spaceman, smoke show, scarecrow, geronimo

I still do not recommend getting covid. I think today was slightly better than yesterday - my throat isn't hurting quite so much, which is v. welcome. However, I've had a headache off and on all day - perhaps some of it is due to covid, but some of it is probably due to the day job. I took today off and I'm preemptively taking tomorrow as well - and I can't remember the last time I took four days in a row off for an infectious disease, so I guess this is not great.

But there was an issue at work that kind of blew up, and I felt like it was in my best longterm interests to fix it. That involved more screen time and more thinking than I was probably capable of, and I also had a video chat with my boss to discuss it, and all of that was just a bit too much. But it's fixed and I don't have to do anything tomorrow other than perhaps answer a couple of last minute questions, so hopefully I can sleep as much as I want. I only got one hour-long nap today and it definitely wasn't enough. When I wasn't working, I mostly showered, snacked, stared into space, texted, and stared into space some more. I also had a quick chat with Terry and Lauren (aka Subz) - luckily I'll see them soon enough in person, since Terry's third wedding attempt is coming up in March. I'm desperate for some San Francisco time and will be superimmune by then, so that's keeping me going.

When I was fully done with work stuff, I zoned out on my couch, drank a Sprite (beverage of invalid champions), and watched a couple of episodes of Queer Eye, which cheered me up immensely. And now, I need to get some sleep - goodnight!

while he wishes he could escape this but it all seems so contagious

My mood is improving slightly, which is good news for my fitbit since it has been tracking a higher-than-usual heart rate the whole last week. Rage is a powerful drug, kids. But today was better - I had a bunch of meetings, but all of them were good. I had some time in the afternoon to get some work done. I had a training session with Alyssa in the late afternoon, and doing some work with kettlebells may have helped burn out just a little bit of my grievances. And then I took a quick shower and walked down to El Camino to meet Katie for dinner. She was in fine form, and we had much to discuss, so we did so over queso (it turns out their queso is great) and margaritas. Since we had plenty of chips with the queso (as well as guac and salsa), I skipped my usual nachos there and got fajitas instead. And Katie v. kindly listened to my raging about various tings that happened last week, thus ensuring she didn't end up on my rage list, so our friendship lives another day.

After we finished at El Camino, we walked down the street to Sweet Cow and got ice cream for dessert. Then we parted ways and I perhaps should have worked, but instead I did absolutely nothing. And now I'm going to go to bed and hope that I get some decent sleep before tomorrow, since tomorrow is brutally packed with meetings. Goodnight!

scheming on a thing that's a mirage, i'm trying to tell you now, it's sabotage

I'm back in Boulder after a truly epic four days in Portland and its strangely-named surrounding cities. I should probably do a full writeup of Claudia's wedding, but I'm still too tired to do it justice - it was a mad dash to get everything taken care of, and I celebrated that mad dash by staying mostly sober at the reception (I was the emcee and had to give a toast, so I needed to stay somewhat sane)...but then went back to our airbnb around 10:30 and drank most of a bottle of white wine while hanging out in the hot tub and gossipping about the wedding. Adit, Vidya, Ayla and I were staying together, but we convinced John and Jess to come back with us and camp on the floor of the living room rather than camping in the llama fields, so it made for a super fun night (despite another guest thoroughly enraging me, but hey, I often rage over things, so it felt like I was in the zone).

The wedding, though, was totally gorgeous - everything came together well, and Claudia looked beautiful, and I cried during her vows, as I am wont to do. The reception was also fun, even with a bunch of mangy kids roaming around. And I'm glad I got to spend so much time with Santy Claude over the course of the weekend - it was a good bonding adventure, and I really enjoyed all of my time with her even if the amount of work we had to do in the last few days was bordering on insane.

So, today was all about recovering and getting the fuck out of Portland. Chandlord and Ayla left super early, but John, Jess, Adit, and I (and the fifth houseguest, who was the one who enraged me last night after deciding she wouldn't come with us when we left, then calling in tears wanting us to come back and get her, which was super annoying since it's a 30min round trip from the airbnb to the farm and I don't know her well enough to gracefully handle such ineptitude) drove a bunch of stuff over to the farm. We said our last goodbyes to Claude, and then we drove into Portland, where we had brunch at Proud Mary. It was well worth the wait - it was one of the best meals I've had in awhile, which is surprising since I had a lot of good food this weekend. I had a hash with ham and a poached egg and kale and a delish garlicky sauce, but I also tried the hotcake, which was covered in edible flowers and was one of the best breakfast sweet dishes I've tried in awhile.

