The opposite of reverse.
I found myself wandering-with-purpose in the Financial District tonight. It was a perfect 65 degrees and the buildings quietly churned with swing-shift tidying. On a street I have walked hundreds of times, I found myself staring at the new location of an old employer. There was no rush of feeling, bad or good, just a slow smile. Well, there you are again. And I kept going. I wish I understood San Francisco. For a researcher like me, the city is frustrating. Parts of it I want to make sense, and they don’t, and they won’t. Parts of it are like the transit system I’m always going on about, and you wonder why I just don’t shut up already. When I hear myself even start to talk about it, I cringe. But this is my first and closest interface with...
Read MoreBeat the drum slowly.
So we have turned the corner from I am joyfully beating drums to wow, I am really not good at this. In the first class, it was expected (by me) that everyone would not be good at this, and there is freedom (for me) in not being the only person flailing about. Not to say that sometime between weeks one and three everyone else got magically awesome at taiko and I did not, but as with anything, the further you progress with an activity that requires not only skill but stamina and perseverance, the wider the gaps between how well people can do it. Which is not to say it makes me miserable, but it certainly does not give me the rush it did initially, which is disappointing but then I get disappointed in my disappointment, because certainly everyone who was ever good at...
Read MoreDoing stuff with pictures instead of words.
Sometimes I want to write and sometimes I don’t. The periods of “don’t” usually coincide with feeling sick, as if writing is only something I undertake in the spirit of health. Strange, considering the number of times I have written myself out of black moods. Over the weekend, in between sneezes and coughs, I finally worked on a Second Life snap I took last summer. I didn’t want to upload it anywhere until I had a chance to work on some of its flaws, but I didn’t know how to do that until my friend Lillian — whose pictures you really should look at, go on, I’ll be here when you get back — gave me a tutorial on a few Photoshop tricks. Rarely, I get to capture quiet moments like afternoon tea with Marian in her...
Read MoreThe Week in Tweets on 2011-02-25
Every Sunday shall henceforth be celebrated with taiko class followed by a feast of cured meats and oysters. So say we all! #fb # My Top 3 Weekly #lastfm artists: They Might Be Giants (13), Florence + the Machine (13) & Mates of State (11) #music http://bit.ly/9AOZf1 # I am so over the moon for taiko that I don't want to write about it yet. I will spare you the links to the eleventy videos I've watched. #fb # Good morning, first day of new job and winter semester. Let us rock. #fb # The not-so-great Islamist menace http://j.mp/fx3qIU via @AddToAny # My avg. daily #fitstats for last week: 5,340 steps, 2.2 miles, 1,828 calories burned via my fitbit http://www.fitbit.com/user/22D4J8 # Job worked, homework begun, dinner cooked, brain blank. The best...
Read MorePortlandia, ho!
I adore Portland. And I think I just might adore “Portlandia”, the new IFC comedy series written by and starring Fred Armisen (SNL) and Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney). Hulu wouldn’t let me embed the pilot, so here is the teaser.
Read MoreWhat it should be.
On the shuttle to work this morning, adrift in a sea of North Face jackets and jeans and sneakers, I held onto my thermal mug of tea and marveled at how we never ever get very far from high school. The seats may be softer, but we bounce around just the same. I have read too much about what content on the web should be. I admit to being very tired of this “should be” talk, external or internal. I would take a side, but taking a side means there are sides to take. We can argue about who is doing it better, whose content is more important, but how does that work, exactly? Are journal entries less important than reviews of iPhone apps? Who decides this, and why? My first taiko class taught me something I forgot: be still, eyes open, and embrace the lack...
Read MoreThe Week in Tweets on 2011-01-09
My avg. daily #fitstats for last week: 4,520 steps, 1.9 miles, 1,800 calories burned via my fitbit http://www.fitbit.com/user/22D4J8 # I got all riled up because my @fitbit wouldn't sync. It's fixed, but I am no longer sleepy. Why can't I just leave things until the morning? # O, endorphins! Just finished #c25k week 1 run 2 with #GetRunning – 28½ minutes of exercise and 8 minutes of running. Next run: Thursday 6th. # I am waiting (impatiently) for the homemade gluten-free chicken nuggets to cook. In the slow-cooker. What a world! #fb # Gluten-free chicken nuggets served with a side of honey-cinnamon glazed carrots: total win. Our slow-cooker rules. #fb # I made coffee in the french press that @FunkyPlaid gave me for Christmas. I may have used...
Read MoreIt was not the quesadilla.
It was not the quesadilla, the sloppy concoction of flat and goo. No, she decided, it was most certainly not the quesadilla itself, but the idea of the quesadilla, the meta-dilla that offended her. Even now, even hours after lunch, six washings with perfumed soap, six applications of scented lotion, and in between all that an hour at the firing range. Lavender? No. Gunpowder? No. Only the crass grease and onion stink. Lovers, too, were like this. Long after they should have gone, they persisted with deserted panties, apostrophes of basin-beached hair. Now email and its hungrier cousins encroached on every absence. The heart grew annoyed, not fonder. She longed for the gentleness of memory in all of this rotting truth.
Read MoreOne more week.
The winter semester starts next Monday, as does my new job, so I have one more week to power through my to-do list before the big items hit. These items are very exciting, I assure you, the kind of exciting that I have been putting off for months. Yet I persist. I am also trying some new recipes so that I will have more momentum to cook dinner regularly. Tonight I made another salmon dish, although I still have yet to find that perfect salmon cooking temperature and time. I made balsamic maple glaze from this recipe, and I liked the taste a lot. Paired with my favorite roasted potatoes with sage brown-butter sauce recipe, it was a nice, cozy meal. Today I thought I might run some errands or clean my closet, but instead I did some file and finance reorganization. I...
Read MoreYou know what my favorite show is?
I wish I had proper attribution for this; I saw it on Plurk.
Read MoreHello What
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