chattervox's blog

Bike sadness!

The offending pedal

Earlier tonight, I was trying to have my nice bicycle ride to yoga.  Halfway there the left pedal on my bike started feeling kind of squishy.  When I got off to look, I saw that the screw of the pedal had worked its way diagonally out of the crank thingy, and because the screw was apparently made of cheapass plastic it was stripped and bent and couldn't be fixed.  I had to call and convince one of my housemates to pick me and the bicycle up and drive me to yoga.  Grrrr!

Bike

I bought this bike just last Friday on an imprudent impulse - imprudent because I don't have a job yet, and I promised myself I'd wait until I did to start any capitalist frenzies.  But I did not wait.  (In fact, historically the amount I spend is inversely proportional to my income, on account of spending money makes indigent life less boring, and ultimately this is responsible for my net worth being, still, in the red column.)  At any rate, I got the itch when I started checking out a critical-mass-type midnight ride that happens once a month or so in Los Angeles, and I came across a bunch of links to local bicycle advocacy and route mapping sites and the like.  I decided it was totally badass to have a bicycle in LA.  I'm a really contrary person - I could have biked around in outdoorsy Seattle, but I thought the drivers there were on average too much of asshats, and the traffic too gnarly.  Now that I'm in LA, where nobody expects you to possibly have a bike, and the traffic could not be gnarlier, I felt the overwhelming impulse to buy one and start biking around.  And then when I found myself in Santa Monica near a bike shop I'd read about, I impulse purchased the moderately-low-end hybrid I'd been reading up on.  Hooray for using credit unwisely!

I kind of expected that I'd make the inadvisable purchase and then compound it by letting the bike languish in the garage out of fear of traffic.  But I did awesome during the first week, considering I'm a bicycling n00b, biking out to hollywood once (about 8 miles each way) and once before today to yoga.  Hills and traffic do make me want to cry but eventually I'm determined to become fierce enough to bike commute to work on occasion, even if it's far away (maybe even in Santa Monica).

But tonight I'm grumpy about this bad luck - I've only ridden on it 2 1/2 times and I already have to trek to the bike shop to try and get some less craptastic (and less brokexored) pedals.  I just hope the bicycle gods do not remain against me or I may not survive.

Unemployed in Los Angeles

Master and Commander (Aubrey Maturin Series)

Oranges in the backyard

I spent much of today sitting on our back porch in the shade of an orange tree in our backyard, re-reading the first book in Patrick O'Brian's long naval adventure series (I have to start again at the beginning since I forget what had happened when I left the series, five books in and at least as many years ago) and eating oranges straight off of the tree.  I ate enough oranges that I feel a little sugar fever.  Soon I'm going to take a leisurely bike ride to a yoga class.

I'm supposed to hear back tomorrow from the job I applied for last week.  I am fervently hoping they will give me an offer, since I think working there would be awesome.  But I'm also going to serously miss unemployment if they do, it's a little bit lovely that every day is Sunday.

What I did in my summer vacation from the internets

You may have noticed that I haven't blogged anything in 3 months.  Although this is normal for me, this time I have an excuse.  Lots of excuses!

Not too long after my last blog entry in July, I started finishing things up for the end of my job at Microsoft.  I had worked there for a year before I decided to move to Los Angeles with my sweetie and announced that I was leaving.  There were a lot of things to finish and I went a little bit crazy.

On my last day of work, August 11, I left in the afternoon to go on a week-long cruise to Alaska with my mom.

Alaska is pretty cool.  We saw glaciers,

eagles and whales and other wildlife,

and a lot of picturesque scenery.

This just about balanced out the downsides; being on a cruise is like being confined to a nice but cramped and really surreal hotel for a week,

and every place we went was covered in tourist traps, overpriced gimmicky jewelry stores, and tacky souvenir shops for a good 10 miles in every direction of where the cruise ships dock.

In conclusion I would probably go on a cruise again, although only if, like this time, someone else were paying for it. But, next time I go to Alaska I think I'd rather see it properly, spend more time in actual Alaska and less on a boat, and maybe do some hardcore camping and hiking.