Eventually, though, the fun started to die...Adit had to go to the airport, so I bid him farewell. John, Jess and I walked around Portland for another hour or so, admiring all the shops and wishing we could eat all the food, and then I said my goodbyes to them and went to the airport. I had just enough time to grab some iced coffee for the plane before we began to board, but all that iced coffee wasn't enough to keep me from sleeping through the first half of the flight.

And now I'm successfully in my own bed, and I am desperate to sleep and get a head start on what's bound to be a ridiculous week at work. Goodnight!

we're gonna rattle this ghost town

I am attempting to embrace a calmer, less angry state - or, as I told someone at work, I'm getting off of the 'rage plane' that I had gotten onto last week, when I had transcended anger and entered some entirely different state of being that was mostly pure rage. Part of this is an attempt to remember all of the things I've learned and self-awareness I've gained over the last decade; part is sheer exhaustion with the idea of being enraged; and part is some sort of smug satisfaction over being the first person in my general vicinity at work to get out of the rage plane. Yes, that's not a very healthy or charitable response. But I'll take what I can get; I am much more productive and generally better able to help others and move things forward for my own nefarious ends when I'm not enraged, so that's an admirable goal.

sssanyway, I went to Palo Alto this morning and trained with Alyssa, but our workout wasn't particularly intense because I was so sore from Tuesday and generally unable to recover that she took it easy on me. Then I went to work, took a meeting, showered (you can see that those were in a rather unfortunate order, so it's good that Alyssa went easy on me so that I didn't end up stinky), worked, had lunch (fish tacos, sans taco), and had meetings until fiveish. Then I did a bit of work, left at six, and somehow managed to keep from stabbing myself in the eyeball during the ninety minutes it took to get home. When I got here, I should have either gone to Jess's musical recital or gone out for drinks with someone I recently befriended, but I was thirty minutes late already for the musical thing and the new friend socializing didn't seem soothing enough for my exhausted state (being calm and holier-than-thou takes soooo much energy). So I had dinner with Terry instead, which involved steak and wine (can you guess where we went?). And now I must sleep; I'm working from home tomorrow so that I can get a lot of stuff done and also end at four p.m. so that I can write. Goodnight!

start anew when your heart is an empty room

I wasn't in the mood to blog last night, and I'm not particularly in the mood to blog tonight, but I suspected there might be a mutiny of all hands (aka my mother) if I skipped for a second night in a row. Suffice it to say that I am in an utterly foul and wretched mood -- not for any particular reason that I can discern, even though Nick and Ellie's continued recalcitrance is grating on my last nerve. I spent several hours this morning procrastinating to avoid this guest blog post that I had to write; I really must stop agreeing to do them, since I think they sell v. few books and I hate writing them. Then, I ate lunch (comfort food: tuna salad sandwich made with miracle whip, on toasted gluten free bread), messed around a bit, and took Terry (who was working from home for the day) to pick up her car from the mechanic. Then, knowing that I needed a change of scene, I went to a cafe and nursed some tea while writing for a couple of hours.

So I'm happy with the progress I made on Nick and Ellie today, even if it's never, ever enough (yes, I see the conflict inherent in this sentence and recognize it's probably why I'm angry and sometimes get ulcers). When I got home, I wrote a bit more, then went downstairs and heated up some of my leftover chili. I ate it sullenly at the dining room table, thinking of everything and nothing, and then hung out in the dining room for another hour while Terry cooked and ate her own supper. Then I came upstairs, knew I was too unsettled to write (Samovar would say I have monkey mind and try to sell me some overpriced lapsang souchong to cure it), and so decided to read a book instead. But of course I hated it, too; my reading has brought me little joy lately, either because I'm choosing the wrong stuff or because I'm in a harshly critical mood about everything and everyone and it would take a work of surpassing brilliance to make me forget to hate on it.

Anyway, the end. My rages don't last very long, so with any luck tomorrow will be much brighter (but I wouldn't count on it; I always fall into weird eddies and doldrums of emotions when I'm in the throes of the middle/end of a book, so this is kind of to be expected). Goodnight!

from underneath the rubble sing a rebel song

I'm in serious trouble. Half of today was bleak, rotten, miserable, the kind of misery that eats away like acid at one's heart and mind, until all one's faith and hope are burnt to ash. The other half was awesome, perfect, transcendent, where all the words come in just the right order and every character lives and breathes and feels so powerfully that they etch themselves on the page.

