Oh blog my blog, how I have missed you...
A quick installment in my ongoing series of publishing my actual opinions on things, thereby ensuring that I can never be elected to any public office. Today's topic: illegal immigration.
The topic has been on my mind since Arizona passed that new law of theirs. Now, I do believe that illegal immigration is a serious issue, that could use some serious actions to address. But, that law is an extremely poor way to try and tackle the issue. Instructing the police to demand identification from anyone they have "reasonable suspicion" of being illegal makes no sense. What is the differentiating behavior that illegal immigrants do that will distinguish them from legal immigrants or native citizens?
There are circumstances in which it does make sense to use the standard of "reasonable suspicion." It makes sense to instruct police to pull people over if there is a "reasonable suspicion" that they're driving drunk, for instance. In that case, there are clear behaviors (weaving on the road, etc.) that distinguish someone who is likely driving drunk from someone who likely isn't. There's no corresponding behavior that's specific to illegal immigrants, and so in the absence of such behavior, policemen are going to use whatever algorithms they have in their heads, which, let's face it, are pretty much going to boil down to "That guy looks Mexican, let's stop him and see if he's here legally or not." That's over the line if we want to live in a free, democratic society. It's not over the line if we want to live in a totalitarian society, but I don't think that's what most people actually want.
Of course, if the Arizona strategy isn't the right one, what is?
First, let me repeat that illegal immigration is a serious issue. My dad immigrated to this country legally, and it was quite a lengthy process for him. It made things harder for him in terms of starting and supporting a family. And yet, he did it the way you're supposed to do it. So I start my approach from the assumption that there definitely *should* be some kind of consequence for choosing to try and go around the system.
That said, the vast majority of people who immigrate illegally are not bad people. Many of them do not actually have the option to immigrate legally. There are only 4 ways to immigrate to our country legally:
1) through the sponsorship of a close family member who is a current U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident
2) through the sponsorship of a U.S. employer (as of 2006 there were 140,000 of these allowed per year)
3) through the special lottery of visas which promotes diversity (i.e., the visas are distributed to applicants from countries that do not normally send a lot of immigrants here.) As of 2006, there were 55,000 of these allowed per year.
4) by being classified as one of the "protected classes" of people (e.g., victims of political persecution, etc.)
So let's do a thought experiment: you're a 35 year old Mexican man with a wife and 2 young kids. You live in Ciudad Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities on earth, and you are poor and underemployed even at the best of times. Every day when you wake up you look out the window and can see America, which is quite literally the city on the hill. (Ciudad Juarez is spread out on a series of low hills on the south side of the 10 freeway, while El Paso sits on the north side of the freeway.) Your goals are simple, and basically the same as the goals of virtually every other man on earth: have a job, have a place to live that is reasonably likely to be safe for you and your family, and have some education for your kids, so that 20 years from now, they're not waking up to face the same option set that you currently are, which pretty much boils down to:
Option 1: stay where you are.
Probability of achieving your goals with option 1: minimal. Unemployment is widespread, and violence and crime are endemic.
Option 2: migrate internally within Mexico
A lot of people choose this option. In fact, the vast majority of human migration is within borders. It's extremely difficult and stressful to move to another country, with different customs and possibly a different language, so most people don't. The result is the rise of cities like Mexico City (population ~21 million), Mumbai (~21 million), Sao Paulo (~20 million), and Cairo (~16 million). Each of these cities has individual slums that are larger than most American cities. I spent a day doing little more than walking the slums of Cairo, and the scale of it is mind-boggling.
Which means, if you don't have some kind of connection in whatever other city you're thinking about internally migrating to, you're probably facing an Option 2 probability of achieving your goals that is "marginal." After all, without a connection or some other kind of advantage, your highest probability is that you end up in one of those giant slums. Still, "marginal" beats "minimal", and hence Mexico City and other cities like it continue to grow. But, you want to keep considering options. So, let's move to:
Option #3: migrate to a non-U.S. foreign country.
Well, there are certainly a lot of non-U.S. foreign countries. But which one do you pick? How will you get there? What will you do when you get there? An international move is an enormous gamble, and you need to pick a place where the increased probability of success outweighs the enormous risks of making a move.
And the thing is, what country is that exactly? The farther you go from home, the bigger the risks are, so the better the payoff needs to be. If you're in Mexico, the nearest non-U.S. neighbors are places like Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, etc. Not confidence-inspiring in terms of providing a much better opportunity than taking your chances in Mexico City, in all likelihood. And the prospects really don't get that much better going farther afield. Which leads us to:
Option #4: migrate legally to the U.S.
The thing is, is this really an option for our hypothetical case? Recall that there are only 4 ways to immigrate legally. Method 1, have a close family member who is already a legal resident, isn't an option for you- you don't have any family in the U.S.
Method 2, have a special skill and/or be sponsored by an employer, isn't an option for you- you're poor and largely uneducated, and your best skill is your willingness to work hard as hell for crazy hours while being extremely flexible on compensation. And that skill, while important and useful, isn't "special" in the sense of "differentiating you from a lot of other people."
Method 3 isn't an option, because you're from Mexico, and there's plenty of immigration from there already.
Method 4 isn't an option, because nobody's persecuting you personally; you're just living in a crime-ridden place that offers minimal prospects. That's not enough to make you a "protected class."
Which means, legal immigration isn't an option. Probability of achieving your goals via this method is zero. Which leads us to:
Option #5: Immigrate to the U.S. illegally.
Thing is, you know it can be done. You know that there's a staggering difference in the amount of opportunity available in America versus the amount of opportunity where you are. Yes, you might end up in a slum in LA or Phoenix or Dallas, but even those slums are not Ciudad Juarez, and even if they are, you're breaking even on that dimension while having a chance at more employment, and some education for your kids. It's high-risk, but potentially high-reward.
Hence, the people who ultimately choose Option 5 are largely people who are coming for economic opportunity, and who respond to a high-risk, high-reward payoff matrix. And actually, it's good to have a nice fraction of your population have that kind of mentality if you want your society to be dynamic, and to foster entrepreneurial activity (starting a business is definitely a high-risk, high-reward payoff matrix).
I mention all this because I feel like what gets easily lost in the debate over illegal immigration is the decision to illegally immigrate can be an extremely rational one. That is, can all of us, faced with an option set like that, truthfully say that we would look at option #5 and say "Well, as compelling as it is, it's against the rules, so I won't do it."? In short, empathy seems to be largely absent from the debate on this issue. And while I see from Justice Sotomayor's confirmation process that "empathy" is not necessarily held in esteem by everyone, I think it's an extraordinarily powerful tool for working out solutions to problems.
So what would I do, if I got to decide?
1) Ruthless enforcement of existing laws regarding the hiring of workers.
It is a well-known and well-observed fact that some businesses go out of their way to hire illegal immigrants. You know what? If, in order to be successful, your business model requires that your labor force be composed of illegal immigrants, then you have what can only be described as a bullshit business model, and you should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
And if it's really true that a significant portion of our nation's agricultural output, for example, simply cannot be properly produced without importing seasonal labor, then fine- it's the role of government to create a program of seasonal visas that allow people to be here legally for specified times. And then anyone who doesn't use that program to bring in their workers should be punished.
2) Institute some kind of sensible penalty for the people who do choose to come here illegally.
There does need to be some kind of consequence for people who immigrate illegally, otherwise there's no incentive to play by the rules, as my dad did. But, I don't think it makes sense to incarcerate people who aren't dangerous in some way, so I wouldn't use incarceration. I wouldn't deport people solely for having immigrated illegally, if there's evidence that they have managed to successfully begin integrating into society. And fining people, which has the benefit of being extremely simple, is nevertheless a tough way to penalize people who are likely to be of extremely modest means, and who we would ultimately like to see fully integrated into at least a middle-class existence.
So, my preferred option, upon discovering someone was here illegally, would be to:
1) set them on a path toward legal permanent resident status. However, I would make that process be longer than it is for people who start off doing it right. It already takes 6-23 years to become a legal permanent resident here, so I'd make the process for someone who was starting this way last 25 years.
2) Institute a required 100 hours per year of community service. That's a lot of community service over 25 years, but you did break the rules, and there needs to be a consequence. That consequence can be to help build up the society you wanted so badly to join.
3) If, during your 25 year path toward legal permanent residency, you were ever convicted of a violent crime, then I'd have you deported without hesitation. There's a limited amount of room here, and there are plenty of other people we'd rather take. If you in any year failed to meet your community service requirement, I'd have you appear before a judge, who would determine if there were a sufficiently good excuse, and if so, would allow the unmet hours to roll over, with some kind of modest penalty. If it were determined there was not a valid excuse, you'd get one more chance. If you failed to meet hours a second time (with no valid excuse as determined by a judge), I'd have you deported. Again, there's limited space here, and we want people who can live responsibly and follow through on things.
Now, there's still the little matter of how you identify who is here illegally. But I think you can get around that by enforcing the hiring standards, rigorously checking for proper identification when people are applying for things (jobs, licenses, etc.), and by offering a quasi-amnesty program where anyone here illegally can 'fess up about that and get put on the above-mentioned longer path toward legal status without any additional penalty. I bet a lot of people would do it.
Obviously, all this would require some effort put into monitoring progress toward community service hours, and coming up with useful community service work, etc., but I think it would be a dramatically better approach than whatever it is you call whatever it is we've got now. Hopefully we'll see some leadership on this issue in the coming months...
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Another good beachcam movie...
April 5th, 2010. The music seems to go quite well with the cloud action...
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
One minute in the life of a high-end tutor...
I am tutoring my 8th grade boy, JS. We are discussing Newton's 3 laws. In a discussion of action-reaction pairs, we talk about how it's not just that the earth pulls on JS, but that JS also pulls on the earth (that's what's meant by "every action has an equal an opposite reaction").
Gus: "So, you are currently pulling on the earth. As am I. Though, I regret to inform you that your ability to influence the earth is even smaller than mine."
JS: "Yeah... because you're FAT!!"
(pause)
JS: "Haha... j/k LOL."
(pause)
JS: "right?"
(pause)
Gus: "I am going to *kill* you."
Gus: "So, you are currently pulling on the earth. As am I. Though, I regret to inform you that your ability to influence the earth is even smaller than mine."
JS: "Yeah... because you're FAT!!"
(pause)
JS: "Haha... j/k LOL."
(pause)
JS: "right?"
(pause)
Gus: "I am going to *kill* you."
Saturday, April 3, 2010
One minute in the life of a high-end tutor...
I was meeting with my student V today, and we had this exchange as I was examining V's essay from last week's practice test, which I graded last week and had not looked at since...
Me: "There's no conclusion, and there are 3 examples instead of 2, and the indentations are barely noticeable, and you write way too small... I gave this an 8?? I can't believe I gave this thing an 8.."
V: "You're such a douchebag."
(pause)
(pause)
Me: "Wow... I'm trying to remember the last time a student actually called me a douchebag during a lesson."
V: "Pretty recently, I'd guess."
Me: "There's no conclusion, and there are 3 examples instead of 2, and the indentations are barely noticeable, and you write way too small... I gave this an 8?? I can't believe I gave this thing an 8.."
V: "You're such a douchebag."
(pause)
(pause)
Me: "Wow... I'm trying to remember the last time a student actually called me a douchebag during a lesson."
V: "Pretty recently, I'd guess."
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Kinship
Kinship, as you might be aware, is defined differently in various cultures all over the world. For example, the !Kung people of the Kalahari have only 36 names for men and 32 names for women, and you are considered related to people who have the same names. For instance, my sister's name is Maria; in !Kung society, that would mean the same incest taboo that prohibits me from marrying her also prohibits me from ever marrying *anyone* named Maria. (So, from the !Kung point of view, one of my college relationships was incest. But what can you do, you know?)
I bring this up because I realized yesterday that I belong to a kinship group I never realized before.
