3 trips to NYC: Part 1

I'm five trips behind in my chronicles, so I'll handle 3 of them now: 3 weeks in a row I went back and forth from HMB to NYC.

The first trip, Thu 6/5 to Sun 6/8, was for my birthday and 1 year anniversary of dating Keiko. 6/5 was the anniversary of our first date, so I took Keiko to the same restaurant that we went to that day: Sette Mezzo, at 70th and Lex. It's a great restaurant owned and operated by the father of one of my former students, who now attends NYU business school. Last year, he had just finished working with me when we went, and his father recognized both me and Keiko and gave us free desserts. Extremely yummy, homemade Italian desserts, I feel obliged to add.

The reason he recognized Keiko, who normally does not interact with too many parents, and if she does, it's almost exclusively via phone or email, is that he would actually come each month to the office to pay personally. In cash. The reason he paid for his not insignificant bills in cash is that his restaurant is a cash-only place.

Funny thing is, I'd forgotten to look that up before we went out last year, and I, thinking I'd be putting it all on Mr. Visa, happily rang up a non-trivial bill. In NYC, my friends, that is a rookie mistake. A LOT of restaurants are cash-only, because it's such tight margins and credit card fees are outrageous, as I'm here to tell you (I actually accept payment ONLY by credit card in my office). So Keiko wound up having to pitch in for our meal. Yes, I am 100% class.

After dinner I took her on a walk down 5th ave, to see a building which my NYC walking guidebook was owned by my student Alix's family back in the day, and which apparently still had their family crest on it. I thought it was pretty cool that their family had a family crest, and I was pretty excited to go see it. And it seemed like a good excuse for a nice nighttime walk in the city. So we headed down 5th ave.

Along the way, we passed the southeast corner of Central Park, where the Armory is located. It's actually a pretty interesting building, with an interesting history, which is comprehensively detailed in a large sign in front of it. I stopped us in front of the sign and we began reading. About a minute later, we had the following conversation:

Keiko: "Wait, are you reading the entire sign?"

Me: "Uh, yeah, I was planning to. Why?"

Keiko: "coughcoughnerdcoughcough"

Me: "GEEK, not NERD. That's an important distinction, I'll have you know."

Keiko: "Uh huh."

So I read the entire sign. As I said, the building has an interesting history- it was built to house munitions, but has also been a police station, an art museum, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember anymore. Then we continued on our walk down 5th until we got to the building I wanted to see, several blocks farther down.

Along the way, I had explained to Keiko about the crest, and how it would probably look pretty cool, and so when we got to the corner we crossed the street from the building and began looking for a large stone crest, which the guidebook had assured me was right on the front of the building. However, despite looking at the thing from every conceivable angle, there was nary a crest to be found. I kept us there a solid 15 minutes circling the building again and again, determined to find that damned crest, and increasingly humiliated that it wasn't turning up. Keiko was remarkably patient about the whole thing, but I imagined she was probably thinking "How the hell do I get away from this crazy person."

Desperate to salvage some respectability from all this, I fell back on my failsafe secret weapon: my sense of humor.

Me: "Well, that's pretty disappointing. I'm totally, well, crest-fallen." [insert boyish grin]

Keiko: "... ... ... wow."

[awkward pause]

Me: "Uh, yeah, so, uh, why don't I walk you home then..."

And that was our first date: Keiko more or less unexpectedly paid for her own dinner, I empirically proved my geekhood, I took her on a 20 block walk to see something that didn't exist, and then I tried to rescue the evening with puns. As I walked home from Keiko's, I figured that

(a) there would probably not be a second date, and

(b) this was solid evidence in favor of my hypothesis that I am fated to die cold and alone in a refrigerator box under the FDR, with no one to notice my passing until a few days later when joggers notice the smell. Though, on the bright side, there will eventually be a Law & Order episode based on my story.

As an important footnote to the story, the crest DOES exist; it's just made out of dark stone on a dark stone background, and it turns out that it's hard to see a dark stone carving on a dark stone background at night. But it's very clearly there in the daytime.

Anyway, a week later we were seated at the same table at a work function, and (unbeknownst to me) Keiko rearranged the name plates so that I was next to her, and so we chatted the entire evening, and then there was dancing afterward, and that's home court advantage for yours truly, so we got together that night and have been dating ever since.

So on Thursday 6/5, precisely one year after that eventful first date, I took us back to Sette Mezzo. And right about when it was time to order desserts (the father wasn't working that night, so no free desserts- damn!), I realized something Important:

I'd forgotten to go to the ATM.

Now, I did have some cash on me, since I had just arrived that day, and I almost always remember to take out cash when I travel. But I was frantically trying to tally up the meal so far to see if I'd be able to cover it. In the end, I opted not to say anything at first; I just let us order our desserts and then 'fessed up:

Me: "Uh, so this is kinda funny..."

Keiko: "oh no." [One year later, Keiko knows me pretty well.]

Me: "...yeah, uh, I forgot to go to the ATM."

Keiko: "You don't have enough cash AGAIN?"

Me: "Well, I'm not SURE I don't have enough cash. I won't know until the bill comes."

Keiko: "You really know how to sweep a girl off her feet. Are you going to take me on another walk to see the crest that doesn't exist?"

Me: "The crest EXISTS. I saw it a couple weeks later in the daytime. It's visible only in the daytime."

Keiko: "I'm sure it is, baby."

At that point, the bill came. I quickly determined that if I threw in every last dollar I had, I could cover the bill plus a 17% tip. Less than I like to tip, but enough not to hang my head in shame.

Me, in my best Dick Vitale voice, "YES!"

Keiko: "My baby has so much class."

Me: "I paid the bi-ill ... I had the muh-ney..."

And so went our anniversary dinner. Since I had caused Keiko to miss the opening of Sex & the City the previous weekend when all her friends went by asking her to come to the LA wedding, I promised to take her and so we went. As we waited outside the theatre, I surveyed the super long line we were waiting in...

Me: "There's like 5 guys in this line, and all of them are with their girlfriends. The entire rest of this line is female."

Keiko: "No, look, there's two guys waiting together."

Me: "Those guys are gay, baby. They count toward the women statistics."

Keiko: "You don't know for sure they're gay."

Me: "No, of course not, they just were hanging out having some beers down at Molly's and one of them said, 'Dude, let's bag SportsCenter and go watch Sex & the City.' And the other one said, 'Fuckin' hell yeah, man, I'm down for that.'"

Keiko: "grrr."

The movie was, I must say, mostly watchable, which was a big surprise for me. The dialogue only made me want to actually vomit once. A best-case scenario, really.

The next night we saw Kung Fu Panda, which we both enjoyed, and we had dinner with Ed and Alison.

The next morning, I woke up a newly minted 36-year-old. I don't get terribly excited about birthdays [especially as I get older] but I was excited to try my birthday luck at the Belmont Stakes. I figured it would be a good day to win some money, and maybe see Big Brown make history by becoming the first horse in 30 years to win the Triple Crown.

Of course, about 10 million other people had the same idea, so we had to get up somewhat early and take the train out to the racetrack on a super hot day. Ed and his buddy Matty have been going every year for a long time, so Keiko and I joined up with Ed and Alison and we took the 1130am train. Matty and his wife were already there; they had staked out some sweet seats.

We got there around 1230, and it was 95 degrees, with 300% humidity, and no shade. We'd brought plenty of water and provisions, including several large containers of Motts Apple Juice, which Ed had dumped out and replaced with beer, in order to get it through security. He was just praying they wouldn't notice the head on the top of the "apple juice".


Ed and Allison. And the rest of NY. In the heat. But hey, there's "apple juice".










So we began a 6 hour wait until Big Brown's race. His race was the 11th of 13 races that day, so there was a lot of time. Time which we had to spend defending our absolutely-no-shade-whatsoever area against encroachment. I whiled away part of the time learning about different horse betting strategies, and decided to try out the most compelling one, which is the wheel bet.

WARNING: The next bit is tutoring in horse racing betting strategy, so if that doesn't seem like an interesting topic to you, skip ahead to THE RESULTS.

Terminology:

Exacta: you pick the first-place and second place horses
Exacta box: you pick two horses, and are betting on both combinations of first and second place

Trifecta: you pick the first, second, and third-place horses
Trifecta box: you pick three horses, and are betting on all 6 combinations of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd

Superfecta: you pick the first, second, third, and fourth-place horses
Superfecta box: you pick 4 horses, and are betting on all 24 combinations of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.

