"Have compassion for everyone you meet even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit, bad manners,or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone." --Miller Williams

it's been raining and raining and raining in california this week - there was a ten day period where we got something like nine inches of rain. it made me grumpy, and reluctant to run, reluctant to get up, generally reluctant. i'm a sun girl. but mostly it made me grumpy when the basement portion (ie, the bedroom) of my apartment flooded. since monday it's been an adventure of mildewy moldy carpet, loud roaring dehumidifiers (and grumpy neighbors), muddy-footed contractors, and a lot of head-scratching. fingers were pointed at the water heater*, but really i think the foundation is cracked and groundwater somehow managed to well in. a LOT of ground water.

none of my stuff was ruined (clever of me to put all my furniture with legs in the basement room, wasn't it?), so it was mostly just a week (and another week coming up) of hassle and inconvenience, treking back and forth from B's place, living largely out of my car, looking a little disheveled, dressing in whichever t-shirt and jeans were cleanest and most readily at hand.

the handyman finally agreed, on day 6, that the carpet really was ruined, and pulled it out and promised to replace it with hardwood floors next week. the landlord agreed to adjust my rent. B has put up with all my whining with amazing patience and my arriving at his place after midnight, like a storm cloud. zeke is lonely, stuck at home where i can't sleep. i go home to pet him for 20 minutes at at time, till the smell of mold and/or cold from having the windows open chases me back out.

anyway, the point of this post actually is that once again, life has a way of putting things in perspective. my car just looks like i'm homeless**. i'm not actually. i have lots of options, lots of safety nets still available to me. i sometimes think about how the difference between me and someone on the street or living in a shelter isn't as much as it seems. it's two things: one big (or a series of smaller) life-disasters, and a safety net. that's the difference: the safety net. i have a community of family and friends who will pick me up and dust me off when disaster (even minor ones) strike. it's the people who don't have safety nets that end up in trouble. the disasters may be minor -- flooded apartment, lost job, unexpected illness. but bouncing back from them, when you have no one to fall back on, sometimes becomes impossible.

i've been volunteering at the SF foodbank once a month and it's a reminder to me to appreciate that i have a safety net. and more than that, to appreciate the generosity of the people who make a place like the foodbank run. they are creating a safety net for complete strangers. services like free meals*** help close the gap between minor disaster and life-derailing disaster. we all need safety nets. but it takes an act of compassion to create safety nets for total strangers.


*which, as it turned out, was nurturing a little farm of mushrooms under its warm damp belly. i knew there was a reason i opened the water heater closet on the first day i arrived, looked at that unfinished, spider-inhabited dark corner and slammed it again in horror.

**backseat contains: oranges, box of wheat thins, duffle bag of tshirts and jeans, shirts and slacks hung on hangers, running shoe and a pair of heels. necklace and earrings hanging from the review mirror, extra sweatshirt, coat, hat, gloves, newspaper and unread mail in the front seat, iphone charger dangling from the cigarette lighter, wrappers from starbucks commuting breakfasts on the floor in the back, running clothes and aikido gi and laptop in the trunk...

***South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer dug himself an impressive hole last week comparing hungry people with stray animals. his lack of understanding about the interconnectedness of community (ie, we all sink or we all swim) betrays him to be the worst possible kind of person to be holding public office. but what i find chilling is how it betrayed his complete lack of compassion.

Labels: volunteerism

another one down: Pasadena Playhouse closes its doors.

i know this is just the human brain's tendency to find pattern and order where none actually exist, but i find that events tend to balance themselves:

had a CRAPPY-ASS week at work -- only had one day off in the past three weeks, working with a bad headcold (which is keeping me from running, making me far more cranky and unfit to deal with work stress). stayed at work till midnight on Thursday running numbers only to get to work early on Friday to discover that the boss wanted other numbers. this after two weeks of staying till midnight during tech. so yeah, kinda hating work (and the way it gobbles up my life) this week, making those flip remarks about "why didn't I go to law school!?"

then another theatre goes down, and i feel grateful to have a job at a company that isn't teetering on the verge of financial collapse. fiscal responsibility is EVERYTHING. take note, young not-for-profit theatres. the art will cease to matter if you can't make payroll.

is this thinning of the herd a good thing, though? will we emerge from economic strife with leaner meaner more economically viable theatres? i want to believe that, that we'll all learn a lesson about fiscal responsibility*, but i think the tough love approach is too simplistic in this application. when the economy tanks, art suffers.

