Wie sagt man, "I would like all the baklava, please."?

The day before I left for Berlin, I bought a suitcase at Ross for $70 because my roommate’s was too big and my coworker’s was too small.  I bought a neck pillow and an eye cover and earplugs. I would have bought Ambien if they sold it over the counter but I bought Melatonin instead and got some Xanax from a friend.

I bought these things in secret because it’s not like me to buy things.  I am supposed to be Carefree Katie.  I am Go-With-The-Flow Girl.  I am from Colorado and my feathers don’t get ruffled when the wind blows.  But I’ve been in California for too long and now I can’t deal with things like jet lag or mediocre sandwiches or bad internet connections or air colder than 50 degrees.  

It’s a slippery slope down to neurosis.   On the morning of my departure, I was struck with a sudden wave of paranoia about dropping my rent check in a mailbox.  At line in the post office behind a dozen or more tardy taxpayers (it had not occurred to me that April 15th would not be a normal day at the USPO), I literally started tapping my foot in a nervous twitch.  Normal Katie would not have batted an eyelash about running twenty minutes behind schedule.  The only items left on my pre-departure checklist were 1. Assemble plane snacks (two minutes max), 2. Remove toenail polish (optional) and 3. Research best practices for taking Xanax (which I could do from my phone while waiting in line).  But OCD Katie could only see a clock arm ticking dangerously close to 10:45 which was the time I needed to leave my house in order to arrive at the airport one hour before boarding. (I decided the two-hour rule for international flights didn’t apply to me since I’ve been TSA prescreened.)  

Of course, as Normal Katie would have known, everything worked out fine.  Despite checking in at the wrong airline (“Lufthansa flight 730 is operated by United, ma’am”), leaving my passport in the self-check kiosk scanner, having the wrong name on my ticket (“I’m sorry miss, the reservation is under Katie but your ID says Kathryn”), and getting bounced from the TSA prescreen line (“If the stamp isn’t on your boarding pass, they won’t let you through”), I still managed to board the plane before takeoff.  And despite not sleeping on the plane (neck pillows and Xanax be damned!), I still managed to feel relatively normal upon arriving in Berlin at 11:00am.  And despite not having the exact address of my AirBnB host or any way of contacting her without internet access, I still managed to serendipitously run into her just as she was leaving the building.  

Despite still having chipped nail polish on my toes, everything was going to be just fine.

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Lucy, my host, has a bob cut and wears a jean miniskirt bunched up over leggings that tuck right into the lace-up boots whose heels barely touch the ground when she walks with a slight duck-footed bounce.   I wanted us to be friends but the tone in her voice when she asked me if I had any questions told me she’d be keeping our relationship professional.  She offered me a cup tea and then headed out for the night.  

The house was cold. I made another cup of tea.  Then another.  I poured more cups until the leaves in teaball were blanched and I was just drinking hot water.  After fidgeting with the knob on the radiator in my room, googling "How to turn on german heater", and pushing all the buttons on a mysterious box in the kitchen, I decided to cook some pasta. Lucy had technically said “Help yourself to whatever” but I could tell she only said it to be nice and didn’t actually want me rifling through her cupboards.  But I didn’t have any Euros yet and I was descending into a manic state of cold and hunger.   I would have stolen a secret slice of her birthday cake if there would have been one in the fridge.   I felt like Lucy owed it to me for abandoning me in her ice house.  But the pantry was all pots and jars of tea leaves and dried beans and one half bag of rotini noodles, of which I stole one cup.   I held the warm pot to my body and stood over the stove, which I left on even after the pasta was done.  

When Lucy got home around midnight, she explained that the central heat for the building never comes on in April so there is no way to turn on the radiators.  Perhaps she felt guilty about sending me to sleep in a room with an unsealed window because she offered me some of the egg scramble she was cooking.  We ate together and had a lovely conversation -- at least I enjoyed it.  I can’t speak for Lucy because once she finished eating she said, “Well you must be very tired...”

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Other than the lack of space-heaters, Berlin seems to be the perfect city.  To me, it is Goldilocks’s middle bowl between my other two favorite places: Bogotá and San Francisco.  The street vendors and jabbering pedestrians and third-world chaos that give Bogotá its charm can also make it impossibly dysfunctional at times.  On the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco’s efficiency-obsessed tech fever is sexy and exciting and famous… and solipsistic to a sometimes nauseating degree.  Berlin has the urban hum, it has the hipster-hating hipsters whining about gentrifying neighborhoods, it has the cultural hodgepodge that makes it tricky to pick out tourists from locals.  It works without trying too hard.