Betting to win: you pick the horse you think will win
Betting to place: you pick a single horse you think will finish either 1st or 2nd
Betting to show: you pick a single horse you think will finish 1st, 2nd, or 3rd

Examples:

Suppose we have 3 horses:

#5 horse is MKisGAY
#7 horse is EDlicksMYballs
#9 horse is HotKeik

The standard bet is $2, and all the winning amounts are posted assuming you're making a $2 bet. Of course, only cheap bastards make $2 bets, so naturally Ed and I made $2 bets all day. When you make a bet, you use this format:

"on the #10 race, give me a $2 exacta box with numbers 5 and 7"

In this case, you've just bet on the 10th race, and you've made TWO different bets at once: you've bet $2 on the #5 horse finishing first, and the #7 horse finishing second, and you've bet $2 on the #7 horse finishing first, and the #5 horse finishing second. So you cough up $4.

Another example:

"On the #8 race, give me a $2 trifecta with #9, #7, and #5."

Here, you've bet on the 8th race, and you've made only one $2 bet: that the #9 horse will finish first, the #7 horse will finish second, and the #5 horse will finish 3rd. Contrast this with:

"On the #8 race, give me a $2 trifecta BOX with #9, #7, and #5."

Here, you've made 6 different $2 bets:

9,7,5
9,5,7
7,9,5
7,5,9
5,7,9
5,9,7

Same kind of thing with the superfecta va. superfecta box.

So here's the thing- most people either make one bet, or bet in bulk using the box methodology. Thing is, any one bet doesn't have great odds, and there's a huge problem with the box, which is that it weights all combinations the same, regardless of probability.

Suppose you think that either #7 EDlicksMYballs and #9 HotKeik could finish first or second, but #5 MKisGAY is sure to finish 3rd. Then you don't want to bet a trifecta box, because 4 of the 6 bets have #5 finishing either first or second, and you're certain MKisGAY is going to finish 3rd. Instead, you use the magic of the wheel bet:

"On the #8 race, give me a $2 trifecta WHEEL with a 7,9; a 7,9; and a 5."

Here, you've made just the 2 bets you're interested in: 7,9,5 and 9,7,5. What the person behind the window hears is: I want to bet on all combinations that have either the 7 or 9 horse winning, the 7 or 9 horse finishing second, and the 5 horse finishing third. Wheel betting is pretty clearly superior from a purely mathematical perspective.

THE RESULTS...

It's a pretty flexible strategy. I used it in the first race I bet on, the fifth race, and that race finished with the top four horses as 7,8,4,2. That was almost the only combination of those four horses that didn't win me a trifecta, dammit. So close to winning like $300...

I had bet 6 combinations, for a total of $12, and I put down a similar strategy on 3 more races, including the Big Brown race. Having spent $48, I decided to take a super longshot and bet _against_ Big Brown by taking a straight $2 superfecta. With the odds so overwhelmingly favoring Big Brown, if i won it'd be huge.

The next race didn't come close to winning for me. But then the #10 race, the one right before Big Brown's came up. In that race, as I'd looked through the odds, I noticed that the 3rd highest odds horse was named "Dancing Forever".

How could I not bet on Dancing Forever?

So I bet a $2 trifecta wheel, with a 10; a 1,5,8; and a 1,5,8. Again, that was effectively 6 different bets:

10,1,5
10,1,8
10,5,1
10,5,8
10,8,1
10,8,5

And wouldn't you know it, but Dancing Forever won. And #5 finished second, and #8 finished third.

TRIFECTA!!!!!


Oh yeah. Winning big on my birthday...


















My winning horses splashed all over the leaderboard. And the bottom row shows my $382 trifecta.









And like magic, the $2 I put on 10,5,8 turned into $382. Enough to cover my $50 of betting, the $20 of entrance fees for me and Keiko, our LIRR tickets, our provisions, and still nearly $300 profit. Now I see how people get addicted to the races.


Flush with victory, and heatstroke.












Next up was Big Brown. After 6 hours of sweating in the sun, we were ready to see him make history. Or, for me, to finish 3rd while the #7 horse won, thus winning me a fortune.



Big Brown. The small one. (#1)












Nearly 100,000 people came out that afternoon, and it seemed like all of them were crowded into our little area. We were standing on our bench, watching as they paraded the horses out. Horse races have varying lengths, and the Belmont Stakes is the longest at 1.5 miles. The starting gate is moved to different points on the track over the course of the day, depending on the length of the race, and presumably on giving each part of the grandstand a decent view of the starting gate at some point during the day.



Lining up in the starting gate...












Matty and his wife had done great work staking out a place close to the front near the center of the grandstand, so we got a great look at the horses, and the start of the race. There was electricity in the air.

AND THEY'RE OFF!

The crowd went nuts. We were all yelling, as Big Brown started off a little slow, but quickly got into third place. "The jockey always does this," said Ed, "He hangs back a little bit, and then at the end he makes a move." We were leaning forward as far as we could go without falling off our bench onto someone's head, breath held, as Big Brown headed for the final turn, still in third. There wasn't much time left to make a move...

And then the jockey pulled him up, and slowed him to a trot. He finished dead last. The audience collectively groaned. People were in shock.

For the record, the #6 horse won. I had the 3rd place horse correct (the #8 horse), though technically, #8 and #9 finished in a dead heat, tying for third. Aside from that, my superfecta got killed. But if you had bet the winning superfecta of 6-4-8-9 or 6-4-9-8, your $2 would have turned into $48,000. Why, oh why, couldn't I have picked those numbers???


Damn. So close to $48,000. OK, not really, but still.











We stuck around for the second to last race, but bailed out after that. Ed and Allison were headed to Brooklyn for sushi, but as someone with no particular affection for either Brooklyn or sushi, I was content to head back to the city with Keiko. But hey, a trifecta on my birthday- not so bad.

Sunday morning I got up super early and took the 540am bus to JFK, and got myself to the gate in a responsibly early fashion. As is typical, getting there early was a big waste, as the flight was way late taking off, and I ended up having to push back my tutoring that day. Although it wasn't a big deal, I want the record to note that once again, being early for a flight does NOT pay off.

Not for me, anyway...

Why I Love Half Moon Bay, Pt 3

Today I went for my morning bike ride a little earlier than usual, because I've figured out that as the temperature differential between the coast and the valley grows over the course of the day, the rising hot air in the valley creates a convection current that manifests itself as the HMB wind.

Basically, earlier in the day = less wind. Less wind is nice because the way the wind blows happens to be in my face for the entire ride back to the house, the last half of which has a slight uphill orientation. A couple of weeks ago, Socci was out west visiting some of his friends, and came down for an afternoon in HMB, which Keiko later dubbed "a middle school playdate" since we rode bikes and played catch. But it was late in the afternoon, by which point the wind had really picked up, and we had to bike all the way back headfirst into it, which was NOT fun.

As a side note, I had gotten the bike that Socci rode so that there would be an extra bike for Keiko to ride when she came out for visits, and although I'd put it together I hadn't actually field-tested it yet. Turns out I had neglected to completely tighten the screw that holds the handlebars in place, so as we were going back across the wooden bridge, the handlebars came loose and Socci crashed into the rusty metal railing. Showing a manly stoicism I wouldn't have thought possible after seeing him wuss out of skydiving ("No way am I jumping out of a plane!"), he remarked only: "So, how long are tetanus shots good for again?" I told him I didn't know, but that whether he lived or died, Keiko would really appreciate his having test drove the bike.

So, today I experimented with an earlier ride. Apparently, this earlier time is primetime for seeing bunnies. I saw 7 of them throughout my ride. Like Hawk the other day, the bunnies were willing to allow me to get surprisingly close before reacting. Then they reacted.

Here's the thing about bunnies. The summer after I graduated from business school, I went on a 7,000 mile, monthlong road trip through the west with Nacole. At one point, we were driving at dusk through Craters of the Moon national park in Idaho. A little piece of trivia about CotM: when you're watching your local news, and they talk about the air quality, and it's determined to be good, or bad, or Los Angeles, or whatever, it's being compared to a benchmark for what great air should be like. That benchmark is CotM, which is a giant exposed lava plain in the middle of nowhere, and because of air currents and the lack of population centers even remotely close by, it has virtually zero pollution.

By virtue of being a giant exposed lava plain, it also has not so much as a visible blade of grass, or a tree, or anything on it. Basically nothing lives there. Except giant jackrabbits. I don't know what they're eating, but whatever it is makes them get big.

