a not good person? I’m not talking about a bad person–that’s easy. Just someone who doesn’t particularly care about other people. That confuses me. Everybody wants to appear like a good person and plenty of people are good at being friendly. Some people are exceptional at it. Maybe this is all just a matter expecting nothing from people.

But enough of that. Hip hip hooray for seventy-two hour weekends. When I was working at the museum, every weekend was this long. Man, that was a another life. These days, I wake up at five for a commute to an office where I am three months behind my grading, which is impressive in light of the fact I have only been working there for two.

Today, though, I got to escape reality at the end of the continent with the Bulldogger. We met up for a simple breakfast in the Mission and then we were off, traversing through the park and whatnot. That’s been my weekend life for the last few months, but I’m not used to having company. It was interesting to have a companion.
Looking ahead, I’m hoping I can hop skip and jump my way through this week and towards nine whole days of Thanksgiving break. I can’t fucking wait. Danny was supposed to make his way over here for the holiday but apparently the people who do things like buy Danny’s plane tickets couldn’t find a deal. A shame: I know he would have been up for football on the beach and midnight movies.

I think plan B is to accompany Jenny down south to where the air might not be so clean but I can think everything over in the sun. I actually haven’t been down to L.A. since I moved West and this is my forth year here. I have been so lost in this city that I’ve barely scratched California’s surface.