Being a foreigner here is neither exotic nor cliché, which is quite relaxing.  However, for the first time in my life I am in a place where I cannot ask for directions from just anyone on the street.  I, the Queen of Eyelash-Batting for Favors from Strangers, have been quitted of my most resourceful superpower.  Thankfully, universal human sign language has been sufficient so far.  That is to say, sufficient enough for me to walk into the Turkish pastry shop and point to the baklava behind the glass and hold up all my fingers to indicate “I would like all the baklava, please.”

 

On weddings

I had no intention of crying but before the bride even appeared in the doorframe, my lids had welled up quicker than flowerpots in a rainstorm.  This wave of emotion struck me as especially odd considering that only hours before,  as I was writing the Congratulations card, I struggled to recall memories of my friend (the groom) from college.  We spent countless hours together over those four years but, sitting there in a hurricane’s eye of wrapping paper scraps and ribbons with only thirty minutes before the start of the ceremony, I could only summon blurry vignetted flashbacks of sitting in the passenger seat of his SUV or stirring boiling pasta in the speckle-stained kitchen of his all-guys house.

But somehow, where my conscious memory failed to produce much substance of our friendship, my subconscious managed to conjure instantly at the sight of him walking down the aisle.  Seeing him in that moment filled me to the brim with an overwhelming pride and happiness that can only be felt about someone rooted in your life — whether or not you remember all the circumstances of the rooting.

The ceremony followed the conventional pattern: Guests mingle amongst themselves sitting in chairs facing the “stage”/altar.  When the music comes on, everyone stops talking and turns backwards to watch a slow motion parade of people down the center aisle until (cue song change) the bride appears and everyone stands up.  Once she has arrived at the center of the arrangement -- groom on the right side of the MC/priest who is flanked on the left by a file of matching women and on the right by a file of matching men -- everyone sits to listen to a series of readings, speeches, vows and “I Dos” and then they whistle and cheer at the official pronouncement and subsequent Kodak Kiss.  The slow motion parade then happens in reverse at a slightly faster pace, there is more mingling while the couple is absent, then food, tearful toasts, drunken dancing and then the couple’s epic exit (usually involving some sort of bombardment).  

I recognize that each element of this ceremony has origins in various religious and cultural traditions.  Allow me to preface the rest of this post by disclaiming that I am not a hardcore feminist (anymore) out to condemn the patriarchal symbolism.  I am simply surprised by--for all the time and energy that people spend planning their weddings--how few people depart from the standard structure.

And it’s not for lack of wanting to be different.  People love kvetching about other people’s weddings more than San Franciscans love complaining about rent prices.  I could invade Russia with the army of bemoaners of how expensive weddings are “these days” and how overdone the whole charade is and how awful it is to be around so-and-so the Bridezilla.

And yet, there in the Graveyard of Famous Last Words, among the skeletons of college student oaths to never vote republican and daughter’s vows to never become their mothers and all of my resolutions to eat dinner before chocolate, is the mountain of promises people make to themselves to have a simple and inexpensive wedding.

But I think that's OK -- getting married is a big deal!  All the most important people in our lives are going to be there, it only happens one to four times in our lifetime, and -- in case we have any insecurity about how to plan a successful and socially acceptable wedding -- there is a billion dollar industry ready to sweep us up in breathtaking capitalistic efficiency and tend to every worry we didn’t even know we had.   It’s going to cost a lot of money, it’s going to be a production, we will fret over details we never imagined would be important, but we should all be prepared to accept this.  Maybe even embrace it.

However, I still don’t understand why the day itself has to follow such a specific formula.  Let’s consider the objectives of the event:

--To celebrate the love between two people

--To commemorate the new union of two families

--To reunite old friends

--To inspire sentimental feelings about the bride and groom’s lives and relationship

--To take a lot of pictures, especially of the young people in their physical prime

Other than that, it’s just a party where the standard objectives apply: to enjoy entertainment, food, drinks, music, dancing, and general merriment.

It seems like there are a variety of ways to achieve these ends that don’t necessarily involve sitting backwards in chairs watching a slow motion parade.  For example, why does the couple hide before the ceremony?  If all of my closest friends and relatives traveled from near and far, requested time off from work, painted their toenails and ironed their shirts to come and see me, I might consider greeting them at the door.  Of course, there will be a lot of people to chat with and ask about how their flights were and compliment their haircuts and it may be exhausting but, if we consult our handy list of objectives, “Enjoying a relaxed and introverted evening” did not make the cut.