Nacole and I discovered them as we were driving through the park at dusk. I was clipping along at around 70mph or so, came around a bend, and my lights illuminated a giant jackrabbit on the side of the road ahead. His eyes were lit up by the reflection of my headlights. I had just enough time to register that he was a very large jackrabbit, and he had just enough time to register in his little herbivore brain that I was both moving very fast and 500 times his size. In that moment, the rabbit, by instinct going into a flight reaction, had a choice between the following two options:

Option 1: turn around and flee into the 300,000 acres of empty lava plain interlaced with 400 trillion miles of tiny passages in which he could hide, and in which God Himself could not find him, or

Option 2: try dashing across the empty, exposed road in front of my car in the hopes that he could make it to the other side without getting annihilated.

The bunny chose Option 2. And was annihilated. For the record, it made an incredible impact on my car. And he had the misfortune of impacting the bumper on the passenger's side of my Hyundai Elantra, which was unfortunate for the following reason:

About 8 months previous, I was leading a group of business school students in a project to provide volunteer consulting services to a local nonprofit, the Shoreline Alliance for the Arts. They provided a number of services that exposed economically underserved kids in coastal southern Connecticut to the arts. Kids like that typically attend public schools that lack money for basic things like books, let alone fancy stuff like art, so for many of the kids the organization worked with, this was the only exposure to the arts that they got.

Historically, the organization had been run by the artists who volunteered for it. At the risk of unfairly stereotyping, in my experience artists are always interesting, often a pleasure to know, and rarely possessed of anything approximating "good business sense". So although the organization was doing a lot of good, from an organizational design and effectiveness perspective it was, not to put too fine a point on it, a train wreck.

Our group had put together some initial findings on simple, quick steps that the organization could take to improve its effectiveness, and since there was no room in the administrative office that could accommodate everyone who wanted/needed to be present for the presentation of our findings, the Executive Director volunteered to host the meeting at her home, a beautiful home in the forest in suburban CT, near a bubbling brook, and at the bottom of a long paved driveway.

I mention that because the morning the 4 of us left for the ED's house, all packed into my little Elantra, it had snowed a bit, and once I got all 4 wheels onto the driveway, we lost all traction and began slowly sliding down.

At the bottom of the driveway, the pavement curved somewhat sharply off to the right, and at the bottom was a long retaining wall, which helped keep the side of the hill from encroaching on the house, and which we were currently accelerating toward head-on. In that moment, I had 2 choices:

Option 1: Attempt to swing the wheel right and hope we slid by the wall without hitting it. If it worked, we would miss the wall, slide along the front of the house, and eventually come to rest in the yard somewhere. If it didn't work, the retaining wall potentially could scrape all along the driver's side of the car, damaging it all the way from front to back, and it we still had enough momentum, put the hood of my car into her front porch.

Option 2: Do nothing but continue to try and regain any traction, and let the front bumper do what it's designed to do and absorb the frontal impact.

Given that we had started at the top from almost a complete stop, I actually did have time to weigh the options in that level of detail in my mind, and I decided (unlike the bunny) not to take the gamble.

So I went with Option 2, and we slowly, majestically, crashed head-on into the wall.

Fortunately, we all had plenty of time to brace for impact, so no one was the slightest bit injured. Except, of course, for Julio (my car). He took it right on the chin, and in inspecting the damage I discovered that the bumper was not solid, but rather was a hollow piece of plastic not unlike tupperware, the major difference being that tupperware does not shatter like glass when you hit it with something.

The other piece of damage was to the retaining wall, in which I put a large, thick crack from the base to the top. So I kicked off our first meeting with our client by explaining that I had just crashed into her house but was happy to pay for all the damage.

Thing was, I had no money to pay for the damage, and thankfully she refused the offer. I also had no money to get the bumper fixed, so from then on I drove around with a shattered front passenger bumper. It was barely hanging on on that side at all, and a few months later when Nacole borrowed Julio to drive to Philadelphia for an audition, and stayed with a college friend, that friend's dad freaked out that the bumper might imminently fall off and so he duct-taped the bumper onto the car.

But by the time of CotM, the jagged shards of bumper had sawed through the duct tape, and so the front of the car on that side was saw-toothed plastic with short strips of duct tape dangling down. And that's where the bunny, his leaping, stretched-out form totally silhouetted in the headlights for a split second, impacted. When I got the car pulled over and got out to take a look, the bumper and the duct tape were covered with bloody bunny bits.

Eeesh.

We got back into the car and started off.

And then it happened AGAIN.

Not 15 minutes later, same drill. Come around a bend, bunny by the side of the road, bunny chooses the wrong option, bunny gets annihilated. This time, I was annoyed. I mean, with instincts like this, how are bunnies not extinct??

I bring all this up because I encountered 7 bunnies on my bike ride today. 4 of them were about 2 feet off the bike path. 3 of them were right on the edge of the bike path. All 7 of them waited until I was passing very close to them (keep in mind that I was not chasing them, I was simply continuing on the path), and then all of them chose between Options 1 and 2.

The results were this: the 4 bunnies 2 feet off the path chose option 1 and turned away from the path and dove into the underbrush. The 3 bunnies right on the edge of the path chose option 2 and dashed across the open, exposed path right in front of me, 1 of them forcing me to hit the brakes, rather than turn around and dive into the much closer underbrush behind them.

This leads me to wonder: if you're a bunny, and a large, fast moving something appears to be headed right for you, presumably causing you to assume the large, fast moving something is a predator bent on eating you, is your dominant strategy to run _toward_ the predator? Presumably then if it misses you on the first pass, by the time it gets itself turned around for another pass at you, you've had time to pretty carefully hide yourself.

Either way, this is why bunnies do not rule the world.

Nevertheless, it was fun to see so many bunnies. And at the end of my ride a pretty big (~ 1.5 ft) snake slithered across the path. I hit the brakes, jumped off the bike, and ran to it hoping to catch it, but it was fast moving, and as a Missourian, my instinct is to hesitate a second before grabbing at it to first verify that it's not a copperhead. That last second of hesitation was all he needed to get far enough under the brush that it wasn't worth trying to go after him.

Upon returning home, I gchatted with Keiko and related the events of the ride. And she asked:

Keiko: "omg, WHY would you try to catch a SNAKE?"

which puzzled me a little, because the answer to the question seems almost painfully obvious:

Me: "Uh... 'cause."

But I guess it's not so obvious, since I had the same gchat with Shara later in the afternoon.

But, it was another small adventure on the bike path today, and that's another reason to love HMB- every day is a little different, and most every day has some little adventure in it...

Why I Love Half Moon Bay, Pt 2

Today on my morning bike ride, as I was coming around the edge of a cliff, I came up on a large red-tailed hawk perched on the ground, on the cliff's edge. I came to an abrupt halt about 8 feet from him, and he gave me a long, appraising look. I kept perfectly still, and after a couple minutes of eyeing me he went back to watching the beach and the surf below.

Somewhat surprised that he did not immediately fly away, I began to edge slowly toward him. I actually got to within 4 feet of him, and then he suddenly fixed me with a look and ruffled his feathers a bit, as if to say, "That's close enough, buster." So I stopped. Just to emphasize his point, he then suddenly lifted up all his tail feathers and dropped a big load of crap, and then looked at me.

I took the hint and stopped trying to get any closer. We contemplated each other for a while... he was really quite beautiful, and surprisingly big. And, I might add, totally unafraid of me. After a while, when it became clear I would respect his space, we each shifted our gaze to the ocean.

It was a beautiful morning in HMB; the surf was coming in high, and there were a bunch of surfers out there taking advantage. There was the occasional person, usually with a dog, walking down on the sand. It was quite warm, for HMB anyway, and the breeze was quite cool. There was quite a bit of haze; not pollution haze, but rather the haze that comes when the temperature is just above the point where the giant fog banks form. That is, the air _wants_ to form a giant fog bank really, really badly, but it's just a little bit too warm and so all you get is a general haze.

All in all, a beautiful day to stand on the edge of a cliff next to Hawk and contemplate life. We probably spent a good 10 minutes together doing just that. Then, he looked back at me, as if to say, "It's been real- see you around," and then he ruffled up his feathers and took off in a long graceful arc, heading north along the cliffs.

And so I headed home, feeling as centered as I have in a while.

I love love love this place.

A Little Bit of History...

So, one of my long-term projects is to read one biography of each of the presidents, from Washington to LBJ, in order. I'm cutting it off at LBJ because that's civil rights, the Great Society, Vietnam, and because anyone after that is too recent, and any biography is going to be too slanted, because the biographer will likely remember the person, or maybe even actually know them.

I've gotten through Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Quincy Adams, and it has been very interesting so far. My personal evaluation of each after reading their biography is:

Washington: unchanged, but much more refined appreciation
Adams: up
Jefferson: down
Madison: pre-1790, up; post-1790, down
Monroe: up
Quincy Adams: up

I try to read 1 biography per quarter, but sometimes I fall behind. I also get sidetracked; for instance, after Madison I read David McCullough's 1776. If there is any piece of history you're interested in reading about, and David McCullough wrote a book about it, you should read his book. It's better than any other one on the same topic, I promise.

