Only in San Francisco
We picked up the San Francisco Bay Guardian yesterday and it happened to be their “Best Of” issue. Thank God we found it because we had no idea how many interesting things there are to do in this city. This is what Sam is doing Monday while I take Ruby to the rooftop carousel at the Yerba Buena Gardens:
Masturbation need not be a covert mission reserved for solo artists behind bedroom doors or within shower stalls. If you’re the type who’s more of a team player, you might like SF JACKS, a group of like minded men who appreciate a good circle jerk. The group has been perfecting it’s “loose and goofy environment” for 26 years, regularly drawing as many as 70 Jacks and Joes, who want to loose their clothes—and their inhibitions—together. Meetings are held every second and fourth Monday at the Center for Sex and Culture, where lube and refreshments are provided. Just show up with your $7 donation (though no one’s turned away for lack of funds), ready to do the hand jive. But just remember to follow the rules. You can touch your dick, but don’t be one.
She needs me, she needs me not…
This picture was taken by my friend Jamie using her Nikon D300 while she was here on vacation with her family. All I can say is it would have been way cuter if she’d used a canon 40D. But whatever. You have to work with what you got, right? This will have to suffice.
We’re off to San Francisco for five days of entertaining our little Nikon-captured roommate up there. This person who resides down the hall from me can pour herself a bowl of cereal now. By that I mean, she can get it out of the child-proofed cupboard, pour it and put it away, sealing the open bag with a bag clip. She can access the bowl even though it’s on a shelf above the counter, retrieve, pour and put away the milk. Helping herself to a spoon is baby talk by comparison. And the kid can clear her dishes when she’s done. Without being asked!
But with Candyland, a matching game, a plastic dolphin, two barbies, a pair of underwear and a terrycloth swimsuit cover-up, the child cannot for the life of her pack a suitcase. To say this makes me feel needed is an understatement.
What a relief: Would you like your refund in installments or one lump sum?
Thanks to a perfect storm created by too many ballot initiatives, dipwad voters, Proposition 13 and Republicans so steeped in ideology that they’d rather watch the world’s eighth largest economy tank than—God forbid!—compromise, or worse yet, embrace some sort of socialistic shared sacrifice, California is officially in the shitter. But we got sunshine! And majestic state parks! Oh, wait…
Roughly 235,000 state employees recently accepted a third furlough day each month and now face the threat of a fourth from Gov. Recalled-The-Other-Guy-For-Bogus-Reasons Schwarzenegger, who is effectively sticking these folks with a 20-percent pay cut. That’s not weekly-latte territory. That’s desperate Jean Valjean territory. That’s murder-suicide territory. What’s The Terminator’s salary again?
Hardly unexpected, this long-in-the-making hose-job has finally snaked its way to the doorstep of our state universities. Both Cal State and UC—I work for the latter—voted recently on the best ways to close breathtaking budget gaps, and the results are not pretty. A nauseating combination of fee hikes, class-size increases, enrollment reductions, pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs are the wave of the future. Excuse me while I go lay down for a sec.
Every cloud has a silver lining though, and UCSD’s arrived in the form of a notification last week from the Office of the Chancellor, an announcement that Transportation Services has a plan to save the day. Well, that might be a bit dramatic, but you know me: I go for cinematic over catatonic every single time. Look alive, people. Stay with me.
Citing a desire to “ease our common financial burdens”—a wholly laughable and transparent phrase given the source—Chancellor Marye Anne Fox announced in a dour tone befitting both the collective mood and the scope of the proclamation, that the parking czars had “identified a way to provide some relief for faculty, staff and students through a temporary decrease in parking-permit fees.”
I’d like to say I read this e-mail with piqued interest. The truth, however, is that my eyelids drooped and my mouth smirked and I sighed as I read about this so-called relief, which wouldn’t pertain to me anyway since I got “relief” by canceling my $81 monthly parking pass in June. But I digress. I read without an ounce of inspiration about the 5-percent reduction in fees that Transportation Services would be offering to UCSD employees over the coming 11 months.
Now, I’m not great at doing math in my head unless it comes to working out a tip. And while I got an A in calculus during college, I cannot to this day balance a checkbook without being reduced to tears.
However.
It doesn’t take intimate knowledge of the Archimedean Property to know that 5 percent of $81 isn’t even enough to buy the average married couple a weeks’ worth of condoms. Barring contraception, it isn’t enough for one 24-ounce can of Nestle Good Start Baby Formula or a travel pack of diapers. You picking up what I’m laying down?
