Why,
I wonder, am I so averse to buying mugs? I am working from home today and just made some tea because it's only 53 out and I'm feeling chilly, and looked at the mug and realized that it was a present for my 28th birthday. Its brother, next to it on the shelf, a present from the professor for a class I TAd in, oh, 1997. And its newish adopted siblings were just thrown in with a bunch of other freebies at a "I'm moving to Costa Rica in a few weeks, please, just take my stuff" yard sale in September. Glasses I like, I like just fine. But there's something about a mug...
(Hey Erma, oh, and Lance too, the aforementioned mug was given to me by a guy with a perm, probably wearing an eagle necklace at the time. Just so you can further contextualize it.)
Tech savvy
A few weeks ago I got a promotional card in the mail inviting me to check out a fancy shmancy gym in the 90210 district for free for a week. How could I say no? So on Saturday I went on over and started my weeklong descent into gym luxury. A dripping ceiling fountain greets you at the front door, along with very attractive card-checking personnel (weirdly, always light-skinned black women, at least so far). The locker rooms have individual digital locks on every locker with combinations that you choose yourself, so you can always remember your code (people, if you learn my ATM code and also figure out which locker is mine, a true bonanza awaits you), and lovely showers that have a variety of nice lotiony products and also free disposable razors and a steam room with mentholated vapor (tonight, it was me and two lady Russkies). There is a spa on site, and also a restaurant with $18 entrees (for takeout as well, for the time-challenged), but weirdly no juice bar for the hanging out purposes -- how do people hit on each other at this place? I will have to see.
Anyway, there is of course also an onsite gym clothes boutique, how could there not be? And on my way out the other day I idly browsed through the sale rock (how could I not?). And considered buying a fancy tank top with built-in shelfy sports bra (but a bit better looking than most) except that it was really too bright a pink. Anyway, while I was still considering said tank top, I was poking around to see if it was worth trying on and saw a small pocket in the bra mesh on the left side, so a small mesh pocket within the other mesh on the top of your left boob. And thought, "oh, a place for your key, that's clever," but when skimming the label learned that this pocket was precisely sized to house your iPod nano. Yes, it was an iPod-nano-friendly ladies bright fuchsia sport tank top. I suppose we're just one generation away from tank tops that play the music themselves with their fibrous wonder, but really, where are we going next?
Meh
Not much to report these days. My cold is still kind of stuck in my eustachian tubes, especially the right one, and I'm still at the point where if I laugh with any serious intake of breath I end up with a little coughing fit, kind of like a 70-year old smoker, although with a bit less depth and richness. So this has me feeling kind of bummed out, I think. And it's been rainy and dreary and ick every day for a while now, with lots more rain to come.
But I've started yoga again, which has me feeling a bit more centered, even if my balance isn't so great yet, and tonight I had the second meeting of this restaurant exploration club (the REC) that I started in December, searching out fun places to eat in the $10 and under entree range -- so things do seem to be on the upswing. And upon reflection there have been more than a few bright spots this week. Most notably: 1) being nominated by an anonymous undergrad for an award for innovation in teaching with technology. The people who have won this in the past have done stuff like write programs that allow users to enter virtual murals and other really high-level stuff involving, you know, code. *I* by contrast was nominated for showing a YouTube clip of Valley Girl in the first class. But I found it terribly sweet that some undergraduate of mine felt compelled to nominate me for a teaching award after just four lectures -- I guess that's at least one good evaluation out of the 200 that'll be coming in at the end of the quarter. 2) I may have mentioned this before, but for my official boring here-are-my-talks here-are-my-articles website, my domain host has software that lets me see the IP addresses of people who visit the site. So I look every day, because I find it remarkable that I have any visitors at all. And every day at least one person comes to my site by means of searching for me on Google. Typing in, correctly, my weirdy first name, and my weirdy last name. Just in the course of the last week, these mysterious people typing in my name have been located in Tokyo, Albuquerque, Boulder, London, Moscow, New York, Switzerland, and, less surprisingly, Lala Land. It's just so cool to think of people in these places actually reading my work. I mean, you spend all this time acquiring all this knowledge and then gathering data and then doing an analysis and then trying to extrapolate this so people can see its significance in terms of the field and of the world, but once your stuff is out there, it feels so obscure and tiny and influence-free. So it's good to think it hasn't all been a total waste...
Today a friend in DC who usually sends the most hip and profound links while gchatting (he is young and tuned in) sent me a straightforward and completely unironic link to a YouTube clip of a super-talkative Siamese cat in England. And there are many, many more such clips out there. I think I'm going to go watch a few right now.
The French are also guilty
A friend sent this link today, knowing I would enjoy the madness that lay within.
For those of you who don't feel like clicking, here is my favorite "creepy old ad" of the lot.
I'm not really sure what to say about this. It's less anthropomorphized than many other knife-wielding or self-serving (as in serving themselves on a platter) animals seen here on these pages. But way, way more gruesome. I mean, not only is it slicing itself up for the delectation of Frenchy omnivores, but it appears to be already made out of sausage -- so on the one hand, we don't see the ickiness of the sausage creation process (the stretching of the intestinal casing, the chopping and stuffing of the various flesh and not-quite-flesh parts, etc.) , but on the other hand, it's slicing itself up! And standing on the slices from what must have been a very very large sausage-pig indeed.
