Run SF, Run

I thought I couldn't run the most well-known footrace in San Francisco because I had a softball game double-header. Turns out it wouldn't have made a difference, even the god-I-love-them nutters who jog Bay to Breakers get up at running time to hit the streets. But I didn't realize this until the night before, over mac and cheese and broccoli and sardines with my buddy Hanna. So I sat this one out, but the two of us made plans to set out early for coffee and looky-loo.

When I woke up at 8, I could already hear the cheers and the music from my open window. The race and follow-up frivolity goes by not so far from my spot on the southern side of Golden Gate Park's panhandle. That is, it turns out a half mile is not so far when it comes to this particular event.

Hanna and I got in touch and I went to get a coffee and wait for her on the corner of Divisadero and Fell. It was a gorgeous gorgeous day. I had put on sunscreen and my team jersey, planning to walk to the fields in time for my game. When I got there, I immediately regretted not rocking the more deliciously garish colors the B2B deserves.

In the twenty minutes I was on my own waiting for my friend, I got to watch the amazing people of my newly rediscovered hometown go by in droves. There were unicorns, toga groups, three sets of homemade MarioCart characters, pokemon, a gaggle of bright yellow chicks, and the usual hot girls wearing hot girl costumes. There was a band of Mormons with bike helmets who greeted each other excitedly in the street, blue-painted tighty whitey wearing guys with the white hats of smurfs (plus one in a yellow smurfette wig), and a group of at least twenty ghostbusters. There were more naked men than I had seen in all of my almost nine years in Paris. There were people dressed as Legos. There was an Italian guy from behind me who taunted the police officers as they stopped people and poured out glass containers into the gutter. "Wow, your job must be incredibly difficult today." 

I struck up a conversation with him and a girl standing next to me. Italian guy eventually wandered off, but she and I continued to muse over what Bay to Breakers is all about. "You must have done this a hundred times, being from the area and all." "No, actually, I've been away for a while in France." "France?? Why would you ever come back?" I looked at her blankly and then gestured to the parade of ridiculous, wonderful people in front of us. It was easily the most satisfying answer I have ever been able to give to that question.

Hanna showed up and we walked up the route a bit to find some shade. We set down our stuff across from a makeshift garage DJ playing house and soul. We danced. She was done up a bit in tie-dyed leggings and running shorts. Again, I was jealous. We shouted out to all our favorite costumes:

- Tie-dye power!

- Yeah opera hats!

- Woohoo Mariachis!

- Right on guy in suit and rollerblades, way to commit!

- Bacon! Yeah! I don't even eat bacon and I love you!

- Marry me Michael Phelps! Nice swimmies!

- Pac Man!

- Juicing cyclists and their nurses!

- Jamaican bobsled team!

- Ostriches!

- Super buffed out dude with girl in fat suit!

- Another Jamaican bobsled team!

etc.

It was wonderful. We were there for about an hour and I then I had to go. My walking route to the field was about the same as the race route, so I got to see more chaos on the way. Including Alamo Square, with all the Full House colorful victorians and hundreds of merry makers. And hundreds going by. 

Next year I will get it together and run the race. There is something so appealing about doing something both athletic and ridiculous. Something encouraging silliness and community. Something so San Francisco. 

And frankly, I was impressed at the level of contained mischief. I had talked with a couple of very coppy looking cops a few days before. The two of them were drinking snob coffee in a hipster cafe and we chatted about the upcoming event. They said they were cracking down this year, but "Honestly, what are you gonna do? Aside from clearing away people who are too drunk to walk. Besides, we're at the bottom of the pay scale. It's just not worth it to keep people from having fun."

Turns out they did a good job. When I got back to Lyon St at the end of the day, no one was passed out in the front lawn. In fact, it didn't even smell like pee.

Reflection hebdomadaire

I was feeling kind of down the other day. 

"Meh, I said, stuff is kind of sucky and not going as I want. Maybe I should have stayed in France where the wine is cheap."

But then I started thinking about my week.

corn memorial

There was a half marathon in Humboldt where I reached a personal goal of mine and got to spend time cooking and eating and playing badminton and catch and innappropriately mocking a corn memorial with some super special people.

There was a pub quiz in which a our team was almost triumphant and they gave us free drinks just for being awesome.

panda and mr perfect

There was a baseball game where I got to cheer and sing my heart out and dance around in excellent company, reminded that winning is almost never everything, and group singing works best with 2000 people and a jumbotron.

There was an evening spent watching friends get riled up over a basketball game and heading home absurdly thrilled at being reunited with night-riding thanks to the discounted purchase of bike lights.

even the pre-show projections were rad.

There was some work, including two days of teaching hilarious fifth graders a variety of things, such as how to appropriately goalie-throw for maximum effect during dodgeball (or balle-aux-prisonniers depending on your linguistic preference), how to reconfigure fraction word problems so they don't seem so intimidating, and how to use Powerpoint.