Still, I wanted to include an accurate number for the piece of mind I intended to send the chancellor, so I got out my calculator and clarified that 5 percent of $81 is $4.05. A month. That’s a grand total of $44.55 a year, 45 cents shy of one campus parking ticket. These are not exactly numbers that will alleviate murderous impulses borne of financial ruin. Then again, it is 10 Big Macs, and perhaps 5,400 extra burger calories would make even the most desperate person too sluggish for violence.
To be fair—or, to be fairly ridiculous depending on your point of view—$4.05 a month can totally make a difference, and I suspect this is the logic of those generous folks in Transportation Services, who regularly pat themselves on the back for their creative altruism.
They must know, for example, that $4.05 can buy one pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream from Vons, provided you possess one of those evil Club Cards that track your shopping habits and DNA and proclivity for pop-culture and porn. If Skippy peanut butter is on special for $1.49, you can get two jars and still have a little change left over for the couch cushions. Ramen noodles are generally a safe budgetary bet, as are SPAM and Campbell’s Soup. But most beer is out of the price range, so you’ll have to gag down Two Buck Chuck if you intend to drown your sorrows. A pack of smokes is out of the question, but you should really quit anyway since $4.05 won’t begin to cover the co-pay for emphysema treatments.
What $4.05 will cover, for now at least, is that extra gallon-ish of gas, which will subsequently get you to your parking spot, which will subsequently get you to the office, where you subsequently won’t be paid for your time thanks to imminent pay cuts, which will be offset by the rather insulting, condescending, seriously disingenuous reduction in parking fees gussied up to look like relief. I think I need to get horizontal again.
Had I been consulted on how to alleviate some of the burden, I would have suggested a meaningful 25-percent reduction in fees for an entire year and an increase in the fees associated with parking tickets. But what the hell do I know? I’m no good at ledgers and whatnot.
“With this meager discount on parking,” I wrote in my e-mail to the chancellor, “you might as well say more plainly what you disguise in sympathy: Let them eat cake.”
Or Big Macs. They’re more affordable.
(As published in today’s issue of San Diego CityBeat.)
She’s growing
I went out for drinks with the girls tonight and came home to this:
This is especially extra adorably good.
And totally worth all those nights when she didn’t sleep. Especially after a bottomless glass of wine and good conversation and no judgment when I admitted—to my embarassment—that I’m reading the wholly horrible “Twilight.” I’m giving it until page 75 before I abort mission.
Chocolate and peanut butter
I love Ross Ching’s time-lapse videos (my friend Nathan Gibbs turned me onto them a couple of years ago…check out his Eclectic series). I also love Death Cab for Cutie. Imagine how much I must love the combo of the two. Enjoy!
Death Cab for Cutie – Little Bribes from Ross Ching on Vimeo.
Harsh reality
“Old MacDonald had a Mommy, eeee-ay, eeee-ay, oh.
With a talktalk here and a talktalk there.
Here a talk, there a talk, everywhere a talktalk.
Old MacDonald had a Mommy, eeee-ay, eeee-ay, taaaaaaaallllllk!”
Et tu, liberal? Et tu?
I’ve been following this story of the black students from Creative Steps Day Camp in Philadelphia for a couple of days now and like what these Harvard grad students have to say about it. One of the most disturbing parts of the whole thing—which they do not mention in their blog post but which Tim Wise highlighted on Facebook today—is that the President of the club which booted the children is a “liberal Obama supporter and head of the Philly area Peace Action group.” Wise goes on to summarize his point: “…he likes his black folks Harvard-educated only: none of those city kids from the hood…”
If you feel so inclined, read a bit about the incident and after contemplating the President’s explanation for the expulsion (“There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club…”), let the racists at The Valley Club know what you think about them denying children a swim in their pool, despite the fact they’d paid to do so:
Email: info@thevalleyclub.com
Phone number: 215-947-0700
Spoilers suck: Play it safe and keep the score to yourself, would you/
I decided to go into work a little later than usual because I’d stayed late the day before and because, with imminent pay cuts, my attitude is sour and because I needed to blow off a little steam and, frankly, because I could.
I dropped my kid at school and headed to the gym, where I rode the bike straight up hill for 45 minutes. Then I pummeled the speed bag for another 20, imagining my fist connecting again and again with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pinched face. He really didn’t have a chance.