Sometimes I think about the trillion dollars we've thrown at Iraq and imagine all the things we could have done with that money instead:

1) universal healthcare
2) reducing class sizes to 10 for every class in America
3) funding research to create a doughnut that has the same nutritional impact as a multivitamin, yet tastes just like a Dunkin Donut
4) funding research to that would establish the ability of any person to regrow and transplant any part of their body (I need a new right knee, right ankle, right shoulder, left big toe, and 2 new thumbs)
5) gene therapy to restore hair loss (bite me.)
6) setting up a machine that could keep David McCullough's brain alive and functioning indefinitely, so that he could write a biography of each US president, and a book about each major event in world history.

I also got sidetracked because JOC made me read a biography of Ben Franklin, which I did enjoy, but which was motivated by his favoring Franklin over John Adams, and my pointing out that he's on crack for taking that position. After reading it, though, I realized that it was pointless to move on to Andrew Jackson until I read a biography of the other titan of the revolutionary period: Alexander Hamilton.

Prior to reading this biography, all I really knew about Hamilton was that he was shot and killed in a duel by Aaron Burr. I didn't realize he epitomizes the American dream in that he arrived in this country a penniless orphaned teenager but studied hard and eventually became Washington's most important aide during the Revolution, and then during Washington's presidency he more or less singlehandedly created America's financial system, while also helping to establish some of the principles of Constitutional law (implied powers, etc.) that we have built modern American society upon.

But all that isn't really what I think is most interesting. What I think is most interesting is a running theme throughout all 8 biographies I've read so far, which is, the extent to which partisan politics then resembles partisan politics today. If you're like me, you have a tendency to deplore modern politics, wondering why we don't have giants like Washington, et al., to lead us. But in fact, politics then was just as spirited, personal, and frequently bitter as it is today.

The two-party system basically was created out of the extremely bitter political infighting between Washington's Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, and his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson. Washington was really the first, and only, "uniter, not divider" that we've ever had. Hamilton's group became known as the Federalists, who are the ancestors of the Democratic party, and Jefferson's group became known as the Republicans (who eventually became Whigs, and then became Republicans again in 1854). By and large, Federalists came from the north, and were businesspeople, city dwellers, and abolitionists. By and large, Republicans came from the south, were farmers, and functionally supported slavery. (I say functionally because Jefferson, for example, privately lamented slavery but continued to own scores of slaves while also supporting the right of the South to continue to have slavery).

It is fascinating to see the roots of the modern parties in these 200 year old struggles. Here is a little quote from "Alexander Hamilton", by Ron Chernow:

"It is tempting but misleading to think of the Federalists as the patrician party and the Republicans as representing the commoners. 'The controversy which embroiled the two champions was not basically concerned with the haves and the have-nots,' James T. Flexner wrote of the clash between Hamilton and Jefferson. 'It was between rival economic systems, each of which aimed at generating its own men of property.' In fact, the Federalist ranks had plenty of self-made lawyers like Hamilton, while the Republicans were led by two men of immense inherited wealth: Jefferson and Madison. Moreover, the political culture of the slaveholding south was marked by much more troubling disparities of wealth and status than was that of the north, and the vast majority of abolitionist politicians came from the so-called aristocrats of the Federalist party."

The parallels here, while not perfect, are nevertheless striking. The modern Democratic party continues to draw its support from the north, and from urban areas generally, while the modern Republican party continues to draw its support from the south and from rural areas generally. And how often do you hear Republican commentators refer to Democrats as "elitist", when

1) From a policy perspective, Democratic politics tends to be more geared toward fighting inequity than does Republican politics, and

2) Tons of Republicans are "elitist", as they use the word. Think both Bushes, who come from an old monied family and went to fancy Ivy-league schools (not that attending a fancy Ivy-league school is inherently bad :-)

I guess the big similarity to me is the success Republicans had then in portraying themselves as protecting the interests of the common man, while some elitist other party tried to screw them, when all the while they were in fact protecting the interests of a narrow slice of the population- a slice of the population that already had tremendous wealth and power. And the battles fought between the parties then were titanic, bitter, fundamentally ideological, and had ramifications for generations.

Just like today.

Spring trips: Monterey

I'm in the middle of a ridiculous string of consecutive weekends traveling:

5/10 - Houston, for Blanc's wedding
5/17 - NYC, for Alix's graduation
5/24 - Monterey, to visit with my sister and my brother
5/31 - LA, for Gina's wedding
6/7 - NYC, for my birthday and Keiko and my 1 yr anniversary of our 1st date
6/14 - NYC, for Alexandra's graduation
6/21 - NYC, for my annual Director's meeting at work

I am racking up the frequent flyer points on JetBlue, let me tell you. In fact, the 5/17 trip to NYC was free. I haven't written about the Monterey trip, so I'll do that now...

Keiko came in Wed night; it works out that the evening JetBlue flight out of JFK gets in around midnight, well after my last Wed night lesson ends. We crashed early, since my sister and her husband Dan were arriving late the next morning. Now, the original plan had us all heading straight to Half Moon Bay and having lunch there, but if you recall from my post about the NYC trip, I had slept through my flight, and as a consequence had to move a lesson onto Thursday at lunchtime. So, the trip got off to a somewhat inauspicious start when (a) we were 20 minutes late picking up Dan and my sister, and (b) I had to tell them to amuse themselves in downtown Palo Alto for a couple hours while I tutored.

Apparently, the 3 of them had a nice lunch somewhere, and when I was done we headed to HMB to pick up stuff for the trip. We had decided to take the coastal route down the PCH all the way to Monterey, which is a gorgeous drive. Because of our late departure, we hit traffic, and ended up barely making it down to the Martine Inn in Monterey just barely in time to change clothes and head to our dinner reservation. Since my sister was a party to this trip, we had fancy things like dinner reservations and itineraries of what we were doing on a given day. All that structure's a little much for me, but hey, I'm flexible.


The view from the front of the Martine Inn.












Sadly, I'd forgotten to print out directions to the restaurant, and the verbal directions involved a tunnel, and a street we couldn't find. But we knew it was near the wharf, wherever that was, so I just hugged the coast as much as possible, and we eventually blundered into the place, a mere 25 minutes late for our reservation. For me, this is a solid performance.

Fortunately, it's Thursday night, so the restaurant wasn't too packed, and we got seated. The food was yummy- a lot of seafood, predictably, but the best part was watching Dan attempt to get help choosing an entree from the waiter.


Dan: "Excuse me, I'm trying to choose between [entree A] and [entree B]. Can you recommend one of them to me?"

Waiter: "Well, is there one in particular you're leaning toward?"

Dan (looking confused): "Well, no, that's the problem. Which one is better?"

Waiter: "'Cause if there's one you're leaning toward, you should go with that."

Dan: "Uh, true, but-"

Waiter: "Which one jumped out at you first? That's probably the one you should go with."

Dan: "Well, technically entree A, but that's becau-"

Waiter: "Then I'd recommend that one, since it jumped out at you first."

Dan: "-se it's the first thing on the menu, so of course you see it fir- you know what, I'll just take entree A. Thanks."


Laszlo has a theory that you can tell the direction of the overall macroeconomy by examining the quality of service in places like restaurants and big box stores. When the economy is doing well, smarter, more skilled people get the better jobs, leaving all the entry level service jobs for, not to put too fine a point on it, dumb people. And dumb people are terrible at customer service. When the economy is doing shitty, smart people start losing better jobs, and supplanting the dumb people in the entry level service jobs. But smart people make for much better customer service.

Based on this theory, our experience in the restaurant says that the economy should be turning the corner any day now.

After knocking back a bunch of food and a bottle of wine, we headed back to the inn and turned in early. Keiko and I were particularly looking forward to the first part of Friday's itinerary, which I had lobbied hard for: sleeping in. Although we have a mutual fondness for Bed & Breakfasts, our track record for getting up in time to attend breakfast is pretty dismal, and Friday was no exception. So we had little food in our bellies as we headed out for item 2 on the itinerary: Monterey county wine tasting.

The first place we went was Chateau Julien, which had gorgeous grounds, and, I must say, decidely mediocre wine. We were all pretty disappointed. But the next place, Bernardus, was a jackpot. Everything tasted good, and some of it was really good, so Keiko bought me a couple bottles for my birthday and we headed to their restaurant for a late lunch.