From that you might guess that I'm in serious trouble because I'm bipolar, but no (or rather, who knows, but that's not the problem). I'm in serious trouble because I have four days until my self-selected deadline for finishing this draft, and I have more than four days' worth of work left to do (particularly since I've got plans every day of those four days, including flying to Iowa). If the deadline slips by a day or two, the consequence is that I have less time for my beta readers to read it and give me feedback before my ultimate deadline, which is currently two and a half weeks away. And I care too much about writing the perfect book to be happy with whatever I can knock out in the next four days, even though my honors thesis experience would argue that I'm certainly capable of finishing in time.

Anyway, today was extremely hermity. I only left the house for three minutes (to stock up on diet mountain dew from the corner shop), and I spent the rest of the time locked in my room, either working or procrastinating (mostly procrastinating in the morning, almost entirely working from 3:30ish until midnight, with a break for dinner). When I'm in procrastinating/stress/work mode, I tend to cook more than I otherwise would, and so my late breakfast/lunch was some applewood smoked bacon and some scrambled eggs with peppers, onions, and cheese, and my supper was the last of my leftover risotto with a freshly-cooked porkchop (which I wasn't entirely in the mood for, but it had to be cooked tonight, and it turned out deliciously enough that I didn't mind it). I also drank some truly excellent coffee from my French press, in addition to two bottles of diet mountain dew, and yet I feel confident that I'll be able to sleep tonight.

Somewhere along the way, I wrote ten pages from scratch (2200 words) and revised several scenes (which involved writing lots of snippets from scratch, but I didn't count up those words), so I'm making forward progress. And all I can say is onward -- it will happen, and all I can do is make it happen as fast as possible. Now I shall sleep, so that I can go see Alyssa in the morning before continuing to work like the devil is gnawing on my heels. Actually, that wouldn't be particularly motivating, but you get the drift. Goodnight!

i'm sexy and i know it

There are no words to describe today. And yet, since I'm supposedly a writer by trade, I have to try to come up with some. So here's a list:

- grill
- clogger
- pinot gris
- dean and deluca
- lmfao
- patrick swayze
- eclipse (of the heart, total)
- failure to drink seventy bottles of water
- suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuubz
- girl talk
- book club
- gondola for one
- what can men do against such reckless hate
- snickerdoodles
- some people call him the cat
- jess doesn't like it when people talk about her (like right now)


Really, there is so much more to it than that. I got up voluntarily before eight am., which is anathema to me, but it helped to ensure that we got off on the right foot. I took a shower, then ceded my bathroom to Vivi (not her real name) while I went to Safeway and bought bagels + three bottles of champagne + juice for mimosas. I then came home, changed out of sweats, and we started drinking around 9:45 am, which made for twelve hours of general drinking for me (I keep typing horus instead of hours, but Horus is the god of Egypt, not a measure of time, which means I'm totally fucking up). sssanyway, the bus showed up, and we were moderately late leaving because someone had an assplosion (as they like to say) at a particular apartment that shall remain nameless (meow) and so were late coming to my place. But it all worked out most wonderfully in the end. We went to Sterling first and were only fifteen minutes late, which mattered not at all, and we took the aerial tram up to the variety of tasting rooms/outdoor patios/etc. Since we lingered, we were a) sober and b) forced to skip the second planned winery altogether (luckily there wasn't a reservation at the second winery). So we got sandwiches at Dean and Deluca, then walked next door to our 'third' winery (Flora Springs), which turned out to be the best thing ever. We had their entire rooftop patio to ourselves for an hour and half, and after we finished tasting four wines, we got a couple of bottles to drink on the roof (which was key, of course).

We boarded the bus sometime slightly before five, and it took forever to get home -- a fact that didn't bother us at all, since we were too busy eating leftover bagels, chips, cookies, etc. and drinking the three bottles of wine we'd purchased for the bus. We got back to my place, Terry and her sisters promptly left to go to Stanford to catch the Stanford/UCLA game, and some of the rest of us (Chandlord, Can, Shedletsky, Bride of Shedletsky (he's not really married, that just makes me laugh), my friend Vivi (not her real name), Adit, Priyanka, and I) stuck around and had Thai food while watching "Date Night" followed by the last half of "The Two Towers" (yes, those movies were marketed as a package, since they really complement each other). We drank a couple more bottles of wine at home, which means I will be quite unhappy tomorrow - but it was worth it. This was possibly the most fun I've ever had in Napa, mostly because we chillaxed and had a lovely time while still managing to rage through a whole lot of wine.

