An important self-realization

I hate canoeing.

Winter break is over

The hordes of screaming children are again out on the playground next to my house for recess. Damn, it was a nice quiet couple of weeks.

Viva Goulet!

Planet earth is a little less awesome today. Robert Goulet is dead.

Slump for Chumps

Paulson Urges Action on Housing Crisis

Help! Crisis! The rich are getting poorer!

Dear P.J. Harvey

Congratulations on the new album. I just have a question: Where are the fucking guitars? It's all piano and harp. Are you Tori Amos now?

BM

I love listening to the change in attitudes about Burning Man from the people who don't go to it. In the late 1990's when I first got here, people would treat talking about BM like speaking about adventure travel: wow that's really cool that you went on a survivalist retreat in the desert. I admire you for it, but that's not my kind of fun.

Then it was known as sort of a raver party thing as it got nearer to the dot-com boom: yeah I've heard about it. It sounds fun but a little retarded. I'm tempted to go but really not all that tempted.

Then the new batches of people flooding into the city who played fusball at work and carried scooters on BART were excited about it, which is about the same time it became okay to mock Burning Man with friends you trust.

Then after the bust it seemed the hardcore burners became militant while word of the event spread further into the country. Here in San Francisco, we learned about after-burn and decompression parties and other exclusionary events: That party sucked; it was full of Burning Man people.

Then slowly the tide had started to turn against them. Otherwise cool people who continue to go to Burning Man annually finally shut up about it and started keeping it to themselves.

And now, it's only three weeks before the event that the chatter picks up. People admit they're going to BM like they admit watching American Idol- it's an embarrassing guilty pleasure. They say: I'm going to Burning Man, but I'm sure you think it's stupid. And more than ever before the average person is openly hostile to it. Rather than feeling someone out before making fun of the event, it's fine to talk shit about BM in public.

And when that guy lit the man on fire prematurely this year, people were laughing and emailing it back and forth at work, glad to see it get messed up. I thought that was a little cruel to be happy when others' good time is ruined, even if you think their good time is dumb.

But then again, I've been hating Burning Man since long before it was cool. Now that all these amateur poseur haters are joining in, it's just not as much fun anymore.

So I'm now declaring hating Burning Man over.

From now on it's all about loving Burning Man ironically.

But I can't talk about that right now. I'm busy planning the best decompression party ever.

Top negative three-word Amazon.com reviews of Eat, Pray, Love

• Whiny, self-indulgent and dull
• Glib, narcissistic and lightweight
• Trite, Inaccurate and Mildly Annoying
• Whine, Cry and Shop for Father Figures

Thwarted by Ikea

My futon couch/bed frame broke for good just before I went away on all my travels. I've had it for about 8 years and it was really comfortable up until a couple of years ago. The extra-thick mattress finally lost its shape, so after that point it's been just a regular sucky futon instead of an ultra-deluxe futon. Still, it's a futon.

So as soon as I got back from Idaho I set about getting a new one. I still like having a dedicated office, which means that I'll still be sleeping in the living room. But I thought at least I'd get a nicer frame. I found one at Ikea that's more of a fold-out couch that looked good and had an optional cover to make it look even better.

The problem is that the frame, good mattress, and cover all come separately. I went to the store once to try it out- it looked great and they had them in stock, so I came back the next day with a rental car to buy it. By this time, naturally, they had sold out of the mattress but still had the frame and the cover, both of which I bought because they assured me the mattresses were coming later that day and would be available the next morning. I was looking forward to my third trip to Ikea in as many days.

Meanwhile, I still had to my old futon to contend with. I disassembled the frame and put it out by the trash cans. I kept the futon inside leaning up against the wall so I could still sleep on it. Coincidentally, my new neighbor Brian moved in and to make room, they were throwing out some old mattresses. We decided we'd go in together on 1-800-got-junk for a pickup.

Now we're caught up to this morning. The junk collectors collected the junk and left. Then I made sure ZipCar had the big car available for rent. Then I called up Ikea to double check the mattresses were there and in stock.