Chateau Julien
















Dan and my sister at Chateau Julien












Lunch at Bernardus was great, sitting outdoors in the sun, sipping awesome wine, etc. When we were done we realized we were all ready for a nap, so we headed back to the Martine Inn. Of course, being me, once there I got sidetracked by the 1950's era race cars that the owner of the Inn has stashed in a garage on the property, and then by exploring all the various halls and passages that led to other rooms, and then by the secret door that was hidden behind a giant mirror, which I believe leads into the wing of the building that the owner lives in, and then by the old pool table in the salon, where I dispatched Keiko a couple of times [for the record, she's actually pretty good], and then by the early evening wine & cheese that the Inn serves, and then by the sea lions that you can see playing in the water from the big bay windows in the room where they serve the wine & cheese. In short, ADD = no nap.


Sea lions on the beach by the Inn. These creatures understand how to live.











Check out that rack...













Eventually, it was time to get ready for dinner. When I said earlier that I'd forgotten to print out directions to the restaurant Thursday night, what I meant by that was that I'd forgotten to print out directions to every place we were going that weekend. Fortunately, this restaurant was actually situated on the wharf itself, and we'd discovered how to get into that area the night before, so we were only about 10 minutes late for this reservation, owing largely to having to park on the other side of the earth.

As you might guess, this was another place that largely served seafood, but I found some great pasta and had that. And we could see sea lions playing in the water as we watched the sun set. That, plus great champagne, made for another great meal.

After the meal, we were slated to head to the theatre to watch the Chronicles of Narnia. What transpired was a 45 minute blundering about of the entire Monterey peninsula, asking several different people where the giant mall with the giant theatre complex was, with no one giving even remotely helpful directions, until we realized what we really needed right then:

A teenager.

Sure enough, at the closest coffeeshop a 16 year boy gave us perfect directions to the mall/theatre, and we managed to get in just as the movie started. For the record, it was quite good. I really enjoyed the books when I read them as a kid, and I'm thus far enjoying the conversion to a cinematic format.

From there, we awaited the arrival of my little brother Mikie, and his new girlfriend Nini. No one in the family had yet met Nini, so my sister and I were very much looking forward to this. Mikie, you see, is a bit of a player, and he doesn't very often acquire GF's, nor keep them for terribly long when he does acquire them. For several years now, my sister had spoken wistfully of Mikie's last GF, "Darlene- Such A Nice Girl!" [henceforth referred to as Darlene-SANG] Well, she didn't last because Mikie, in a bold show of caring and empathy, helped Darlene-SANG's parents plan a surprise 21st birthday for her, and then that night, at around 10pm, after all the other guests had arrived, Mikie called up to say that he was on South Padre Island with his frat buddies, because it was his last possible frat event (he was about to graduate from college).

Naturally, Darlene-SANG was a bit upset by this. Crushed, really. Which, BTW, Mikie had a hard time fathoming. My sister felt so embarrassed for Mikie that she sent Darlene-SANG flowers on his behalf. But that was really the beginning of a pretty quick ending for that relationship.

My personal favorite Mikie story occurs a couple years earlier, when he and I were both home for the holidays. He and I were staying down in Willie's room, in the cat-shit-smelling basement, while Willie crashed at some of his stoner friends' places. This was not an imposition on Willie- he was a lot like an outdoor cat. He would disappear for days on end, and so you just put out some pizza rolls on a plate and eventually he'd turn up hungry and eat them.

As I was walking back from the bathroom in the basement, to our shared bedroom, I could hear Mikie on the phone:

Mikie: "Dude, if you're not comin', then it's just me and Nana [his best friend] and like 6 or 8 chicks in the hot tub tonight."

(pause as friend presumably is speaking...)

Mikie: "Well don't you worry about that, 'cause Big Daddy M can handle those ladies..."

Me: "BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!"

I was rolling on the floor- I nearly burst something. BIG DADDY M??? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Mikie was seriously annoyed.

Anyway, so Mikie had a new GF, and we were excited to meet her. They were driving up from San Diego, which is a pretty long drive, so they got in pretty late and we had to wait until Saturday morning to meet Nini. For the record, we like her. She is American, but grew up in Saudi Arabia, where her parents still work. She is smart, cute, and seems to be able to handle the Mikie-ness of Mikie, which is a pretty critical quality to have.

After meeting Nini, we went to grab lunch down by the Monterey Aquarium, which is awesome. Not the lunch, which was disappointing (I had disappointing fish & chips- Barbara's Fishtrap in HMB has the best fish & chips around), but the Aquarium. Our group broke down into the following components:

Me: happy to spend hours looking at all the exhibits, including putting my hands in the touch ponds to play with all kinds of slimy, scaly, bizarre-looking creatures of the sea

Keiko: happy to humor my desire to do the above, while keeping herself amused by taking pictures

Dan, my sister, Mikie, and Nini: bored after 90 min and ready to please-can-we-get-the-hell-out-of-here

I think we ended up spending 2.5 hours there, and I could easily have stayed longer. Fish are mesmerizing.


Jellyfish. I love this shot. It's quite good, which is how you know Keiko took it, not me.


















Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming...













Funky cool eels...


















I kept waiting for one of them to tap dance, but no such luck. I think these penguins all have sad feet.











Sneaky dude, waiting patiently...














Look! Sea anemonemonemonees...










Sand dollars! Tons of 'em. It's like Nature created a giant, underwater, biological tip jar.

















Sharks are so badass. I totally want to be a shark, but lacking gills, the closest I could get is I-banking (uh, no thanks), or corporate law (I don't want to die inside).




After the aquarium, we headed back to the Inn because Keiko and I were moving over to the hotel Mikie and Nini were staying at, and my sister and Dan were moving to a super-fancy place further south. So after relocating everyone and getting changed for dinner, which was at the Bernardus winery again, at their other, nicer restaurant, we met at my sister's room for some pre-dinner wine and some NBA playoffs.


Me and Keiko, and the view from my sister's room.













Mikie and Nini.













Dinner at Bernardus was amazing. Definitely one of the best meals I've had in a long, long time. Although we knocked back a lot of wine, we managed to get ourselves to the theatre again for a late show of Indiana Jones. Now, I'm the easiest touch in cinema audiences- I'll believe anything you want. The world is being invaded by a giant army of tiny, man-eating, one-pawed cats with green feet from the planet Felinus? Sure, I'll believe that- I can see them now, hordes of them hopping by the Secret Service and eating Dick Cheney. Just make your story internally consistent. I was a little annoyed that with decades to think about it, the writers couldn't come up with a story that was even remotely internally consistent. That, and if I wanted to see the X Files movie, that's what I'd do.

Anyway, after the movie we headed back to our hotels, and the next day met back at my sister's place for a very nice brunch on the patio deck overlooking the cliffs and the ocean. Very nice. Then Mikie and Nini headed out for their long drive south, and Dan, my sister, Keiko, and I all headed back up to HMB.

Once there, we dropped Dan and my sister off at the Ritz Carlton ('cause that's how my sister rolls- don't say the rest of didn't warn you, Dan), and they opted for couples massages, etc. Keiko and I opted for that long-awaited nap. Then we went back down to the Ritz to meet them for a walk on the beach. We got sidetracked by a wedding, which my sister wanted to watch, presumably because she's a woman and therefore thinks weddings are inherently interesting. As a guy, I think weddings are inherently boring as shit, and only become interesting to the extent that you actually know the people getting married. But the grounds of the Ritz in HMB are stunning, and the weather was perfect, and so we watched some strangers get married before taking our walk on the beach.


The view from the beach at the Ritz-Carlton HMB.












That's the Ritz up on the cliff.













Me and Dan, killing time while my sister waits for strange WASPy people to get married.








From there, we headed down to Mezza Luna, in HMB's harbor (just down the road from Barbara's Fishtrap). I've noticed that every major city in America seems to have a "Mezza Luna" in it, but the one in HMB is most appropriate (just in case you're not up on your Italian, Mezza Luna = Half Moon). Dinner there was quite good, and involved more wine (we drank a shit ton of wine on this trip), but we decided to call it an early night after all the weekend's activities.

The next day, I was all set to drive Dan and my sister to San Jose airport. We planned to be there to pick them up at 10, but were running a little late and picked them up at 1015. Now, Dan is the kind of guy who gets antsy if he's only an hour early for his flight, so my plan was to arrive early enough to take scenic route 84 to the airport without causing undue stress. With our late arrival, that plan seemed tenuous, but I figured we'd still get them there a full hour early.