I was almost done with my beach run when I noticed that the ocean had washed up a set of keys onto the shore, a set of keys that looked suspiciously like the ones that ended up at the bottom of Mendocino Bay in the Valentine's-Day-gone-awry story with Keiko. Given the way the currents work on the coast of California, it is actually possible that my keys could one day wash up on the beach in HMB, so I stopped to pick them up.
But alas, the car key, though it looks a lot like mine, is a little thinner. And the key fob, though it looks like mine, is a little squarer. And the housekey that's attached, though it looks like mine, is a little rounder. Plus, there's no office key attached.
I examined them for awhile. Whoever owned these keys must have lost them a while ago, based on the amount of rust on them. Then I tucked them into my pocket and kept running. I felt good. Not because some foolish dude lost his keys in the ocean; that was a terrible experience and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But rather, I felt good because I realized that there's a whole different group of people I'm related to out there that I never knew about before.
And so I say to you, foolish, foolish dude, who was surely doing something pretty obviously stupid, probably against the wishes and sound advice of your girlfriend, when you lost your keys into the ocean, I say to you: you are my brother. And there must surely be more than just the two of us- a whole family of foolish brothers, scattered far and wide throughout the world. To you, my brothers, I say: you are always welcome here in HMB.
But if you should ever come for a visit, I'm going to insist that we stay safely on land...
I bring this up because I realized yesterday that I belong to a kinship group I never realized before.
I was almost done with my beach run when I noticed that the ocean had washed up a set of keys onto the shore, a set of keys that looked suspiciously like the ones that ended up at the bottom of Mendocino Bay in the Valentine's-Day-gone-awry story with Keiko. Given the way the currents work on the coast of California, it is actually possible that my keys could one day wash up on the beach in HMB, so I stopped to pick them up.
But alas, the car key, though it looks a lot like mine, is a little thinner. And the key fob, though it looks like mine, is a little squarer. And the housekey that's attached, though it looks like mine, is a little rounder. Plus, there's no office key attached.
I examined them for awhile. Whoever owned these keys must have lost them a while ago, based on the amount of rust on them. Then I tucked them into my pocket and kept running. I felt good. Not because some foolish dude lost his keys in the ocean; that was a terrible experience and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But rather, I felt good because I realized that there's a whole different group of people I'm related to out there that I never knew about before.
And so I say to you, foolish, foolish dude, who was surely doing something pretty obviously stupid, probably against the wishes and sound advice of your girlfriend, when you lost your keys into the ocean, I say to you: you are my brother. And there must surely be more than just the two of us- a whole family of foolish brothers, scattered far and wide throughout the world. To you, my brothers, I say: you are always welcome here in HMB.
But if you should ever come for a visit, I'm going to insist that we stay safely on land...
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Awesome cloud action...
Check out this movie from the beachcam on March 3rd, especially toward the end of the day...
Monday, March 15, 2010
At last, someone who understands me...
This weekend I flew to Harrisburg, PA to visit Jill.
The flight there started as usual- planned to go to the office before heading to the airport, but didn't allot enough time and had to rush, arriving at my gate moderately early, at least by my standards.
Now, you can't fly directly to a place like HBG from San Francisco. And, there aren't a whole lot of airline options. I chose Delta, which I basically never fly, since it was cheapest by far. Delta, you may remember, bought out Northwest a few years back. Northwest, I am sad to say, I have flown many a time, and as near as I can tell, that airline has never once in its entire misbegotten history flown an on-time flight.
Thus, when Delta bought NWA, I wondered if the relative competence of Delta would be dominant or recessive in the merger. This would be my chance to find out.
My flight to Detroit started out a modest 15 minutes or so late, which id definitely not the end of the world, and compared to most of my experiences with NWA, a stunning success. Just based on that flight, it was hard to tell if the 15 minutes was just random variation, or the slow infection of Delta with the disease of NWA incompetence.
Then, on the 2nd flight, a 54 minute flight from Detroit to HBG, we hit a flock of geese on take-off. It makes a surprisingly loud thumping noise. It is, I might add, disconcerting to hear your airplane suddenly start making an odd thumping sound while it's taking off.
So, now we have a problem: since we just hit a flock of geese, and "Sully" isn't flying our plane, we need to land and have the plane inspected. Except, we have to finish taking off. And then we have to get out of the takeoff lanes in the air. And then, we have too much fuel to safely land, so we have to do doughnuts around Detroit's airport until we burn off enough fuel to be allowed to land.
My problem with this is: if you're worried the plane might crash because of damage to the hull/engines, why are you going to make us circle forever above Detroit? I mean, granted that at this point, if we do crash we have very low odds of actually hitting the 5 buildings left in Detroit that are actually occupied at any given moment, but still, it's a 54 minute flight, so if you're going to make us circle for 35 minutes burning fuel, couldn't we instead burn the fuel by, I dunno, FLYING TO HARRISBURG??
By the time we land back in Detroit, we've been in the air 44 minutes. And I am now convinced that incompetence/being constantly subject to weird star-crossed turns of fate is the dominant gene in airline mergers.
So, we taxi to a stop on the runway. Of course, there's no gate for us. We wait for a gate. Then, they finally find a spare gate for us, and commence the inspection. For the record, the inspection process seems to consist of the following components:
1) Jimmy comes out of the basement with his wrench and gives ol' Betsy a few gentle taps here and there to verify structural integrity. (approximate duration: 5 minutes)
2) The proper forms are located, delivered to the captain, filled out by the captain, and filed with the proper regulatory and insurance agencies. (approximate duration: 45 minutes)
I was really hoping someone would fire a frozen turkey into our engines, but alas, no such luck.
Thankfully, ol' Betsy passed her inspection, so we tried again to take off, and this time managed to do it without hitting anything. And so, I did eventually make it to HBG, a couple hours late.
Since it poured pretty much nonstop the entire time I was in HBG, we didn't get out too much, but we did have dinner with Denni, an old friend of Jill's, and her husband Steve. It was a nice dinner, at a Tuscan restaurant owned by a woman whose level of service was absolutely exemplary. And apparently, this morning Jill received this feedback from Denni:
"Did you get the message from Steve and I? He’s great; unbelievably handsome, normal, fun, smart, normal, interesting, normal, and did I say normal???!!"
At last.
At long last.
Someone understands that I am indeed so normal, it's worth saying 4 times in just one sentence. It's so great to get that from an unbiased source.
Other than that, we mostly stayed in. Dinner at a fantastic French restaurant Sat night, with the best veal meatballs I've ever tasted, and then we hit one of HBG's few clubs. Apparently, there is little enough nightlife in HBG that we made it onto the website showing the local scene:
Just 2 normal folks out on the town.
Sunday was Alice in Wonderland, which I very much enjoyed. Johnny Depp is always fun to watch, even if he's always playing variations on the same theme.
Sadly, I had to get up at 430 this morning to catch my flight back here. By the time I get home tonight, I will have been up almost 24 hours straight. Good to know I haven't lost all of the stamina that got me through college. And life in LA. And grad school. And life in NYC...
The flight there started as usual- planned to go to the office before heading to the airport, but didn't allot enough time and had to rush, arriving at my gate moderately early, at least by my standards.
Now, you can't fly directly to a place like HBG from San Francisco. And, there aren't a whole lot of airline options. I chose Delta, which I basically never fly, since it was cheapest by far. Delta, you may remember, bought out Northwest a few years back. Northwest, I am sad to say, I have flown many a time, and as near as I can tell, that airline has never once in its entire misbegotten history flown an on-time flight.
Thus, when Delta bought NWA, I wondered if the relative competence of Delta would be dominant or recessive in the merger. This would be my chance to find out.
My flight to Detroit started out a modest 15 minutes or so late, which id definitely not the end of the world, and compared to most of my experiences with NWA, a stunning success. Just based on that flight, it was hard to tell if the 15 minutes was just random variation, or the slow infection of Delta with the disease of NWA incompetence.
Then, on the 2nd flight, a 54 minute flight from Detroit to HBG, we hit a flock of geese on take-off. It makes a surprisingly loud thumping noise. It is, I might add, disconcerting to hear your airplane suddenly start making an odd thumping sound while it's taking off.
So, now we have a problem: since we just hit a flock of geese, and "Sully" isn't flying our plane, we need to land and have the plane inspected. Except, we have to finish taking off. And then we have to get out of the takeoff lanes in the air. And then, we have too much fuel to safely land, so we have to do doughnuts around Detroit's airport until we burn off enough fuel to be allowed to land.
My problem with this is: if you're worried the plane might crash because of damage to the hull/engines, why are you going to make us circle forever above Detroit? I mean, granted that at this point, if we do crash we have very low odds of actually hitting the 5 buildings left in Detroit that are actually occupied at any given moment, but still, it's a 54 minute flight, so if you're going to make us circle for 35 minutes burning fuel, couldn't we instead burn the fuel by, I dunno, FLYING TO HARRISBURG??
By the time we land back in Detroit, we've been in the air 44 minutes. And I am now convinced that incompetence/being constantly subject to weird star-crossed turns of fate is the dominant gene in airline mergers.
So, we taxi to a stop on the runway. Of course, there's no gate for us. We wait for a gate. Then, they finally find a spare gate for us, and commence the inspection. For the record, the inspection process seems to consist of the following components:
1) Jimmy comes out of the basement with his wrench and gives ol' Betsy a few gentle taps here and there to verify structural integrity. (approximate duration: 5 minutes)
2) The proper forms are located, delivered to the captain, filled out by the captain, and filed with the proper regulatory and insurance agencies. (approximate duration: 45 minutes)
I was really hoping someone would fire a frozen turkey into our engines, but alas, no such luck.
Thankfully, ol' Betsy passed her inspection, so we tried again to take off, and this time managed to do it without hitting anything. And so, I did eventually make it to HBG, a couple hours late.
Since it poured pretty much nonstop the entire time I was in HBG, we didn't get out too much, but we did have dinner with Denni, an old friend of Jill's, and her husband Steve. It was a nice dinner, at a Tuscan restaurant owned by a woman whose level of service was absolutely exemplary. And apparently, this morning Jill received this feedback from Denni:
"Did you get the message from Steve and I? He’s great; unbelievably handsome, normal, fun, smart, normal, interesting, normal, and did I say normal???!!"
At last.
At long last.
Someone understands that I am indeed so normal, it's worth saying 4 times in just one sentence. It's so great to get that from an unbiased source.
Other than that, we mostly stayed in. Dinner at a fantastic French restaurant Sat night, with the best veal meatballs I've ever tasted, and then we hit one of HBG's few clubs. Apparently, there is little enough nightlife in HBG that we made it onto the website showing the local scene:
Just 2 normal folks out on the town.
Sunday was Alice in Wonderland, which I very much enjoyed. Johnny Depp is always fun to watch, even if he's always playing variations on the same theme.
Sadly, I had to get up at 430 this morning to catch my flight back here. By the time I get home tonight, I will have been up almost 24 hours straight. Good to know I haven't lost all of the stamina that got me through college. And life in LA. And grad school. And life in NYC...
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Valentine's Day 2010, or If Only I Were a Person Who *Really* Loved Wine...
This past weekend was the annual dinner party extravaganza.
As always, I had grand dreams of deciding the menu well in advance, doing a practice run of each of the dishes, and having a good enough tactical plan to start dinner on time. And as always, I was still making menu decisions the day of, I did not get a practice run of anything, and the tactical plan was disrupted somewhat by waking up late, brunch going a lot later than planned, etc.
The whole weekend looked to be in peril initially, since the entire East Coast was hammered by snow storms. In fact, Socci had planned to arrive in SF on Wed to hang out with a friend of his, but his flight out of JFK got canceled, and they couldn't guarantee him a flight before Sunday. So, in a display of heroic dedication to the dinner party cause, he took a 19 hour train ride to Chicago, flew from there on Thursday to Long Beach, and stayed overnight in a Travelodge to catch the early flight to SF on Friday morning.
