Suzy Says

Love/Hate for Friday, March 22, 2002

Travel: The Process

I have travelled a fair bit in my life, mostly because my father was English. When his parents were alive, we’d visit them every other year, and when my father retired back to England, I visited him there at least once a year. Since he was conveniently located in London, it was easy to go all over Europe and even as far as Russia.

Even though I have done this, and am planning to go to London yet again this year, I hate the travelling process. Number one, I’m afraid of flying. I was worried about it even before 9/11, and that certainly didn’t help matters. Mostly, it’s just that I can’t believe this huge hunk of metal is going to stay in the sky, and if you’re flying between San Francisco and London (11 fun-filled hours, and that’s non-stop), much of it is over the Arctic, so if the worst happens, you’re pretty much toast (or ice cubes). But I have developed my own guide to surviving air travel:

1. Avoid going coach if at all possible. Somehow I feel less likely to die when I have more legroom and am being pampered. You also get something close to real food and get to get off the plane first. Negative: If the plane crashes nose first, you’ll get a few less seconds than the poor folks in cattle class. Of course, you could look at it as the express lane to the afterlife.

2. Drink as much champagne as possible. If you have avoided going coach, the champagne is free, so you have no excuse not to drink it. You also get a glass before you take off, which is when you really need it. Both the likelihood of the plane crashing and the fear of it are severely diminished by at least two glasses of champagne. Negative: You will have to pee a lot. So get an aisle seat.

3. Try and get a Valium or two. You probably know someone who has it. Think of all those neurotic friends and relatives, not to mention co-workers. Make something up if you have to so they feel sorry enough for you to give it to you. Who cares if they think you’re neurotic? They’re the ones with a whole prescription, for God’s sake. It’s worth the trouble to get some — it really does take the edge off the horror.

4. Diversion is critical. Bring lots of things to read, and a Walkman or portable DVD player is good, too (though with the DVD player, you’ll probably get unwanted people looking over your shoulder). I usually hoard “New Yorkers” for about a month before the flight and bring at least two books. It amazes me that people will get on a plane knowing the flight is 11 hours long with NOTHING TO READ. The in-flight magazine is not that interesting. Trust me.

Basically, air travel is public transportation, and that’s the other main drawback to it. PT is something I try to avoid as much as possible. I walk to work, and I should walk home, but when I don’t feel like it, I take a cab. The closest I get to public transportation is taking the cable car, but its charm kind of overrides the public transit aspect. As Dorothy Parker observed, other people are hell, and being stuck in lines behind them for hours doesn’t endear the human race to you. I will never understand why the people ahead of me are always checking huge boxes held together with string, countless suitcases, and have to talk to the person checking them in for 15-20 minutes. Whereas when I get to the desk, I’m done in 30 seconds. This may have something to do with the fact that even if I’m doomed to cattle class, I only have one carry-on bag and have my seat pre-assigned.

Once wedged on the plane, you are surrounded by the people who held you up in line. There will be at least one screaming baby and one kid who keeps meandering up and down the aisle, pursued by its ineffectual parent(s). The person in front of you will jack his/her seat back as far as it can go and leave it there for the duration of the flight, eliminating what little personal space you had to begin with. You will be served unidentifiable and inedible food at very strange times. You will be at the mercy of the various diseases owned by your fellow travellers, who are only too happy to share. You will have to wait in line for the bathroom, which gets less and less salubrious with every hour that passes. Someone will be drunk and loud. People will take pictures of each other sitting on the plane. There will be boring conversations (time for the Walkman). If you’re a girl on your own, guys will feel not only that they can talk to you, but that talking to them is preferable to being left alone. You explain the error of their ways firmly enough that they go away. Time will slow to a crawl. You will doze weirdly and wonder if you’re there yet.

Then when you do get there, more waiting in line at Customs, and if you checked your bags, fervent praying that your bags made it, too. There are no atheists in Baggage Claim.