And now, I must sleep; tomorrow is Sunday, which means some kind of brunch, some kind of hangover/regret, and some kind of phone call to my parents. Goodnight!

our love turns to rust

Perhaps some 'splaining about last night's blog post is in order, but I'm not going to spend much time 'splaining because I should be in bed. Needless to say, my Saturday took some unexpected twists and turns; I almost didn't go out at all after taking a mid-afternoon nap, but my decision to rally for Leland Tea led to a twelve hour descent into debauchery. As a result, I stayed over at Adit's and awoke in the morning feeling better than I deserved but worse than I preferred. Jess was staying over as well, even though she hadn't hung out with us until showing up at Adit's place at midnight looking for a place to crash since she had plans in the city on both Saturday and Sunday. I convinced her to cancel her Sunday plans, though (opera in the ballpark, which I and everyone else was bailing on due to precipitation and the fact that it's the opera - j/k, opera fans), and the three of us decided to get brunch together. We called Katrina and forced her to come with us, and it looked like it was going to be an awesome time...

...until we went to Samovar and my love affair with that place was irreparably damaged. Any longtime (or even shorttime) readers of the blog know that I love Samovar with all my heart, despite their occasionally bad service and their overpriced menu options. I went back through my blog and confirmed that I've gone 40+ times in the past two years (at which point I stopped counting), both alone to write/brainstorm and with friends. I had a Groupon for Samovar, which is part of why we ended up there today, but it ended up being a complete shitshow. Food for Adit, Jess and I came very quickly, but Katrina's food took almost an hour. The waitress's apology wasn't really an apology; she said that the kitchen was very small and had gotten swamped, and that we could look back in the kitchen to see how small it is (which is a terrible excuse, since Samovar has been open 10+ years and wasn't entirely full this morning anyway - they should be able to get a fucking bowl of rice with some salmon on it out of the kitchen in less than an hour). She also failed to bring us water until the third time we'd asked, which was also ridiculous. And the icing on the cake was that when we paid, she said there wasn't enough change to break a freaking twenty dollar bill, which meant that we had to break it amongst ourselves and then get change from the restaurant across the street because they were out of change.

So, I was unusually irate about all of this (note: my horoscope for today says: You might try to keep your feelings to yourself as the Moon returns to cool Virgo today, but you won't likely be able to prevent an emotional eruption. You have run out of patience and may think that you have to do something immediately or you'll lose your chance. Just remember that initiating action is easy now, but you won't be able to just hit the undo button tomorrow.). Usually I let such ridiculousness slide, and might not have said anything, but Katrina had been chatting up the owner (Jesse) earlier, and when he came by at the end, she very politely/cheerfully told him about the late food and the lack of change. He seemed totally sympathetic at first, and at first I calmed down. But then I walked out and realized that he hadn't really given much of an apologize. Nor had he asked what he could do the change the situation - if nothing else, I think he should have comped Katrina's food or at least her tea, and/or gone to get more change.

At that realization, I went nearly incandescent with anger. Samovar's service problems clearly stem from an owner who doesn't quite know how to apologize and doesn't attempt to make customers happy again, and who uses the 'zen' aspects of teamaking to excuse slow, sloppy service and food prep (their menu even says that the modern world is too hectic to appreciate tea, and that everyone should just slow down and wait). And if they stem from the owner, they're not going to improve. And, like so many things in my life (and this is not a trait I'm proud of), Samovar has disappointed me for the last time and I'm going to cut it out of my heart despite my love for it.

If you stuck through that rant, you deserve a cookie (I would give you a scone, but since I'm not going back to Samovar, you'll have to settle for a scone from somewhere else). Post-Samovar, I was too angry to continue to hang out and realized that, like a small child who hasn't slept enough, perhaps I needed a nap and some quiet time. So I abandoned my friends, came home, took a nap, did some dishes, talked to my parents (of course), and then finally started doing the work I was supposed to do this weekend. I didn't quite get through all of it, but I judged five contest entries, took care of some spreadsheet stuff, and thought a little bit about my upcoming agent conversation. The next few days are going to be hectic, but hopefully my rage will subside and clarity will replace it.

Now, though, I should really sleep; I have to see Alyssa tomorrow, and I've got a ton to do both before and after to get my week off on the right foot. Goodnight!