I was sweaty and generally disgusting but totally rejuvenated as I headed to the locker room. My morning of hooky couldn’t have been better. Then I spied—on one of the many giant flat-screen TVs lining the hallway—the fifth and last set of the Andy Roddick / Lleyton Hewitt semi-final Wimbledon match playing out. Allah O Akbar! My fabulous morning had become even fabulouser.
Forget work, I thought. I set down my bag, wiped the sweat off my face and stood akimbo to watch the match play out.
As a die-hard tennis fan, it’s with great shame that I admit that, until that moment in the hall—a mere three days before the final weekend of play—I hadn’t seen one match of the 2009 tournament. Not even a highlight! Things at work had, for the previous two months, consumed every minute of my time that wasn’t already consumed by all the other consuming stuff that consumes my life. In fact, it had been so long since I’d switched on the television that I would’ve needed to refer to the user manual for the remote control. And I don’t even know where to begin to look for that.
All my sorry ass had time for between bureaucracy and birthday parties, were written reports of the many dramatic moments. Thanks to the fantastically detailed Straight Sets blog in the New York Times, I was able to wring my hands with angst over what I’d been missing: A tearful Ana Ivanovic literally throwing in the towel against Venus in the fourth friggin’ round because of an injury? Absolute heartbreak. Serena, busting through to the final in the longest women’s single semi-final match in the history of the tournament? Heart-stopping.
Of course, there will never be anything as thrilling, as monstrous, as gargantuan as last year’s five-plus-hour men’s final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. It was the match to end all matches, the one you live for as a spectator. It was an epic of rain and sweat and determination and rain and anguish and strength and agility and fatigue and rain and hours and hours of glorious, amazing tennis between two of the finest sportsmen ever. Yes, I’d have sex with either and/or both of them.
When Rafa withdrew a few days before the tournament began, the dashed hope of a re-match was devastating. But as I stood in the hallway last week staring up at the screen, watching Roddick fire off aces and Hewitt answering with some of his own, I began to feel a surge of excitement not unlike that which I’d experienced last year. It’s the kind of anticipatory, nearly unbearable excitement that never comes with a blowout. It’s the kind that makes a fan a fanatic.
The tail end of this nearly four-hour match would not be the Roger-Rafa Redux I craved, but it was high-caliber tennis nevertheless, and it would more than feed my jones. Because I’m a hopelessly addicted fan, I continued to blow off my arrival at the office like I was hitting the snooze button on a Monday morning.
So there I stood, joined now by one other guy, watching the last set, getting more and more worked up until I was clapping at the end of each point won by Roddick (Hewitt’s a twerp). And when the score was 40-30, just before Roddick was about to serve for the match, another dude wanders up to see what the hullabaloo was all about. Then he says to me, “Isn’t this from last night?”
I turned to look at him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t seen it. I’m watching it right now.”
“Yeah, this is from last night,” he said. He had a white towel draped over the top of his head and it bobbed up and down as he nodded. “Roddick won.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, that was the sound of the needle being violently dragged across vinyl.
“Duuuuuude! Did you seriously just say that?”
“Uh—”
I ask you: What kind of tool does this? Has this guy never taped off the ticker on ESPN because he’s watching a game that’s being re-broadcast? Has he not avoided text messages from heckling friends? Where is the respect? I mean, for chrissake, I was clapping. Loudly. In a gym. Any numb-nut could have deduced that I hadn’t seen the match.
Well. Any numb-nut, that is, but my Spoiler.
“Wow,” I said as I turned my attention back to the game. “Wow.”
Roddick tossed the ball high into the air and arched back to hit it. “I guess this is it then,” I muttered. All of my enthusiasm was—pfffffft!—gone when he smashed the ball. The two men volleyed a bit before Hewitt hit his final forehand long and ho-hum, Roddick did the fist pump or fell to his knees or cried. It didn’t really matter anymore since now I had to hustle in to work.
The Spoiler muttered a sheepish apology and made his way back to the sorority slider or Stairmaster or some other wussy apparatus. I went the other way, heading for the door, but made a sharp detour and went back for a few more minutes of hammering on the speed bag. And that night, I set the alarm for 5 a.m. to watch the remaining matches in real time.
God Bless America (aka The Good, The Bad and The Ugly)
Real questions I received from grown adults during a 24-hour period this past weekend. Ruby was within earshot for all of them:
“Adoption? That is so wonderful! I want to adopt my 20-year old maid. I love her but I don’t know how to adopt her.”
“Why is her skin black and yours isn’t?”
“Do you like that color of skin?”
“Does she know she’s adopted?”
“Why would you tell her? Why would you do that?”
“Did you know you were getting a black baby?”