It’s definitely better than the days when you either had to sail around the even more deadly than air travel Cape Horn or take a train across the vast expanse of the USA, then cross the also deadly Atlantic by ship, all of this taking weeks and weeks. And the Concorde, when it isn’t killing people, is pretty fast, though it only goes from New York. But why haven’t the scientists gotten together and developed a faster way to get where you’re going, as featured in Star Trek? That would pretty much eliminate most of the horrors of the way we travel now, and it would be almost fast enough for me, too.

My horoscope for today, from the Chronicle: “You’ve spent too many nights worrying. Let matters run their course.”

Considering I’m writing this at 1:00 a.m., it’s probably good advice.

Reward for walking home on Tuesday: I finally got to see Nicolas Cage! He has a house (one of many, I’m sure) three blocks from our place, and in the 7 years we’ve lived on this street, I have never seen him. But on Tuesday, there he was, chatting to two guys in his garage with the garage door open. He has quite a messy garage. As I passed, I smiled, and he smiled back and said “Hey”. Brush with fame!

This brings me to a grand total of 4 brushes with fame:

1. Driving through Seacliff in my convertible with the top down, passed Robin Williams’ house with a birthday party going on for one of his kids. Balloons and kids everywhere, Robin severely outnumbered but taking it well. Exchanged a smile and wave, my usual MO when encountering famous people.

2. Walking across the Hungerford Bridge in London, saw Elvis Costello shooting a video. I was with my Dad, which really limited the fun, because he had no idea who Elvis Costello was and there was no point in trying to explain it. Usual smile & wave exchange. Elvis was wearing a silly hat.

3. While visiting Althorp, Princess Diana’s childhood home, met her brother and had an actual conversation for a change. He’s really a celebrity by association, so it may not count and might be the reason I was able to exchange words instead of the drive/walk by wave’n’smile.

4. The Nicolas Cage walk by wave’n’smile.

Why is it that I can never come up with a clever and/or witty thing to say when faced with a famous person?

Reward for taking a cab home yesterday:

Cab driver looked very Japanese, much like Pat Morita, but talked like a hick from Arkansas, the total hillbilly accent. The contrast was so delightful that it was hard not to laugh. Cab driver also a conspiracy theory nut who held forth all the way home. He was wasted on me, since he was really John’s dream cab driver. He also reminds me of a story John tells of when he lived in Edinburgh and was going home late one night. The only other person on the bus was a very drunk Indian (as in Indiah) guy, beautifully singing “Danny Boy” with a deep Scottish accent.

It was a lovely drive from San Francisco to Albion on Friday morning. Despite the gloomy weather forecast, the sun was shining, and the usually “golden” (read: brown) hills were still green from the winter rains. Delicate, orange California poppies, waxy white Calla lilies and bright yellow daffodils bloomed together by the side of the freeway. I even saw little fawns poking around the flowers, completely unperturbed by the noise of the freeway. My brother and sister consider deer to be garden-destroying nuisances, but I’m a city girl, so I think they’re cute.

I never pass San Quentin without thinking of when my sister taught in a preschool where San Quentin could be seen in the distance. The kids thought it was a castle, and she never told them otherwise.

Maybe I’ve been married to John too long, but a big sign for a luxury housing development in Sonoma County caught my eye. In big, bold letters, it shouts, Captain John’s Passage is now open! There’s something both vulgar and amusing in that. I can’t imagine proudly telling people that I live in Captain John’s Passage.

When you’re going to Albion, you get off Highway 101 in Cloverdale, “where the vineyards meet the redwoods”. I finally realized how the town got its name. What looked like drifts of snow were actually drifts of snow white clover.

Stopped at the Anderson Valley Brewery in Boonville for lunch (though we didn’t drink beer), and bought a pint glass for John. It was nice to have lunch overlooking the beautiful valley, with hummingbirds buzzing outside the window like giant bees, and turkey vultures and red tailed hawks swooping overhead, looking for their own lunches.