*it's spectacular, how long it takes to dig a theatre out of financial ruin vs. how quickly one can sink a theatre into unmanageable debt.

Labels: theatre closings

got through the usual january tech crunch only to arrive at my first day off with a yucky head cold; i suspect this is my punishment for jogging past a clinic in berkeley yesterday where a cheerful guy offered us free flu shots, which we declined.

so big day-off hiking plans were derailed by a combination of the NEVERENDINGRAIN plus body aches, so it was a good day to stay in and continue my bread-baking education. i moved on to the King Arthur Flour recipe, the one that calls for making a bucket of dough that just lives in the fridge until you are ready to bake a portion of it.

the first loaf (dough made Saturday, loaf baked Sunday) came out tasty, a little denser than the NYTimes recipe from last week, and slightly underdone. (not that that stopped us from consuming it in a single day, mind you). i think my oven was a little hot; the top was browning before the inside was fully cooked. the next attempt is a pair of stubby baguettes (baby-baguettes = baguette-ettes?). lacking a pizza stone, i'm convinced by my beginner's luck that using a ceramic baking dish is the key to a successful loaf; therefore i'm limited to loaf shapes that will fit into a 10" round casserole dish. this dough is also drier (i'm sure there's a more bread-specific technical term than "dry") than the NYTimes recipe; it makes for easier handling but uglier loaves since the folds and creases aren't quite as forgiving. to wit: one of the baby baguette grew a lump off one side while in the oven. how to prevent this? i have no idea.

thus far i've only worked with no-knead recipes for simplicity; and based on my knowledge of quick breads, i've been reluctant to handle the dough any more than absolutely necessary. though now that i think about that, that makes no sense at all, since over-mixing quick bread batters leads to the formation of gluten, and gluten is the cornerstone of leaven bread technology. anyway, maybe i should try a recipe that does involve kneading next, so that i can get in there with my hands and work the shape of the dough without concern that i'll wreck it or make it tough.

thus far, the winner?

for taste: NYTimes. bigger bubbles, a satisfying chewiness, delicous crunchy outside.

for convenience: King Arthur Flour. two hours of rising time (vs 14-20 required by NYTimes) means less time that i have to construct a bread-rising shelf over my radiator, less time i need to stay home and tend the bread. plus the convenience of pulling it from the fridge and baking at any time in the next two weeks. (like fresh bread would last in my house for two weeks. ha ha).

Labels: baking

this is probably the wisest and most succinct summary of my job that i've heard in a long time:

"We have three variables which are finite, and none are personal. Time, Money, Labor. It's all just an algebraic equation from there.

How well these are applied to an artistic, flexible, emotional outcome is the art of the production manager." - M. Botosan

sometimes i LOVE my professional network.

Labels: theatre

i made a few misguided attempts at bread a few years ago, but the result was always something dense and, while not actually inedible, not really appetizing either. what troubles me is that i'm not entirely sure what i did differently on this time around, other than following the directions very carefully. baking is science, people. respect the science.

the recipe, courtesy of kidchamp, is here. it really is pretty fool proof. now i'm excited about trying out this recipe that a friend sent me. it's basically a bucket of dough that lives in your fridge and you can pull out a chunk, let it rise for an hour, bake it, and instant fresh bread. awesome.

Labels: 101 in 1001, baking

1. we go to a bar. over beers, we play checkers. he kicks my ass. i feel foolish, and then all the more so for feeling competitive over checkers.

2. we go home, play scrabble. i kick his ass. the night is redeemed.



the next morning we completed an analysis of each game - i dislike games like checkers or chess because they start with a completely level playing field - there's no element of chance. so if i lose (which i invariably do), there's no one/nothing to blame but my own ineptitude. in a game like scrabble, which relies upon skill but also includes the element of chance, the field is wide open. it's more like life. you need to be good at it (whatever that means to you) to succeed, but there's also a healthy dose of luck and everything depends on what you do with what you're dealt. life isn't fair, why should our games be?

Labels: relationship test

it's not christmas till someone pours hot oil all over the dining table...

Labels: dipsea stairs

2: so i was just doing the math, and i am....89% of your age.

1: get out of my car.