So, as one would expect, the story ends with me waiting "three to five days" for more mattresses to arrive at Ikea, while owning a useless new couch frame and cover and having no old futon mattress to use in the interim. So I'll be sleeping on the floor next to part of a couch for the next week or so.

When I try to fight squalor, squalor always wins.

Health Care for Everybody! (Eventually)

San Francisco opened enrollment in its universal health care plan yesterday. The press releases tauted the July starting date, but now that it's July it turns out the plan is only open to people who already use a couple of particular free clinics. Then it will be open to people who use all free clinics, then not until January will the plan be open to people like me who just can't afford health insurance but aren't checking in to SF General every week. So basically the plan is not covering anyone who isn't getting free health care already.

One of my writer's organizations finally expanded their health care plans outside of NYC so I called them up. For any of the plans I can afford, there are discounted doctor's visits and prescriptions and then rates for all sorts of different hospital and emergency care. The thing is they all have deductibles and maximum pay-outs. If I understand it correctly, a trip to the emergency room would involve a co-pay on each part: the ambulance, emergency room care, hospital bed, and services. If you add it all up, you've got several thousand dollars' worth of bills. I only have a few thousand dollars in my savings account, so I would be broke after a hospital visit after paying a couple hundred bucks a month for the privilege. The alternative is not having health insurance and having to declare bankruptcy from a hospital visit anyway. Either way, I'm broke at the end.

Both options are just terrific.

Finland, Land of the Punctual

I'm going to Finland next week and have been reading about travel (mostly what the local alcohols are) to get ready. I was very pleased to find this on WikiTravel.org:

Another highly regarded virtue in Finland is punctuality. A visitor should apologize even for being late for a few minutes. Being late for longer usually requires a short explanation. 15 minutes is usually considered the threshold between being "acceptably" late and very late. Some will leave arranged meeting points after 15 minutes or 30 minutes (maximum). With the advent of mobile phones, sending a text message even if you are only a few minutes late is nowadays a norm. Being late for a business meeting, even by 1-2 minutes, is considered bad form.

God that would be nice. Maybe I'll move there.

Oh the indignity

I was relieved that the stupid whales made it out to sea so that I'd no longer have to endure the hourly updates on the Chronicle's website, but they're finding extra stories to milk it.

I have to fully reverse the position I made on this blog earlier that the Chron should just stop worry about news and focus on features to save money, because as they continue to up the fluff I am getting increasingly nauseated with features on sick teenagers and animals. I'm starting to want some good old fashioned terrorism to ground me in reality.

My least favorite reporting that the Chron loves is reporting on their own reporting, and today there was a doozy! Back in March, they did a feature on cyber bullying. Then last week they ran another feature on how because of their feature, people were writing to the bullied girl to comfort her. Then today they ran a third feature on how since their last feature 1,000 more people wrote emails to the bullied girl in question.

My writing about cocktails for the paper is starting to look like actual news in comparison.

Rich Geezers

I try not to read any more about how the Baby Boomers are screwing over the world, but it just keeps coming up. In USA Today:

The growing divide between the rich and poor in America is more generation gap than class conflict, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal government data. The rich are getting richer, but what's received little attention is who these rich people are. Overwhelmingly, they're older folks.

Nearly all additional wealth created in the USA since 1989 has gone to people 55 and older, according to Federal Reserve data. Wealth has doubled since 1989 in households headed by older Americans.

Not so for younger Americans. Households headed by people in their 20s, 30s and 40s have barely kept up with inflation or have fallen behind since 1989. People 35 to 50 actually have lost wealth since 1989 after adjusting for inflation.

Props to people like Anya Kamenetz of Generation Debt who are trying to fight the good fight for the people getting screwed by the older generations. I think I'd just dynamite the AARP.

BS Phone Home

I've had the same cell phone company and number since I originally signed up around 1997. It was called Cellular One then. The company was bought by AT&T so then it was called AT&T Wireless for a while, then it became Cingular Wireless and now I've just been notified that it's AT&T again.

AT&T is also my DSL provider, not that I signed up with them either. It was Yahoo DSL, which then became AT&T.