Then...

I stopped back home in Seattle for about 5 minutes after which we went to Orcas Island for our friends' wedding.

Wedding

We were staying on a farm.

Farm

Tonx took millions of pictures of the animals

and so did I.

Then...

back in Seattle for a few days and another wedding (you people and your marriaging) before we went to Burning Man.  Burning Man should have been a crazy experience--the two times I've gone before were both intense.  But this year I was physically and mentally worn out and nervous about moving to LA, and I could not muster any energy to do it up right.  Our camp made some completely transcendent waffles though one day, and t of course made delicious coffee.  I didn't take any pictures there, but, our friend took a pic I really love of the van that was our home that week.

Then...

two days after we got back from the desert, we drove down from Seattle to Los Angeles over the course of four days.  We stopped for coffee a lot.

I scheduled two job interviews during the one week I was subsequently in LA at the beginning of August.  That was kind of unwise--after all this, I was a nervous wreck.  I was completely incoherent for my talk at USC, and hadn't prepared my slides well at all.  I think the other interview may not have been as much of a debacle since they're having me back for another interview this Friday.  Knock on wood for me.

My one week in LA was followed by two weeks back in Seattle.  I flew back to Seattle to pack up all our belongings, load them into one of those moving cubes, and then party.  T was already on the job in L.A., but since I was unemployed by this point, and wanted to hang out in Seattle a while longer, I did not mind packing up our stuff myself. Here was the plan: pack like crazy for the first week, get it all done early, and spend the second week hanging out with friends and lounging around visiting my favorite Seattle haunts, and maybe having some kind of crazy goodbye party.

Here was the reality: spend the first week rearranging and reorganizing all our things in a completely useless but obsessive-compulsive fashion and also reading mystery stories.  Spend the second week panicking, staying up all night packing several times, and coming down with a horrific cold.   Because of this new strategy I invented, the enjoying Seattle and hanging out with friends parts of the moving experience did not really happen.  But, there was still time for a little drinking.

Laura with beer

Even though it was hellish, and I came down with the cough of doom, it was actually my best-planned move ever so far.

And now, here I am in Los Angeles.  What?  But as soon as I finish getting over my icky moving cold, then I shall have all kinds of adventures.  And blog about them!  For my summer vacation from the intarwebs is over!

Garage sale of happy memories

Beezus and Ramona

Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (Avon Camelot Books (Paperback))

My next-door neighbors were having a yard sale on Sunday, and the daughter, who's probably twelve now and has outgrown such nonsense, was selling two Ramona books for 25 cents each.  I couldn't resist, I was filled with too much nostalgia for when I loved these books as a kid.

The funny thing I never realized when I read these long ago, is the ridiculously long time span over which Beverly Cleary has written these books.  Ramona Quimby, age 8 was written in 1982, at least ten years later than I would have guessed.  When I was first reading this, it must have been some seriously right-off-the-presses hottness--I had no idea.  Beezus and Ramona, on the other hand, set 4 years earlier, was written in 1955.  Mind-blowingly, I found out from wikipedia while double-checking my dates that there is another Ramona book I have never heard of from 1999.  It is like a creepy reverse version of that really godawful Robin Williams movie, the one where he's a six-year-old dying from premature oldness disease in a sadly-poignant-yet-wackily-comedic manner, to think that spunky ostensibly-nine-years-old Ramona is actually 48 years old in that book.  Gah!  Weird factor eleven.

So if you pay attention, which I couldn't help doing this time, you can see the sands shifting under the small-town wholesomeness of the Quimby household: in 1955, mother is presumed to be home all day with the kids while father is off at some unspecific job, while by 1982 mom's the breadwinner while dad is working part-time and going back to college to become a children's art teacher.  That's cool.  Still, you have to be looking hard to see it move--there's a static archetypical atmosphere in their neighborhood that's almost as mythic as middle earth.  Even the approaching-millenial Quimbys live in a world where it's totally normal for a family with two kids to store a barrel of apples in their basement and to only go out for burgers once every couple months.  That's actually kind of cool.