Of course, it had been quite a while since I'd driven scenic route 84, and I kinda forgot that although it travels the same net distance east/west as the 92, which is the usual way I get in and out of HMB, it is a WAY windier road, and so you can't travel nearly as fast on it. About 1/4 of the way up into the hills that separate the coast from Silicon Valley, I realized that this was actually going to be cutting it pretty close. But still, we should get them there 30-40 minutes early.

Then we ran into the construction.

It's a one-lane road each way, and our direction is closed for construction, so we have to wait what seems like 3 days before all the traffic coming the other way has cleared, and we can proceed to use the one remaining lane. Conversation, incidentally, has now ceased. I am focused on taking every turn as fast as humanly possible, while everyone else is focusing on trying not to reveal how stressed out they are.

When we finally get out of the hills, I am relieved, because now I can get us on the freeway, and make back some of the time. If I speed like mad, I can probably get us back up to 30 minutes early. I get on the freeway, and immediately kick it up to 90 mph, which is about as fast as my SUV can realistically go.

And so, as I come around the first turn on the highway since I got on, I nearly pass a CHP officer in the next lane while going 90. This would not be good, as I got a speeding ticket 7 months and 7 days ago as of this writing, meaning I still have 10 months and 23 days to go before I can get another speeding ticket without it staying on my record permanently. So I hit the brakes and just barely manage to avoid passing him.

Now I'm forced to get in behind him and match his pace. But it's a long way still to San Jose, so I figure sooner or later he's going to pull someone over, or get off the freeway, something.

Wrong.

In fact, he stays in front of me the entire way to the vicinity of San Jose airport, which means he costs me 6-8 minutes. That might not sound like a lot, but given how fine we're now cutting it, that's a significant amount of time.

We get to the airport with 18 minutes to go before their flight is scheduled to take off. We all jump out of the car, exchange superfast hugs, pass off the baggage, and then they run like crazy. Poor Dan had an expired license, which he had to use until the new one came in the mail, so he had to go through extra security, and so when they ran up to the counter, the gate agents were in the process of giving their seats away to standby passengers, which they were only just barely able to head off. But they made it. They got on the plane, and so did their bags, and the story ends well there. All in all, a great weekend.

BTW, I hope you will note that with a crazy dramatic airport arrival, we have yet another happy ending. This fits the pattern I've been establishing about the folly of showing up early to the airport. I'll have more to say about that in my next post- 3 trips to NYC.

Reminiscing, Chapter 2, addendum

I forgot to add one of my favorite Gina/Sarah/Gus stories...

Before I went away to business school, I spent four years working in LA in advertising and in tutoring, roughly 70 hours/week altogether, but I also spent 30 hours/week or so ballroom dancing competitively. Over the course of those four years I had two different dance partners, each with her own flavor of drama.

The second one, Debbie, and I eventually made it up through 5 levels of amateur competition to compete at the highest level you can as an amateur dancer. We danced the 5-dance International Latin event: Cha-cha, Samba, Rumba, Paso Doble, and Jive. We only danced two competitions at the highest level before our drama as a dance partnership and our separate directions in life killed us, but in that second (and last) competition together we made it through quarterfinals and semifinals into the finals, where we placed 6th. It was a national level competition, and that was as far as we ever got. We basically got to the point where we could compete with any American couple, but we were nowhere close to being able to beat Russians, who dominate the sport (yes, it's a sport- if something as lame as golf is a sport, ballroom dancing is definitely a sport).

Some Debbie&Gus pics from the vault:

One of our first competitions. That was Debbie's first competition dress.










This competition must have been even earlier- Debbie has no dress, and I'm in a purple shirt. And a bolo tie. Eek.




But it took us 2.5 years to get to the top level, and I was dating Sarah for that entire period, so she had to go to a lot of ballroom dance events. For one of them, Gina decided to come also, and I was particularly excited because Gary and Diana McDonald were going to be flying out from NJ, where they lived and taught, to compete in the Open Professional International Latin event. They were generally regarded as one of the top 2 Latin couples in the US, and I had taken classes from each of them at ballroom dance camp. In fact...

This one time, at ballroom dance camp, I was taking a class from Diana McDonald, who was hothothot, and the TA was helping someone with the step we were doing, which was some kind of chasse into a double reverse spin in the Quickstep, and she wanted to demonstrate the step again, so she quickly looked around the room and then pointed at ME and said, "You- get out here and help me demonstrate this."

I'm just going to go ahead and admit it- I froze. I half turned my head to see if some taller, more obviously skilled guy had sneaked in behind me, but there wasn't anyone. Fortunately, my dance partner (the first one- Maria), put her hand in the small of my back and literally shoved me out there. For the record, this is what was waiting for me out there:


Diana McDonald. And Diana McDonald's legs. I used to weep every time I saw them flex. In fact, I think I'm tearing up now.
















So I nervously walked out into the center of this giant room, with all these people around the edge watching me, and I held up my arms into dance position.

Now, one thing you should know about the standard dances- slow waltz, tango, viennese waltz, slow foxtrot, and quickstep, is that the three fundamental partner positions in these dances all involve the woman's hip being pasted onto your hip, and you are in part judged on your ability to maintain this connection through all the moves that you do. As I held up my arms, I expected that we would chastely demonstrate this move, with plenty of space between my obviously unworthy mortal body and her blonde dancing goddess self. So I was caught offguard when she immediately grabbed my hand and came into dance position like the D-train, fully pasting her body onto mine.

At that point, I felt a powerful urge to do what anyone would do in that situation- faint dead away. Fortunately, that powerful urge was trumped by an even more powerful urge: Preservation of Male Ego (PoME). My PoME reflex filled my brain with images of the mortification I would suffer if I did in fact faint dead away, so I managed to focus and execute the move perfectly, after which she sent me back to my spot. I was careful to walk back with all due swagger. Maria and I had gone as part of a much larger group, and for the rest of the day, the other guys in the group would come up to me randomly and say "I heard you got to dance with Diana McDonald... can I- can I just touch you?"

So, it was exciting to think that Gary and Diana would be coming to LA; they normally did not come out for the West Coast competitions, and so Debbie, Sarah, Gina, and I all went. By this time we were dancing a higher level, so we'd acquired better competition clothes:

A very well-centered picture, obviously.



















Ballroom dancing is so expensive- and we were so poor. After every competition we'd scour the floor for rhinestones that had fallen off other people's costumes, and Debbie made all her rhinestone stuff, plus glued a bunch on a regular belt I had to make the belt you see in this picture, out of the stones we picked up off the ballroom floors of America.

I don't remember how we did that particular day; I don't think we won, but we probably placed. But later that evening, the event we'd all been waiting for arrived- the Open Professional International Latin competition. Debbie went to go sit with her crazy stalker boyfriend, whose name I don't remember, though I think it might have been Eric, but it doesn't matter anyway because I always referred to him as "Clownboy", or "CB" for short.

Clownboy literally stalked her, and was a big part of the drama that characterized our dance partnership. Although she broke up with him early on, he never really accepted that, and even though she made him give back the key to her place, she would still come home sometimes to find him there. He also would follow her around sometimes, etc. She would frequently wonder aloud what she was going to do, and I would frequently respond to that by suggesting calling the police, charging him with B&E, getting a restraining order, etc., but she always demurred, saying that he really wasn't a bad guy and that he just had "problems".

Duh.

Eventually, she adopted a different strategy altogether- reward the behavior by taking him back. This decision was baffling to everyone on planet Earth not named Clownboy, but I suppose we all have to make our own decisions in life.

Sarah and Gina and I had a table at the far corner of the dance floor, and we were standing with me on the left, Sarah in the center, and Gina on the right. Here are two photos from the evening:


Me and Sarah. Ah, to have hair again...


















Me and Gina




















Note two things: Sarah is wearing a velvety dress, and Gina is wearing a satiny dress. This is important for reasons you will soon see.

As the highlight of the competition, the Open Professional Latin event came near the very end, so we had been at the competition for several hours. And, it's a five-dance event, so it lasts about 15 minutes or so. So, about halfway through the event, during one of the dances, Sarah, who was getting pretty tired, sat down in her chair, which was right behind her. I didn't notice this, since I was fixated on the competition, and we were wedged in pretty tightly. Being a pretty physically affectionate kinda guy, at some point soon after this I instinctively reached out and put my hand on Sarah's hip, and slowly, sensually, drew it up the side of her body.

Now, 99% of my consciousness was focused on the event. That 99% was like a farmer working way out in his field, totally focused on what he's doing. The other 1% of my consciousness was like the farmer's wife, who comes running out of the farmhouse yelling something. The farmer can't really hear what she's saying, but he can tell by her body language that it's something important. So he starts coming in from the field. Which is to say, I slowly, reluctantly, started to shift more of my consciousness from the competition to my hand, which was continuing to slowly move up Sarah's body.

