Author: maggeh

Of Note

If you’re in San Francisco, find House of Shields on New Montgomery near Market. Walk past the bar to the women’s restroom in the back. Go inside and open the door of the stall in front of you. Look for the earthquake crack running through the tiny mosaic tiles on the floor.

Follow it with your eyes until you come to the wall on your left. There, near your feet, someone has painted a pale blue sprout reaching up for light from the crack in the floor.

Don’t Stand So Close to Me

Jason on proxemics:

“I stand alone in the elevator, right in the middle, equidistant from the four walls. Before the doors close, a woman enters. Unconsciously, I move over to make room for her. We stand side by side with equal amounts of space between the two of us and between each of us and the walls of the elevator. On the 12th floor, a man gets on and the woman and I slide slightly to the side and to the back, maximizing the space that each of us occupies in the elevator. At the 14th floor, another man gets on. The man in front steps to the back center and the woman and I move slightly toward the front, forming a diamond shape that again maximizes each person’s distance from the elevator walls and the people next to them.

It reminds me of cell division in an embryo or the arrangement of atoms in a molecule…”

Here Comes the Bride

My to-do list is my life, and my life seems to be on red alert. We’re ten days out, and today I noticed that my list has ballooned into 123 items at five priority levels:

ACK!

Gasp!

Urgent

Necessary

Very Good Idea

The list is done though, so that’s comforting.

Potent Second-Hand Smoke

Walking past a head shop on the Haight, I notice a
Maneki Neko (Chinese lucky cat) in the window. This one is made of plastic and is battery operated, so the raised arm moves up and down. As I pass, the cat’s arm movement is perfectly timed to the music blaring out of the shop’s door. For the moment, Maneki Neko is rocking out.

Habits as They Form

Public pipe smoking has always seemed like a misguided pretension to me, one that’s especially odd in a younger man. A pipe-smoker in his twenties may as well stand on a corner shouting, “Look at me everyone. Observe my young yet thought-worn brow. I thoroughly enjoy Yeats!”

That said, yesterday I saw a guy in his early twenties parking his motorcycle. He removed his helmet, reached into his bag, and pulled out a pipe. Leaning against the bike, he packed and lit the pipe, and took a few puffs. Only then did he finish parking the motorcycle, and head inside with the pipe anchored in his jaw. So I was forced to wonder about his deal for a while. Which, I suppose, was the point.

Good Words

manque–unfulfilled or frustrated in the realization of one’s ambitions or capabilities

somatize–to express psychological conflict through bodily symptoms

Things That Happend at My Bachelorette

  • Had three seemingly innocent cocktails at the hotel. Noticed I was having trouble balancing. Turns out Vodka, Tequila, and Watermelon Schnapps (with a twist of lime) are pinkly delicious.
  • Almost climbed into a Toyota–occupied by a family of four–because I was under the mistaken impression that it was our cab.
  • Climbed into an actual cab with aforementioned Pink Terror cocktail in hand. This was less of a problem than you might expect, as the cab driver already had a bottle of beer in his cup holder.
  • Danced with another bachelorette’s giant inflatable penis.
  • Thanked my dear friends for not making me carry a giant inflatable penis.
  • Danced with a bridesmaid near a wall of cheering Latin gentlemen. When one of us tipped too far off vertical, said gentlemen caught us, tilted us upright, and resumed cheering.
  • Wore a pink, leopard-print G-string on my head.
  • Accidentally sprayed cherry-flavored whipped cream all over a friend’s blouse.
  • Assured my roommate that it was fine that she was making out with my high school sweetheart, who happened to be dressed as a very unattractive woman for the evening.

Overheard

Scenario: A 13-year-old girl in a thrift store holds up a trucker cap, showing it to her approximately 20-year-old shopping companions.

Girl: What do you think?

Guy: Of that?

Girl: Yeah!

Woman: For what?

Girl: For, like, wearing.

Woman: Are you serious?

Girl: Yeah. (Puts cap on.)

Guy: It’s ugly.

Girl: You don’t like it?

Guy: No. It’s ugly.

Woman: He’s right.

Girl: These are, like, really cool right now.

Guy: No they’re not.

Woman: It doesn’t look good on you.

Girl: Are you sure?

Woman: Very, very sure.

Stuff I Learned from Reading

  • How to figure out when it’s your dream. From O Magazine‘s interview with Salma Hayek:Salma Hayek: …This is one thing I learned: How do you recognize what is your true dream and what is the dream that you are dreaming for other people to love you?

    Oprah: How?

    SH: The difference is very easy to understand. If you enjoy the process, it’s your dream.

    O: Correct.

    SH: If you are enduring the process, just desparate for the result, it’s somebody else’s dream.

  • I want to read Common Shock by Kaethe Weingarten. O‘s book reviewer describes the premise like this: “In a society rampant with binary thinking–good versus evil, us versus them–how do we move toward understanding and forgiveness of those who are different? How do we hold onto hope and let go of fear?”
  • I’ve been watching too much T.V. Painter Robert Henri says, “You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a certain thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.”
  • North Koreans are living in an Orwell novel. From this week’s New Yorker, “Alone in the Dark” by Philip Gourevitch:”Pyongyang is North Korea’s model city, full of model schools and model hospitals and model people: residence is reserved for the Party’s chosen, the political and military elite, the commissars and cadres and their most faithful followers, and the population is regularly cleansed of those deemed ideologically lax, as well as the old, the sick, the disfigured, and the lame, who are banished to the provinces and replaced by a fresh crop of loyalists.”