The ad reads, for those of you not so Frenchified:
"One eats with pleasure and....... without fatigue
the 'good sausages of the prodigal pig'!."
(Sausage fatigue is one of my biggest eating concerns, actually.)
It is apparently from some place called Avergne, and, somewhat less believably, has an absolute food purity. Because really, when it's straight from the pig's middle to your mouth, what could possibly taint it?
Sometimes I think that human beings are just unbelievably disgusting. Maybe it's time to go vegetarian again.
Thinking back to happier times
It wasn't all that long ago that I wasn't sick and actually went out and did fun stuff involving physical exertion. But it kind of feels like forever. The worst, of course, has been the periodic laryngitis, where it has either hurt to talk, or I haven't been able to talk at all. The pain! Both metaphorical and literal.
So since I wasn't able to get away for a beachy relaxy kind of vacation over the holiday break, I decided to have an LA-style vacation before I headed up to SF for a yoga retreat with young Stovielet and L'il Abner -- I figured, people actually come here for vacation-type experiences, so I could do it myself. I made a list of excursions, found companions for many of them, and headed out every day for a week. There's an awful lot to do around here! And the-good-weather-most-of-the-time thing really helps. Anyway, here's some of the prettier stuff, which I really meant to post in a more timely fashion, but it's not like I've been doing anything photogenic since then (and I caught sight of myself coughing the other day, and boy, that wasn't pretty).
One fine morning, Rabbitlet and I headed out to the marina and spent some time kayaking. The rental shack was surprisingly festive --
I'm still not sure how they got those balloons inside the other balloons, obviously some kind of miracle of modern science.
The kayaking was not nearly as scenic as some other places I've been,
but there were still things of interest to be seen. Nicest of all were the birds, like the pelicans,
cormorants,
and grebes,
along with other nautical elements.
Many of the boats had funny names, although they were all forgotten by journey's end (except for Good Vibrations, coming out of San Francisco, which I really feel shouldn't be allowed unless it's the boat of the sex shop owners), but I liked this one because it resembled nothing so much as an Imperial Trooper.
Really, don't you think? Maybe it's dangerous catamarans like these that make kayaking into a deadly sport that requires a long and somewhat hyperbolic caution label.
We met up with the Stik on a nearby fancy street, filled with boutiques and galleries, and he treated us to little gem-like dessert madness. Mine was beautiful,
and filled with chocolatey caramelly goodness. Other desserts were perhaps more festive,
but certainly not tastier (and I'm not sure I'd ever really want lavender infused throughout my cake -- my feeling is, if it's in a perfume, I probably don't want to eat it) (this includes all thing civet, by the way).
After looking at what seemed like thousands of chi-chi tchotchkes, I headed back to the beach for the sunset, which was, for a change of pace, really quite lovely.
The other photogenic parts of my LA vacation were all on my hikes (that mountain lion was, I'm sure, very photogenic, but I kind of didn't manage to catch it on camera). On my first hiking day, I went up a mountain to the northeast, and on the second day, I climbed a ridge trail to an ocean overlook. Both hikes provided amazing views of the area, and made me wish I had web access on the phone just so I could figure out what I was looking at -- instead I had to take a lot of photos and then check out Google Maps first thing to try and calibrate the overhead view with what I had seen. Fellow hikers, it turns out, are often not the best source of information -- for example, this guy sharing a bench with me at the top of the first peak told me that the thing I was pointing at was a famous cemetery, when in point of fact it is a contentious landfill in a public park.
Views from the northeast looked like this
and this,
while views from the oceanside park looked more like this.
A lot of the beauty in wintertime comes from leafless trees and bushes and plants sticking up into the sky.
More ordinary flora, like oaks and moss and native flowering bushes, were also quite nice, of course.
Of course, you can never pretend you're in serious wilderness at any time -- there's always some sign of humans that preceded you, be it unofficial and kind of hippie-esque
or kind of official.
I thought it was funny that the steep dirt firetrail, with switchbacks and everything, that I hiked to reach the top of a peak is apparently designated both a boulevard and a motorway, while not really appearing to be a prototypical example of either one. Well, car is king here!
Sick!
Just when I thought I had successfully avoided that stupid cold that's been going around for the last few weeks, it brought me down Friday afternoon. Like a tree that fell in a forest, except into my (down comforter, bamboo sheet, down mattress cover) bed. But soundless! (Seriously, it happens. Rarely. But it does.)
I actually mostly enjoyed staying in bed from Friday night to Sunday night, getting up only to make tea or pee it out again like 15 minutes later, or to work on my lecture for today. But then today in class my lapel mike didn't work, so I couldn't impersonate an inspirational speaker in front of my 200+ person lecture (I suppose it's illegal for me to wheedle money out of them anyway) and then I was stuck behind the podium with the big mike, which for some reason made me feel like my old rabbi (minus the beard), plus didn't allow students to see the flashy lining of my long black silk coat. Or my beautiful celebration-of-not-getting-killed-on-the-highway new shoes. Oh well. They still enjoyed the You Tube presentation of Valley Girl, and I finally get the places Zappa was talking about. I just hope my croaking nightmare voice is back to normal by Wednesday's class so I don't sound like a pimply teenaged boy at the fast food window. Such a shonda for someone talking about communication.
Pictures of LA-area hiking and exploration still to come. At some point. Later.
