I liked my Thanksgiving parking spot at LAX

And I'm glad I came back to find Pepe in one piece.

Beverly Hills auto update

Not as in an automatic update, just an update of the mechanical excitement to be found in Beverly Hills, which I pass through every time I head to campus.

• The other day I heard and then saw the aftermath of a bright yellow Ferrari crashing into the rear of a silver Porche Carrera. Accrued damages to both certainly worth more than the total of what I paid for Pepe S. The Beverly Hills police arrived within 30 seconds in a giant cop SUV.
  
• Most of my Beverly Hills bike ride in today was next to a cream-colored Bentley convertible. We kept pace for many blocks. It looked a lot like this, making me feel a bit shabby in my $2 shirt and $3 pants.
• I biked by not one but two idling Priuses in which the drivers were smoking. So if you're not putting out one kind of fumes it gives you space to put out another kind?
• (Further update - en route home I rode for about 7 blocks next to a "Star Homes" tour bus, but it was more like the A-Team van that had had its top sawed off and some extra minivan seats put in. On the side were airbrushed caricatures of Marilyn Monroe (who looked nauseated) and a bearded guy that it took 5 blocks to identify as Pirates-of-the-Carribean era Johnny Depp. As we rode down the street the driver announced something in muffled tones and the French guy just to my left whipped out his video camera and pointed it right at me, or rather, over me at the house behind me. Who lives there? Will the house be obscured by my giant head? I hope they have many happy viewings of their Beverly Hills videotape back in France.)
  

Other entertaining sightings in the last few days include a woman on my block with hair past her rear, almost the length of her quite short ruffled miniskirt, who turned around to reveal that she was like 60, and two different men in thong bathing suits on Venice Beach (not that anyone should really be wearing those, at least in North America, but one of these guys really shouldn't have been wearing one). It's all about self-presentation in this town.

Influence

The other day in class we were discussing a passage in which a contemporary scholar's last name happened to be used as an adjective. We talk a surprising amount about social justice in my class, a topic that is in the background of much of the theoretical reading that we're doing, but becomes foregrounded by my bleeding-heart do-goody students (since I'm of the same ilk, this is just fine by me). Anyway, I was reading the sentence with the last name as adjective aloud, and I paused to say something wistful about how you'd know you'd had an impact on the world not only if you engaged in work on behalf of social justice and tried to make it a better place, but also if your name could be used as an adjective. "My last name is really not well-suited to adjectivalization," I said a bit sadly, "but how nice it would be to have your name out there modifying stuff, and feel like there was some kind of positive characterization associated with you and your work?"

Later that evening, one of my students e-mailed me her abstracts and critical questions for the week's readings -- they usually turn them in at the end of class, but she had read one of next week's articles by mistake and needed some extra time do read the assigned article. I expected her to possibly incorporate insights from the class discussion into her summary of the hyper-theoretical article, but what I did not expect when reading over everyone's abstracts this morning was this, quite sly, sentence: "His discussion of the biblical creation story (94) is, in a word, [Mylastname]ian -- employing the elegant use of ironic storytelling to make a larger analytic point."

Oh, I am laughing again as I type this up. Sure, there is a tiny element of grad student sucky-uppiness in this, but really, it's much more a phatic expression of enjoyment of the class and my teaching, and as such makes me really happy (and how much sucking up do students do to people who are completely adjunct to their department?). Plus, how often in this world do we express absurd wishes and have them granted almost immediately? I'll take what I can get.

Northward ho!

Which is not to say that I am self-referring as a prostitute here, I'm just trying to cleverly note that I drove up to San Francisco last weekend, with a soupçon of Marin and also Berkeley thrown in for good measure. Back in the day, I was part of a monthly supper club that met, well, monthly -- one person would cook for everyone, meaning that you got to have exciting and delicious meals with good company every month while only having to deal with the stress of meal prep like every 9 or 10 months or so. Anyway, suddenly all the supper club folk are getting married -- I went up for Shapiro's wedding in June , and now I drove Pepe (that is my LA-style sportscar's name, Pepe S., because he is so peppy and snappy (oh, to have six cylinders firing away when I press down on the gas!)) up to SF for MassageGirl's wedding, with a bonus engagement party for Lefty thrown in on the previous evening (not to mention Goldie's upcoming nuptuals in Canada and then California -- J-ka and I now the final holdouts). Of course, no Bay Area visit for a wedding is about just the wedding: there is always food, nature, and a range of aesthetic enjoyment, along with familial bonding with young Stovielet and nostalgia for times past.