1% - something's wrong
5% - something's wrong with my hand
10% - something's wrong with the way my hand feels
15% - this feels smooth
18% - and satiny
25% - what does Sarah's dress feel like?
50% - velvety
75% - whose dress is satiny??
100% - GINA'S!!!

And that's when I turned and saw the following things:

1) my hand is now on Gina's upper body
2) Gina is looking at me in shock and horror
3) Sarah, who is sitting down and therefore has an eye-level view of all this, is looking at me in shock

And so I yelped.

Sarah and Gina, bless their souls, upon seeing how shocked and traumatized I was about it, decided it was actually quite funny. I got to that place too- like 2 days later. But that's the story of how I accidentally felt up a good friend in front of my girlfriend's face.

So, sorry Gabe, for feeling up your wife.

But, at least she hadn't yet started dating you then...

Reminiscing, Chapter 2

This weekend I saw my friend Gina get married down in LA. Keiko came out for it, so that makes 5 weddings we've been to in 7 months. Fortunately, I'm down to just a few single friends left, and none of them seem particularly close to getting married, so I might have a break for a while. Keiko's friends are all in that mid-20's stage where at best a few of them will get married, and most of those will regret doing so, so there should be calm on that front as well.

When I was in college, Laszlo, his brother Steve, his friend John, and I all would hang out sometimes. Those 3 all grew up in Claremont, where Pomona College is, so this was their home turf, and when we hung out together we'd go to their favorite HS haunts and mostly talk about nothing.

One night, we went to one of the local parks and had fun being an acapella singing group. Ed, were he here to comment on this right now, would say "Dude, that's extremely gay", to which I would give my standard response, which is: "I have no problem with people being gay, but gay people:

1) Do not get all the fun music
2) Do not get all the nice clothes
3) Do not get all the yummy drinks, and
4) Do not get all the fun activities."

I really don't care if every other guy on earth who likes ABBA, soft sweaters, amaretto sours, and ballroom dancing, and uses the word "yummy" to describe anything, is gay- I'm not, and if you have a hard time believing that, you can, to quote Ed one more time, "lick my balls".

Anyway, so we sang songs for hours, in a manly, platonic, thoroughly fun way. After a bit, we somehow got onto the subject of marriage, and who might get married first. Naturally, this brought out the competitive posturing, and it all resulted in the 4 of us making a solemn oath/bet: each of us would throw $500 in a pot. The last person to get married would win the pot.

I vividly remember that night, and vividly remember attempting to talk the others out of it, out of a (in retrospect economically irrational) attempt to prevent them from losing money. Because, I knew they had absolutely zero chance of winning. At the tender age of 20, I already knew I would be very, very late to the marriage party. I could just feel it.

But the others insisted. After all, I was in a relationship with Tasha for over 2 years at that point, and they all teased me that I would in fact get married first. But as I responded I realized for the first time ever that I knew in my gut Tasha and I would never be married, and I tried to warn them. They didn't listen.

I won the bet years ago. Laszlo, Steve, and John have all been married for years and have among them 2, 3, and 2 kids respectively. But they all went on strike and said I don't get to collect my winnings until I get married. Which is a bit of a cop-out, but I don't have the leverage to force the issue. Anyway, I won and they know it, and most of the utility (in an economic sense) comes from that. But I do wish now that I'd gotten other people in on the bet; enough other people and it might've paid for a wedding someday.

Since it's a pain in the ass to drive down to LA, especially if you have a big honkin' SUV like I do and gas is 6 trillion dollars a gallon, I decided to fly down to LA. By using southwest, and having Keiko come in on JetBlue, I was able to time our arrivals at Burbank airport to within 1 minute of each other. Of course, that meant getting to the airport, which is all too often something of an adventure with me.

I managed to finish tutoring at 615pm Friday night, and took my stuff for the long walk down to the CalTrain station to catch the 712pm train. Catching that train was important because the next one wouldn't get me to the airport in time to make the 9pm flight. I reached Darbar, which is an Indian restaurant right across the street from the train station, at 630. As I passed Darbar, I decided to duck in and get some food. I made this decision based on the following factors:

1) There were still 42 minutes before the train was due
2) I only needed to cross the street and go through the tunnel under the tracks to the southbound side and buy a $4 ticket at the machine, and
3) Darbar has historically been pretty speedy about serving your food

I knew I'd be rushed, but I hadn't had a meal yet and we had an hour drive to Claremont coming after we landed and got a rental car, so I didn't want to have to stop us for food once we were in LA.

By 642, I was seated, with yummy chicken vindaloo in front of me, reading my book (The Great Influenza, by John Barry- quite good), and I set about eating quickly as I read. At 657, I told the waiter I needed my check because I had to catch a train across the street. He proceeded to go to the counter, pick up a check, and deliver it to another table, then greet a family coming into the restaurant, then seat said family, at which point I got up and walked up to the counter myself, trailing my suitcase. Then he ran up and gave me my check.

By this point, it was 705. I paid cash to save time, and at 707 was out the door, now feeling a bit nervous. I half walked, half ran across the street to the tunnel that goes under the tracks, now able to hear the train's horn blowing in the distance.

And that's when I discovered the construction.

Apparently, for the last year they've been building a new southbound platform. Of course, I haven't been here a year so I never noticed a change, but since the last time I took the train down to the airport, which is the only reason I ever take the train, the new platform apparently got finished. And so the old platform, and the tunnel leading to it, were fenced off and blocked by light construction machinery. There was, however, a sign telling me that I could find the new platform that-a-way, to the left.

Somewhere.

It's now 710, and I have no idea where the new tunnel/platform are, I can't just run across the tracks because everything's fenced off, and even if I did, I would probably get greased by the CalTrain, which is now beginning to pull into the station.

I run down the street in the direction the sign points. I can hear the train braking. I find the new tunnel, and race down it trailing the suitcase. I run up the stairs on the other side. The train is parked, and people are starting to stream off. Shit! Where is the ticket machine?? I find it, and start the process of getting a ticket. People are starting to board. I need to pay $4. I start feeding it $1 bills. The only other thing I have is a $20, and I don't have time to wait for all that change. The first 3 bills go in just fine. The last one gets spit back out. The last people are getting on the train. I swap the $1 bill for a different one. It's even older, and keeps bunching up in the feeder. I finally get it in, and a ticket drops out. I run for the train.

Too late.

The doors close as I'm running at the train, and it starts to pull away.

Fuck. Fuckshitdamnpissfuckitall.

So, now I'm in possession of a $4 ticket I'll never use, since the next train is useless to me. So I turn around and speedwalk back all the way to the office, reflecting as I go that maybe my decision to forgo getting gas on the way to work was unwise. As I left home, I looked at my gas gauge and thought, "Just enough to get me to the office, plus a small fraction of margin, so I can deal with this when I get back from LA."

Now I have to hope that the gas margin is big enough to get me all the way down to San Jose airport, because it's not at all clear that I have time to stop at a gas station. I get back in the office, jump in the GMC, and head off to the airport. It's now 730.

Fortunately, it's just past rush hour, so although traffic is heavy, it's moving. I employ all my most aggressive driving techniques, and arrive at the airport complex at 750. Now I've got to get into long-term parking, and get a shuttle to the terminal.

It's important, if you're someone like me, to know certain things about the airports you frequent, particularly things that help you move through it faster. For the record, you may wish to know that in San Jose's long-term parking lot, the shuttle stops go from A to S, and they form a giant wavy loop. The lot is designed to encourage traffic to flow from A to S, and the shuttle hits the stops in that order. But, if you ignore the way traffic is intended to flow, and make a couple of clever turns, you can immediately end up by stop S, which, because of the loop effect, is actually pretty close to stop A. And, stop S is the last stop the shuttle makes before heading back to the terminals.

So, I whip into the long-term parking lot, bail off the main path, and come flying into the aisle that has shuttle stop S, at which point 2 things happen:

1) The idiot light/sound effect comes on, which means I've got maybe 10-12 more miles of city driving left before I will run out of gas, and
2) The shuttle turns into the aisle.

By the grace of God, there is an empty spot just 15 feet from the shuttle stop, so I zoom into the spot, jump out of the car, grab my suitcase, and run for the shuttle stop, where I'm just in time to jump on. Time: 8pm.

The shuttle drops me off at the terminal at 810, and I check in and get through security by 825, so I am actually able to walk to my gate, where the boarding process is just beginning, at 830. Hence, I congratulate myself for arriving early, because after all, in Gus's world, if you were able to actually walk to your gate, and people haven't even started filing onto the plane yet, you have definitely arrived early.