Boonville is a small town, but the brewery has been listed in the top ten in two World Beer Championships. Boonville also has its own language, called Boontling. For example, signs above telephone booths in Boonville all say “Bucky Walter”, which is Boontling for telephone. It’s a pretty interesting place for having a grand total population of 700. I’ve been reading Robert Mailer Anderson’s very entertaining first novel, Boonville, lately, and only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

For those unfamiliar with Highway 128, take a look at the curves and you’ll see why it takes almost 4 hours to drive from San Francisco to Albion, despite the fact that it’s only 150 miles. Because of the curves, there are signs every few miles reading “SLOWER TRAFFIC MUST PULL OVER”, so those who haven’t driven the road before will do the right thing. But sometimes you get stuck behind someone (particularly RV’s driven by ancient, withered people who can barely see over the steering wheel) who just won’t pull over. Then you honk the horn and flash your headlights. I can tell that recently someone had a bad experience, because on one of the signs, someone had spray painted a circle around the “MUST” and underlined the “PULL OVER.”

But it’s all worth it to end up here.

Jed Arm: Pronunciation: jed ‘ahrm (noun); a condition of the human upper limb, with varying degrees of pain, caused by throwing a ball or stick for hours at a time. Similar to housemaid’s knee or tennis elbow in cause and effect.

Back from my long weekend in the country with a mild case of Jed Arm. Jed is my brother’s dog, and she lives to retrieve the stick/ball/pine cone/giant, unwieldy branch. Playing with her is one of the joys of visiting my brother & sister. She is literally unbelievably well-trained: no-one believes it until they see it.

On Saturday, we visited Point Cabrillo light house. When Jed jumped out of the car, the ranger said she should be on a leash. The thing is, Jed doesn’t have a leash, because she doesn’t need one. So my sister Megan demonstrated Jed’s heeling and obedience abilities, which made the ranger say he wished his kids were as good as Jed, and told us to go on down to the light house. Jed sat nicely by the light house until we came out and said she could come with us to watch whales.

The whales are migrating back from Baja, and they are closer to the coast during their home migration than they are on their way south in the winter. So we had good views of giant tails, spouting blow holes, and massive, curving backs carving the cold waves. It was amazing. The rangers had a box of binoculars so you could see the amazing creatures up close.

But the ranger we encountered at Van Damme State Park was a dramatic contrast to the Pt. Cabrillo rangers. Megan and I were throwing the ball for Jed, who despite the chilly temperature, was happily chasing the ball into the ocean, swimming around, and then bringing it back to us, bounding with joy. Megan noticed the ranger approaching before I did, and said, “Oh, great.” He came up to us and said Jed couldn’t be on the beach without a leash. Megan apologized, put Jed on a heel, and we started back to the car immediately.

Either this wasn’t enough for him, or he just felt like exercising his authority that day (and it’s never wise to argue with a man carrying a gun, especially in a small town, where you know you’ll see him again), but he actually ran Megan’s license and put a warning on it. He also acted like he was doing us a giant favor by not giving her a ticket. Megan was really mad, and we got home in record time — without a ticket.

OK, kiddies, I’m off to visit my brother & sister in the country for a long weekend, leaving John to his own devices (staying up late, watching horror movies, eating frightening junk food). But never fear, here’s your Friday Love/Hate (see below). Have a good one!

Love/Hate, Friday, March 15, 2002

Birthdays

John and I both turn 40 this banner year. He is much older than I am, since his birthday is in April and mine is in distant June, but his feelings about his birthday verge from the indifferent to active dislike, whereas I love my birthday. I always have. There have only been two birthdays where I had mixed emotions:

1. When I was 8, going on 9 (at what age do you stop “going on” or being a fraction, like 5 and 1/2? Probably when you realize growing up is much less fun than you previously thought) and my mother was expecting my little sister Megan on MY birthday. Of all days. I considered this an outrage, since it was my birthday and that’s what counted. Clearly, having a baby born on my birthday would take attention way from me on the one day when I should be able to count on it. But good news, she was born 9 days before my birthday. And OK, she did come home from the hospital on my birthday, but it was after the cake had been eaten by my friends and me and thus was more in the nature of a floor show than the main event of the day.

2. When I turned 30 and realized that my youth was speeding by faster than I could spend a thousand dollars at Tiffany’s, and I would never be a child prodigy, or any kind of prodigy, and pretty soon, high school boys would stop noticing me, and then it was just a greased slide into wrinkles and all the other horrors of aging and then death and oh my GOD is that a wrinkle?! John applied jewelry, which calmed me down considerably. Guys, note this technique for future reference.