The drive up is like 5 1/2 hours (when you're in Peppy Snappy [Mylastname] going like 80 the whole time) but the entire last hour felt "local" to me, because suddenly I went from mostly unfamiliar territory to being in my old hiking zone radius. When you live in a place a long time -- and I say this as someone who has for the last four years and change been moving far too frequently -- you get grounded in ways that I personally find deeply satisfying. I remember one time towards the very end of grad school taking off from the Oakland airport and heading northeast and looking down from the air and being able to identify every major street and locating all the apartments I'd lived in and all the parks in the Oakland and Berkeley hills that I'd hiked in, and having history and experiences and memories (mostly good) all over the territory we were covering, and it feeling so lovely, like I really belonged there, and had inscribed it into my memory, and in some ways been inscribed into the collective memory of the place. You know, like the carbon dioxide once in my lungs was probably still floating around somewhere. Happy as I am in LaLaLand, I completely long for the day when I feel so part of and inscribed upon a landscape once more. Which perhaps will be this one -- we'll see. Anyway, once I passed Livermore, highway exits became not just names but places I had kayaked, or nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, or been hypnotized by waving grass, or had romantic picnics, etc. etc. It was nice to be back.

We walked to Sunday morning brunch in a place that is not only tasty but also aesthetically pleasing on every level, to the point where even the outdoor menu holder is perhaps the coolest thing ever.
The view from the brunch place was a bit more prosaic,
although I found the store inventory somewhat mysterious (as if a store owner had been playing the old Sesame Street "one of these things doesn't belong" game). Tummies full and snacks purchased, and with the autonomy granted by having Pepe at my beck and call, Stovielet, L'il Abner and I headed over to one of my favorite beaches in Marin, Rodeo Beach (two linguisticky issues with the beach: it has no relationship of any kind to an actual rodeo, as far as I know, and also it is adjacent to Fort Cronkhite, which invokes both Walter and illness (German Krankheit), neither of which are the prettiest associations) and headed up the one of the hiking paths to the northwest.

Like many beautiful and hilly places adjacent to a narrow waterway, this land was once a military installation, and there are all kinds of rusty and charming-in-their-disuse remnants of this military past, like fallen chain link fences,
and cannon mounts,
and bunkers that are tempting spots to jump out and try and frighten your oh-so-skittish sister.
More pleasing of course, was the view. To the north,
(still facing north here, I just wanted to note that I like how you can tell which mini islets and cliff faces are the favorite resting spots for our avian friends)
and west,
and southeast, back towards the city.
At our lunch spot there were at least two hawks (as-yet still unidentified by us, but with a whitish tail with two black bands) and a kestrel doing all kinds of exciting flying using updrafts to hover way above the ground (while still flying below us, actually -- we were pretty high, and there are some dramatic drops), and skimming just over the scrub looking for rodents and other edibles, and also a pair of lovebird type crows, shown here, who also engaged in exciting updraft riding with the lady crow for some reason clucking like a chicken. A lot. For real! We all heard her. Any explanation for this from anyone more than welcome, really.
Also fascinating to me was the patterning of the water streaming back to the ocean as interrupted by rocks, which I rarely get to see from above, but is really beautiful.
and stays visible much longer than one might expect.
It was imagery like this that kept me going through the darkest, most methane-laden parts of Route 5 on the way back home, where the air not only looks terrible, but smells even worse. My friend J-F says it's the fault of the cows, but I kind of feel like we're all to blame. (Well, not you people reading this from far, far away, although maybe the flapping of a butterfly in Chicago or DC or Korea or wherever can cause smog and horrible air pollution in the Central Valley.)

Falling back

is one of my favorite parts of the fall. I like the idea of sleeping an hour more than usual, except for the part where due to my sleep issues it's not really the alarm clock waking me up, usually more like a cat or a stress dream. Although both of these issues better since the move back to California. But the excitement of the new time quickly wears off once I realize that this will hamper my biking -- now if I'm going to stay on campus after 5 pm, I'm probably going to have to take the bus. LaLa Land drivers are bad enough in the daytime, where they glare at you angrily for taking up space on the roads where cars are king, or in certain parts of Beverly Hills, where middle-aged men rev their motors at me as they speed down the block from one stop sign to the next one, located maybe 1/4 mile away. I don't know at what point car engines started indexing male genitalia, but I do wish they'd get over it.

I'm currently back in San Francisco, first trip up since the move on out. A friend from my old supper club is getting married tomorrow, and another friend from the supper club had an engagement party this evening (totally fortuitous). So it's kind of a marital time. I'm kind of wishing in my frantic 10-minutes-before-I-left packing this morning I'd actually managed to bring the wedding invitation, since I kind of think I remember where it is, but I'm not entirely sure...