There were amazing seats to a super nutty, scenically and theatrically creative ballet rendition of Cinderella that juiced me up for another run at writing for performance and allowed me to watch my mom and her boyfriend giggle.

There were a couple of glasses of lovely wine in a lovely secret garden backyard in lovely Hayes Valley, where the light filtered through the leaves in that way it has and we could still hear the sounds of the city just over the wall.

Funky Door Yoga on Waller 

There was the beginning of a Bikram Yoga series that kicked my butt and various other muscles and left me clamoring for more.

There was the best burrito I have ever tasted. Really.

There was Karaoke in the Chinese mall in El Cerrito, followed by a surprisingly satisfying hangout in the parking lot of a Mill Valley 7-11 that allowed me to deliciously relive my youth over orange flavored soda and Coke Zero.

mom's day hydrangea

There was Mother's day, and another ballgame with blue skies and garlic fries and a win this time, and the wonderful gift of being with family on one of those family holidays that you wouldn't travel across the country or the ocean for, one of those days that manifests its own importance by simple declaration, one of those days that in a string of days is a memory of time spent physically with people I love and haven't been able to passively be with for so long.

So, thanks California. Thanks for that. I feel better already.

A Brief Affair

We both knew it couldn’t last.

It had been a while since I tried my hand at a June/December romance. He was graying a bit, becoming squinty around the eyes. But so handsome, and worldly in that charming way of a gentleman who had lived.

People noticed us in the street. In the park, by the fountain and the cello player in front of the Academy of Sciences. Women would say hello. Men would recognize him, ask heartily who I was, pat him on the back. It was a little off-putting, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was happy.

He was wary at first, I think the ringing in his ears and his failing voice were beginning to make him question his virility. When a gentleman friend came to dinner with us, he puffed up. Defensive. Aggressive. Suspicious. Obstinate and demanding the next day, as I cleaned the dishes and he shuffled around underfoot.

He went through my belongings when I was out too long. I would come home to the insides of my purse disturbed. On rare occasions, my things lay in pieces all along the hallway and into the room we shared. Ripped paper. Torn plastic. Mangled tubes of cocoa butter. What was he looking for? What did he find? Funny how the mind forgets and this particular memory fades.

Strange to think now of how we played house, how we slipped into the lives of people long intimate. The Inner Sunset provided a comfortable blanket of fog that cocooned us safely inside of our own story. A place I never frequented before meeting him. A place worlds away from the hippies and pit bulls of the Haight or the pigeons and hipsters of the Mission. Here he became imprinted on me. The deep pools of his brown eyes. The soft way in which he called to me. The bridge of his nose against the curve of my calf.

We walked together every day. Many times a day. At first it was just a little, around the block, to work up an appetite and a reason to go back home and feel warm again. But our strolls soon grew longer. We went into Golden Gate Park, visiting the baseball diamond and looking in at the botanical gardens. I was training for a race at the time, and was used to speeding through in washes of greens and blues and browns. But he insisted on stopping, to smell the grass and the flowers and who knows what magical things awaiting just off the pathway. He tugged at me. Taught me to take my time. To smell and taste.

We both had someone else. His was in Hawaii on what we had begun to think of as an unending vacation. She had introduced us, before taking flight. “So nice to see you two becoming friends,” she would later write, from some mysterious beach so many miles away as we sat on the deck, gazing sleepily at each other in the glow of the afternoon. Mine, of course, was across the bridge, having her own adventures in the decks and gardens and wide goose down beds of Mill Valley.

In the end, when our time was up, there were no long goodbyes, no drawn-out gazes. I went out as if I would return and he padded off into the yard, to do whatever it is the older set does when they are left to their thoughts. I don’t see him anymore, except for that one time I ran hurriedly through the house, feeling I’d missed something, when his eyes followed me passively as I rushed in and out of those few rooms, checking water and food dishes, certain I was leaving something behind.

I still think of him. I think of how warm he was and how his breath barely disturbed his ribcage as he slept, on his side. I’ve dreamt of him. I’ve dreamt of running on the beach and falling together in the sand. I wonder if he dreams of me sometimes, his feet grabbing at somnolent earth the way he did when his body would forget that separation between dream and reality. Dreaming of running. Calling, barking hoarsely in the night. The same way his name lingers on my lips in the morning when I think today would be a good day for a long walk. Two syllables: Cody. Cody who would never be mine but would always have a piece of me. 

Café

This is how acclaimed linguist Ray Jackendoff makes his morning coffee:

 This is how I make mine:

'nuf said.



First image from Jackendoff's article "Parallels and Nonparallels between Language and Music" in Music Perception. Vol 26, Issue 3, PP 195-204. 2009. 
Really, this is a representation of how a robot would make coffee, used to illustrate a more relevant connection between the structures of robotics (and I assume job-coding in general) and language than between the structures of music and language.

Second image resulting from my own text passed through online word-cloud creator Tagul. What a difference a visual representation makes, eh?