But other than that, I love my birthday. It is completely satisfactory. I like the date (June 4) and it isn’t during one of those bummer months with bad weather, not that there’s real weather in San Francisco, but still. I grew up in upstate New York, and it was nice enough to have my birthday party outside, but it was not yet the zillion degrees that made us flee to Maine every summer, and there weren’t mosquitoes yet. School was almost over, the glorious summer vacation stretching ahead.

Also, my birthday is not on or near a holiday, so I don’t get chintzed on the presents, which is, after all, one of the best things about birthdays. My birthday is conveniently located 6 months before (or depending on how you look at it, after) Christmas, the other major present date of the year, and what could be better than that? The people I know with birthdays even 2 or 3 weeks before Christmas get routinely ripped off and made to do with a combined present, which is one of the worst notions ever invented, right up there with Republican presidents and school all year round.

My birthday is the one day of the year which should be exactly as I want. I feel like that about the other 364, too, but it’s much harder to enforce on non-birthday days. I never, ever work on my birthday, because work does not fall into the category of what I want to do. It falls into the “I have to do it to pay the mortgage” category. So no work on the great day, and sleeping in and waking up sans alarm is also required. After that, we’ll see. It’s my birthday and I’ll do what I want to.

OK, so yesterday was a fairly Z grade day as days go: exhausted and cranky with teeny burning holes in my face where my eyes should have been; endless crazed phone calls from my mother; mathy work requiring cognitive thought when sleep-deprived.

Now, bad days are always improved by getting the hell out of work and getting home, and yesterday was no exception. But fun things happened between leaving the office and returning home:

1. Saw a pair of red, high-heeled sandals abandoned outside an elegant building on Nob Hill, facing toward the door as if their owner had vanished before she could go inside.

2. A total stranger sitting at a sidewalk caf? said, “Hey, nice hair!” as I passed. I’m pretty sure he was serious, however strange that may be.

3. I stopped by to see my HBO deprived friend Richard, and his cat, the appropriately named Kitty Kelly, bearing a shopping bag from the Mus?e d’Orsay stuffed with tapes of the Sopranos, Sex & the City, and that 9/11 special (he taped from 8-10 instead of 9-11). I’m beginning to feel like a drug dealer. Lat week, he asked to borrow Six Feet Under, of which he had heard much acclaim, and then when he was hooked on that, I hit him with the other HBO Big S shows. Maybe TV really is the opiate of the masses, and not religion. Anyway, it was fun to see him and have Kitty bite me and play with me. I’m still trying to decide if the bites are a compliment or an insult. She comes out to see me, and rolls around, but then she bites me. Maybe she’s just me in cat form.

When I got home, I discovered that it was an especially good mail day. Since letters have been almost universally replaced by e-mail, mail mostly now is bills and possibly magazines, along with the usual junk mail. But yesterday (it seems to be a list-y sort of day):

1. No bills!

2. A little welcome card from the allergist I first saw a couple of weeks ago, endearingly signed by hand, “Dr. Jeff”.

3. A whole box of the Caffe Trieste Mocha Java coffee of my total addiction, with handwritten thank you note on the equally handwritten packing slip. Also, they have new, cute packaging! I am the packaging fan the packaging designers are inspired by.

4. An original drawing by the tragi-comic genius, Lynda Barry! Dedicated to ME! And with an extra, spring-inspired drawing, too. Oh!My!God! Lynda, you are so Number One!

And just to top it all off, one of my travel diaries was lying open in the hallway, as if one of the cats had been reading it and was interrupted.

I wish I could call in sleep deprived. Not sick, but impaired. Somehow, I don’t think my boss would take kindly to that phone call. “I’m sorry, but I’m staying home to sleep. We’ll all be better off.”

For the past three nights, I have fallen asleep exhausted, slept for 3 hours, woken up, stayed awake for another three or four, and then fallen back asleep for an hour or so before the alarm goes off. So I’m in the deeply sleepy phase when I get yanked awake. I am beginning to think I’d be better off just staying awake.