As for the rest of the ceremony, I am one hundred percent in favor of putting on a show starring the couple and their families and best friends.  I, as evidenced by yesterday’s sneak attack of tears, find the slow motion parade very moving.  But it occurred to me that the same effect could be accomplished in another scenario with, for instance, the main cast of characters actually facing the audience.  Perhaps, instead of readings, each person could share a funny memory or sing a song or show some old photos.  What if the bridesmaids and groomsmen sat together on stools on one side of the stage?  What if they didn’t match their outfits? What if, instead of the father/daughter mother/son dances, the first dance was a big group dance so that everyone is already on the floor when the party music starts?  Again, it’s not that these ideas are any better -- they are just possibilities that seem to never get considered.  

These are probably my own famous last words.  I can see myself reading this the day after my own daffodil-themed Pachabel's cannon white-dress fairy tale wedding and scoffing at my youthful hubris to invent a new version of something steeped in centuries of tradition.  

But, mark my words, if I ever get married, there will be chocolate before dinner.

Rooftop reflections

Have you ever had one of those days when you are riding your bike and you feel a tire go flat?   And  you notice that every pebble jostles your balance and you push the pedals twice as hard but go only half as fast?  But then, when you get off to check the pressure of the tires and they are both tight as drums, you have that moment of realization that the flatness is in your own body?

The morning stains the western tips of the sky with a citrus glow, but above the horizon’s blush the lavender dawn is almost unblemished.   The only interruptions in the entire dome of the Earth’s cap are the moon (whose unsubtle and pearly presence looks like the work of a bad Photoshop artist), a diamond gleam in the east (whether a star, planet or spacecraft is unknown), and, in the bottom inch or two of skyline, chimneys, satellite dishes, rooftops, and various other urban spires of mysterious name and function.  All is still as a picture, save for the occasional aviary silhouette gliding from one spire to another.

Climbing up to the roof is to take a camera lens and crank it ninety degrees to the left so that all the things that were impossible to ignore--traffic lights, swerving mopeds, skateboarders, slamming gates, sirens, dogs yanking on leashes--suddenly blur out of focus and the silent plume of steam exhaling from a roof pipe above the Picassoesque geometry of shingles upon housetops upon balconies upon towers comes into sharp relief.  

I come up here to think.  After several months of chasing after my life with a butterfly net, I was due for a moment of pause.  For I have learned this about myself: I am a creature of The Now.  Whatever is happening in this waking moment takes precedence over all else and unless I forcibly remove myself from my daily Ferris wheel, I will follow the breadcrumb trail of buzzing phones, work emails, dinner invites, race registration alerts and free samples all the way down into a sleepless oblivion, in a comatose state of knee jerk Yes! reactions to all immediate stimuli.

Some people struggle with living in the moment.  They buy books about the art of Zen and present-mindedness.   For these people it is an effort, a prayer, a New Year Resolution to bury memories and anxieties and to just bask in each of life’s savory moments as they pass.

I am not one of those people.  All of my cares about the future weigh less than Forrest Gump’s feather.  I lose sleep over nothing (unless I am on a plane in which case I lose sleep for lack of prescription medication to make me forget that I am trapped).  Most of the worries I discuss with friends are more topics of conversation than actual sentiments I mull over when I’m alone.

The go-with-the-flow lifestyle is ulcerless and lovely… to a certain point.  The only problem arises when “the flow” starts drifting in an unintended direction.  The problem is when there are so many things to do but, when you look closely, no real reason for doing any of them, other than the fact that the opportunities presented themselves, in sequined and sexy nowness, at the door.  The problem is when getting out of bed every morning is more a result of muscle memory than will power.  It’s when you find yourself moving through the days by some unnamed inertia, happenstance gusts of wind and the momentum of a busy-ness addiction, without any internally anchored drive to arrive at any particular destination.  But a wheel can only roll for so long without a motor.

As I pondered this on the Rooftop of Catharsis, I decided that, in defiance of Carrie Underwood and in homage of Incubus, it was time I take the proverbial Wheel and outline something of a life plan for myself.  

I dug up my faux-leather serious-thoughts-only notebook, and started thumbing for a blank page.  At almost exactly the midway point, I found the end of the inked section and stretched the stiff binding open flat, like cracking vertebrae on a stiff back.  Upon closer inspection, I realized the page I had opened to was not, in fact, empty.  It was almost blank except the top corner was labeled 12/2/2013 and on the header there was a single scribbled word in all caps: “GOALS.”

I suppose I am nothing if not consistent.

Superhuman

Sometimes I’m pretty sure I am a superhuman.  Last night, for example, I managed to unlock the outer gate and the front door to my apartment, carry my bike up the stairs, walk into the kitchen without knocking anything over, and assemble and consume three medium sized burritos (each with a flawless chicken:guac:slaw:salsa ratio).  I accomplished all of this with a blood alcohol level of whatever results from chugging five 5% beers while running 2,000 meters plus two 8% celebration beers.  