Now I need to find one or more young children to give these away to again, since I have more than gotten my fifty cents worth.  (Anyone in Seattle need young person books?)

Blue

Blue (Three Colors Trilogy)

Last night we finally got around to watching Blue, the first film in Kieslowski's trilogy of films on the themes liberty, equality, and fraternity.  We've had this for the past two or three weeks; although in theory I was looking forward to finally watching it, I've kept putting it off.  My worst netflix habit is that I queue up lots of dark, elliptical, subtitled movies that I theoretically want to see, and then when they arrive we put off watching them for ever.  Eventually there's a whole stack of subtitled movies that we don't feel like watching right that moment, and we have to go rent Dodgeball from the video store.

Dodgeball - A True Underdog Story (Widescreen Edition)

I shouldn't have delayed watching Blue so long, though--like the decalogue, which I watched years ago and loved more than anything, it's subtle and profound, but without being too difficult or screwing with my head.  Which is not to say that I'm against difficult movies--I have a feeling even that they're theoretically more worthwhile somehow than accessible ones--but there's only the occasional evening where I come home from a day of work wanting to be put through the emotional wringer.  Blue I could watch any night of the week; in fact, I will probably queue it up again to rewatch in a few weeks, after I've seen White and Red, both of which I now can't wait to finally watch.   I feel like there's a lot that I didn't catch the first time that I want to watch more carefully, especially after seeing the DVD feature where Kieslowski explains what went into one 5-second scene with a sugar cube (if you watch the DVD, that extra feature is essential viewing).  And plus, Juliette Binoche is so pretty that it would be easy to spend two hours watching her clip her fingernails, let alone swim through water that has somehow cinematographically arrived at the apparent consistency of clear blue paste.

Dodgeball, incidentally, was very funny.

zen thought of the day: zerotasking

Today was the second time I've gone to this one zen meditation group not far from where I live.  The meditation is followed by a dharma discussion--where we take turns reading paragraphs from a book of zen talks, and discuss--and then tea and cookies.  It's very pleasant, I like the people I've met there very much, and I seem to need the peer pressure of being in a room with other people meditating just in order to sit the fuck down, so it's good for me.

You Have to Say Something

During today's dharma discussion, we read one of the talks from the book "You have to say something", and the topic of 'multitasking' came up.  The group leader, Kyoan Sandra, was saying that Zen discourages it.  Ideally, one would do only one thing at a given time, and do it as well as possible.   As a counter-point, another long-time meditator, John, told the following anecdote.  The well-known teacher Suzuki Roshi was eating breakfast and reading the newspaper.  One of his students came up to him and said, why are you eating breakfast and also reading the paper, when you have told us one should do only one thing, as well as possible, at any given time?  He replied (I'm paraphrasing here), what I am doing is eating-breakfast-and-reading-the-paper, and I am doing that one thing as well as I can.

I have been trying to keep my mouth shut as much as I can during these dharma discussions, because although I do love to hear myself talk, I don't think that my chattering on and trying to sound smart is going to help my quest for inner stillness etcetera.  While, on the other hand, listening to these short zen talks has been very good for me so far.  At this point, though, I could not help myself and interjected a short discursion.  How much multitasking one can do mindfully, I suggested, probably depends on how practiced a meditator one is.  Suzuki Roshi, I would imagine, could achieve a meditative state even while fixing dinner or doing the crossword or both.  There's no reason why meditation needs to happen while sitting on a cushion doing absolutely nothing with one's eyes shut.  For beginners like me, though, I added, even single tasks are distracting, so that I need to do that sort of zerotasking just in order to try to meditate at all.

John, who is a delightful gentleman and philosopher, commended me for inventing the word zerotasking, which gave me considerable ego gratification on account of how much I like to think that the stuff I say is diabolically clever.  So probably going to the sitting today was a net neutral as far as enlightenment is concerned.  To make up for this, I'm determined to sit and zerotask for a little bit of time, at least a couple mornings this week, since I've resolved to become relentless in my pursuit of happiness.

Hello world

Just dropping you a note to say hi.