Viewing posts for the category my friends do the greatest things

the true price of free

Thursday, mar. 27, 2008   |   0 comments

Stephen has started reporting on what he finds crawling under that particular rock known as the free-giveaway section of Craigslist. Here's a stirring sampling:

"Ha ha! Crappy shelves and . . . wait, there's nothing funny about this. What's funny about a chair that looks like it's about to die of loneliness?"

And...

"Hi, how are you! We've decided this futuristic trigon of a cheese grater is either (1) too unsanitary (2) too dangerous, or (3) too useless for its intended purpose to allow it to stay in our home for even a moment longer. Right now, we've got it in the garage. But that's not quite far enough away. Do you want it?"

And...

"Retro Sofa poster, your piece of furniture is why god gave man fire."

Keywords he's felt compelled to use so far include broken, dangerous, dirty, ugly, unsanitary, useless, and old and busted -- it takes the true grit of genius to find the laughter in those defeated words. I bow to you, eyes shut respectfully, friend Stephen!

I'm right here!

Monday, oct. 1, 2007   |   0 comments

Sorry, sorry, sorry for the blogio silence, it’s just that I somehow got myself a real job, not at the kids detective agency (pictured above), sadly (though how amazing would that be?), but at a big-girl bank by the name of Wells Fargo. And while I like the work, and I’m thrilled by the regular dollars, the sudden onslaught of regular working hours and meetingsmeetingsmeetings and the office coffee and the “conduct training,” it all just sort of threw me for a loop for awhile there. Basically all I could manage to do for the last four months was:

6am: Get up.
6:10: Drink cups and cups of ambition alone in the quiet still-dark.
6:20: NPR.
6:30: Walk the squeeziest dog in the world.
7:30: Leap into the shower
7:32: Apply makeup (what? who?).
7:40: Iron slacks.
7:45: Don slacks.
8: Walk to the casual carpool pickup spot (each unique snowflake of a ride described in 140 characters or less via Twitter).
9: Work, work, work (right alongside the great and awesome and awesomely talented Annie, lucky!).
5:30pm: Walk to the bus station.
6:10: Disembark at the top of the Oakland Rose Garden.
6:10 to 6:15: Walk through the Oakland Rose Garden, sniffing and smiling.
6:20: Home again.
7: Eating.
9:30: Yawning.
10: Bed.

Notice that there’s no naps in that schedules, none. Weaning myself off the 3pm nap was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do — there were some real zombie days in the beginning there, lots of shuffling and “huh?“ing.

When I was first considering taking the job, a friend of a friend (who works at the company) said hopeful things about how the hours are sane enough that you can actually do other things with your life, but he warned that it would take “about four months” before I would work up the stamina to be able to do anything beyond stare at things during my off hours. And today? Is my exact four-month anniversary! And so, Hi.

In other news, I’m back to desperately writing about Desperate Housewives. And! I appear to have gotten myself shangboozled into another reading (and ohh, just typing those words gave me a wooze of panic):

Opium’s Literary Death Match
Friday, October 12, doors open at 7pm
The Swedish American Hall
Tickets: $15 (price includes the latest copy of Opium)

The unfairly talented Daniel Handler will be anchoring the lineup, along with Wesley Stace and Gary Kamiya (whom I’ve never met, but I really have a good feeling about those guys). And of course I’m going to be there, all drunk and sweaty and nerve-poisoned, and who wants to miss out on that? Really, I could use your strong, honest-work-coarsened hands, both to offer soothing pats/sippables and to bring the noise when it comes to the clap-o-meter portion of the competition. Here’s hoping!

Also: My good friends The Kids Are Alright have written the world a song about blogs, and love. You’re welcome!

a month of phat tuesdays!

Thursday, mar. 29, 2007   |   0 comments
I've been having such good Tuesday luck this March! This past Tuesday, Adrienne and I met up with Liz, Brett, and Josh at the big "Meat & Greet" launch party for the shiny new Meatpaper, a magazine which is proving to be one of those overlapping circles of coincidence that life sometimes hands you -- I heard about it because Sasha, the woman who designed the Sleep book, is one of the founders, but then her co-founder is magically the wife of my special new internet friend Chris, and she also works with Adrienne at KQED, and she also is ultra-close friends with a woman I went to college with, and, and, AND -- which leave you feeling like you're the superstar of a complicated Dickens novel, where everything puzzles together with a satisfying, cardboard-y SNAPPP! (And then Adrienne and I went to the St. Francis for warm brownies and cold ice cream. PERECT ENDING!)