In addition to this, last night I had those weird dreams that leave you with a bizarreness hangover, making the whole day seem completely surreal. I feel like I’m sleepwalking (although that would mean I was actually asleep). According to the National Sleep Foundation, more than 60% of Americans are sleep-deprived, so I can stop feeling special right now. But if that’s the case, and since sleep deprivation has been shown in study after study to cause slower thinking, less creativity, memory loss, and an increased likelihood of accidents when driving or operating machinery, among other undesirable effects, we really should be able to call in sleep deprived.

I just hope I can make it through the day, not to mention the night.

San Francisco’s mayor, Willie Brown (who refers to himself in the ebonics third person as “Da Mayor”, and I’m not kidding), decided that he’d rather be in Paris than attend his city’s very first coalition meeting on homelessness, which many San Franciscans consider the city’s biggest problem.

Now, I’m a big Paris fan, but surely Brown could have timed his visit better. Not only did Da Mayor commit this stunning faux pas, but while in Paris, he actually blamed the lack of safety and hygiene on San Francisco streets on — I do hope you’re sitting down to read this — the independent press, such as SF Weekly and other free newspapers.

Brown says that people open up these newspaper boxes and scatter their contents to the winds, and that’s what the whole problem is. Newsflash for you, Willie: that’s the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is a city whose mayor gave up on even trying to solve the homeless problem shortly after taking office, saying it was insoluble. But the City still spends $200 million a year on this problem, which has only gotten worse in Brown’s reign, and is as “insoluble” as ever. According to a recent Chronicle article, San Francisco has more homeless people than New York City, which has ten times the population. Something is very wrong here, and it’s not newspapers, free or otherwise, scattered on the street.

I hope Brown takes a good look around while in Paris. I have visited that beautiful city many times over the past 20 years, and I can tell you what Paris has that San Francisco doesn’t: a fleet of green street cleaners with “Propret? de Paris” on the side, which clean up everything from newspapers to Gitane butts to empty Orangina bottles every morning. Paris apparently feels that it should spend some of its tax dollars on keeping the city streets clean for the citizens who pay those taxes. How’s that for a concept?

And by the way, Willie: no-one has ever confused San Francisco with Miami, and they never will.

We took all four of our cats to the vet today for their annual check-ups. Cleo has to have her teeth cleaned, Hannah has one of her recurring ear infections, and Sophie is on diet food again to lose 2 pounds, but otherwise, they’re all in good health. Jack, who is the naughtiest cat in the entire world, is absoutely perfect. But then, she is the youngest.

I almost had a heart attack when we got the total bill, though. Both Cleo and Sophie are now officially geriatric, so their blood work is a lot more expensive, and the bill was a frightening $750. Eeek!

It seems that we’re the white trash of the vet office, just like we’re the white trash of our apartment building. Dr. M’s patients include one of the best-known newscasters in the Bay Area (who had to give up his cats after his allergies to them caused him to code out not once, but twice, and his wife totally begged him to), and a millionaire who had his dog’s teeth polished so he’d look his best before taking the dog to spend the spring on his yacht in Monaco. I’m not kidding. Whereas we wait until we get our tax return and then take the cats in for their check-ups, and we could only afford to have Sophie’s teeth cleaned last year and Cleo’s this year. But we don’t love our cats any less than the rich folks. In fact, we probably love them more. And they love us back. Check out this picture of Hannah sleeping on my pillow last night.

Love/Hate – Friday, March 8, 2002

John and I are going to try and start our very own Friday tradition, though with my limited attention span and capricious temperament, who knows how long the tradition will last? The idea is we’ll pick something and each take a side, one of us for and the other against.

And for our first foray, what could be better than starting with our favorite TV heroine, the adorable Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? We’ve been Buffyphiles since the show first started — though I must admit that John had to talk me into it, the premise sounding so goofy and all. But it has the best writing on TV, with a wit to match Frasier and emotions deeper and truer than anything on the small screen. And what other show could have a musical episode that was so fantastic I had to watch it twice (and I would pay not to see any Broadway musical you care to name)? Not to mention the fact that the cast is very, very cute and can out-act almost any other TV cast. So it’s completely satisfying on just about every level.