I deserved a trophy.  Made of carbs.  The fact that I got last place in the Beer Mile was overshadowed by the olympic execution of this complex series of tasks.  The last and most challenging event of the Frontal Lobe Decathlon was to make an online reservation.  I needed to reserve a Getaround car (like Zipcar but better) for 7:15 the following morning.  It needed to be under $7/hour, automatic transmission, within a mile of my house, and big enough to fit my bike.  Processing this amount of information with so few available brain cells would not be easy, but I was in a herculean mood.  Using mostly my index fingers and one squinted eye, I clicked and scrolled and entered my correct password (on the third try) like a champion.  

The day’s work done, I slept the sleep of a sweaty baby on a merry-go-round but, thanks to satellites that remember daylight savings, my cell phone alarm did not fail to punctually end the restless night.   I “awoke” (if you can call it that) feeling just enough head pain to make me feel alive.  I stood and faced the world outside my window and inhaled all the momentum my lungs could hold.  By 7:30, I was heading out the door with my helmet, goggles, swim cap, running shoes and registration number for the Redwood City Triathlon.  How did my dehydrated raisin brain remember to assemble all of these things? I marveled.   

But alas, at the height of my invincibility, the universe saw fit to remind me of my mortality.   Right before I left, I went to loosen the anti-theft pin on the front fork of my bike so that I could easily remove the wheel when I got to the car.  If you’ve never seen one of these, they look like this:

I twisted and heaved until my palms were purple — the pin would not budge.  My pajamaed roommate leaned against her doorframe, watching with lips pushed to one side of her face.  I stood up and looked at her.  

“I’m going to the streets to find a man.”  

She gave an earnest nod.  “Good luck.”

There is only one type of man to be found on the streets of SoMa in the early morning hours on a Sunday.   He is not known for chivalry.  There was a pack of four of them on the corner of 8th and Howard and I rolled towards them at an uncertain angle, like a grandma’s bowling ball toward a cluster of four pins.  When I was close enough to realize they were all simultaneously spitting profanities at each other, I rolled straight on past without a word.  Gutter ball.  The bike shop was closed and so was the liquor store.  Sleepy weekend dawns in The City are normally one of my favorite things.  Most Sunday mornings, I love nothing more than riding through the still urban streets, quiet as the apocalypse.  But on this particular morning, I was just annoyed by the astounding lack of non-drug addicted humans within a mile radius of my house.  I stared up into the windows of the new gleaming high rises — come on hipsters!  I know you’re in there!  Don’t you want brunch already?!  

Fortunately, right as I was passing the gas station, a cop car pulled in to the coin vacuum.   I silently apologized for cursing the San Francisco police just one day earlier after getting pulled over on my bike and I gave the officer my brightest debutant smile as he stepped out of his car.   He was obliged to rescue my distressed damsel self, even when I muttered something about “yeah well I loosened it” when he unscrewed the pin on his first attempt. 

I checked my watch — 7:48, plenty of time.  Everything was back on track… until I got to the parking lot and the car was not there.  I called Getaround and was informed that I had made the reservation for 7:15 PM.   Wait a minute.  What does that mean about my perceived success of everything else that happened at home last night?  The stealth entrance, the perfectly ratioed burritos??  (Suddenly I saw a grizzly flashback of a clanking bicycle, scattered tupperware lids, guacamole plopping to the floor.  Nooo!!)  God bless Josh, the phone support guy at Getaround, who immediately booked me another car—a Prius, automatic, $7/hour, big enough for my bike—only two blocks away.  

This post has been brought to you by Getaround — official sponsor of the Peace As In 

✌ blog and the best invention since Craigslist. 
(I’m kidding about the sponsorship, but serious about the rest.)

As someone who hasn’t owned a car for almost a year and hasn’t consistently driven at all in the past three years, I have a question for the automotive world: when did keys and ignitions go out of style?  To an outside observer, I must have looked like a chimpanzee in a science experiment trying to start the Prius — turning and flipping the fob, lifting it to my eyes to stare at it from every angle, smelling it for clues as to where the actual key might be.  When I finally deduced the right combination of levers and switches to pull a tiny key out of the fob, I couldn’t find anywhere to insert it.  

I spent about ten minutes triggering windshield wipers, clicking the emergency lights, activating the brake and turning on the radio before finally resorting to a YouTube tutorial.  My IQ pride was slightly comforted by the fact that I only needed to type “How to start a P” for Google to know what I needed on the second guess.  Apparently there are almost as many dumb drivers as people who want to start a photography business, so at least I’m not alone.  

