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.

Fog

It is very foggy in the Bay Area.

You would think I would remember this, that 8+ years living away would not have wiped my memory of this integral fact, but it seems to have slipped through the cracks. The window that looks out onto the bay from the dining room at my mother's house here in Mill Valley is white with fog, criss-crossed with telephone lines and bordered with leafy green. And red. And greygreenred.

I went jogging today on the bike path that runs under the freeway, to Sausalito and San Francisco, and was almost trampled by a woman with an industrial-sized baby buggy and golden retriever.  They came out of nowhere. Manifested out of the white. I dodged them, barely. Must remember the sporty yuppy factor when in Marin. Not so much a problem back in Paris. In Paris jogging threats were mostly limited to guys overexcited about the idea of a woman with stamina. Or people picnicking on the canal. Or my own incapacity to multitask (unzipping my sweatshirt, changing my music, and keeping my feet going on uneven terrain having ended in bloody knees on more than one occasion). Here it seems the fog can hide all sorts of forgotten threats.

In the strong visibility of of the living room, my cats are having a face-off. Paris trying to gain terrain on California. Shady, so named by one of my college housemates for her ability to sneak around and grab at people's ankles from under beds and tables and couches, is trying to hold her home turf. Her low-pitched threats sound impressive, at least for a cat protected by the slats and legs of the piano chair. Shady is the matriarch. I left her here with my mother in 2003, when I went to Paris "for a year or so" to check things out. Shady has since been joined by Kittyton, the lumbering star of my brother's youtube channel, and now Maya, straight off the plane from France, has come to rattle the delicate balance. Right now Maya is lying on the floor, about five feet away, watching. Every now and then she sneaks closer, bridging the gap, working on reducing the space between them. 

I imagine them outside, in a ring covered in white fog, darting in and out, circling and hissing, until they decide it's not worth it and lie down in a dogpile. Well... catpile.

While the cats try to get used to each other, my brother is lying on the couch, watching baseball. He and my mother are teasing me for my lack of player and stat knowledge. I tell them that it's not that I am not a fan, I just don't particularly care. My mother says it's only a matter of time. That soon enough I'll be sporting orange and black, shouting at the TV and refusing to go to the kitchen to replenish snacks when it's my turn. Maybe so. 

But for now the fog is too much for me.