Labels: relationship test

i'm a big believer in the "do something that scares you, just a little, every day" adage. i started taking that seriously that a few years ago, and, without wanting to get all preachy or nuthin', it has made all the difference.

but since i moved to california, there's something or other in my new job that scares me every day. which means that i've not really needed or wanted to pursue other, scary activities in life. working half the evening, then coming home, cooking dinner, writing or zoning out over some tv and knitting, kinda sounds great to me most nights. when the sun was up later i'd go for a hike after work if there was enough light (there isn't these days, with the winter solstice less than a week away).

but working long hours and hanging out with the cat isn't really a way to make friends and build a life here. a career, perhaps, but not a life. for a while i was running with a women's running group, but it closed up shop in october. but with the end of the year coming up rapidly, i was running out of time to do several of the things i had promised myself i'd do this year.

last week i finally checked out a dojo where i think i'd like to train: Aikido of Berkeley. walking into a new dojo, walking in new anywhere, is incredibly hard for me, i'm so fucking shy. but going to class the first time at Shinjinkai was one of the hardest, and best, decisions i ever made. so i went. i'm going to check out another dojo or two, but i'm pretty sure this is a place i'd like to train at.

next on the scary-to-join list is volunteering with One Brick. if you don't know about One Brick, check them out -- they are in the Bay Area, Chicago, DC, New York, Minneapolis, and Seattle*. the idea is that they make it easy for people to volunteer their time - one evening at a time, no long term commitments, and after every event, folks go out for a beer and hang out. do good work, hang out with other cool people. good deal, right? and it was. my burning awkward shyness aside, i did chat with interesting, nice people while we repackaged several hundred pounds of raisins at the SF Foodbank, then went out for Vietnamese food afterward. it made me miss Chicago, where i already had friends and a life and a place and a community, terribly. but it's not going to get better till i suck it up and find some communities of my own.

next week: going to the community center pool and swimming for the first time in 8 months. i'm not a good swimmer. and gyms are intimidating. but i will persevere, intimidating gym!


*hey, i just realized that i know people in all of those cities.

Labels: aikido, shiny new life, volunteerism

felting is an amazing, magical process. these slippers started out as large, loosely-knitted bags, and after 20 minutes in a hot washing machine, turned into slippers. still, felting is an inexact science, so it's hard to gauge just how big the finished item will come out. i started making these for a friend's newborn, but it became clear that they were never going to felt down to teeny weeny size. so now they have to find a new, toddler-aged recipient.

credit for the pattern goes here; however, while making the froggy slippers, i temporarily placed one felt eye in the center of the slipper. cyclops froggy! thus was born the idea: my own line of monster slippers. they can have teeth, tufts of hair, fins, even a tail or stubby little arms and legs. we dreamed up a website where customers can design and custom-order their own monster slippers. think of it like Mix My Granola, only for wacky slippers.

my kitchen floors are bitterly cold in the morning, and require slippers (not just socks) to stand on them for any length of time. so i think i'll start with a collection of guest slippers for the house. which size monster are you?

Labels: knitting

1: would you mind if i threw my panties at Ira Glass?

2: if you can lob your panties all the way from here to the stage, i will buy you a beer.

Labels: relationship test, search terms i will regret

so we've got this play running right now in which (spoiler alert!) a huge comet hits the earth about 1/3 of the way into the show. nearly all forms of life are obliterated, with the exception of our heros, who are safely tucked in a biolab-cum-bomb shelter underground.

hilarity ensues.

at the moment of impact, even underground, there's some considerable dust, shaking, rattling of cupboards, and so forth. a critic for SFGate wanted to know how we did all the stage tricks -- making a cupboard swing down off the wall, a ceiling panel crashes in, boxes come tumbling down, and so forth. our PR manager asked me if i'd answer the reporter's questions about how some of the specific tricks worked.

i really tried to be succinct. i did. but when you ask someone in the trenches how things work, well, be prepared for the long answer. sadly, an hour's worth of email got boiled down to what essentially amounts to: "they used extra lumber and some magnets." to wit:

what i wrote (it's seriously okay to skim):

The dropping cabinet --
The dropping cabinet effect had to be taken into account pretty much every step in the design and build process, from analyzing and pricing out the set plans, construction methods and materials, to designing the sequence of cues for the Boom and staging the actors.

Both the upstage wall and the cabinet had to be constructed differently to be able withstand the 8" drop nightly. The entire wall had to built out of heavier, sturdier lumber than what you'd typically use for a standard theatrical flat. The cabinet, too, was constructed from a steel frame skinned with 3/4" plywood, then a layer of masonite, brackets in all the corners to help it stay square under the stress of the fall. The cabinet alone weighs about 400 lbs.