Which brings us to the topic du jour: what was Buffy thinking when she chopped off her hair? For the purposes of this blog, I’ll refer to the character (Buffy) rather than the actress (Sarah Michelle). OK.

I freely admit that I have long hair and in general, I think long hair is prettier. Some girls can carry off the short hair and look great, but Buffy’s hair looks like a little Dutch girl hat. I think the chopping is supposed to be symbolic and has something to do with her, uh, relationship with Spike (is there an “R” rating for TV?) and her coming back from the dead, but who cares why she did it? It looks icky. And I’m talking about a girl who is completely cute in a fast food uniform.

Also, part of the fun of watching Buffy in action is the contrast of the monster-killing with her stylish clothes and hair flying.

I think she’s already realized it was, as Ahnuld would say, a big mistake, because it looks like it’s growing back already. Hopefully her tressage will be restored by the time she gets married (the actress, not the character).

I completely struck out at the Body Shop yesterday. My plan was to pick up a couple of things for John as a tiny surprise, and one thing for me, since I can hardly ever buy a present for someone without buying myself one, too, no matter how small.

But…the Body Shop near me had none of the things. Not one. So, I decided to try and get the stuff on-line, instead. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the only things you can buy from the website are “selected gift items”. This pretty much blew my mind, partly because you can buy just about anything on the Web, including castles, and partly because the Body Shop is supposed to be so forward-thinking. What is the point of having a website where you can read Anita Roddick’s views on hemp products, but you can’t actually buy any of their products, including the hemp-based ones? Call me crazy, but I would have thought that one of the things they would want their website to do is actually sell things.

What could be a ruder awakening than the shrill, hateful voice of the alarm clock (a necessary evil, or evil necessity, if there ever was one)? A cat leaping from the floor onto the bed at 2:00 a.m. and landing with all her weight, reinforced by velocity, on your relaxed, sleeping, and unsuspecting tummy muscles, is what. I can completely understand now why Houdini died of being punched in the gut before he had a chance to fortify his muscles against the assault. Damn. There’s a physics lesson I could have done without.

John and I have swapped obsessions this week. He lent me the stupidly named, yet incredibly gripping Disturbia by the brilliant and erudite Christopher Fowler. The story is set in London, a place Fowler obviously not only knows well, but loves well, and the ancient city is as much of a character as its lower class, would-be journalist protagonist, Vince. Vince gets caught spying on a secret, very upper-class, and murderous society, and to avoid being killed by the society’s members, has to solve 10 London-related riddles in the space of a single winter night. I couldn’t wait to get home and read the next installment, and the ending was both shocking and satisfying. This one screams movie. Bad news, though: seems you can only get it in the UK.

I lent John what is possibly my favorite book ever, Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart. Mikal is the infamous Gary Gilmore’s little brother, and his unflinching look at hs family’s doomed, damaged history, leading with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy to Gary’s execution, is brilliant and deeply moving. When I first read it, I carried it from room to room so I could get in a few more sentences, and it stayed with me for weeks after reading it. One of the saddest and most brilliantly written books I have ever read. It has cast its spell over John, too, who also can’t wait to get home and read more of it. Yet we would probably never have read these books if it weren’t the other. I think that’s kind of cool.

John and I had brunch with Richard on Sunday at Rex Caf?. It was warm enough to sit outside in the sun, and although I was with two redheads, and the only one wearing sunscreen, I was the one who ended up with a slight sunburn. Malibu Suzy! The food was OK, but not great. We’re beginning to run out of good breakfast places on Polk Street. But it was good to catch up with each other.

You may remember that the apartment across the hall from us was bought by a couple with the same last name as John’s, a truly remarkable coincidence considering there are only 6 apartments in the entire building, two on each floor. What are the chances that both apartments on the same floor would be owned by people with the same name? It’s not a particularly common one, either.

And although this is a city, sometimes it seems like a city masquerading as a small town. On the weekend, we picked up John’s three prescriptions (with gratitude for my excEt medical benefits, since the actual cost was $250 and we only had to pay $15), only to be told by the pharmacist that Mr. Same Name’s mysterious and expensive prescription was ready. The pharmacist was amazed by the coincidence, too, and kept joking about it. Then when we were at the Good Guys on our toy shopping expedition, the computer brought up another guy with the exact same name as John’s, who also lives in the city. Yet we never win the lottery.