But nothing restores healthy ego like a bunch of white people giving you high fives for swimming, biking and running all in a row — especially when they assume that your lack of wetsuit is not an act of stinginess, but an intentional act of bravery.  I am not cheap, I am daring!  Icy cold water be damned!   You amuse me with your attempt to freeze me to death!  By 11:00 AM—less than 17 hours after I was clutching my knees to hold back Budweiser vomit on the track—I was strolling the strut of a king out of the triathlon finish area, bike in one hand, bagel and a banana in the other (did I mention I think I may have superpowers?).  

Back at the car I realized that the Prius is actually big enough to fit my entire bike without having to remove the front wheel so… I’ll know for next time to skip the charade with the street men and the cop.  Somehow it took another ten minutes of monkey detective work to put the damn car in reverse (seriously Toyota, what is with that shifter?), but when I was finally driving out of the parking lot with the windows down, sun on my forearm, Bay salt in my hair and crumbs of peanut butter bagel all over my face, I was a winner. 

When it rains

I ran a race on Sunday so I technically could have taken Monday off, but I wanted to take my visiting friend on my favorite loop around Mission Creek.  I could have taken Tuesday off but Tuesday is team practice day at Kezar which I skip about as often as my Grandmother skipped Sunday Mass (i.e. only on her death bed).  I had already RSVPed to my neighbor’s birthday run on Wednesday and since I knew I’d be taking a day off to drive to Tahoe on Friday for a company trip, I figured that, despite the steadily increasing soreness on the side of my foot, I should go ahead and run on Thursday too.

After the eleventh mile on Thursday (the 48th of that five day span), I was walking with a bit of a limp.   Nothing a little ice massage and 24-hour break couldn’t heal, I thought.  But on Friday I was still sporting a Quasimodo-ish strut and on Saturday morning in Tahoe, when the rest of my coworkers piled into cars with goggles and boots and company-expensed lift tickets on their jackets, I stood on one foot in the parking lot like a pathetic flamingo, waving goodbye in the rain.  My boss stayed back with me and agreed to participate in whatever non weight-bearing activity I could come up with.

Since swimming in the lake wasn’t exactly feasible and snowmobiling is about as appealing to me as driving around in a convertible sports car (pastimes I don’t understand), we walked to the nearest rental store and asked for a pair of bikes.  The employee, a woosh-haired kid with lanky arms, started laughing through his braces.  A woman that was arranging a stack of skis behind the counter stopped what she was doing to turn over her shoulder and raise her eyebrows at us.  An older bearded man at the cash register who looked like the store manager and a Knower Of Things Related To Outdoor Sports looked at us with a confused face as if he was unsure if we would understand his English and said, “You know it’s raining outside?”

Under different circumstances I might have let myself get talked out of the idea.  I did, after all, have a thick novel, a perfectly lovely leather couch by a crackling fire, and Olympic figure skating playing on flat screen TV back at the hotel lodge.  But the thought of everyone else having adventures in the mountains filled me with a college freshman’s determination to have fun at all costs.  Not R&R fun.  Extreme fun.  So I put on my confident “What on earth is everyone so concerned about?” face and proceeded with the checkout process for the rentals.  My boss bought a facemask and I considered getting some waterproof gloves but they were $40.  I found two ziplock bags in my backpack, dumped the crumbs and banana peel slime, scraped off the wad of gum, and put them over my wool mittens, tucking the tops into my jacket sleeves for optimal air-tight element protection.  

The rain was coming down in sheets.  Within five minutes my snow pants had tripled in weight from absorption of water.   We tried to stick to the bike path but when the snow was too deep we had to ride along the highway where ski-and-snowboard-laden SUVs splashed us with their grumbling chain tires. My boss’s ski gloves "resisted" water with as much success as Justin Bieber resisting arrest and when we stopped to check the map, he rung out a small faucet’s worth of rain from each one with yellowish-white hands that had clearly stopped receiving circulation.  The map was soaked and disintegrating but after a quick study, we knew the general direction of our goal: Lily Lake.  It was the place the lanky braces kid told us would have been beautiful in nicer weather and the destination we had deemed worthy of our epic trek.  

A couple miles down the road, my boss, in an I’m-not-complaining-just-stating-the-facts tone, said he was not able to use his brakes because his fingers were unresponsive.  We pulled over into the nearest cafe and I asked for two plastic bags that I tied around his hands (Dear Gortex, You should consider partnering with Ziplock for your next product line.).  My fingers, although relatively dry, were also frozen but I refrained from mentioning it.   I actually couldn’t stop laughing because, besides my mission to achieve maximum Fun, the entire scene was so ridiculously miserable as to be legitimately funny.  I also think the cold was making me slightly hysterical.