Hanging it on the wall was tricky, also -- the bottom right corner is a pivot point that allows the cabinet to rotate. The top left corner of the cabinet is a peg that runs through the wall in a curved slot -- the top of the slot is where the cabinet sets in its upright position, the bottom of the slot is where the cabinet rests once gravity has had its way. Calculating the path that the cabinet would take as it rotated on its pivot point required some geometry. The other two corners of the cabinet don't attach to the wall at all -- they couldn't, for the cabinet to be able to swing -- so the cabinet has to hang on the wall with only two attachment points. That was one reason for the rigid steel frame construction.

Behind the scenes, on the upstage side of the wall, the upper left corner of the cabinet (the side that drops) is held up with a big electromagnet suspended from the lighting grid above the stage. The magnet we used was rated to hold up to 1400 lbs. It's a disc about 5" in diameter. When turned on, it sits flat against a steel plate welded to the back of the cabinet. Our Master Electrician had to rewire the electromagnet to work with the theatre's lighting system so that it could be controlled by the lighting board (rather than plugged in with an extension cord).

When the moment for the drop comes, the magnet is turned off (there's a loud clunk sound that comes from the magnet itself -- fortunately not a sound that needed to be masked given all the other loud sound cues happening at the same moment) and the cabinet drops 8" to its bottom resting point.

Inside the cabinet, all the stuff -- the boxes of batteries, cliff bars, bottles of bourbon, diapers, etc -- had to be glued down inside the cabinet so that when it falls, they don't roll out. The bottles of bourbon were created from plastic, rather than glass, for safety reasons and also to cut down on how much weight went into the already-very-heavy cabinet.

How the timing works --
Because we're using an electromagnet, we were able to connect and control the magnet with the light board. Which means that turning off the magnet was simply written into a lighting cue. That way we had very detailed control over the timing of the cabinet drop. The Stage Manager calls the series of light and sound cues that make up the sequence of the Boom to the Board Operator, who runs the light board and the sound computer (which in turn controls the analog sound board). So the light cue was written to turn off the magnet at the exact moment we wanted the cabinet to drop in the sequence. That way the timing is exactly the same every night.

Safeties and backstage --
There are two safeties on the cabinet. Any time the show isn't running, the corner of the cabinet sits on top of a stage jack, a wooden brace that sits between the counter top and the cabinet. It keeps the cabinet safely upright and steady. Storing it upright reduces stress on the cabinet joints (cabinets weren't meant to hang at an angle).

As a second safety, there is a chain backstage which hangs from the lighting grid above the stage which clips onto the cabinet's steel arm and holds it in place should the magnet be turned off unexpectedly.

When Stage Management sets up for the show, they have the Board Operator turn on the magnet with the light board, confirm that it is holding the cabinet securely, then remove the stage jack. The chain safety backstage remains on until about 3 minute before the actual drop. When we get close to the Boom cue sequence, the Production Assistant, who runs the deck backstage, removes the safety chain so it is only being held by the magnet until the moment of the drop.

Also, the Technical Director and Stage Management conduct daily checks of all the elements involved in the cabinet drop --- making sure that nothing is bending, showing signs of stress, skewing out of 90-degree square, etc, and that it is hitting the same marks each night.

The boxes --
There are a total of 26 boxes stacked on top of that cabinet. Most of them are assembled into a "box sculpture." They are attached to one another with several kinds of glue, tape, and thin strips of wood. The base of the box sculpture is lined with plywood, which is in turn bolted directly to the top of the cabinet. That way the cabinet can move and the boxes move with it but keep their orientation with regard to one another. There are seven boxes that aren't built into the sculpture, and they are the ones that fall. They are stacked up there before each performance by the Production Assistant. Even the falling boxes aren't random, though -- our Scenic Designer and Props Artisan designed a look for the entire set of boxes, and each of the seven falling boxes is numbered and gets preset into the stack in a specific position and orientation according to a photo "map". The idea is for the falling and fixed boxes to blend together visually so that when they fall, it's a surprise.

Actor safety --
Though an empty cardboard box is not a terribly dangerous thing, probably no one wants to find themselves under a stack of falling boxes nightly. So we had to work with our performer, Blythe (who plays Jo), so that she was thrown back from the door by the blast into a position where she is clear of the falling boxes. Those physical actions are rehearsed on the set nightly before every performance, to help the actors make sure they hit the same mark each night, keeping them safe and in control.

