Train of Thought

There will be a longer post about the following, but I figured who doesn't love lists.

Things I think about when I am running:

Is is possible to drown in your own snot while running?

Why am I so slow?

That house has stupid outdoor space.

Why is that person so much faster?

I hate her (because it is always a woman who is faster. I am a sexist runner and am not bothered by fast men).

I hope she trips and horribly scrapes her knees so that she can't wear a dress for months.

How can my body hurt so much?

I love this song!

Why do my legs hate me?

Oh my gosh, I can't wait to drink beer.

Oh, look, there's that fast bitch again. I hope she gets pregnant and fat.

That house has stupid outdoor space too.

Does anyone in Monterey care about their outdoor space?

The bay is so pretty.

Oh shit, I just tripped on a stone because I was so busy looking at the bay. Stupid water.

Why do I jiggle so much?

How many more miles do I have to run before I burn enough calories to eat truffle fries?

Am I lost (the answer is usually yes)?

Can I stop yet?

Looking at this list, I see that I am a very negative runner (more accurately: yogger). No wonder for me running is not cheaper than therapy. In fact, it makes me go to more therapy. It also makes me want to key the cars of people with the stickers that read "Running: Cheaper than Therapy" or "26.2."

Screw you and your love for running.

How many times is that fast bitch going to lap me?

[Disclaimer: There will most likely be a lot of running posts in the coming months since, regrettably, that is what I am spending most of my time doing (besides drinking, but it's not P.C. to avidly post about drinking). Tolerate me.]

My weekend (in a list)

a girl and her goat

Between Thursday and Sunday the following happened at least once but sometimes more:

Drank beer and ate free popcorn at the Lucky 13 (discovered that they had a back patio and a black and white photo booth)

Bought a waffle maker

Drove to Oakland to retrieve and drop off my cooking club ladies (the Divas)

Received a stuffed goat

Got up between 5am and 530am every morning because we couldn't figure out how to turn off the alarm clock

Watched the sunrise over the hills of Napa

Had coffee by 6am

Had champagne and/or (but mostly and) a bloody mary by 7am

Made caramelized onion and jalapeno waffles

Rode around Napa in a limo with the Divas and previously gifted stuffed goat

Took said goat to every winery we visited

Drank wine at chichi Napa wineries for free because "I'm in the industry"

Spent $250 on two (2) bottles of wine at one of the above wineries

Watched more TV than I've ever seen in my life which included but was not limited to Bring it On Again and three (3) hours of "Yes to the Dress"

Macerated strawberries

Laughed so hard that I peed my pants (in public)

Cried

Watched Bridesmaids

Ate about a zillion pounds of buttered popcorn even though I was completely and painfully stuffed from the above waffles

Ate brie baked with caramelized onion jam

Ate a pasta dinner followed by macerated strawberries with basil

Never stopped drinking

Found a water glass from Tyler Florence's Rotisserie & Wine restaurant in my purse on Saturday morning (one of the Diva's also found a jalapeno from Florence's store in hers--Sorry Tyler)

Went to a scary train and dollhouse store

Drove over the Bay Bridge for the first time

Attempted to park my giant-ass truck for an hour in San Francisco

Purchased Invisible by Paul Auster at City Lights Books

Read the above at Vesuvio's

Walked to the Ferry Building because I really wanted a samosa from the farmers' market there

Found out the market was closed

Bought a coffee at Starbucks even though I wanted a coffee at Blue Bottle or Caffe Trieste more because I needed the free wifi to find a place that sold samosas.

Walked to an Irish bar that sold Indian food

Ate Samosas back in my car while frustrated people waited for me to pull out so that they could take my parking spot

Drove south from San Francisco to Monterey on the 1

On my way out of San Francisco, drove by the Blue Bottle coffee shop on Jessie street and cried a little because there was no parking

Made regular waffles for a hungry small child as soon as I got home

Made a fava bean soup for the hell of it

It's amazing what you can get done in a day if you get up at 5am.

Bucket List-less

I learned a new term today: bucket list.

Okay, so it's not all that new. I've heard/read it many times on people's blogs, and I've inferred that it has something to do with things you want to do in your life. But I never actually looked up the term to see why these (hella long) lists were called bucket lists.