The flight was a blissfully short 46 minutes, and we had no trouble getting the rental, or getting to Claremont. Both my dance partners lived in Claremont, so I used to drive out there 4-6 times a week for 3 years. I can do it in my sleep, and on some occasions actually have.

Saturday we got up and went for a walk around Pomona's campus. I always try to visit the old alma mater when I'm in town, and I like showing it to people because then it's easier for them to have a picture of what's going on when I tell Pomona stories.


Keiko on Walker Beach at Pomona.












You can't see the mountains in the background, because it was a pretty hazy day. I arrived at Pomona not knowing almost anything about it, since it was originally my 4th choice out of the 4 schools I applied to. In fact, I didn't know there were mountains nearby, and toward the end of August the air quality there can get bad enough that the haze completely obscures the mountains. So, I went through days 1 and 2 not knowing the mountains were there. No one told me about them. So imagine my surprise on day 3 when I woke up, went outside, and looked up to see mountains where there hadn't been any the previous day. It's psychologically jarring in a way that's extremely difficult to explain.

I only applied to Pomona at all because my guidance counselor Bonnie had a rule that you had to apply to at least 4 schools. (If I should ever run into her again, I will thank her for making me apply.) My algorithm for selecting schools was this: I needed a school in or near a big city, relatively small in size, with strong physics, psychology, dance, and russian departments, plus a strong commitment to foreign exchange, and to diversity in the student body. After spending 4 years in a school that was 100% male, 99% Catholic, and 98% white, I was pretty desperate for diversity. Turns out, not so many schools fit that category. I submitted my list as Rice, Oberlin, and University of Chicago. Bonnie made me pick a 4th school, and I ruled out the following alternatives:

1) Duke, because they'd only ever taken valedictorians
2) Swarthmore, because why on earth would you ever want to be in rural PA (sorry, JJM)
3) Reed, because it's in the middle of nowhere and a lot of people there seem to kill themselves

In the end, I picked Pomona because, quite literally, it was in LA, which meant it couldn't be too far from the beach, and I figured if for some reason I ended up going there and hating it, I could always just spend 4 years on the beach, and then figure something else out.

Rice was my first choice because I was in the midst of my first long-distance relationship, with Kate, whom I met in the Soviet Union on the train to Leningrad. [Literally every long-term relationship I've ever had has involved some component of long distance. My therapist keeps bugging me to think about why that might be...] She lived in Houston and was a year behind me in school. They also had a nice partnership with NASA, so I was pretty dead set on going there.

I never took applying to Pomona that seriously, so I decided to have a little fun with the application. My personal essay was a comparison and contrast between myself and Jesus Christ. Sadly, unless it's locked away in a dusty vault at Pomona, the only copy of that essay was on a 5.25" disk from our old Apple IIC, and is lost to history. But I do remember Jesus came out of it looking pretty good.

In the end, Rice wait-listed me, and I got accepted to the other 3 schools. I went and visited Chicago first, and thought it was, in a word, joyless. The students I stayed with said to me: "Don't come here if you want a social life." That's all I needed to hear.

Oberlin remains the site of the best college party I have ever been to. It stretched across 4 or 5 houses along a street, with what most have been hundreds of people drunk off their asses, including, pretty quickly, me. I lost track of the students I was staying with, and at 4am some kind other students helped me find my way back to the room I was staying in. I liked the people I met, but Oberlin is in the middle of a cornfield. So although I had a great time, it seemed to me like that party encapsulated pretty much all there was to do.

Plus, Oberlin was close to some of my mom's wackiest relatives, the ones who would provoke you into an argument about something over dinner and then whip out a pocket book of Bible verses to augment their case. Even though we hadn't told them I was going to be in the area, I think my grandma squealed, and they called up all excited that I might be nearby, and could come over for dinner sometimes. All in all, not a great case for Oberlin.

Pomona was too far away for us to go visit, and that plus my never really taking the application there seriously meant I knew nothing about it. The big determinant was going to be financial aid, since my parents couldn't afford very much at all. Oberlin gave us a relatively crappy deal, so that was the final nail in that coffin (sorry J-Rob, we would've made great classmates!).

Pomona and U Chicago gave essentially identical offers, and since I knew Chicago was joyless, I opted for Pomona, sight unseen. And I've always been glad I did. One of the best decisions I ever made. But I would definitely have gone to Rice if I'd been let in, so it's just another example of the universe having a better idea of what's good for me than I do.

Anyway, Keiko and I wandered around Pomona for a while, and then went for lunch to my favorite Thai restaurant on earth: Sinamluang. I used to go there at least 3 times a week in college. Entrees were $3.50 (Keiko, eyeing $5.50 entrees, "The food is so cheap!" Me, eyeing the $5.50 entrees, "It's so expensive now!"), the place was open until 3 a.m., and the cute Thai waitresses would teach us Thai words. They've really cleaned the place up now- no more animal carcasses hanging next to the cash register, and the bathrooms aren't horrifying, but I'm pleased to report that the food is still outstanding.

From there, we drove down to Temecula for Gina's wedding that afternoon. They had an outdoor ceremony at the Temecula Creek Inn, which was very nice...


Gina and Gabe














My friend Sarah was the Maid of Honor, and I'm proud to say I brought the two of them together; I introduced Sarah to Gina after Sarah and I started dating.

Gina and I worked at Katz together. She was in a different division, and I'd seen her around but never spoken with her. Then, late in 1995 we were asked to fly to NYC and learn the new computer system our company would be going on, and then come back and teach the other 70 people in the LA office how to use it. That was one of my formative tutoring experiences, BTW, and although the LA office was the 2nd biggest in the company, we ended up generating the 2nd fewest calls to the help desk in the first few weeks after we went live on the new system. Only Portland generated fewer calls, and they only had 4 total people, one of whom had gone to NYC for the training (every office sent either 1 or 2 people, depending on size). I don't remember much about the training except that Portland was cute, and the two girls from Atlanta were cute, and we went out drinking every night until 4a.m., and it made me wonder how anyone could possibly live in NYC and not rapidly become broke, alcoholic, and dead from sleep deprivation.

Another thing I remember about the trip was that Gina was scared of flying, and she spent the entire 6 hour flight clutching my arm in ways varying from a vice-grip to a death-grip, depending on whether the plane had just jostled a little or not. Numerous alcoholic drinks did nothing to lessen this. She swears she's better about that now, and I hope for Gabe's sake that that's true.

The wedding was very sweet, and the reception was fun. A few pics from that:


Me and Keiko



















Me and Gina. And a lightning bug on my shirt.












Keiko continues to maintain that the lightning bug is not, in fact, a lightning bug, but rather is some kind of giant mutant flesh-eating bug monster from outer space. Or so I gather- I'm paraphrasing a bit. But I'm sure it's just a garden variety lightning bug, despite all her protestations to the contrary. Of course, her people did come up with Godzilla, so it may be natural to see monsters all over the place. [Hopefully this joke is funny enough not to get me into an assload of trouble...]


Me, Gabe, Gina, and Sarah














Hmm, placing 5'7" Keiko in 5" heels next to 5'1" Gina in 2" heels is maybe not the wisest compositional choice...










At the afterparty...










Eventually, Keiko and I bailed the afterparty because we wanted to be able to get up early enough to go to the beach the next day. This was partially successful; we did get to Will Rogers State beach late in the afternoon. But it took forever to get there and then another forever for us to find a place with beach towels, since neither of us remembered to bring one and there's not much in the way of services in Pacific Palisades. Plus, we had to leave to go meet one of Keiko's LA friends. We ate at a place called Buddha's Belly, near the 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica:

Me, Keiko, Viv. And Buddha's Belly, which you can see hanging over my shoulder. Keiko kept patting my belly and saying it was good luck... that's her subtle way of calling me fat.



I was happy to hang around Santa Monica more, but Keiko, like most people, seems not to react well to my style of arriving at airports, so we left early and got to the airport at 745 for our 9pm flights. And in the process, I realized that it was actually a good thing that I missed the train, because by the time I would've landed in San Jose and caught the shuttle to the CalTrain station, I would've missed the last northbound train and been stuck in the middle of nowhere where there aren't any taxis. One small thing I do miss about Manhattan is the 24 availability of trains, and the copious supply of taxis (except, of course, when it's raining).

So I made it back OK, and found a gas station about 9 miles from the airport, so that was a little nerve-racking, but all in all a good trip. It was good to see Gina finally find someone; she's always been a sweetheart and deserved to find (and did find) a good guy.

I totally should've made her join the bet.