Another trivia fact --
One of the sound sources that our Sound Designer used to design the rumble of the comet blast was an underwater recording of the Indian Ocean earthquake that caused the terrible tsunami in 2004.

what he wrote:

Stage sets aren't built to withstand the impact of a massive comet hitting the planet. Few things are. That's the problem designer Erik Flatmo and the Marin Theatre Company crew had to solve in "Boom," Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's apocalyptic sex farce in which just such an Earth-shattering event occurs. The actors, sound and lighting effects depict the moment of impact, but the set plays a big role as well - which means it had to be constructed from heavier materials than usual. The cabinet beneath that stack of boxes is a 400-pound steel-frame affair, attached to a solidly framed wall on pivot points that allow a degree of precise movement. An electromagnet (rated for 1,400 pounds), wired into the lighting system, holds it in place until its big moment. For added impact, one of the sound sources used when the comet hits comes from an underwater recording of the 2004 earthquake that generated the huge Indian Ocean tsunami.

(original article, with a set picture)

so there. now you all know. closes December 5, bay area peeps!

Labels: reasons why working at a theatre is awesome

thanksgiving was a quieter affair this year, as many of the orphans from Keenans' Orphan Thanksgiving weren't orphaned this year, or, rather, have jobs that wouldn't let them zip cross country for the day. those of us who were there drank moderate quantities of alcohol, pots of decaf coffee in the morning, and no one suffered a raging hangover at any point in the weekend. goodness, are we growing up? perhaps yes. but not outgrowing friends, the extended families of our twenties. things are just...shifting.

it was lovely to be back in chicago, the weather was cold and refreshing but not bitterly cold, trees all bare and crisp sunshine. visits with friends went by much too fast, there were plays to see and there was time to train at the dojo, which left me sore for the rest of the week. oh and B and i made a killer apple pie. his mom's filling recipe + cook's illustrated's pastry dough recipe + Martha Stewart's presentation (pastry dough cut into maple leaves) + the keenans' deep dish pie pan are an unstoppable combination. for the rest of the weekend we all ate pie and coffee for breakfast. mmm, pie for breakfast.

i flew back on saturday night with that displaced feeling: which way is home? am i scanning the airport monitor for flights to or from Chicago? to or from San Francisco? i say 'here' when i mean 'there', and 'there' when i mean 'here'. leaving chicago was harder than i expected, and then getting back to california was easier than expected. it hasn't been an easy transition, this one. but when i look in the mirror, i am surprised that the face looking back at me doesn't reveal all the uncertainly and reluctance i feel lodged in my chest. it is a face that looks strangely determined.

Labels: holidays, moving, photos

1: "does it make you like me more or less, knowing that i may or may not have roasted and eaten a lizard once?"

2: "oh, infinitely more."

Labels: relationship test

Multitasking works? Not really, Stanford study shows

it says more, perhaps, that i've been meaning to blog about this article for weeks than the article itself. the study confirms something that i'd begun to suspect - that when i'm multi-tasking, i'm not actually doing any of the tasks as well as when i'm focused on one task. my job demands that i jump around a lot - there is a constant stream of traffic in and out of my office door, phones that ring, reasons why i need to go to the shop and stage and rehearsal room - but i've noticed that i'm getting really bad about starting one task and then leaping to another and another, before i finish any of them.

i do think that multi-tasking is a pretty key skill for the nature of my job, but being good at it/flexible about its demands has been giving me permission to multitask even when it's NOT necessary. i have two monitors on my desk*, and i starting using mac's spaces function, thinking that it'd be handy to sort my applications into different screens: one for communication -- to-do list, email and calendar and quick web research (that's multiple tabs on multiple firefox windows), another for excel, another for word documents -- what i'm realizing is that it's giving me permission to have even more projects going at one time.

i'm also facing a larger workload than i've had in a long time, probaby ever, and feeling the pressure to be really efficient with the way that i work. i've been thinking about picking up a book on efficient working practices.** so tonight, on a get-lost-in-a-bookstore-date with B, i wandered over to the business section (steered clear of the self-help section) and looked at some books on time management. i picked up The 25 Best Time Management Tools & Techniques: How to Get More Done Without Driving Yourself Crazy, and this is the blurb on the back:

You get the benefit of the top twenty books on time management in one easy to read book. The authors took an interesting approach to writing this book. They started by reading the Amazon.com customer reviews for over 40 time management books. Then they bought and read the top 20 of these books. The key points from these books were then summarized as 25 clearly described tools and techniques and grouped into five areas of focus.