We rode on.  We rode through puddles up to our pedals and across clumpy ice that made our handlebars shake and our back tires fishtail.  The worst parts were traversing snowy bridges or unplowed back roads in low gears moving slower than if we were to just walk carrying our bikes on our backs.  The best parts were the climbs that required enough physical effort to get our pulses up.  There was a moment on the mountain when we were pedaling up a trail that was essentially a creek, water and mud spraying from all directions, where I was seized with rush of crazed adrenaline and it occurred to me that there was nowhere else I would rather be.  My elevated heart rate was sweeter than sex.  It was also the only thing keeping blood pumping to my extremities (at least that is what I hoped was happening since I couldn’t actually feel anything past my knees or elbows).  

At the crest of the hill my boss asked how long it generally takes for frostbite to set in after feet go numb.  Just out of scientific curiosity.  I’m not sure how close we were but we never made it to Lily Lake.  I like to think we were only within a couple miles when we surrendered and turned back.  Going down the mountain was much more challenging than the climb.  I’ll take a tingling fire in my quads over a needle-stabbing numbness in my brake-clutching fingertips any day.  The sight of the highway at the bottom of the back road was a relief, scenery be damned.  There was too much rain to see beyond a ten-foot radius anyway so, as long as my tires could roll forward without sliding from side to side, I had no problem riding next to metal side rails and piles of dirty plowed snow.  My mind lost the capacity to do anything but fantasize about a steaming hot shower.

Much to my momentum-obsessed chagrin, we made one last stop at a thrift store on the side of the road where my boss bought another pair of socks.  Our shoes were essentially ice sponges at that point (I was secretly hoping the extended cold treatment would heal my injured foot).  When he sat down to take his shoes off, his entire body--from his hands to his thighs to tiny muscles on his back--was trembling in unsettling jerky spasms.  I made a short speech about perseverance and endurance which gave us just enough emotional inertia to get to the first bridge where a wall of gale force wind nearly knocked us off our bikes and knocked our spirits back down to base survival mode.  

When we finally made it back to the rental store, I half expected the employees to throw us a parade.  A few of them did clap.  Most of them just shook their heads.  When I tried to make a joke about Just a little water never hurt anyone ha ha, it came out slurred and in slow motion from my frozen lips.  My boss, definitely not in a joking mood, said he would rather run ten marathons in normal weather than walk the mile back to the hotel in the rain.  But a sunny ultramarathon was not on the menu, so walk we did (me limping on my bad foot) in a single-minded zombie delirium for warmth.

Frankly my dear...

I was miraculously not hung over when I woke up on Saturday morning but 7:00am was nonetheless surprising and unwelcome.  I considered combing my hair and putting on makeup but when I looked in the mirror, I saw Rhett Butler staring back at me.  All of the sudden, the words “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” became my mantra for the weekend.  

I fist-pumped the Lyft driver half-heartedly hoping that he would just let me stare out the window, but the round and jovial Arab man, like my mother, seemed to consider early morning drives to the airport prime time for bonding.  

“Where are you headed?”

“Kansas City,” I said in a quiet voice to indicate my predisposition to introversion.  He was undeterred.

“Oh wow!  Brrr!  What are you going to Kansas for?”

I was too tired point out his geographical error.  “I have a conference for work and also visiting a friend in town.”

By the time we arrived at SFO, the man had ascertained enough major bullet points of my life story to write my online dating profile and, as the half of my brain that was not participating in the conversation performed some checklisting, I had realized that I, in my 7:00am stupor, had forgotten to pack my one clean dress shirt, hair dryer, scarf and gloves.

Fortunately, Missouri was not as apocalyptically cold as I feared it would be.  Unfortunately, the AirBnB apartment was not as luxurious as I hoped it would be (no laundry, no hair dryer).  And interestingly, Kansas City was not the hustling metropolis I remembered it being.  I was supposedly in the heart of downtown and there was not a soul in sight nor a market, grocery store, or even a Walgreens within reasonable walking distance where I could buy the toothbrush and deodorant I had also forgotten (apparently the only things I remembered were my running shoes and the bag of custom-branded stress balls to hand out at the conference).  Standing on the sidewalk watching the midwestern wind rustle naked aspens, I shrugged my shoulders and thought of Rhett’s words...