I see the ever-popular Friday Five is all about vacations this week. It’s amazing that I ever even go on vacation when it looks like this, right here, right now, right outside my window. You gotta love it that it’s been 70 degrees and sunny for the last week of February. This is why we pay the big bucks to live here.

I have travelled a fair bit, but there are still places I’d like to visit. Some are impossible, though. I’d love to visit Egypt 50-100 years ago, before the tourist traffic got so heavy that it started ruining the very things that attracted the hordes in the first place. Hawaii, 50-75 years ago, ditto. I’d like a decent hotel, but not high rises on the beach. Unless they get going on that Star Trek instant travel thing (and why haven’t they?), I’m not going to Thailand or Australia, even though I want to. I can’t face 14+ hours in a plane for any reason whatsoever, even first class. Too boring, too long. And since time travel, too, is still impossible (what have scientists been doing all these years, anyway?!), my Number One vacation wish remains impossible: to spend a week in Bar Harbor, Maine (where we spent the summers when I was a kid), as a 9 or 10 year old. But it would have to be 30 years ago, when I really was that age, and life was fearless and good and the summers were endless.

Within the realm of the possible: Greece; Morocco; Tanzania (where I would go on safari with an old friend who lived with us for a few years as a student before returning to his native Tanzania); Easter Island; Tahiti & Bora Bora.

So it’s Friday, and sunny, and I’m counting the hours until I can get out of my office building and start living my real life. I’m meeting John after work today and we are shopping for a CD burner. We have our iMac back and our joy knows no bounds. In order to show it how happy we are that it’s home, we are going to buy it a lovely new accessory, which has the added bonus of being fun for us, too. I might even get the new Joey Ramone CD and copy it for my bro and sis, so I can bring it up when I visit them in a couple of weeks. Joey’s gone, but the music lives on, and you haven’t really lived until you hear his version of “Wonderful World.”

To recap: sunny, beautiful Friday, shopping on the agenda, and the iMac is back. Yes, I may have poisoned John slightly with last night’s leftovers, and it is just when everything is going great that Fate usually gives me one of her nastier surprises. But I am giving way to a cautious, uncharacteristic optimism anyway. Stay tuned.

Looks like it’s going to be somewhat expensive to get the iMac out of the hospital — like $300 — but still worth it. I hope it’s home by the weekend. I’m very, very tired of being in incommunicado (incommunicada?) and inefficient world. I miss happy, speedy, beautiful iMac world. There’s no place like home.

And there’s no year like 1962. What a vintage year it was! Despite seeing the exit of the incomparable Marilyn, it also saw the d&eacutebuts of my old friends Peter and Richard (a day apart, and they have been friends since the age of 7), and John and me. Happy birthday today to Richard! You look mahvellous, darling.

And by the way, 1962 was also an excEt year for Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne. So here’s to a fabulous vintage!

Yesterday, I went to the allergist for the first time in my life. One thing I have noticed since I have started going to doctors this year is the similarity to travelling, i.e., you spend more time waiting than you do actual travelling or seeing the doctor. I never mind waiting at the dentist’s, because, well, waiting is better than their ministrations and because my dentist has all the best and most current magazines, like Architectural Digest. I have never been able to spend more than a few wishful moments mentally redecorating before being whisked away to the torture chamber.

At the allergist’s, who is also John’s allergist, I had to make do with Readers Digest and People, and most of it was spent semi-naked while the allergy tests did their thing. They tested me for 80 different things on my back and arms, and it turned out that my suspicions were correct.

Here’s the culprit! Turns out that yes, I do have allergies, and I am allergic to three things: two different kinds of house dust mites, d. farinae and d. ptero, to give them their Latin names, and, oddly, Valley oak trees. So I have been doing the right thing in living in the city and avoiding housework all these years. After all, whenever I have attempted it myself, it has been a nasal disaster.