...and that just kind of horrified me. the quantity vs. quality notion. the approach that we can strip down tasks to make them as efficient as possible. that a book on time management was made by leap frogging off of other people's books and reviews on time management and then repackaged. i'm...having trouble putting into words exactly what seemed wrong about this to me, but something's definitely missing. i do need to find ways to do a large work load efficiently and in the lowest-stress manner possible. but i'm not sure i need a list of ways to color-code and organize my post-it notes. i need to think through the philosophy of putting my head and my values in the right place. this job is always going to be hard, always going to be too much work for too little time and pay. the question is whether i can get my head in the right place to work hard, be proud of what i've done, and let go of the things that i can't do. i guess i should be browsing in the philosophy section instead.

PS. it took me almost two months, from the time i started it, to finish this post. and it started out being about multi-tasking, and ended up being about why i'm working in the arts and whether it makes me happy. QED.

* i'm not that fancy - it's just that both are tiny and i need real estate for spreadsheets

**maybe i can read it while i watch a movie and check my twitter account.

Labels: waxing poetic

one of the things i like best about the part of califonia i've moved to is the variety in flora: on the hillside surrounding my apartment, the following plants are growing: palm trees, deciduous trees: cherry, live oak, eucalyptus among others, coniferous trees: redwoods and others, ferns, bamboo, blackberry bushes, wild grasses, cactus, agave, and ivy. what do all those plants have in common? basically, nothing, except that they all live in my front yard. its kind of an amazing climate.

the other thing about northern california is that the colors of the seasons are all mixed up. growing up in the Idaho rocky mountains, the seasons work thus: summer is green, fall is golden, winter is brown, and spring is...mostly more brown. the same general rule applies to Chicago. but here, everything works backwards: there is so little rain in the summer that everything turns golden brown by july, and stays that way until the rains start in october or november. then suddenly everything turns green, and the morning fogs cease and the skies are deep dark blue, and the world continues to green throughout the winter. spring brings flashes of color as the early flowers bloom. i remember being so surprised by this pattern when i came to northern california for college. being away for eight years, most of which i spent in chicago (or idaho) i'd forgotten how upside down the color palettes are here.

mind you, i'm not complaining. it's november first, and i woke up to sunlight from my south-facing windows at 7am. by 8am it was warm enough to have the front door open, an zeke went out and slept in the sun on the porch. B and i spent the morning hiking in the hills above MV. recent rains have caused the ferns to spring out of the ground in force, whole hillsides of lime-green fronds unfurling in the shade. the trees that do respond to the changes in light are throwing down their leaves, crunchy, a smell of rotting leaves that evoked some memory from childhood.

but golden gate park shows no sign of impending winter:

Labels: california, waxing poetic, weather

i started the morning, as i do every Halloween, with the ritual playing of Bobby Boris Pickett's Monster Mash.

he got out of bed and turned up the volume.

Labels: relationship test

one of the stranger emails i've had occasion to write to my co-workers:

Ladies of the MTC Staff --

Please save and bring in your empty tampon boxes so that Seren can assemble them into a prop. (In the 3rd act in BOOM, Jo walls off her "territory" of the set by building a wall of tampon boxes). It's better not to flatten the box if possible. There'll be a box in my office where you can drop them off. A variety of brands is desirable, which is why we're collecting actual boxes instead of mocking up fakes. We need them by the end of this week.

Thanks!

J

best response so far:

it takes a village to build a play. apparently, a village of menstruating women.

Labels: reasons why working at a theatre is awesome

on the phone with B tonight, who is in Washington for the week, and we got to talking about city planning, the ways that major US cities conform (Chicago, DC) or refuse to conform (Boston) to a cartesian grid. generally, i'm a fan; when the numerical portion of an address corresponds to a physical distance it's easier to know how far apart two locations are, how to navigate there, and so forth. but the discussion of gridded cities reminded me of one of my least favorite places: Salt Lake City. one of my chief objections* to Salt Lake is the way the city streets are laid out. instead of clarifying the street name's position by assigning it a numerical position on the grid, they just skipped over the street name part and numbered all of the streets. So you can navigate to an address like 910 S 900 E. wait, what?** okay, so it's a little confusing, but a few days and you get the hang of it. after which, navigating is a breeze. but tonight i finally figured out what bugs me so much about that. the city has no place names. think about what a deeply ingrained part of the cultural landscape place names are. there is an entire field of study (toponymy, thank you, wikipedia) built around the study place names. place names matter. how can you trust a city that refuses to name their streets? it's like numbering your children or something.

it makes me love england even more, for all their crazy street names that change every third block, and the way that cottages in small villages still have their own individual names.