So, once I figured out all the meaning and etymology behind bucket list, I began mentally compiling mine. But then I stopped for a few reasons (and not very good ones at that):

1. I don't know how to put a bucket list tab on my blog page (other people are doing it on Blogger, so it must be possible). I am embarrassingly computer-stupid.

2. But even if I did know how to put a bucket list tab on my blog, what if my bucket list isn't cool enough to hang out with all the other bucket lists? What if instead of being a clever shortening of the term, my bucket list is indeed a b-list?

I have a fear of being a b-list person. It's my own private (or not so much now) personal insecurity: people find me a b-list person. I fear mediocrity and b-list smacks of it. This fear is grounded in some experience.

a) I was home-schooled and didn't have any friends besides books (and goats and rocks and trees--sort of like a Disney heroine except I have bad hair and a shitty singing voice and no fairy godmothers (that I know of)) for many years of my life, so this whole being in the company of peers thing is still relatively new (say about 1/3 of my life). I lack the social graces that apparently you pick up when you are being tormented in junior high. I'm often awkward.

b) I have had some friends(?) close acquaintances(?) who very obviously considered me their b-list friend: if something better came up (and it often did), they had no problem with abandoning me to my own devices (luckily I had all that practice reading books and not having friends as a child, so my devices are quite competent). This behavior wasn't some soul scaring thing for me. It was a bit sad, but I recognized the situation and didn't spend (too) much time wondering why these people didn't want me a an a-list friend. But the psychological damage has been done. [Of note, three people, who don't know each other at all, have randomly apologized for making me a b-list friend . . . while that apology (which confirmed everything) is nice, it didn't do much to assuage my fears that I am indeed a b-list person.]

c) My name starts with a "b," so I am perpetually on a b-list somewhere by virtue of that (though I do love the letter b. It makes me think of that Sesame Street song, "Letter B").

And further, what if my b-list is not only completely uncool, but it is also shorter than 100 (or 101 for some blogs) things. WHAT IF I AM SO BORING I CAN'T COME UP WITH 100 COOL THINGS TO DO BEFORE I DIE?

Seriously, people the Internet over are judging each other by the items on their b-list.

"Oooh, she wants to catch fireflies in a jar" (read: quirky, appreciates aesthetics, yet enjoys the simple things in life)

"and he wants to run an ultramarathon barefoot in Mexico with the Tarahumara tribe" (read: super in shape yet knows how to party, impenetrable feet, loves nature and being in solitude for a long time, reads books on running)

You get my point. How do you even think of stuff like this? I can't. My b-list would contain: drink wine and read books. Then I would cross those off over and over and over and over again because I do them everyday. But they aren't things I want to stop. They aren't things that you can do just once and say "whew, that reading thing, glad I got that one over with, now I'll never read again." I like drinking wine. I love reading books. I want to do so much more of both of those before I die ("have sex" is something else that has happened before and I would like to have happen again, so it would probably be on my list too--I guess I could cool that one up with a location or type of sex act, but honestly, how do you know when you've crossed the creepy line? The goats (happily) never taught me those kind of social skills . . . did I just cross the line there?)

3) And speaking of thinking of my b-list contents, how do you organize your head enough to even make a list of things you want to do before you die? Nothing I want to do stays static. I tend to get passionate about something for a period of time and then I just abandon it along my road of life without a second glance. I would have to update my list every week or so to accommodate the new things I want to do and get rid of all the stuff I no longer am interested in. And we all know I wouldn't actually update it, so then I will go back to it in like 13 years and have a panic attack because I never made my son homemade blueberry pancakes. Or, worse, I'll feel so committed and locked into doing the things on my list that I'll sneak into my son's college apartment on a Saturday morning as he's sleeping off his hangover from the night before and make said pancakes only to be surprised by his naked roommate coming out of the bathroom. Then the roommate and I will have to sit down and eat the pancakes because my son won't be awake yet, and I'll have to pretend that the roommate isn't naked and all shaved and pierced (was that crossing the line? Damn those goats). It will be awkward for all of us.