Just noticed that my archives are on strike, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

The allergist himself looks much like a younger Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, complete with the glasses and mole-like way of peering at you. He is very earnest and hails from Montreal. He seems to be very homesick, so I gotta wonder why he lives here instead of there. Probably because he can make more money here, and it’s 70 degrees and sunny instead of 39 degrees.

That reminds me: happy birthday to my old friend Peter, who grew up in Montreal. Happy 40th, baby! I’m right behind you!

God, I hope our Mac gets fixed soon. I’m really sick of being completely cut off from e-mail, not to mention the fact that the old PC we have been using while the Mac is indisposed swoons like a Victorian lady whenever I try to access Movable Type. I had forgotten how much fun it is to have your computer crash over and over again, for no apparent reason. And I pity the people who can’t or won’t give the Mac a try. On the other hand, once you’re hooked, it’s just about impossible to go back to the evil old PC.

So think good thoughts for our little grey iMac, OK?

By the way…thanks to Babs for the care package, which arrived on Saturday, after a long journey from coast to coast. You are the sweetest!

Here’s a coincidence: for the first time in years, John & I were idly watching cartoons on this sunny Saturday morning (yes, the minute John’s parents returned to the frozen north, it became warm and sunny here), only to discover later that the creator of the cartoons, the brilliant Chuck Jones, had died at his home yesterday. He had a long and innovative career, and his creations will live on and entertain generations to come.

Since we’ve spent the past month either feverishly preparing for visitors, or amusing them, we have given ourselves the weekend off. It will be devoted to unreportable lethargy if I have anything to say about it.

I was bitten by a parrot yesterday.

This doesn’t happen very often to a city girl like me. I have never once been molested by the wild parrots, whom I often see flying overhead with a clatter of green wings glinting in the sun, calling out with their distinctive, rough voices, “You’ll never get us in a cage!” They are the descendants of a pet parrot who escaped many years ago, according to local legend, and I find them one of the many delightful details of living in San Francisco.

Yesterday, I stopped off at Petco on the way home to get some cat-related supplies. While paying for my purchases, one of the tame parrots who belongs to the owner perched on my hand, happily saying his name. Everything seemed to be going OK, but suddenly, he decided that my hand was a chew toy, and started biting me really hard. If you’ve never been bitten by a parrot, I can tell you: they bite very hard and their beaks are as much like rock as possible without actually being rocks. As John pointed out to me later, they crack nuts with their beaks.

I think I should be commended for keeping my hand still until the parrot could be removed, because it hurt like hell. My hand today is covered with parrot marks. The parrot also has a keen sense of humor, besides being sneaky. He laughed his ass off after being removed from my (bleeding) hand, and the apologetic owner said he always laughs when he’s done something naughty. Who says animals aren’t sentient beings? That bird has a better sense of humor than many people I know.

So I arrived home with my parrot-injured hand to find that our upstairs neighbor is having her bathroom re-re-done. So not only considerable construction noise directly overhead, but the water was brown and not warm enough to have a bath. In fact, it reminded me of the plumbing in Russia, where the water was always brown (I brushed my teeth in mineral water while there) and not very hot, besides smelling quite odd. Also, they don’t seem to understand that the goal of flushing a toilet is to make the contents actually go away, rather than making more farewell appearances than Barbra Streisand. Fortunately, though, it was only the bath water that was Russian-style and nothing else.

However, I have to wonder about the other inhabitants of our small apartment building. There are 6 apartments, all the same size and configuration, two to a floor. The Same Names across the hall paid nearly half a million dollars for their place, and appear to barely be 30 years old. Rich parents? Dot commers who got out in time? Who knows? But the real mystery is Miss Upstairs. She is dumb enough to be a member of the Bush family, with their trademark inability to put a sentence together, yet she paid considerably more for her apartment than we did, and is single. She has also renovated said apartment 3 times in the 7 years we have lived there, which begs the question: how does someone who is so stupid have so much money? Our two favorite theories are porn star and heartless divorc?e who took her very wealthy husband to the cleaners, but we’ll never know for sure. Any other theories?

So that pretty much makes us the white trash of the building, since we aren’t rich and don’t drive a BMW or Land Rover and don’t give a crap, either.