Consequently, the first guest to actually arrive was Socci's GF Carey, whom I had never met. She arrived Thursday night, so I picked her up from the airport and took her to In-N-Out, and from there to Safeway for some of the grocery shopping. Considering we were complete strangers to each other, and didn't have Socci there, we were surprisingly comfortable with each other. She's 22 to his 33, so it's a pretty eye-opening age differential, but on the other hand, Keiko was 25 and I was 35 when we started dating, so I guess it's dangerous for me to be throwing stones from within my little glass house.
After the Safeway, we headed back to SFO to pick up the next guest: Jeffrey. He flew in from Richmond, ready to have another exciting weekend in the Bay Area (see hey-thanks-for-coming-out!). His flight was late, so by the time we got back to the house, there really wasn't time to do any of the cooking prep that I'd planned to do.
The next morning, I had to get up and go get Socci. Once we had him in hand and were back at the house, I was finally able to get started making food. I sent the 3 of them out for a number of things, and started baking. Among the things I asked them to get were champagne, for brunch, and brandy, for one of the recipes. And although they successfully procured these things, 2 of the bottles of champagne and a sizable portion of the brandy ended up being consumed over the course of the afternoon. None of it by me, btw, since I was frantically trying to catch up to where I was supposed to be in the tactical cooking plan.
Thus, by the time the evening rolled around, and we were about to leave for Socci's friend Michael's party up in the city (which we figured we'd hit before heading to the airport to pick up Jill, who was coming from Harrisburg, PA and the rest of the NYC crew, who were scheduled to arrive within 20 minutes of each other in a fortuitous bit of airline flight scheduling) Carey and Jeffrey were totally shitfaced, and Socci was looking a little wobbly. Carey and Jeffrey immediately hit it off because Carey, like Jill, has the ability to identify and instantly become BFF's with any gay man within a 5-mile radius.
So we headed up to a very nice party in SoMa. The 4 of us took 4 different approaches to the party: Socci, who knew several of the people there, had a good time catching up with people. Jeffrey, who was 95 sheets to the wind, sat on the sofa and proceeded to drift in and out of sleep sitting up. Carey, who was 195 sheets to the wind, bounced around the room in full-on Brownian motion and draped herself randomly on people, one at a time, and attempted to engage them in conversations that didn't make any sense, to the point where eventually Michael came up to me and asked who was responsible for her that evening. I did what I always do at such parties- I made a half-hearted attempt to engage people in small talk, which I am not especially good at and which I don't particularly enjoy, in the hopes of blundering into a conversation I actually found interesting. That didn't happen until the end, when we were trying to get everyone together to leave, and I realized by process of elimination that Jeffrey must be in the bathroom, and so I stood in front of the bathroom door and had a 20-minute conversation with the host's GF and a few of her friends. After 20 minutes of talking, I started banging on the bathroom door, and after about 5 minutes of banging, Jeffrey finally emerged, claiming to be perfectly fine.
Riiiiiight.
By this time, we'd discovered that Jill's flight was basically on time, while the NYC crew had been delayed almost an hour, so the fortuitous bit of airline flight scheduling had gone down the drain. So the 4 of us drove to the airport and picked up Jill, and then we went to get her rental car, and then 4 of us went home to the beachhouse and left Socci with my van to pick up the NYC crew.
Back at the house, I got started on another round of cooking, while Jill unwound and Jeffrey and Carey more or less passed out. Eventually, the NYC crew showed up. It was good to see them, and a bit lucky, given all the flights that got canceled out of JFK. A good sign for the weekend.
The next morning I served the traditional Gus breakfast of eggs, hashbrowns, fruit salad, and cinnamon rolls. We'd forgotten to put the other bottles of champagne in the fridge, so no mimosas. But we got a late start, and took a long time eating, so it was basically 2pm before I started the day's cooking. That was about 2hrs later than I'd hoped. Not a good sign for an on-time 7pm start.
Still, with plenty of sous-chef help from Jill, and also from Jeffrey and at times some of the NYC folks, we made up some of the ground and actually had dinner on the table not long after 8. That worked perfectly, because that's when Laura and Dmitri arrived. I was hoping L & GA would come, but they couldn't find a babysitter, so GA stayed home, and L came late, arriving for the 3rd course. Here was our lineup for the evening:
1st course: fried masa cups with spicy pork filling, and spiced ground beef empanadas
2nd course: black bean soup with shrimp
3rd course: jicama salad with oranges
4th course: meat and vegetable stew with rice
5th course: slow-roasted pork in banana leaves, and spice-rubbed baked fish
6th course: almond-flour torte with mixed berry compote
Amazingly, with the prior planning and prep, plus significant amounts of sous-chef assistance, the entire dinner was done by 1145pm, the swiftest and earliest-ending dinner party ever. The downside of moving so quickly was that we only went through 8 bottles of wine, but the bright side was, we were able to get out of the house the next day by 2pm. Last year, Ed was still fetal at 5pm the day after.
Naturally, I forgot to give Jill my camera to take some pictures of the dinner party. I don't know why I even bother owning a camera- I never remember to use it.
Sunday, the original plan was to get out of the house in time to stop at the wine store in SF before heading over to our 2pm brunch reservation at the Cliff House. We needed a stop at the wine store because on Saturday afternoon Alex and J-Rob had taken a group there to get the wine for the dinner party, and a few of the bottles turned out to be bad, forcing us to go into the leftover wine from last year's dinner party, plus some of what I bought on last year's Napa trip. I didn't mind at all consuming the wine from my stash, but it was offensive in principle that the store had sold us several expensive bottles of bad wine.
Unfortunately, we didn't end up leaving the house until 215pm, so we had to go straight to the Cliff House. It happened that this was the weekend of the Mavericks surf contest, so beach traffic was nightmarish. By the way, because of the El Nino, the waves in HMB have been spectacular all winter, and they had record surf at mavericks. In fact, a rogue wave came overall the seawall and literally swamped the judges' tent and dozens of people. None of them drowned, but a few had to be hospitalized with broken bones (you can hear in the video clip halfway down the page people screaming for a medic because of a broken leg). I know the feeling, dudes.
Here's a link to some photos from the event. There's some pretty awesome pics in there. It really makes me want to learn to surf. Apparently individual waves can crest as high as 50 feet, though I think this year they only got to 40.
Anyway, we got to the Cliff House around 330pm. Brunch there was as fantastic as any buffet-style brunch could ever be- there was an amazing selection, it was all actually quite good, and they kept the champagne coming the entire meal. They even made Ed a special bowl of eggs after they'd taken away the last container of them, but he still wanted more. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, as you can see:
The view from our table.
Working hard to eat all that delicious food.
Ed & Alison
Me & Jill
After the Cliff House, we split into 2 groups: one for the wine store, and one to go for a hike around Land's End. That's the tip of the SF peninsula, and on clear days it offers stunning views of the Marin headlands, plus the Golden Gate bridge, from the west. Since it was a near-perfect day, me, Jill, Jeffrey, Ed, and Alison opted to take the hike, and we agreed we'd meet the others in Chinatown after they were done at the wine store. Since it also happened to be Chinese New Year, we thought it might be fun to be in that part of town.
So, I led us on a hike around Land's End. Now, given that it was already 5pm, it might have been a little smarter to just do the short version of the hike, but the last time I was there it had not been nearly so nice a day, so I pushed us all the way to Eagle's Point:
That ledge just below center in the picture is Eagle's Point.
The Golden Gate from Eagle's Pt. The container ship full of lead-poisoned toys from China really makes the picture.
This pic looks like folk rock cover art. The Ali Cats.
The sun is setting rapidly now, and we're a long way from any light. Also, this is as tall as I will ever look.
The sun is still setting rapidly. Also, this is as angelic as Ed will ever look.
We started to head back, but there was a nifty section of beach below, so I led us down there, figuring we'd be able to make it back before it got completely pitch black...
Sunset from the path down to the beach at Eagle's Pt.
Almost to the beach at Eagle's Pt. Beautiful, no?
The waves were coming in strong, and it's very rocky, so it was creating some cool, creepy sea foam.
Ed, pretending he's Neptune, and calling forth the power of the sea.
Suffused with delusions of godhood, Ed catches sight of this dude on the giant boulder, and, in an attempt to prove he has a giant penis, sets out to climb there...
...however, confirming that in fact he has a tiny penis, he wussed out and settled for climbing the knee-high rock.
I, drawing on my vast experience of injury/almost dying in situations involving boulders, climbing, darkness, inappropriate footwear, and the ocean, opted not to make any attempt at all. I think that counts as wisdom.
Although, to be fair, I think if only 4 out of 5 of those factors had been involved, and not *all* 5, I probably would have tried it. Certainly after seeing Ed chicken out.
Sunset from the foamy beach
Of course, by the time we started climbing back up, the sun was already below the horizon, so it was getting dark quickly. And, it turns out that climbing/hiking in the lee of a giant cliff, after sunset, with no sources of light cliffside, is harder than you might think. It was getting pretty hard to see anything by the time we made it back to the car. However, we *did* make it back, just fine. I don't know why anyone was worried. Sheesh.
Of course, the other group had long since finished their errand, and had retired to a pub in the financial district near where we'd decided to meet. So we made our way across town to meet them, and I parked Jill's rental in the garage that I normally use at the office. Then we walked over to the pub and got some drinks, and settled down in the basement to watch the NBA all-star game on TV. Plus, they had a pool table down there, so I played Alison in pool for a while. I'd asked Ed, but he refused to get up while the game was still on; he's not as much of a multitasker as I am.
After a while, we were all starting to fade, so Jill and I lobbied to take our group back to the beachhouse. The other group was going to stay, because some friends of Rose's were about to meet us at the pub. They arrived shortly thereafter, so Ed said, "C'mon... one more drink."
Nothing good ever happens when Ed says that. If I had acquired wisdom about that, I would've ignored him and taken us home. But I didn't.
Consequently, after another round, and some chitchat, we walked back to the garage, arriving at precisely 1105pm. Only to discover that this garage is not open late; in fact, it closes overnight. At 11pm.
The dude was locking up the gate, and I ran up to him saying "wait, our car is in there. It'll only take a second to get it out!"
Dude: "Sorry- the system is shut down." Proceeds to twist the key in the gate lock.
Me: "Wait!! That's a rental, and it has to go to the airport. Here's $40 and the ticket, you can run it through the system tomorrow. Please just let us get the car!"
Dude: "Sorry- I'm late!" Jumps in his waiting car and drives off.
Shit. Shitfuckingfuck.
A quick call to the number on the sign goes to the office of California Parking. Which is not staffed right now. But I can leave a message- they open at 6am. No emergency number is listed on the sign or on the voicemail.
So, a desperate call to Socci, who is driving my car, reveals that they have headed out to drop off Rose's friends before going to the airport to pick up our rental van for the Sonoma trip tomorrow. I explain the situation and Socci swings around a few blocks and meets us on the corner.
The problem is, my Envoy technically seats 5, and with Rose's friends, there's already 7 in the car. Plus, the wayback is loaded full with wineboxes and styrofoam, for the muling back on the airplane of all the wine the NYC crew is going to buy. So we agree that Socci and the gang already in the car will go to drop Rose's friends off, and we'll wait on the corner, which we do.
When Socci and the gang finally return, we proceed to turn my Envoy into a clown car. Socci and J-Rob take the front, Alex has Rose on his lap, I have Jill on my lap, and Jeffrey is wedged in between us on the back seat, and we carve out a cubby of space amongst the boxes and styrofoam in the wayback and stuff Ed & Alison in that. The entire trip to the airport was full of disembodied comments coming from the wayback (disembodied because you literally could not see either of them- they were entirely encased in styrofoam)like "No! Don't lean there!" and "Hey! Slower on the turns!" Fortunately, the airport was only 20 minutes away.
At the airport, we dropped everyone off at the rental place and Jill and I parked my car in long-term parking, so that I'd have a way to get home after Sonoma. The drive back to the beach house was *much* nicer, since we'd rented a 12-person van for the wine country trip.