4) Maybe I'm ascribing too much weight to this b-list thing, but if I am going to put down life goals in writing, I really want to make sure that they are things that I really want to do and not just filler. However, sometimes I won't know whether or not something should be on my b-list until after I do it (and we all know how dissatisfying it is to add something you've already done to a list just to cross it off). For example, "jumping in puddles and rescuing worms with my son during a rainstorm followed by "hot-tubbing" it in our giant bathtub with (kinder)beers" wasn't something that I wouldn't have included on my list de novo, but now that I've done it, I know my life needed that moment to be complete. Our lives need hundreds and thousands of these little moments to be complete, and we often don't know it until they've happened. They are moments that can't be anticipated and that is why they are so precious. How do I take those moments and condense them into a pithy little line and then cross them off? I think something is lost. I want to live my life, not necessarily make it a to do list.

I love lists. I love having goals and desires (in fact, I have so many of both that I have been referred to as a cavern of want). Yet I am reluctant to merge the two. Maybe because I can't solidify what I actually want to do with my life. Maybe because I am afraid of the reckoning that articulating something brings. Maybe because I just don't really want to examine all that I want to do before I die. Maybe because I'm afraid of what would happen to my heart if I actually put something like "write a book that gets published" into print and then I am 95 years old, dying, and it didn't happen.

Maybe I am making this whole bucket list thing into a way bigger deal than it really is.

That's likely.

In any case, I am now going to drink wine and read. So I can cross those off my list

again.

Long Way Home

You can end up with a day of blessings in ways that would never make it on the "blessings I expect" list. Certainly, I wasn't looking for any blessings on my first-long-drive-post-stupid-freeway-accident-while-leaving-the-city-I-love-to-return-to-a-town-I-am-ambivalent-about-potentially-driving-in-a-brutal-storm (snow! at 500ft in Southern California. That's just crazy, ya'll.).

But blessings come, whether we expect them or not. We just need to live (and drive) with our eyes open.

Here are a few of the wondrous things I saw on my way from San Diego to Monterey:

• The brutal storm of the night before had scrubbed the air clean. Even LA, with its perpetually made-up and grimy face, was fresh and bright. For the first time, I could see its natural beauty--a white city nestled against stark hills and opened to a wide ocean. Towering clouds caressed the hills as they paraded across a gun metal blue sky. Even the sprawl almost looked beautiful.
• Snow-covered hills, frost frozen, looked filigreed from fragile crystal. The lower hills, dusted with snow, were muscled and sinewy like the flanks of a silver stallion. The rocky crust looked like the hide of a great and powerful and vibrant beast. These hills transitioned to impossibly green (for Southern California) slopes, laced with shadow and light as the clouds danced around the sun on their cobalt dance floor. The fruit trees on either side of the highway added whimsy and sheer joy as their delicate blossoms responded to the sun or cowered from the passing rain.
• Layers of rain curtains awaited me near Paso Robles. Once I passed through the first, it was like pushing through a room strung with grey gauze. The sun back lit the rain so that some of the curtains were opaque, hiding the world from view, while others gleamed silver and overlaid the green hills, still an improbable emerald.
• Snow! Snow! In Paso. The whirling wisps streaked into my headlights in complex patterns like a throng of moths trained in military formation mobbing a flame.
• Beyond Paso, I became transported to Ireland. So much green in the dying light. Ghost layers of hills tried on every variation of the color, only outshone by the silver clouds that seemed to possess a light source separate from that of the sun sinking behind them.
• From Salinas to Monterey, the setting sun transformed the clouds from silver to purple-pink, lined with a fierce orange. Closer to Monterey, the cypress trees began to appear, clawing at the remaining light.

Sheer pleasure in the beauty of it all.

Don't forget to breathe.

5 Embarrassing Movies I Loved When They First Came Out

.....and saw not just once.

The advent of Tron2 has pulled me down memory lane to other movies I loved as a (not-so) small child. Though Tron really isn't that embarrassing to love, I am putting it first since it spurred the emergence of these other movies I didn't necessarily want to admit I love(d). And, of course, I am now putting this all on the Internet which just goes to show you, I don't know how to stop.

1. Tron
2. Krull
3. Ruthless People
4. Short Circuit
5. The Last Unicorn

I encourage you to do two things: 1) look up some of these on youtube and watch actual clips. They are like train wrecks in a blizzard sliding perilously towards a children's hospital. 2) Add your five embarrassing favorites. They can't be things like Dark Crystal or Labyrinth or Innerspace (okay so maybe that one) because those types of movies we all loved without shame. They have to be legit embarrassments.

[Incidentally, I find it telling that Jeff Bridges is in more than one of these films . . .]