Also, my phone company, formerly SBC, became AT&T as well.

Not that there is a communications monopoly or anything.

What's wrong with California?

I think this Chronicle Two Cents (public opinion about an issue) Article pretty much articulates what I hate about Californians in general, and San Franciscans in particular.

It's an opinion piece- "Have you ever used the carpool lane illegally?" It appears that nearly everyone has, but everyone has the same excuse- "I HAD to- I was late for something important."
In California, personal development- whether that's intellectual, spiritual, career, or physical- trumps all sense of civility. I would have done something for the greater good/ for you/ kept a promise/commitment/ abided by the law, but something that I felt like doing more came up so you really can't blame me.

People are so used to this attitude that they don't even see it as wrong. Which is just another reason California is the most selfish place on earth.

Note to Self

I read most of the current New York magazine article on children's self-esteem. It's about how praising children's intelligence actually makes them lazy and unwilling to try things at which they might fail, whereas children praised for their effort work harder and do better.

(By the way, after reading that summary sentence, you can skip the article. I was about 3,000 words into it when I realized it was just repeating that thought ad nauseum.)

I only read the article because I hate children, and know that the self-esteem nonsense has been creating monsters out of them for decades. If you've ridden public transit, surely you've seen it too: the stupid (and/or poor) kids scream endlessly about how great they are when they can't even form coherent sentences, arguing over their inherent perfection. The smarter (and/or richer) kids air their unearned entitlement whenever possible, spouting banal nonsense to each other (as opposed to at each other like the poor kids), then perking up and throwing around statistics when impressible adults are around.

Aside: I also believe that the basic wrongness of hip-hop music is due to self-esteem training that began in the 1970's and 80's. The person doing the heavy lifting is the anonymous guy making the beats, who is rarely also the person talking over them. The one rapping about how great he is is usually unoriginal and untalented and learned the value of high self-esteem in the public school system. It's not that all rappers are without artistic merit, but almost anyone could have a hit album if Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, or the Neptunes were making the beats and producing it.

But back to my story- after all, what is blogging if not talking about oneself incessantly, like rappers of the internet- I realized that I was a test case for the praising intelligence versus praising effort.

I always got straight A's in everything until college. My brother was a B and C student. I'd bring home a report card and it would always be the same old thing, but if my brother got a B+ in something then they'd fall over themselves and we'd all go out for sundaes at Friendly's to celebrate. I think there was some reward system where we'd get 20 bucks or some portion of it for good grades, and they'd fluff up my brother's portion to encourage him, whereas to me they mustered all the enthusiasm of paying taxes.

But here's the real rub: My parents once told me when I was in 7th grade or so that they thought my brother was actually more intelligent, and I was not as smart but just worked harder. So rather than praise me for good grades they insulted me. (Note: is it any wonder I hated my parents?) This didn't result in me throwing myself off a bridge, but it drove me to try harder and get smarter and further prove that my parents are stupid hicks.

In the end though, my brother developed a work ethic in college and is the married one with a couple of houses whereas I stew in adolescent squalor. But I do work really hard at it.

Life's Full of Smurfs

I have had a backpack full of change (except for quarters) that I've been trying to get rid of forever. I go to one Safeway and they don't have a CoinStar machine any more. I go to another one and wait in line only to have the only one that works break down on the person in front of me. And today I learned that the CoinStar machines, the ones that don't take out 10% of your money for a service fee if you get an Amazon.com gift certificate instead of cash, have been replaced by CoinMaster machines that still do.

Note to banks: fuck you for not taking loose change. You're a bank! If there was a bank that offered free coin counting machines, I'd switch to that bank on principle.

So anyway, I was in Safeway getting ripped off by the CoinMaster, then went shopping. I noticed that the Veggie Patch fake chicken nuggets were on sale two-for-one, so I bought two of them. I only buy the fake meat- this brand and Morningstar Farms stuff- when it's on sale because normally it's also a huge ripoff. Why does a hamburger with buns and crap cost a buck at McDonald's while a veggie burger made out of the stuff you feed to the cows that make those burgers cost four bucks a pack?