The next morning, we managed to muster by 9am (nothing motivates this group in the morning like the prospect of imminent drinking), and we headed up to the city to drop off Jill at the parking garage. Fortunately, she was able to retrieve her car without incident, and she headed south to the airport to get herself back to Pennsyltuckey. Tragically, she had to work the next day.
The rest of us headed up to Sonoma, and were there in no time. J-Rob, Alex, and Ed had put together an aggressive lineup of wineries to hit. We were largely going to young, up-and-coming vineyards getting extremely good reviews, and typically specializing in Pinots. We had a lot of wineries on the agenda, but one that *wasn't* on the agenda was a new winery getting a lot of rave reviews: Hanzell.
Most wineries in Napa/Sonoma offer tastings, or tours of the vineyard, or both. The prices for a tasting can range from free (for instance, Rocchioli, which supplies wine to the White House and whose wine club has a 5-year waiting list... their wine is so awesome that as soon as you taste it you just want to buy it in mass quantities, except you can't afford to, and so they don't feel a need to charge for tasting) to a nominal $5 or $10. A few of the most aggressively priced places will go as high as $20 for a tasting.
Hanzell: "We do a tasting and tour of the grounds for a price of $45 per person."
J-Rob (retelling to us): "I was like, 'Are you kidding?'. So I said, 'Um... I don't think we're going to want to do the tour. How much is it just to do the tasting?'"
OK class, it's time to do a negotiating exercise. You have bundled together services A and B at a price of $45, but your set of 8 potential customers has said that they don't want service B, and the price is too high, and has inquired about the price of service A alone. You must choose a negotiating strategy. I'll pause for a moment so you can consider what strategy you'd employ...
(pause)
I think the strategy here is pretty obvious. You've probably already hit upon it yourself. And to their credit, Hanzell also hit upon the obvious negotiation tactic in a situation like this:
condescension.
Hanzell: "Well, we find that people who really *love* wine go on the tour. Because they want to see the grounds, and how the wine is actually made."
J-Rob (retelling to us): "I didn't even know what to say at first. I mean, I wanted to say 'Right- I did hours of research to find this place, got on a fucking plane in the middle of fucking February, and flew all the way across the country to get here, all because I only kinda like wine.'
But I didn't say that.
I said, 'Uh, yeah, we're not going to want to do the tour. Can you give us a price just for the tasting?'"
Hanzell: "Well, I'll have to talk to my manager and call you back."
OK class, you're up again: you went with the obvious strategy and it didn't work. Now you're going to have to actually dig deep and get creative. Fortunately, you've bought yourself some time to do that by saying you'll need to talk to management, who, we can only assume, will draw on their vast well of experience in customer service to help you craft a negotiating position that will lead to the kind of win-win situation that we all aspire to in negotiations. I'll pause for a moment again for you to draw upon your own vast well of customer service experience to come up with your new strategy...
(pause)
Whatever you just chose, it probably isn't as clever as the solution that Hanzell came up with. Their solution has a kind of elegant simplicity to it, an almost Solomonic quality really...
Hanzell: "I talked to my manager. Good news- you can just do the tasting only... for $45 per person."
J-Rob (retelling): "I didn't say anything at first, because I thought she was joking. I mean, I seriously thought she was joking. When I realized she was serious, I took a deep breath and explained that we do this every year, and we typically hit about a dozen wineries, and in our years of doing this, no one has EVER charged more than $20 for a tasting. No one. EVER."
Hanzell: "I'll have to talk to my manager again and call you back."
I'm not even going to bother pausing here, because only an actual genius could come up with what Hanzell came up with, on only the 3rd try:
Hanzell: "OK, you can do the tasting only at half-price: $22.50."
J-Rob (retelling): "OK, that at least seemed like a semi-reasonable offer. It would still be the most we ever paid for a tasting, but whatever. But then I said to her: 'OK, that seems fine, but I just want to make sure you're OK with the fact that although there are 8 people in our party, there will only be 5 tastings, because one of us is driving, and there are 2 couples who share tastings, since we're going to 6 vineyards in one day. Obviously they'll share a glass and you don't need to pour any more than usual- I just want to make sure you're OK with that.'"
Now, sharing tastings is pretty standard stuff, and in fact this is how we've done it every year, at EVERY winery we've ever visited. J-Rob was just being buttoned up about it with Hanzell, since everything they do seems to be unusual. But in fairness to the woman from Hanzell, who must surely have been heady with feelings of genius and self-congratulatory beneficence, this last wrinkle would surely have caught her completely off guard.
Which would explain why she defaulted once again to the obvious negotiating strategy:
condescension.
Hanzell: "Well, it's just that we're really more of a boutique winery, and less of a bar."
J-Rob (retelling): "And that was it for me. I was done. I thanked her for her help, and said we wouldn't be coming. She seemed genuinely surprised. I mean, genuinely SHOCKED that we wouldn't be coming, when they were bending over backwards to be accommodating."
And that's why we didn't end up going to Hanzell. For the record, their wine is supposed to be quite good, even if their customer service strategy isn't. Anyway, if you're unlike we are, and are people who actually *love* wine, you'll take their tour.
We started the day at Rocchioli, where I took down some menu ideas for the dinner party next year from a couple letters on the wall from the White House, which always say what the wine was served with. From there, we went to MacPhail, which was phenomenal. And had excellent customer service. After that, we hit Nalle at some point (pics below), which was not bad, but was not especially good, but we also hit 3 other wineries I think, and it's hard to remember, because I wasn't sharing a tasting (I need Jill to be present next year) and consequently was pretty wrecked by the end of the day.
In fact, I apparently sent texts to Jill throughout the day. Which she transcribed exactly, in order, and included the time stamps, and then sent to me in an email the next day.
eek.
Here they are, copied exactly from Jill's email, which begins: "Here is the wonderfully sweet and hilarious drunken progression of texts from yesterday:
(1:56 PM): babe we just tasted a bunch of fucking phenomenal pinots @an up-and-coming winery & now I'm totally tipsy. we should build a house together, & hv a wine cellar.
(2:48 PM): 3rd winery not as good but I drank everything they gave me & now i'm perilously close to shitfaced. Next plc only 4min away. Wish you were here my love...
(5:18 PM): leaving our 5th winery, for the 6th plc. i am totally shitfaced. thank god socci is driving. I miss you & can't wait to take you here.
(6:08 PM): Now we're leaving the 6th plc. Omg, i am *fucked* *up*. i hope your flights are going well. I miss you so much...
(6:24 PM): we're trying to find dinner now. I'm alive, but fucked up. I miss you so much. i swear I can't drink another drop of wine.
(6:42 PM) we've settled on healdsburg bar & grill for dinner. they use the acronum HBG-it makes me think of you. Oh god I'm drunk & i really want a bacon cheddarburger&you
(9:43 PM) just walkws into the hotel & am going straight to bed. I love you and miss you and will talk to you tomorrow..."
I remember I liked this place. The dude working there was hilarious. Can't remember which winery it was though.
I think this is the same place. Not sure. But it *is* a pretty day...
Uh, a winery. In Sonoma.
A great day for a wine country visit...
Taking a work call while waiting for our last appointment. Although the call actually went very well, in hindsight it was maybe not smart to do that while hammered.
Drinking is hard work.
At our final appointment. What J-Rob clearly needs is another glass of wine.
Honestly, for me the day is pretty much a blank after MacPhail. I remember the bacon cheddarburger at HBG was good though.
Tuesday, we got up early to make an appointment at Freeman, which has an extremely good reputation, and which we all enjoyed, although their wine did not seem as revelatory as we were expecting. Still, we got to have a tour of the Wine Cave, which was pretty neat...
The Wine Cave. Cave vino.
The Freeman wine cave guy. Very nice, very helpful. Jill and I may go and volunteer there this fall to help with the harvest. It could be a blast, and we can learn winemaking operations, in case we should ever retire to a vineyard.
Rose, fast-tracking inebriation, and using the opportunity to cop a feel.
The gang.
Freeman was our 1st stop. Merry Edwards was the 2nd, and was quite good. She's been around a while working for other vineyards, but is relatively new as her own label. But the experience shows through.
After that, I know we hit 5 other wineries. I don't know precisely which ones they are/were, except that I remember we went to Marimar for an excellent tasting/gourmet lunch (which, btw, cost $40... eat that, Hanzell):
Seriously, the meal was *delicious*.
Drinking is very serious business...
unless you're Rose...
and a total lush.
Ed, proud that his people have not been *completely* overshadowed by the French and the Italians.
Rose married a Jew, and hence feels obligated now to eat Christians, preferably babies.
You know what a world-class winery needs most in order to convey that special je-ne-sais-quoi?
Giant fucking dog sculptures.
Rose. 'Nuff said.
Alison, enjoying life.
Ed likes it doggie-style.
Ed, thinking he is Atreyu.
Goodbye, giant dogs. Don't chase after the van...
Once again, it gets pretty blurry after this. And, because I was too wasted the night before to remember to charge my phone, it died halfway through the day, thus mercifully preventing me (mostly) from sending ridiculous texts to Jill. The last one I sent ended with "I koce you," so you can imagine the state I was in.
Don't mind me... I'll just be back here w/ the prosciutto. And the box of raisin nut bran I picked up at the Safeway. b/c nothing cleanses the palette like a combination of prosciutto and raisin nut bran.
By the time we made it back to the city for dinner, which we had at Harris' steakhouse, I was pretty wrecked again, and had had the hiccups for like 3 hours. But dinner was excellent, and I began the process of sobering up. We had a nice long dinner, and then we headed down to the airport. Although the flight ended up delayed, everyone got home OK; the only casualty of the weekend was a bottle of Zinfandel that broke in transit on the plane. A truly tragic event, but hey- we fulfilled the only real goal of the weekend, which was not to have to dial 9-1-1 for any reason.
After all, it's important to have goals...
And nice to achieve them.
As always, I had grand dreams of deciding the menu well in advance, doing a practice run of each of the dishes, and having a good enough tactical plan to start dinner on time. And as always, I was still making menu decisions the day of, I did not get a practice run of anything, and the tactical plan was disrupted somewhat by waking up late, brunch going a lot later than planned, etc.
The whole weekend looked to be in peril initially, since the entire East Coast was hammered by snow storms. In fact, Socci had planned to arrive in SF on Wed to hang out with a friend of his, but his flight out of JFK got canceled, and they couldn't guarantee him a flight before Sunday. So, in a display of heroic dedication to the dinner party cause, he took a 19 hour train ride to Chicago, flew from there on Thursday to Long Beach, and stayed overnight in a Travelodge to catch the early flight to SF on Friday morning.
Consequently, the first guest to actually arrive was Socci's GF Carey, whom I had never met. She arrived Thursday night, so I picked her up from the airport and took her to In-N-Out, and from there to Safeway for some of the grocery shopping. Considering we were complete strangers to each other, and didn't have Socci there, we were surprisingly comfortable with each other. She's 22 to his 33, so it's a pretty eye-opening age differential, but on the other hand, Keiko was 25 and I was 35 when we started dating, so I guess it's dangerous for me to be throwing stones from within my little glass house.
After the Safeway, we headed back to SFO to pick up the next guest: Jeffrey. He flew in from Richmond, ready to have another exciting weekend in the Bay Area (see hey-thanks-for-coming-out!). His flight was late, so by the time we got back to the house, there really wasn't time to do any of the cooking prep that I'd planned to do.
The next morning, I had to get up and go get Socci. Once we had him in hand and were back at the house, I was finally able to get started making food. I sent the 3 of them out for a number of things, and started baking. Among the things I asked them to get were champagne, for brunch, and brandy, for one of the recipes. And although they successfully procured these things, 2 of the bottles of champagne and a sizable portion of the brandy ended up being consumed over the course of the afternoon. None of it by me, btw, since I was frantically trying to catch up to where I was supposed to be in the tactical cooking plan.