Last Tuesday I finally, finally flesh-met Amelia Bauer, the woman who illustrated the Sleep book. For a year now, she and I have somehow managed to keep missing each other -- I'm in New York, she's in Santa Fe, she's in San Francisco, I'm in, I don't know, somewhere stupidly not-San Francisco -- and anyway, you know how you meet someone and you just instantly like the way their face moves when they talk? That's Amelia...just a fresh little plucky cloud of yay! She and I enjoyed a nice rice storm at Little Baobob along with a bunch of the McSweeney's kids, and a bunch of pitchers of that crazy-great fruit booze punch. There may even have even been some jerky public puppet dancing along to the dreaded (hoh!) reggae music?

And then the Tuesday before THAT, one of my oldest, greatest friends Shree and I went to see Word for Word's take on a story by the bogglingly likeable Lorrie Moore. Dave and Vendela and Lisa and Daniel were all there, milling around in the lobby before/after the show, and Dave nicely introduced me to Lorrie, and I smiled and shook her hand (!) and said, "hello" and "nice to meet you," like a completely normal person, which as you well know is a big step for me. But then I countered that small victory by babbling strange, uncomfortable things to everyone else in the room. (Evany to Vendela: "Sorry I had to keep leaving your reading, but I had to go outside and cough so hard I peed my pants." Vendela: "I don't think that's supposed to happen until you have a baby." Evany, gesturing in a circling motion at her peeing apparatus: "Oh, I've got a LOT going on down there." World at large: "Shhhhhhh?") I also ate a incredibly fine vanilla cupcake from snooty Greens!

And then...something really good happened the Tuesday before that. Was it the Trapped in the Closet Sing-along? Where, while waiting in line, I overheard someone say, "Is there an age maximum for this?" No, that was on a Wednesday, so that doesn't fit in here at all. OH WAIT! After an archeological dig through my e-dusty email inbox, I now remember exactly what happened Tuesday, March 6: Jennie took me to the Kasper Hauser SkyMaul powerpoint show! After which we stupefied ourselves with tracter-pull portions of Indian food! Oh right. That was good.

Coming up: chicken-shopping with Caroleen, also everyone's favorite Brangien's in town!

two days in the life

Sunday, mar. 18, 2007   |   0 comments

Things have been gloriously busy in both my life and head these past weeks. To give you an idea of just how much of a liar I’m not about this, here’s a little glimpse at my schedule from last weekend:

9am Saturday: Wake up, do some gentle puttering and coffeeing in my delicious cashmere robe.

Noon: Marilyn (in town all the way from Boston) and I hit the dog-friendly Redwood Park for a thigh-shaking nine-mile hike with Pigstar.

4pm to 5:15pm: Frantic showering and outfit-fussing.

6pm: Marilyn, Marco, and I join Liz, Ivan, Heidi, and Paul for a delicious dinner at COCO500, wherein much pink wine is consumed (by me), mini crowns are doffed, three different cameras are flashed, and the conversation lurches from Beaches to the Dutch East India Company with lusty (if ignorant) verve.

8pm: Heidi, Paul, Marilyn, Marco, and I pile into the brown, brown Marco-mobile, new home of the mysterious authentic ali-croc head, and putt on over to the Grey Area Gallery, where the opening friend Annie was so fired up about is being held, and where I ogle the find arts (Amy Ruppel’s beeswax/resin painting/collages are even more lux in person, hoo!), talk to one of the gallery owners about her most excellent Proenza Schouler for Target top, and (eek!) forget to tip the bartender (oh how I woke the next morning full of panicked regret over this!).

9pm: We all leap back into the car and head back to SOMA, to the Utah, where my friend-from-grad-school Buzz reads from his brand new book, Madonna of the Toast, and where I am so happy to run into friend Kirsten, it’s been too long! Bands play, multiple readers read, and finally…

Midnight: …Marilyn, Marco, and I head back to our place, where we tuck Marilyn into the couch and shuffle off to buffalo (bed).

9:30am Sunday: Already well coffeed and yogurt-fed, Marilyn packs up her rental car and heads off to the airport — bye, Marilyn, we’ll miss you! — and Marco, Sandra, Pigstar, and I roll off to Pacifica, where Marco surfs, Sandra and I fondle sea anemones, and Piggy runs and runs.