That night I went out for burgers with my coworker and a friend, whose personalities are about as similar as a cucumber and a chili pepper.   Sitting between them at the restaurant, I realized the combination actually made for pleasant dinner table dynamics -- one literally screaming to accentuate especially interesting parts of a gushing stream of stories while the other piped in with periodic follow up questions and genuine laughs.  Everyone was enjoying themselves so thoroughly that, even though the meal had been my fourth that day, far be it from me to rain on anyone’s dessert parade.  Who gives a damn?  Let us eat cake!  As the three of us devoured a “Chocolate Bag” -- a $14 Kansas City delicacy filled with cream and berries -- I swallowed my guilt (and slight nausea, at that point) with an internal commitment to 100% healthy foods for the next 24 hours.   

But after a long morning run followed by a series of unplanned errands causing us to miss the first three quarters of the 49ers game, the fruit and granola bars were defenseless against my rising irritability.  I could feel the bristly fur growing on my knuckles.  By 2:00pm, it came down to a lupine transformation or the sweet potato fries.  There’s no bad mood a little grease dipped in barbecue sauce can’t subdue.  Screw it.  Rhett wouldn’t give a damn.  Plus, if I was going to be schmoozing with prospective clients all evening, I would need all the energy I could get.  

At the conference, we stood at a booth handing out wine and chocolate and stress balls to people in blazers and buttoned shirts.  I looked around me and saw a shimmery fog dissipate to reveal the futility of everything.  I made a silent promise to never grow up to be one of the people in that room.  I tried shielding myself from the reality that I already was one of the people in that room with another dose of my weekend’s apathy streak.  I didn’t really care about any of it.  That makes me better than them, right?  All the people, bustling around in their Marshalls khakis with their leather portfolios and little metal business card holders, they are below me because they take serious pride in the “PRESENTER” and “VOLUNTEER” and “FIRST-TIMER” ribbons stacked in a self-adhering rainbow below their attendee badges.  They wear those lanyards like Olympic gold medals.  I do not stoop so low as to take an interest in the keynote address.  I do not attend any educational sessions. I suppose I don’t abstain from the free breakfast buffet with the giant shiny platters of scrambled eggs and mini croissants, but I certainly don’t show up early to be first in line.  I, at the very least, acknowledge that this event is largely irrelevant to anyone outside the room.  I am at least aware that these smiles and handshakes and Grand Prize Drawings! may as well be featured on a Truman Show that we are watching about ourselves.  

So long as I withheld my damn-giving and maintained a layer of cynicism under my own Marshalls sweater, I was immune to my own mockery.

“Here is your invitation to the After Hours VIP party in Suite 32 on the 18th floor,” the dyed-blonde woman with the badge “Ashley, Event Coordinator” said to me with a wink.  I thanked her in a “Who, me?” flattered voice but, once she was out of earshot, I turned to my coworker with a sarcastic “Oooo!”   We started clearing(/eating) the leftover chocolates and putting away the stress balls and our “Enter Your Business Card For A Chance To Win!” bag from the table and my friend asked, “So what do you guys want to do now?”  It was still early and we’d already eaten plenty of free orderves...

Up to the 18th floor we went.  Of the wine and cheese we partook.  Yuck and guffaw with the pot-bellied midwestern conference-goers we did.  Not a single damn did we give.  (And I was really beginning to appreciate the adaptability of my new philosophy.)

For our last dinner, after days of fried and saucy indulgences, we went to a vegan place called Cafe Gratitude.  Each menu item was a sentence written in the first person.  I ordered the “I Am Fortified” with a side of “I Am Humble” and we spent the rest of the meal making fun of hippies.  But--perhaps it was the quinoa or the warm lighting or the flower and sunshine wall murals--but I actually walked out of the restaurant feeling sincerely grateful.  The lack of animal byproducts had magically rid me of my Rhett Butler syndrome and I found myself genuinely caring about and feeling glad for all the good things in my life.   

I was grateful for my friend who spent the weekend driving us all around Kansas City (Who knew that request-by-app-taxis don’t exist in Missouri?***).  I was grateful for the infinite patience and optimism of my coworker.  And when I landed back home to a 65-degree sapphire sky San Francisco day, I thanked all the stars and moons and vegetarian gods that I live in California.

And I’m grateful for Lyft drivers.  They are so friendly.

***NOTE.  Announcement for all hipsters travelling to the midwest: Sitting shotgun and fist-pumping the driver is not appropriate in normal taxis.  Such behavior can and likely will lead to awkward situations you will regret.

Graduation from 2013

Every year when my brother and I were little, my parents and uncles marked our heights on the wall at my grandma’s house.  I miss that.  I’ve realized most of my New Years resolutions these days are some variation of that ritual -- I tell myself I’m going to start filling out annual surveys about my thoughts on life or take a picture every day for a year or write a letter to my future self or keep a video diary… anything to keep track, to be able to get to the end of a year and say, “Look!  I’m bigger now!”  I have yet to complete any of these projects successfully, but I almost always end up throwing myself a therapy party this time of year to sit down and ask myself all the questions I used to roll my eyes at when my mom would ask me on my birthdays.  (“What was your proudest accomplishment this year?  Happiest memory?  Biggest regret?”)  