Thus, by the time the evening rolled around, and we were about to leave for Socci's friend Michael's party up in the city (which we figured we'd hit before heading to the airport to pick up Jill, who was coming from Harrisburg, PA and the rest of the NYC crew, who were scheduled to arrive within 20 minutes of each other in a fortuitous bit of airline flight scheduling) Carey and Jeffrey were totally shitfaced, and Socci was looking a little wobbly. Carey and Jeffrey immediately hit it off because Carey, like Jill, has the ability to identify and instantly become BFF's with any gay man within a 5-mile radius.
So we headed up to a very nice party in SoMa. The 4 of us took 4 different approaches to the party: Socci, who knew several of the people there, had a good time catching up with people. Jeffrey, who was 95 sheets to the wind, sat on the sofa and proceeded to drift in and out of sleep sitting up. Carey, who was 195 sheets to the wind, bounced around the room in full-on Brownian motion and draped herself randomly on people, one at a time, and attempted to engage them in conversations that didn't make any sense, to the point where eventually Michael came up to me and asked who was responsible for her that evening. I did what I always do at such parties- I made a half-hearted attempt to engage people in small talk, which I am not especially good at and which I don't particularly enjoy, in the hopes of blundering into a conversation I actually found interesting. That didn't happen until the end, when we were trying to get everyone together to leave, and I realized by process of elimination that Jeffrey must be in the bathroom, and so I stood in front of the bathroom door and had a 20-minute conversation with the host's GF and a few of her friends. After 20 minutes of talking, I started banging on the bathroom door, and after about 5 minutes of banging, Jeffrey finally emerged, claiming to be perfectly fine.
Riiiiiight.
By this time, we'd discovered that Jill's flight was basically on time, while the NYC crew had been delayed almost an hour, so the fortuitous bit of airline flight scheduling had gone down the drain. So the 4 of us drove to the airport and picked up Jill, and then we went to get her rental car, and then 4 of us went home to the beachhouse and left Socci with my van to pick up the NYC crew.
Back at the house, I got started on another round of cooking, while Jill unwound and Jeffrey and Carey more or less passed out. Eventually, the NYC crew showed up. It was good to see them, and a bit lucky, given all the flights that got canceled out of JFK. A good sign for the weekend.
The next morning I served the traditional Gus breakfast of eggs, hashbrowns, fruit salad, and cinnamon rolls. We'd forgotten to put the other bottles of champagne in the fridge, so no mimosas. But we got a late start, and took a long time eating, so it was basically 2pm before I started the day's cooking. That was about 2hrs later than I'd hoped. Not a good sign for an on-time 7pm start.
Still, with plenty of sous-chef help from Jill, and also from Jeffrey and at times some of the NYC folks, we made up some of the ground and actually had dinner on the table not long after 8. That worked perfectly, because that's when Laura and Dmitri arrived. I was hoping L & GA would come, but they couldn't find a babysitter, so GA stayed home, and L came late, arriving for the 3rd course. Here was our lineup for the evening:
1st course: fried masa cups with spicy pork filling, and spiced ground beef empanadas
2nd course: black bean soup with shrimp
3rd course: jicama salad with oranges
4th course: meat and vegetable stew with rice
5th course: slow-roasted pork in banana leaves, and spice-rubbed baked fish
6th course: almond-flour torte with mixed berry compote
Amazingly, with the prior planning and prep, plus significant amounts of sous-chef assistance, the entire dinner was done by 1145pm, the swiftest and earliest-ending dinner party ever. The downside of moving so quickly was that we only went through 8 bottles of wine, but the bright side was, we were able to get out of the house the next day by 2pm. Last year, Ed was still fetal at 5pm the day after.
Naturally, I forgot to give Jill my camera to take some pictures of the dinner party. I don't know why I even bother owning a camera- I never remember to use it.
Sunday, the original plan was to get out of the house in time to stop at the wine store in SF before heading over to our 2pm brunch reservation at the Cliff House. We needed a stop at the wine store because on Saturday afternoon Alex and J-Rob had taken a group there to get the wine for the dinner party, and a few of the bottles turned out to be bad, forcing us to go into the leftover wine from last year's dinner party, plus some of what I bought on last year's Napa trip. I didn't mind at all consuming the wine from my stash, but it was offensive in principle that the store had sold us several expensive bottles of bad wine.
Unfortunately, we didn't end up leaving the house until 215pm, so we had to go straight to the Cliff House. It happened that this was the weekend of the Mavericks surf contest, so beach traffic was nightmarish. By the way, because of the El Nino, the waves in HMB have been spectacular all winter, and they had record surf at mavericks. In fact, a rogue wave came overall the seawall and literally swamped the judges' tent and dozens of people. None of them drowned, but a few had to be hospitalized with broken bones (you can hear in the video clip halfway down the page people screaming for a medic because of a broken leg). I know the feeling, dudes.
Here's a link to some photos from the event. There's some pretty awesome pics in there. It really makes me want to learn to surf. Apparently individual waves can crest as high as 50 feet, though I think this year they only got to 40.
Anyway, we got to the Cliff House around 330pm. Brunch there was as fantastic as any buffet-style brunch could ever be- there was an amazing selection, it was all actually quite good, and they kept the champagne coming the entire meal. They even made Ed a special bowl of eggs after they'd taken away the last container of them, but he still wanted more. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, as you can see:
The view from our table.
Working hard to eat all that delicious food.
Ed & Alison
Me & Jill
After the Cliff House, we split into 2 groups: one for the wine store, and one to go for a hike around Land's End. That's the tip of the SF peninsula, and on clear days it offers stunning views of the Marin headlands, plus the Golden Gate bridge, from the west. Since it was a near-perfect day, me, Jill, Jeffrey, Ed, and Alison opted to take the hike, and we agreed we'd meet the others in Chinatown after they were done at the wine store. Since it also happened to be Chinese New Year, we thought it might be fun to be in that part of town.
So, I led us on a hike around Land's End. Now, given that it was already 5pm, it might have been a little smarter to just do the short version of the hike, but the last time I was there it had not been nearly so nice a day, so I pushed us all the way to Eagle's Point:
That ledge just below center in the picture is Eagle's Point.
The Golden Gate from Eagle's Pt. The container ship full of lead-poisoned toys from China really makes the picture.
This pic looks like folk rock cover art. The Ali Cats.
The sun is setting rapidly now, and we're a long way from any light. Also, this is as tall as I will ever look.
The sun is still setting rapidly. Also, this is as angelic as Ed will ever look.
We started to head back, but there was a nifty section of beach below, so I led us down there, figuring we'd be able to make it back before it got completely pitch black...
Sunset from the path down to the beach at Eagle's Pt.
Almost to the beach at Eagle's Pt. Beautiful, no?
The waves were coming in strong, and it's very rocky, so it was creating some cool, creepy sea foam.
Ed, pretending he's Neptune, and calling forth the power of the sea.
Suffused with delusions of godhood, Ed catches sight of this dude on the giant boulder, and, in an attempt to prove he has a giant penis, sets out to climb there...
...however, confirming that in fact he has a tiny penis, he wussed out and settled for climbing the knee-high rock.
I, drawing on my vast experience of injury/almost dying in situations involving boulders, climbing, darkness, inappropriate footwear, and the ocean, opted not to make any attempt at all. I think that counts as wisdom.
Although, to be fair, I think if only 4 out of 5 of those factors had been involved, and not *all* 5, I probably would have tried it. Certainly after seeing Ed chicken out.
Sunset from the foamy beach
Of course, by the time we started climbing back up, the sun was already below the horizon, so it was getting dark quickly. And, it turns out that climbing/hiking in the lee of a giant cliff, after sunset, with no sources of light cliffside, is harder than you might think. It was getting pretty hard to see anything by the time we made it back to the car. However, we *did* make it back, just fine. I don't know why anyone was worried. Sheesh.
Of course, the other group had long since finished their errand, and had retired to a pub in the financial district near where we'd decided to meet. So we made our way across town to meet them, and I parked Jill's rental in the garage that I normally use at the office. Then we walked over to the pub and got some drinks, and settled down in the basement to watch the NBA all-star game on TV. Plus, they had a pool table down there, so I played Alison in pool for a while. I'd asked Ed, but he refused to get up while the game was still on; he's not as much of a multitasker as I am.
After a while, we were all starting to fade, so Jill and I lobbied to take our group back to the beachhouse. The other group was going to stay, because some friends of Rose's were about to meet us at the pub. They arrived shortly thereafter, so Ed said, "C'mon... one more drink."
Nothing good ever happens when Ed says that. If I had acquired wisdom about that, I would've ignored him and taken us home. But I didn't.
Consequently, after another round, and some chitchat, we walked back to the garage, arriving at precisely 1105pm. Only to discover that this garage is not open late; in fact, it closes overnight. At 11pm.
The dude was locking up the gate, and I ran up to him saying "wait, our car is in there. It'll only take a second to get it out!"
Dude: "Sorry- the system is shut down." Proceeds to twist the key in the gate lock.
Me: "Wait!! That's a rental, and it has to go to the airport. Here's $40 and the ticket, you can run it through the system tomorrow. Please just let us get the car!"
Dude: "Sorry- I'm late!" Jumps in his waiting car and drives off.
Shit. Shitfuckingfuck.
A quick call to the number on the sign goes to the office of California Parking. Which is not staffed right now. But I can leave a message- they open at 6am. No emergency number is listed on the sign or on the voicemail.
So, a desperate call to Socci, who is driving my car, reveals that they have headed out to drop off Rose's friends before going to the airport to pick up our rental van for the Sonoma trip tomorrow. I explain the situation and Socci swings around a few blocks and meets us on the corner.
The problem is, my Envoy technically seats 5, and with Rose's friends, there's already 7 in the car. Plus, the wayback is loaded full with wineboxes and styrofoam, for the muling back on the airplane of all the wine the NYC crew is going to buy. So we agree that Socci and the gang already in the car will go to drop Rose's friends off, and we'll wait on the corner, which we do.
When Socci and the gang finally return, we proceed to turn my Envoy into a clown car. Socci and J-Rob take the front, Alex has Rose on his lap, I have Jill on my lap, and Jeffrey is wedged in between us on the back seat, and we carve out a cubby of space amongst the boxes and styrofoam in the wayback and stuff Ed & Alison in that. The entire trip to the airport was full of disembodied comments coming from the wayback (disembodied because you literally could not see either of them- they were entirely encased in styrofoam)like "No! Don't lean there!" and "Hey! Slower on the turns!" Fortunately, the airport was only 20 minutes away.
At the airport, we dropped everyone off at the rental place and Jill and I parked my car in long-term parking, so that I'd have a way to get home after Sonoma. The drive back to the beach house was *much* nicer, since we'd rented a 12-person van for the wine country trip.
The next morning, we managed to muster by 9am (nothing motivates this group in the morning like the prospect of imminent drinking), and we headed up to the city to drop off Jill at the parking garage. Fortunately, she was able to retrieve her car without incident, and she headed south to the airport to get herself back to Pennsyltuckey. Tragically, she had to work the next day.
The rest of us headed up to Sonoma, and were there in no time. J-Rob, Alex, and Ed had put together an aggressive lineup of wineries to hit. We were largely going to young, up-and-coming vineyards getting extremely good reviews, and typically specializing in Pinots. We had a lot of wineries on the agenda, but one that *wasn't* on the agenda was a new winery getting a lot of rave reviews: Hanzell.
Most wineries in Napa/Sonoma offer tastings, or tours of the vineyard, or both. The prices for a tasting can range from free (for instance, Rocchioli, which supplies wine to the White House and whose wine club has a 5-year waiting list... their wine is so awesome that as soon as you taste it you just want to buy it in mass quantities, except you can't afford to, and so they don't feel a need to charge for tasting) to a nominal $5 or $10. A few of the most aggressively priced places will go as high as $20 for a tasting.
Hanzell: "We do a tasting and tour of the grounds for a price of $45 per person."