* okay, let's be honest. another of my chief objections to Salt Lake is that it is the iconic center of the mormon faith. and having grown up as the only catholic kid in a mormon high school, i developed something of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to the subject of mormonism. yes, that was 15 years ago and i need to get over not having been popular. i get it. but still.

** okay, so Chicago DOES have a corner where North Avenue intersects Western Avenue. I'll give you that one.

Labels: travel

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Labels: 101 in 1001, travel

Here's a new idea for you, airlines: free wifi in the terminals (yeah, in the air, too, but one thing at a time). I appreciate Southwest's rocking chairs, the banks of leather arm chairs with outlets for laptops, even some table and chairs so you don't have to eat pre-flight meals in your lap. But what about wifi? It could be unlocked with your flight's confirmation code and last name, that way the terminal wouldn't be flooded with other airline's passengers trying to bogart it (tho, don't get me wrong, i'd rather there was just free wifi for the people, especially in airports).

Bongo, i will not pay your exorbitant fees!

Labels: travel

Mcdonald's egg-mcmuffin-minus-the-canadian-bacon is my early-morning airport guilty pleasure. I've been indulging in this long enough that I'm prepared for the buyer's remorse when it comes to eating the sandwich (delicious melty “cheese” suddenly congeals into a rubbery cold substance on the wrapper and you wonder what sort of “food product” you just ate), but what really kills me is the packaging waste. I finish my sandwich, and now have a paper wrapper, three napkins, a receipt, and a paper bag, all of which, besides the wrapper, are perfectly pristine. There is no paper recycling in this terminal so I tuck it into a corner of my bag, to recycle it when I get home. City of Chicago: see what your bad recycling policies have brought me to? Hoarding trash. This is not the first instance of this behavior you have invoked.

PS - the in-flight service gives me the guilty heebie-jeebies, too. one can easily go through 3 or 4 of those clear plastic cups in a cross-country flight. styrofoam for coffee. a bleached white napkin under each cup. and all those snacks in single-serving packaging. ugh. okay, i still can't resist the those fake-cheese-and-cracker sandwiches that southwest gives out, but i'm making a point of filling up my own water bottle at the departing airport's drinking fountain and using that instead of having a new cup of water every time they offer me one. err, don't say anything about the ecological damage that the jetfuel is doing, okay?

Labels: recycling, travel

October 11, 2009 -- Chicago Marathon 2009: 3:59'01”

Okay, so I started running three and a half years ago. In May of 2006 I decided I'd train for a half marathon. the goal was just to complete it. I started out with a run-one-min-walk-one-min plan for 30 minutes at a time, three times a week. It took me 6 weeks to get up to being able to run 3 miles in a half hour.

Since then I'm four running seasons, 2600 miles, eight pairs of shoes, seven half marathons and three full marathons down the road. And I know that dry wit and self-deprecating humor is basically all that keeps this blog afloat, but i'm going to get all sincere for a minute and say that I'm really proud of that. I just am, okay? I fully recognize, and embrace, the fact that i'm a decidedly middle-of-the-pack, recreational runner. i'm never going to be anything besides that. But these miles, these races were not easy for me. The things these miles lead me to, and away from, in my life, were not easy. But I am so blessed, so fortunate, so lucky (is there a word there that's both secular in connotation and yet as sincere as “blessed”? i can't find it) that i found running, or running found me, when it did. It's taught me how to break insurmountable tasks into tiny, achievable blocks. If what's up ahead is too scary, then keep your head down, look at your feet, watch them carry you up the next block, around the corner, through the next mile, the next workout. since i've started my new job i've needed that technique in my non-running life a lot lately.

that's life lesson number one. the second is probably even more valuable. it's that, regardless of how you prep and organize and prepare for a big event like a marathon, the most important preparation you can do is to prepare yourself to respond to whatever unpredictable thing comes your way on race day. Being able to respond to what life throws at you with strength, grace and flexibility is, I think, one of the keys to happiness. And it's really really not easy.

But anyway, the the sub-4 hour marathon has been a goal for a long long time. I wasn't sure I had it in me this year, but conditions came together just right and there it was in front of me. And I reached out and grabbed it (just barely, with 59 seconds to spare, and not an ounce of energy left). So, the question is, what's next? I have a few ideas.

1) The North Face Challenge 50k. yeah, it's a 31 mile race. But it's completely different from a marathon road race. A marathon like Chicago is all about finishing as quickly as you can. This trail race will be about the adventure, not the finish line. The course is on the single-track and fire roads in the hills of the Marin Headlands. Which, conveniently, happens to be my greater backyard. Participants have 10 hours to finish the course; there's time to stop, to stretch, to refuel, admire the view, and then run some more. after pushing myself to run as fast as i can, i'm looking forward to doing some serious distance runs that are about completing the distance, not pushing for time.