After a little calendar and photo album reminiscing, I’ve concluded that 2013, definitively, happened and that it was, on the whole, a good year.  I broke my personal record for number of street tacos consumed in a ten day period, I learned how to use a power drill and I swam in bioluminescent water.  I relived an entire 13-month relationship in one weekend when my ex came to visit and concluded that breaking up was, in fact, the right decision.  I traveled to Atlanta, Toronto, Baltimore, Chicago, Portland, San Antonio, Bend and Austin and concluded that San Francisco is, in fact, the best city in the US.  My best friend was accepted to an ivy league medical school, my teammates got married in a Redwood grove, and a person of unspecified relation to me had the cops called on him for pooping in the woods.  It was awesome.

Also friends’ hearts got broken, mom’s heart got surgery, and things got stolen (two laptops, two bikes and a wallet, but who’s counting?).  My friend Virginia got deported to Colombia after accidentally setting her host family’s house on fire and my friend Brandon “Collins” turned out to be a criminal with a stolen identity.  There were a few long nights enduring the view of spinning tiles on bathroom floors and a few long weeks enduring a knee injury and runninglessness.

But at the end of the year, I’ve certainly collected a few extra bullet points on my life resume.

Things I learned about life in 2013:

• Almost everything tastes better when chopped up in a massive bowl of spinach with greek yogurt, lemon, salt and a little balsamic.  That may sound weirdly healthy, but it’s actually just a sneaky way to take more bites out of something that tastes good.  (e.g. 1 Burrito = 12 bites.  1 Burrito cut up in a giant bowl of spinach = 40 bites.)
• The cheapest spinach is at Mi Tierra market on 16th and Mission.  
• Always wear a helmet.  Always lock up bikes with a U lock.  Never put bikes on roofs of cars.  
• The “I think we should stop seeing each other” conversation does not get easier with practice.
• Wearing basically the same clothes every day frees up a lot of mental space.
• A designated laundry “Purgatory” holder next to the hamper (not technically clean, but not quite dirty) is essential to life.  Giant lamp shades work well for this.
• There are few opportunities to repay your parents (i.e. moments when they need your love and support as much as you have needed theirs throughout your life).  Such opportunities should not be squandered, though they usually are.
• Proscuitto will definitely get stuck in your throat if you try to swallow it without chewing.  No matter how well your darts game is going, just stop and go clear your air passage.
• Witty intellectual Halloween costumes, even when based on trending pop culture or political themes, are rarely as good as easy-to-recognize classic ones.
• Never pay someone before they deliver your furniture.  
• If ordering multiple barrels of wine for a party, open one at a time. That way if people only drink a few liters, the other two are still intact (and potentially returnable for a refund).
• Happiness is biking from Golden Gate Park to SoMa at 10pm on a Tuesday night after a track workout and a few $2 Tecates at the Mucky Duck.

Things I learned about myself in 2013:

• Fine dining and high fashion are not luxuries I appreciate.
• Grocery delivery and non-stop flights are luxuries I appreciate.
• I am slowly becoming my mother.  
• I am addicted to agnosticism -- the dangerous tendency to relegate anything that is complex or difficult to understand to the realm of “Things that humans will never be able to fully comprehend.”
• If there is cheese in the refrigerator today, there will not be cheese in the refrigerator tomorrow (I am incapable of not eating all the cheese).  
• The thing I value most in a companion is the ability to be surprisingly honest, unfiltered and authentic.  But if they can also fix bikes, tell good jokes and/or love tacos, it doesn’t hurt.
• Running is essential to my mental and emotional well-being. I may have already known that in 2012 but it really hit home this year.
• I am more flattered by exclamations of surprise and disbelief than by direct compliments (think talking to a five-year-old: “No way! Can you really name all the colors?!”)
• I should not have pets.  Or plants.
• I should not be trusted near other people’s leftovers.
• If someone asks for my help on a project, I will commandeer the entire operation, go above and beyond all expectations and leave them feeling grateful but also uncomfortable with critiquing anything I’ve done (even if it was never really asked for).
• I have a mediocre singing voice and am not the least bit embarrassed by it.

I’m not going to mark my personal growth on the wall in my apartment (mostly because it’s painted green and pencil wouldn’t really show up) but I think it’s safe to say I’m older now than I was a year ago.  

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure what the actual Goal of growing up is… Becoming a Master Sage, I suppose.   So if nothing else, the lampshade laundry purgatory was a major step.