The problem when the fake chicken nuggets are on two-for-one sale is that I come home and eat two packs of them right away, thus saving no money and doubling my caloric intake. Somehow, this is someone else's fault.

I need my safe place

I went to the Safeway in Potrero Hill for the first time in only a month or two, but now it's all changed around. They yuppified it, and it sucks. They have a kitchen accessories section with overpriced measuring cups and a Williams-Sonoma cookbook rack. They have a much-expanded natural foods section (formerly the natural food aisle) with a bunch of bulk food bins at the end. The coffee section seems to cover three aisles now. The vegetable section now has hardwood floors and organic tomatoes stacked into neat little pyramids. They shrank the size of the checkout lanes so everyone is jammed in there together.

They also have a giant circular nut bar. Seriously, like the size of my bedroom. I'm not sure if I was just hallucinating, but I think you can put your special blend of nuts into a grinder there and make your own peanut butter. WTF?

It's weird because that Safeway is fairly ghetto, and San Francisco is already packed full of Trader Joe's and Whole Foods and Bi-Rite already. Do they think the overpriced grocery demographic is underserved?

If this is their new plan, I'm surprised they haven't yuppified the Safeway at Church and Market yet. But then again, I haven't been there in a week.

Christmas Jingle

I was just in Safeway shopping for booze. They were playing Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer over the loudspeakers and I started getting angry.

Basically, the other reindeer are a bunch of fucking jerks who shun Rudolph until his freakish mutation comes in handy. Then all the reindeer loved him? What kind of moral is that? Handicapped people should be locked away until they can prove themselves useful?

In the claymation version of the Rudolph story, even Santa chides Rudolph's father Dasher when Rudolph's mud-covered red nose is exposed.

If I were Rudolph on that foggy Christmas Eve when Santa came begging I'd be all, "Fuck you, Santa. And fuck your fucking elves, and the rest of you reindeer can eat shit. I hope your whole fucking North Pole melts from global warming and some PETA militant cracks your fucking skull for wearing fur. I'm out of this ass-factory, and I'm taking the dentist with me."

Big Fun

This holiday week is great. I still have a bunch of deadlines to meet, but things are a little calmer than usual and there are two Mondays off. That means I can sit around the apartment in my underwear and not feel guilty about it. Yesterday I only left the house to go for a run, and I wouldn't even have done that but I'm going to Florida in a month and need to get into swimsuit condition.

My friend CJ recently called me an introvert, which offended me greatly. I see no reason why you can't stay in the house all day and still consider yourself an extrovert. With blogs, you're putting yourself out there even if you never go out there. And with my five blogs, I'm practically a gadabout.

So trying to prove CJ wrong, we met and went into the Castro. I guess it had been a while since I was there because I forgot how much it depresses me. We were only in two bars and I was bitching and moaning and aching to leave. I don't like it over there.

I still claim my extrovert status. I just don't want to spend time in bad bars.

Lost and Found

If I ever get lost in the forest, remind me to be a member of the media when it happens.

If you live practically anywhere in California, you can't help but knowing that an editor from CNET and his family got stuck in the snow for about a week. The family was found but the father, who left the car to try to find help, has not yet. And with temperatures in the 20's at night, it doesn't look good.

It's a sad story and all, but not riveting enough as its prime placement in the media. It is the Page One story in the SF Chronicle, SF Examiner, San Jose Mercury News, and on CNET.com, where they don't usually put news on the front page at all.

Today so far there is no new news, (I check news websites at least once an hour for no reason I can explain) so all the headlines are "Family doesn't give up hope," and "Search for James Kim goes on."

Yesterday the news was "Pants Found in Grants Pass!" as a pair of pants matching Kim's were found. No good theories emerged on why he would have taken off said pants in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that I could die in my own apartment and nobody would notice it for a week until the smell reached the neighbors, let alone be lost in the wilderness. I'd be the one found eight months later with gnaw marks on my skull from wild boars chewing on it and my editors would be all, "I thought it was weird he never turned in that story about wine coolers." But in a way, that would be them saying they really cared.