J-Rob (retelling to us): "I was like, 'Are you kidding?'. So I said, 'Um... I don't think we're going to want to do the tour. How much is it just to do the tasting?'"
OK class, it's time to do a negotiating exercise. You have bundled together services A and B at a price of $45, but your set of 8 potential customers has said that they don't want service B, and the price is too high, and has inquired about the price of service A alone. You must choose a negotiating strategy. I'll pause for a moment so you can consider what strategy you'd employ...
(pause)
I think the strategy here is pretty obvious. You've probably already hit upon it yourself. And to their credit, Hanzell also hit upon the obvious negotiation tactic in a situation like this:
condescension.
Hanzell: "Well, we find that people who really *love* wine go on the tour. Because they want to see the grounds, and how the wine is actually made."
J-Rob (retelling to us): "I didn't even know what to say at first. I mean, I wanted to say 'Right- I did hours of research to find this place, got on a fucking plane in the middle of fucking February, and flew all the way across the country to get here, all because I only kinda like wine.'
But I didn't say that.
I said, 'Uh, yeah, we're not going to want to do the tour. Can you give us a price just for the tasting?'"
Hanzell: "Well, I'll have to talk to my manager and call you back."
OK class, you're up again: you went with the obvious strategy and it didn't work. Now you're going to have to actually dig deep and get creative. Fortunately, you've bought yourself some time to do that by saying you'll need to talk to management, who, we can only assume, will draw on their vast well of experience in customer service to help you craft a negotiating position that will lead to the kind of win-win situation that we all aspire to in negotiations. I'll pause for a moment again for you to draw upon your own vast well of customer service experience to come up with your new strategy...
(pause)
Whatever you just chose, it probably isn't as clever as the solution that Hanzell came up with. Their solution has a kind of elegant simplicity to it, an almost Solomonic quality really...
Hanzell: "I talked to my manager. Good news- you can just do the tasting only... for $45 per person."
J-Rob (retelling): "I didn't say anything at first, because I thought she was joking. I mean, I seriously thought she was joking. When I realized she was serious, I took a deep breath and explained that we do this every year, and we typically hit about a dozen wineries, and in our years of doing this, no one has EVER charged more than $20 for a tasting. No one. EVER."
Hanzell: "I'll have to talk to my manager again and call you back."
I'm not even going to bother pausing here, because only an actual genius could come up with what Hanzell came up with, on only the 3rd try:
Hanzell: "OK, you can do the tasting only at half-price: $22.50."
J-Rob (retelling): "OK, that at least seemed like a semi-reasonable offer. It would still be the most we ever paid for a tasting, but whatever. But then I said to her: 'OK, that seems fine, but I just want to make sure you're OK with the fact that although there are 8 people in our party, there will only be 5 tastings, because one of us is driving, and there are 2 couples who share tastings, since we're going to 6 vineyards in one day. Obviously they'll share a glass and you don't need to pour any more than usual- I just want to make sure you're OK with that.'"
Now, sharing tastings is pretty standard stuff, and in fact this is how we've done it every year, at EVERY winery we've ever visited. J-Rob was just being buttoned up about it with Hanzell, since everything they do seems to be unusual. But in fairness to the woman from Hanzell, who must surely have been heady with feelings of genius and self-congratulatory beneficence, this last wrinkle would surely have caught her completely off guard.
Which would explain why she defaulted once again to the obvious negotiating strategy:
condescension.
Hanzell: "Well, it's just that we're really more of a boutique winery, and less of a bar."
J-Rob (retelling): "And that was it for me. I was done. I thanked her for her help, and said we wouldn't be coming. She seemed genuinely surprised. I mean, genuinely SHOCKED that we wouldn't be coming, when they were bending over backwards to be accommodating."
And that's why we didn't end up going to Hanzell. For the record, their wine is supposed to be quite good, even if their customer service strategy isn't. Anyway, if you're unlike we are, and are people who actually *love* wine, you'll take their tour.
We started the day at Rocchioli, where I took down some menu ideas for the dinner party next year from a couple letters on the wall from the White House, which always say what the wine was served with. From there, we went to MacPhail, which was phenomenal. And had excellent customer service. After that, we hit Nalle at some point (pics below), which was not bad, but was not especially good, but we also hit 3 other wineries I think, and it's hard to remember, because I wasn't sharing a tasting (I need Jill to be present next year) and consequently was pretty wrecked by the end of the day.
In fact, I apparently sent texts to Jill throughout the day. Which she transcribed exactly, in order, and included the time stamps, and then sent to me in an email the next day.
eek.
Here they are, copied exactly from Jill's email, which begins: "Here is the wonderfully sweet and hilarious drunken progression of texts from yesterday:
(1:56 PM): babe we just tasted a bunch of fucking phenomenal pinots @an up-and-coming winery & now I'm totally tipsy. we should build a house together, & hv a wine cellar.
(2:48 PM): 3rd winery not as good but I drank everything they gave me & now i'm perilously close to shitfaced. Next plc only 4min away. Wish you were here my love...
(5:18 PM): leaving our 5th winery, for the 6th plc. i am totally shitfaced. thank god socci is driving. I miss you & can't wait to take you here.
(6:08 PM): Now we're leaving the 6th plc. Omg, i am *fucked* *up*. i hope your flights are going well. I miss you so much...
(6:24 PM): we're trying to find dinner now. I'm alive, but fucked up. I miss you so much. i swear I can't drink another drop of wine.
(6:42 PM) we've settled on healdsburg bar & grill for dinner. they use the acronum HBG-it makes me think of you. Oh god I'm drunk & i really want a bacon cheddarburger&you
(9:43 PM) just walkws into the hotel & am going straight to bed. I love you and miss you and will talk to you tomorrow..."
I remember I liked this place. The dude working there was hilarious. Can't remember which winery it was though.
I think this is the same place. Not sure. But it *is* a pretty day...
Uh, a winery. In Sonoma.
A great day for a wine country visit...
Taking a work call while waiting for our last appointment. Although the call actually went very well, in hindsight it was maybe not smart to do that while hammered.
Drinking is hard work.
At our final appointment. What J-Rob clearly needs is another glass of wine.
Honestly, for me the day is pretty much a blank after MacPhail. I remember the bacon cheddarburger at HBG was good though.
Tuesday, we got up early to make an appointment at Freeman, which has an extremely good reputation, and which we all enjoyed, although their wine did not seem as revelatory as we were expecting. Still, we got to have a tour of the Wine Cave, which was pretty neat...
The Wine Cave. Cave vino.
The Freeman wine cave guy. Very nice, very helpful. Jill and I may go and volunteer there this fall to help with the harvest. It could be a blast, and we can learn winemaking operations, in case we should ever retire to a vineyard.
Rose, fast-tracking inebriation, and using the opportunity to cop a feel.
The gang.
Freeman was our 1st stop. Merry Edwards was the 2nd, and was quite good. She's been around a while working for other vineyards, but is relatively new as her own label. But the experience shows through.
After that, I know we hit 5 other wineries. I don't know precisely which ones they are/were, except that I remember we went to Marimar for an excellent tasting/gourmet lunch (which, btw, cost $40... eat that, Hanzell):
Seriously, the meal was *delicious*.
Drinking is very serious business...
unless you're Rose...
and a total lush.
Ed, proud that his people have not been *completely* overshadowed by the French and the Italians.
Rose married a Jew, and hence feels obligated now to eat Christians, preferably babies.
You know what a world-class winery needs most in order to convey that special je-ne-sais-quoi?
Giant fucking dog sculptures.
Rose. 'Nuff said.
Alison, enjoying life.
Ed likes it doggie-style.
Ed, thinking he is Atreyu.
Goodbye, giant dogs. Don't chase after the van...
Once again, it gets pretty blurry after this. And, because I was too wasted the night before to remember to charge my phone, it died halfway through the day, thus mercifully preventing me (mostly) from sending ridiculous texts to Jill. The last one I sent ended with "I koce you," so you can imagine the state I was in.
Don't mind me... I'll just be back here w/ the prosciutto. And the box of raisin nut bran I picked up at the Safeway. b/c nothing cleanses the palette like a combination of prosciutto and raisin nut bran.
By the time we made it back to the city for dinner, which we had at Harris' steakhouse, I was pretty wrecked again, and had had the hiccups for like 3 hours. But dinner was excellent, and I began the process of sobering up. We had a nice long dinner, and then we headed down to the airport. Although the flight ended up delayed, everyone got home OK; the only casualty of the weekend was a bottle of Zinfandel that broke in transit on the plane. A truly tragic event, but hey- we fulfilled the only real goal of the weekend, which was not to have to dial 9-1-1 for any reason.
After all, it's important to have goals...
And nice to achieve them.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Sometimes you're just having a day...
8am: Wednesdays I have to be in the SF office by 9am to do my weekly phone meeting with Sheila. After being late 2 weeks in a row, I make sure to be out the door by 8am. The average time to the office is 50 minutes, with a standard deviation of about 4 minutes, so I have a better than 95% probability of making it to the SF office on time. And that includes having inclement weather, which there's been a lot of recently, and which is in full force today.
To get to SF from HMB, I take the PCH along the cliffs, which is 1 lane each direction, through the Devil's Slide area and down into Pacifica, where it turns into 2 lanes each way and goes around another set of cliffs before depositing you onto the 280 and a clear path to the city.
815am: Despite the pouring rain, I am making pretty good time. I'm still easily projecting a 50 minute trip time when I come around a bend and see that a pickup truck has skidded, lost control, and t-boned the side of the hill, thus blocking the other direction of traffic completely. Traffic is already pretty backed up on our side.
For the next 30 minutes, I slowly inch forward until I get to the place where it becomes 2 lanes in each direction. CHP has shut down the southbound road from there, and is turning everyone around and sending them back north. Thus, our northbound lanes are having to accommodate twice the usual amount of rush-hour traffic, and they're not doing an especially efficient job of that accommodation.
845am: I finally make it past the slowdown, and gun it for the Daly City BART station.
855am: I arrive at the BART station, but now if I get on the train, I'll be WAY late to the meeting with Sheila, so I decide that I'll have to call Sheila from the car. That's what the magic of cell phone technology allows you to do, after all. With the 5 minutes I still have before our scheduled time, I decide to drive down John Daly Blvd and look for a coffee shop or something where I can grab a pastry.
Sadly, I have a 50-50 shot as to which way leads to the coffee shops and restaurants, and I of course choose wrong, as I do approximately 99% of the time when faced with a 50-50 shot of getting something right. So, I end up having to pull over and park at a meter so I can call Sheila.
9am: Upon opening my phone, I realize that I forgot to put it on the charger at work yesterday, and I am down to one bar of juice. Not enough to do a 1-hour phonecall. So I call Sheila and explain, and while explaining this to her, my phone changes from 1 bar of juice to "low battery", meaning maybe 5 minutes of talktime left, tops.
Sheila generously agrees that if I can get myself to the SF office in half an hour, she'll do our phone session in full then. So I start up the car to head back to the BART station. Now, in the 5 minutes it has taken me to make the call to Sheila, a Comcast van has pulled into the meter ahead of me, and a pickup truck has pulled into the meter behind me, and BOTH of them have left about an inch between my vehicle and theirs.
909am: After a 100,000 point maneuver to get out from between these two imbeciles, I am headed back to the BART station. It is still pouring rain.
914am: I pull into the surface lot at BART. No spots. No problem, I'll head for the GIGANTIC parking structure.
916am: I enter the parking structure. No spots on the first level.
917am: No spots on the second level.
918am: No spots on the roof. I have shown up here as late as 10am and still been able to at least get a spot on the roof. No problem, there is a secret area behind the parking structure, that I found once only by mistakenly heading down a service road- I'll check that out.
920am: Secret back area is totally full. No problem, there is a secret small overflow lot down the tiny unmarked, unsigned back road behind the parking structure. I'll use that.