11:30am: Marco, Sandra, and I brunch it up on an insane three-way split of hash, olallieberry crepes, and a towering Rueben, jesus christ!

2:30pm: Drop off Sandra and head home.

3-4pm: Power nap.

4:30pm: Drive to San Jose.

5:30pm: SHARKS ON THE POWERPLAY!

7:30pm: Drive home.

8:30pm: (Without, of course, neglecting to stop at In-N-Out for a burger animal style, which I always mistakenly refer to as “Monster Style,” much to everyone’s mirth and confusion.)

9:30pm: Home again, home again, only barely conscious enough to brush our teeth and hobble to bed.

5am Monday: The alarm blares…

a breathless story about a small series of events

Thursday, feb. 22, 2007   |   0 comments

A couple weekends back I got a great deal on Southwest and flew down to LA for my friend Megan’s housewarming party (her loft is insanely gorgeous, with brick walls and tons of light and space, wow). The trip perfectly coincided with an art opening for one of my favorite web people, Lisa Congdon, which was held at the Reform School, a store I’ve long wanted to poke into.

So even though it was the scheduling was a tad hectic — Megan’s party started right at eight and the opening started at seven, giving me only the briefest window in which to navigate to the Reform School (in Megan’s ridiculously sporty convertible Audi thing), ogle everything, and then dash back to Megan’s — I scrambled my way over there, managing to get turned around only once or maybe four times along the way.

Now, as a small subplot to all this, I’d tried to get Pam to hit the opening with me, but she couldn’t go because she had to go buy a ball gown for this black-tie event (she wound up coming to Megan’s party instead, which was such a delightful clash of my worlds, delightful and booze-soaked). By the way, that’s my new favorite excuse for bowing out of any invite: Unfortunately I shall not be able to accept your kind invitation as I’ll be otherwise ensconced in a ball gown shopping spree. Anyway, so as I was heading off to the opening, my Sidekick rattled with a text from “AB”: “Are you going to Lisa Congdon’s show tonight? YOU MUST CALL ME!” AB. AB? Who do I know by the initials AB who also knows I’m headed to this opening? Huh. So I called the number, and the one and only Anna Beth answers; she’s busy making cupcakes in Louisiana, and thus can’t make Lisa Congdon’s opening, but would I be so kind as to buy one of Lisa’s pieces for her? You know, which ever one looks the nicest? (A little more background: She’d asked Pam to go on her behalf, and Pam, amused by the strange coincidence of two of her out-of-town friends trying to get her to go to this thing, gave her my number, much to AB’s confusion, seeing as I’m supposed to be in Oakland, etc.)

Cut to me, at the crowded, crowded opening, on the phone with the hilarious AB, whispering descriptions — I was painfully aware of being the frantic Los Angeles asshole on the cellphone — of all the different pieces as AB tried to match each one to the small photos on Lisa’s site. “There’s the painted ‘Regret’ platter thing,” I hissed, “and a small wood block wrapped with butcher’s twine? With like…antique sort of photos of I think Asian people on it?” All the while, the list of available items was dwindling as more and more “sold” stickers got stuck next to item after item. “Oh my god! AB, people are buying everything! Fast! Faster! PICK ONE!” And then in the middle of all that, Megan beeped through, in a panic over needing a bottle of cooking oil (for her mind-meltingly great parmesan beignets, holy shit). So quick, quick I bought a piece for AB (one of the gorgeous little collage blocks), and whoops, I also got myself a little something (see below), and then I scrambled over to pay my (deep, so deep) respects to Lisa, whom I’ve never met before. But Lisa was already talking to another one of her fans, so I hovered off to the side as unobtrusively as I could manage, but then yet another fan swooped into the respectful two-second cushion I’d left open. So finally I just dove in, and what witty opener did I wow her with? “I HAVE TO GO BUY COOKING OIL!” And then I followed up that insane greeting with a bunch of bumbling half-gushes — “such a big fan” and “everything…so lovely” and “the walls…pretty!” — all while pumping her hand feverishly.

And then, sweaty and mortified, I raced off and bought cooking oil at the weirdest 99-cent store ever.


Here’s the shedding tree I was lucky enough to grab for myself (image pinched from Lisa’s own Flickr set from the show — I won’t actually get it in my hot little hands until after the show breaks sometime in March).