922am: The secret areas, it turns out, cannot actually be said to be secret in the generally accepted sense of "other people not knowing about them." No spots.
923am: I consider heading back home; I could make it there in 25 minutes. On the other hand, the direct route is southbound on the PCH, which I happen to know is currently shut down. Therefore, I have to chance driving all the way into the city. On the other hand, it's technically past the peak of morning rush, and apparently everyone has decided to BART in, so hopefully the 280 is not too back up.
930am: The 280 is totally backed up.
955am: I arrive in Chinatown. I'm in such a hurry, I forget that the cheap garage is on Pacific, not Jackson, so I inadvertently park in the Hilton parking garage, where I will ultimately pay about a billion dollars to park.
1005am: I finally arrive at the office. It has taken over 2 hours to get the lousy 23 miles from my house to here. And because Joe Fucktard couldn't control his fucking pickup truck and drive competently in the rain, literally hundreds of people, including me, had more than an hour tacked onto their commute, and in addition to that, his incompetence will cost me an extra $200 in compensating Sheila for an additional hour of time (which she did not ask for, because she is very kind like that, but which I will pay because it's fair), plus the marginal cost of paying to park at the Hilton rather than paying $3 at BART. And the additional wear-and-tear on my car, and an additional fraction of a barrel of oil from some godforsaken bullshit country in the Middle East that one or both of my brothers could end up doing another tour in. And the additional carbon impact. So thank you, Joe Fucktard- heckuva job you've done today.
Grr.
To get to SF from HMB, I take the PCH along the cliffs, which is 1 lane each direction, through the Devil's Slide area and down into Pacifica, where it turns into 2 lanes each way and goes around another set of cliffs before depositing you onto the 280 and a clear path to the city.
815am: Despite the pouring rain, I am making pretty good time. I'm still easily projecting a 50 minute trip time when I come around a bend and see that a pickup truck has skidded, lost control, and t-boned the side of the hill, thus blocking the other direction of traffic completely. Traffic is already pretty backed up on our side.
For the next 30 minutes, I slowly inch forward until I get to the place where it becomes 2 lanes in each direction. CHP has shut down the southbound road from there, and is turning everyone around and sending them back north. Thus, our northbound lanes are having to accommodate twice the usual amount of rush-hour traffic, and they're not doing an especially efficient job of that accommodation.
845am: I finally make it past the slowdown, and gun it for the Daly City BART station.
855am: I arrive at the BART station, but now if I get on the train, I'll be WAY late to the meeting with Sheila, so I decide that I'll have to call Sheila from the car. That's what the magic of cell phone technology allows you to do, after all. With the 5 minutes I still have before our scheduled time, I decide to drive down John Daly Blvd and look for a coffee shop or something where I can grab a pastry.
Sadly, I have a 50-50 shot as to which way leads to the coffee shops and restaurants, and I of course choose wrong, as I do approximately 99% of the time when faced with a 50-50 shot of getting something right. So, I end up having to pull over and park at a meter so I can call Sheila.
9am: Upon opening my phone, I realize that I forgot to put it on the charger at work yesterday, and I am down to one bar of juice. Not enough to do a 1-hour phonecall. So I call Sheila and explain, and while explaining this to her, my phone changes from 1 bar of juice to "low battery", meaning maybe 5 minutes of talktime left, tops.
Sheila generously agrees that if I can get myself to the SF office in half an hour, she'll do our phone session in full then. So I start up the car to head back to the BART station. Now, in the 5 minutes it has taken me to make the call to Sheila, a Comcast van has pulled into the meter ahead of me, and a pickup truck has pulled into the meter behind me, and BOTH of them have left about an inch between my vehicle and theirs.
909am: After a 100,000 point maneuver to get out from between these two imbeciles, I am headed back to the BART station. It is still pouring rain.
914am: I pull into the surface lot at BART. No spots. No problem, I'll head for the GIGANTIC parking structure.
916am: I enter the parking structure. No spots on the first level.
917am: No spots on the second level.
918am: No spots on the roof. I have shown up here as late as 10am and still been able to at least get a spot on the roof. No problem, there is a secret area behind the parking structure, that I found once only by mistakenly heading down a service road- I'll check that out.
920am: Secret back area is totally full. No problem, there is a secret small overflow lot down the tiny unmarked, unsigned back road behind the parking structure. I'll use that.
922am: The secret areas, it turns out, cannot actually be said to be secret in the generally accepted sense of "other people not knowing about them." No spots.
923am: I consider heading back home; I could make it there in 25 minutes. On the other hand, the direct route is southbound on the PCH, which I happen to know is currently shut down. Therefore, I have to chance driving all the way into the city. On the other hand, it's technically past the peak of morning rush, and apparently everyone has decided to BART in, so hopefully the 280 is not too back up.
930am: The 280 is totally backed up.
955am: I arrive in Chinatown. I'm in such a hurry, I forget that the cheap garage is on Pacific, not Jackson, so I inadvertently park in the Hilton parking garage, where I will ultimately pay about a billion dollars to park.
1005am: I finally arrive at the office. It has taken over 2 hours to get the lousy 23 miles from my house to here. And because Joe Fucktard couldn't control his fucking pickup truck and drive competently in the rain, literally hundreds of people, including me, had more than an hour tacked onto their commute, and in addition to that, his incompetence will cost me an extra $200 in compensating Sheila for an additional hour of time (which she did not ask for, because she is very kind like that, but which I will pay because it's fair), plus the marginal cost of paying to park at the Hilton rather than paying $3 at BART. And the additional wear-and-tear on my car, and an additional fraction of a barrel of oil from some godforsaken bullshit country in the Middle East that one or both of my brothers could end up doing another tour in. And the additional carbon impact. So thank you, Joe Fucktard- heckuva job you've done today.
Grr.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Belize Navidad!
Merry Christmas, everyone!
First, credit where credit is due- the title comes courtesy of JOC. He would definitely want you to know that.
Mom and I just got back from midnight mass here in HMB. I've never attended mass here; there's only one church, and HMB is so provincial that I've always been a little skeptical about the likely quality of the mass. Since music is the part of church that I most enjoy, it's hard to find a church I will actually attend that's not in a big city, where there's enough local singing talent to put together decent music. So I was, as I said, skeptical going in.
Reality, it turns out, exceeded my expectations for how bad it would be. In order:
1) The pre-mass singing was, in a word, awful.
2) The pre-mass violinist was terrible in "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring", which is one of my favorite pieces ever. She was pleasantly mediocre for "O Holy Night". She achieved her greatest consistency in being quite distinctly flat in absolutely every note she ever tried to play in the upper parts of the register.
3) The mass did not appear to be rehearsed; people at times looked like they weren't sure what came next, and the musical director at one point polled the audience to see if anyone knew a particular Spanish carol that they really wanted to sing, but didn't currently have anyone who really knew.
4) The homily was awful. And when it was finally, blissfully, over, one of the other priests got up and gave it again in Spanish. It was much better in Spanish, since I couldn't understand most of it, and that priest spoke a lot faster.
Moments ago, as I was airing this complaint to mom:
Mom: You should become a deacon. Then *you* could preach...
Me: Ma, they're not going to let ME be a deacon.
Mom: I was talking to Father McCabe about this, and he said they'd never let you be a deacon either. You think too radically. He did, however, think you could be a Jesuit. They like to think radically.
Me: Mom, I'm single like 4 months and already you're trying to recruit me for the priesthood???
Mom: Not ME. Father McCabe. He said since you just dumped another girl, you should think about it.
Me: OK, I admit my situation is grim, but it's not THAT grim. Jeez.
5) After communion, one of the associate priests had disappeared (his chair was now conspicuously empty). The main priest just sat in his chair quietly, and the entire congregation sat there looking at him. Minutes passed. "What the hell is he waiting for?" was what was going through my mind, when finally one of the other priests jumped up and went to the microphone to explain what was happening. In Spanish. Apparently, it was amusing.
Finally, the back door of the church opened, and in marched Santa Claus. Or, technically, the missing priest, now back from his quick costume change and ready to march up to the little manger yelling "Hallelujah! Christ is here!!" He then made a big show of bowing several times to the little toy Jesus, and then exited the way he came, again shouting "Hallelujah! Christ is here!!".
Once he was gone, the main priest explained that Santa represented commercial christmas, and that the symbolism of seeing him bow to the baby Jesus was important.
Oy vey.
But it's over now. If we do christmas in CA again, I'll take mom up to the city for midnight mass. I'm not doing weirdo mass here again.
Just 4 days until I board a plane bound for Belize. I so need to get away from here for awhile.
Anyway, Merry Christmas to all! And to all, a good night!
First, credit where credit is due- the title comes courtesy of JOC. He would definitely want you to know that.
Mom and I just got back from midnight mass here in HMB. I've never attended mass here; there's only one church, and HMB is so provincial that I've always been a little skeptical about the likely quality of the mass. Since music is the part of church that I most enjoy, it's hard to find a church I will actually attend that's not in a big city, where there's enough local singing talent to put together decent music. So I was, as I said, skeptical going in.
Reality, it turns out, exceeded my expectations for how bad it would be. In order:
1) The pre-mass singing was, in a word, awful.
2) The pre-mass violinist was terrible in "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring", which is one of my favorite pieces ever. She was pleasantly mediocre for "O Holy Night". She achieved her greatest consistency in being quite distinctly flat in absolutely every note she ever tried to play in the upper parts of the register.
3) The mass did not appear to be rehearsed; people at times looked like they weren't sure what came next, and the musical director at one point polled the audience to see if anyone knew a particular Spanish carol that they really wanted to sing, but didn't currently have anyone who really knew.
4) The homily was awful. And when it was finally, blissfully, over, one of the other priests got up and gave it again in Spanish. It was much better in Spanish, since I couldn't understand most of it, and that priest spoke a lot faster.
Moments ago, as I was airing this complaint to mom:
Mom: You should become a deacon. Then *you* could preach...
Me: Ma, they're not going to let ME be a deacon.
Mom: I was talking to Father McCabe about this, and he said they'd never let you be a deacon either. You think too radically. He did, however, think you could be a Jesuit. They like to think radically.
Me: Mom, I'm single like 4 months and already you're trying to recruit me for the priesthood???
Mom: Not ME. Father McCabe. He said since you just dumped another girl, you should think about it.
Me: OK, I admit my situation is grim, but it's not THAT grim. Jeez.
5) After communion, one of the associate priests had disappeared (his chair was now conspicuously empty). The main priest just sat in his chair quietly, and the entire congregation sat there looking at him. Minutes passed. "What the hell is he waiting for?" was what was going through my mind, when finally one of the other priests jumped up and went to the microphone to explain what was happening. In Spanish. Apparently, it was amusing.
Finally, the back door of the church opened, and in marched Santa Claus. Or, technically, the missing priest, now back from his quick costume change and ready to march up to the little manger yelling "Hallelujah! Christ is here!!" He then made a big show of bowing several times to the little toy Jesus, and then exited the way he came, again shouting "Hallelujah! Christ is here!!".
Once he was gone, the main priest explained that Santa represented commercial christmas, and that the symbolism of seeing him bow to the baby Jesus was important.
Oy vey.
But it's over now. If we do christmas in CA again, I'll take mom up to the city for midnight mass. I'm not doing weirdo mass here again.
Just 4 days until I board a plane bound for Belize. I so need to get away from here for awhile.
Anyway, Merry Christmas to all! And to all, a good night!
Monday, December 21, 2009
Things That Exist Only Because Women Exist, Part 1
Dryer sheets.
Seriously, no man would ever have invented such a thing.
I think of this because tonight, as I was throwing my laundry in the dryer, I was momentarily distressed to realize I had forgotten to throw in a dryer sheet. Prior to dating Keiko, I had never actually laid hands on a dryer sheet, but she felt very strongly about the importance of a fresh scent coming out of the dryer, and bought me some. Over the next year, I slowly evolved to the point where I am now- that it distresses me not to have a dryer sheet in my laundry.
This is what women do to you.
Nowadays, I leave the seat down, I at least strongly consider throwing away socks and underwear just because they have a few holes in them, I actually launder my sheets periodically, and I find myself distressed if I don't have dryer sheets.
I am but a shadow of a man anymore...
Seriously, no man would ever have invented such a thing.
I think of this because tonight, as I was throwing my laundry in the dryer, I was momentarily distressed to realize I had forgotten to throw in a dryer sheet. Prior to dating Keiko, I had never actually laid hands on a dryer sheet, but she felt very strongly about the importance of a fresh scent coming out of the dryer, and bought me some. Over the next year, I slowly evolved to the point where I am now- that it distresses me not to have a dryer sheet in my laundry.
This is what women do to you.
Nowadays, I leave the seat down, I at least strongly consider throwing away socks and underwear just because they have a few holes in them, I actually launder my sheets periodically, and I find myself distressed if I don't have dryer sheets.
I am but a shadow of a man anymore...
Friday, December 18, 2009
Thank goodness for moms
Mom arrives tomorrow for a week. As silly as I feel saying this, being a 37-year-old man and all, I really need her right now. It's not great for me to be alone in the house as much as I have been over the last couple of weeks. It will be great to hang out, have metaphysical conversations, and read books. Also, it's nice to come home to home-cooked curry, which is comfort food for me.
She leaves 12/27, and on 12/29 I leave for Miami, and then Belize. 6 days of tracking around the jungle with JJM and AC is exactly what I need- the chance to explore, be away from my life here, and remember what it's like to be have fun and be happy.
Then I have to come back and figure out how to really start building a life here. Lots to figure out where that's concerned.
But more on all that stuff later. Right now, thank goodness for mom...
She leaves 12/27, and on 12/29 I leave for Miami, and then Belize. 6 days of tracking around the jungle with JJM and AC is exactly what I need- the chance to explore, be away from my life here, and remember what it's like to be have fun and be happy.
Then I have to come back and figure out how to really start building a life here. Lots to figure out where that's concerned.
But more on all that stuff later. Right now, thank goodness for mom...
Sunday, December 13, 2009
The hearts that never played in tune...
That's a line from a song called "Aubrey", by Bread. It's a fantastic, if extremely mournful, song.
This is going to be one of those cathartic, mostly depressing posts. So, you might want to consider not reading it. I'd almost rather you didn't. Last time I wrote a post like this, L read it and strongly suggested I take it down, on the grounds that I shouldn't allow anyone to see me so emotionally stripped bare.
But the thing is, this blog is something I actually do for myself. I allow it to be publicly readable because my life is just wacky enough just often enough that I think it has the ability to amuse the small group of people who actually read it. And I've never regretted not taking down that previous post, because from time to time I read it to remind myself of what I was feeling then.
So, I'm writing another post like it tonight, to try and get out of myself the feelings that have left me all but paralyzed for the entire weekend. I need to get the feelings out, because I have to get up and function like a normal person tomorrow, but I want to remember through the years what I went through during this time.
And so this is it: your last chance, dear readers, to bail out before we do a deep dive into what LAJ once called "all my complicated glory". You've been warned.
Although Keiko and I broke up over 3 months ago, we have tried hard to be friends, and continued to gchat a little pretty much every day, and talk on the phone maybe once a week. That was a lot less communication than we used to have when we were dating, but both of us hate being single and I think were relying on each other to be a steady presence even as we confronted an uncertain future, and the need to start getting back out there and dating other people.
Recently, as Keiko started to get out there and start meeting people, (something markedly easier to do when you're 27, stunningly gorgeous, and in a town full of single twenty-somethings, than it is to do when you're 37, balding, and in a town full of software engineers), it had gotten harder for us. For me, it was hard to see her moving on, even though I knew it was the right thing for her. For her, I had only in the last month really done enough processing of our relationship to do the relationship post-mortem from my perspective, and that stuff was hard for her to hear. All of her relationship post-mortem stuff had come in the first month post-breakup, and although that stuff hadn't been easy for me to hear either, I'd listened to all of it and tried wherever I could to validate whatever she was feeling. I know the job I did was imperfect, but I think I did a reasonable job of that.
But the end result was that this last week we had a series of very hard conversations followed by a series of very painful emails. I was reminded anew of some important rules about email:
1) NEVER put in an email something that requires the reader to correctly supply complicated nuances of tone. What will happen, invariably, like a law of nature itself, is that the reader will hear in their mind that sequence of tones which is most directly *opposite* the ones you wanted them to hear.
2) When someone writes an email like that to YOU, remember that (1) as noted above, you are almost certainly getting the tones all wrong, and (2) whether you've got the tones right or wrong, NEVER respond to the email while you're still gripped by whatever emotions you're feeling. Slow it down. The emotional release you'll get from the quick response will last for the briefest of moments. The regret you'll feel about what you said, that you'll carry for the rest of your life.
In our last series of emails, both Keiko and I violated those rules repeatedly. As it all spiraled out of control, the last email she sent, late late Friday night, ended with "I think it'll be better for us if we were just exs who tried once and realized we didn't work as friends. I loved you passionately and I learned and grew so much from this relationship. Thank you."
I don't know if I've ever been so hurt by a couple brief sentences.
So, in clear violation of Rule 2, I wrote back that I was sad that she didn't want to be friends, but that I would leave her her space and wait 6 months before trying to give her a call to see how she's doing. Looking back, I wish I'd slowed it down more along the way. Who knows, we may well have come to this point anyway, but maybe not. We'll never know.
Now I confront the loss of Keiko a 2nd time. Losing her as a girlfriend hurt a lot, but losing her as a friend, confronting the possibility that we may never again share laughter or really know what's going on in each others' lives, I feel that loss a thousand times more strongly. In the end, we did not actually make great life partners for each other, for a number of different reasons, but we *did* actually make great companions for each other, and the loss of that companionship has left me, for the first time in my life, feeling deeply, deeply lonely.
I doubt that Keiko will ever read this post; I remember her saying a couple weeks ago that she couldn't read my blog anymore because it was just too painful for her. But Keiko, if you do end up reading this, this is what I would say to you now: I didn't do as good a job as I should have in the time I had you of loving and cherishing you as you do indeed deserve to be loved and cherished; I didn't communicate with you nearly as much as I should have, nor did I do enough work to understand your communication style; I think you looked to me for leadership in this relationship, and I totally abdicated that responsibility. That's a lot of different ways to have let you down, and I'm truly sorry for that. But I did grow to love you more deeply than I have ever loved another woman, and the 2 years we spent together are an important part of who I am, which means *you're* an important part of who I am. I will love and treasure that part to all the end of my days, and I hope that you will find it in your heart to do the same. And maybe, just maybe, one happy day 6 months or 6 years from now we will reconnect as friends, and once again find ourselves eager to share with each other what's going on in our lives. I know I will always be hoping for that.
Goodbye, my baby. May you one day very soon find the man who will love and cherish you as you deserve, and who will give you the simple, quiet family life that I know in your heart you desire. And through the years, if you should chance to think upon me, know that wherever I am, I am wishing you peace, love, and happiness...
Always.
This is going to be one of those cathartic, mostly depressing posts. So, you might want to consider not reading it. I'd almost rather you didn't. Last time I wrote a post like this, L read it and strongly suggested I take it down, on the grounds that I shouldn't allow anyone to see me so emotionally stripped bare.
But the thing is, this blog is something I actually do for myself. I allow it to be publicly readable because my life is just wacky enough just often enough that I think it has the ability to amuse the small group of people who actually read it. And I've never regretted not taking down that previous post, because from time to time I read it to remind myself of what I was feeling then.
So, I'm writing another post like it tonight, to try and get out of myself the feelings that have left me all but paralyzed for the entire weekend. I need to get the feelings out, because I have to get up and function like a normal person tomorrow, but I want to remember through the years what I went through during this time.
And so this is it: your last chance, dear readers, to bail out before we do a deep dive into what LAJ once called "all my complicated glory". You've been warned.
Although Keiko and I broke up over 3 months ago, we have tried hard to be friends, and continued to gchat a little pretty much every day, and talk on the phone maybe once a week. That was a lot less communication than we used to have when we were dating, but both of us hate being single and I think were relying on each other to be a steady presence even as we confronted an uncertain future, and the need to start getting back out there and dating other people.
Recently, as Keiko started to get out there and start meeting people, (something markedly easier to do when you're 27, stunningly gorgeous, and in a town full of single twenty-somethings, than it is to do when you're 37, balding, and in a town full of software engineers), it had gotten harder for us. For me, it was hard to see her moving on, even though I knew it was the right thing for her. For her, I had only in the last month really done enough processing of our relationship to do the relationship post-mortem from my perspective, and that stuff was hard for her to hear. All of her relationship post-mortem stuff had come in the first month post-breakup, and although that stuff hadn't been easy for me to hear either, I'd listened to all of it and tried wherever I could to validate whatever she was feeling. I know the job I did was imperfect, but I think I did a reasonable job of that.
But the end result was that this last week we had a series of very hard conversations followed by a series of very painful emails. I was reminded anew of some important rules about email:
1) NEVER put in an email something that requires the reader to correctly supply complicated nuances of tone. What will happen, invariably, like a law of nature itself, is that the reader will hear in their mind that sequence of tones which is most directly *opposite* the ones you wanted them to hear.
2) When someone writes an email like that to YOU, remember that (1) as noted above, you are almost certainly getting the tones all wrong, and (2) whether you've got the tones right or wrong, NEVER respond to the email while you're still gripped by whatever emotions you're feeling. Slow it down. The emotional release you'll get from the quick response will last for the briefest of moments. The regret you'll feel about what you said, that you'll carry for the rest of your life.
In our last series of emails, both Keiko and I violated those rules repeatedly. As it all spiraled out of control, the last email she sent, late late Friday night, ended with "I think it'll be better for us if we were just exs who tried once and realized we didn't work as friends. I loved you passionately and I learned and grew so much from this relationship. Thank you."
I don't know if I've ever been so hurt by a couple brief sentences.
So, in clear violation of Rule 2, I wrote back that I was sad that she didn't want to be friends, but that I would leave her her space and wait 6 months before trying to give her a call to see how she's doing. Looking back, I wish I'd slowed it down more along the way. Who knows, we may well have come to this point anyway, but maybe not. We'll never know.
Now I confront the loss of Keiko a 2nd time. Losing her as a girlfriend hurt a lot, but losing her as a friend, confronting the possibility that we may never again share laughter or really know what's going on in each others' lives, I feel that loss a thousand times more strongly. In the end, we did not actually make great life partners for each other, for a number of different reasons, but we *did* actually make great companions for each other, and the loss of that companionship has left me, for the first time in my life, feeling deeply, deeply lonely.
I doubt that Keiko will ever read this post; I remember her saying a couple weeks ago that she couldn't read my blog anymore because it was just too painful for her. But Keiko, if you do end up reading this, this is what I would say to you now: I didn't do as good a job as I should have in the time I had you of loving and cherishing you as you do indeed deserve to be loved and cherished; I didn't communicate with you nearly as much as I should have, nor did I do enough work to understand your communication style; I think you looked to me for leadership in this relationship, and I totally abdicated that responsibility. That's a lot of different ways to have let you down, and I'm truly sorry for that. But I did grow to love you more deeply than I have ever loved another woman, and the 2 years we spent together are an important part of who I am, which means *you're* an important part of who I am. I will love and treasure that part to all the end of my days, and I hope that you will find it in your heart to do the same. And maybe, just maybe, one happy day 6 months or 6 years from now we will reconnect as friends, and once again find ourselves eager to share with each other what's going on in our lives. I know I will always be hoping for that.
Goodbye, my baby. May you one day very soon find the man who will love and cherish you as you deserve, and who will give you the simple, quiet family life that I know in your heart you desire. And through the years, if you should chance to think upon me, know that wherever I am, I am wishing you peace, love, and happiness...
Always.
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