2) Use marathons as a way to see new and foreign places. A couple of races I have my eye on: Stolkholm (annually in May), Dublin (October), Tokyo (Feburary), and Big Sur (April). But that'll take time. I can only really fit one marathon into my life per year, it seems like. I gotta make sure it keeps being a hobby, not a burden.

3) Start training to be a marathon coach or mentor. I love dorking out on running physiology, and I seem to be pretty good at encouraging/cheerleading people through their goals. It's a weird, satisfying moment when you find something that you are really suited for, you know? When you realize there's something that you're both good at and enjoy doing. That's how I felt about “coaching”* a couple of my friends through their first marathon last year. Talking someone through a moment of crisis in the middle of their 20-miler, and seeing them find that inner strength, and finish, and go on to marathon and beyond, is a pretty great thing. (God, this post is all just inspiration pollyannay, isn't it? Cue Chariots of Fire and release the slow-motion runners on the beach.)

But by coincidence, while i was on the plane home from chicago, and typing this blog post, i got into conversation with the guy sitting next to me. it turns out that, not only had he just finished running the chicago marathon, but that he's a mentor with Team in Training (the training program/charity fundraiser that got me through my first marathon in 2007). he told me all about the mentoring program, how I could get involved. again...you know when it seems like opportunity is knocking?

* by coaching i mean, it was my 2nd marathon and their first. I'm no expert. I was more like the group cheerleader. But it was important. It got us all to the finish line (and the starting line) under some very tough race conditions.

Labels: 101 in 1001, chicago, marathon, running

hello, rainy cool weather dunkin donuts coffee bouncy walkway at midway long ride on the Orange Line to the Brown Line to the Purple Line potbelly's sandwiches whole town talking marathon industrial southside tree-lined northside noyes street saturday morning brunch red eye crossword that only-in-chicago accent smell of incense at the dojo simon's tavern bumping into friends on the street. chicago, i missed you.

Labels: chicago

the fridge yielded beer, bread, cheese and and an apple. that didn't seem like enough for a picnic dinner on the beach so we swung past safeway en route to supplement the meal.

apparently our ids were selecting the food: "mmm...chicken wings. mmm...sushi. wait, peanutbutter cookies? great idea!" thus, was born the idnic: no attempt at balancing nutrients, flavor, or style, just instant gratification.

on saturday Chris, Teresa, Geneva and i drove up to Petaluma to go to the Windrush Farms FiberFest -- basically an expo of yarn, spinning, dying, felting -- all kinds of fiber arts that start with wool. one could follow the yarn-making process from start to finish in a single afternoon -- there were alpaca and sheep on the farm, great piles of greasy, newly-shorn wool, tools for carding and cleaning the wool, spinning wheels and drop spindles, dyeing vats and beautiful skeins of yarn for sale, looms for weaving and knitting swatches.

aside from being really much too hot for late september, it was an awfully pleasant, pastoral scene: everyone was so friendly, sitting in the sun watching kids run around the yard and pet the animals, skin tanned and weathered from spending seasons out in the sun and the wind, trading stories and sharing knowledge of something that, now an art form, was for thousands of years, a basic skill. a pair of golden retrievers trotted around the yard loving up to everybody. there was a wood-fired oven in the yard and a guy making hand-made pizzas and lemonade, to be eaten at folding tables and chairs set up in the shade. the farm animals suffered to be petted on the nose (or fed tasty leaves).

the turn of the fall weather (fall arrived on sunday, by the way, the day after our hot trek up to Petaluma), plus the imminent arrival of several friends' babies, means that i'm inspired to start crafting again. somehow the direct mail gods know this, as i have received three knitting catalogs this week (and, naturally, have earmarked more patterns that i want to knit than i shall ever have time or funds for). but anyway, getting knitting catalogs lets me play the "who would knit this?" game. see, that's the tricky thing about knitting. finding nice yarns and patterns. because for every beautiful, modern or classic (classy classic, that is, not "christmas sweater" classic) pattern out there, there are a dozen hideously frumpy things to knit out of terrible, cheap plasticky nasty synthetic yarn. it's almost too easy to play the WWKT game, especially with the patternworks catalog. so for this week, i submit this, to you, dear readers (knitters and wearers of sweaters and non-knitters or sweater-wearers alike): who would knit this?

Labels: california, family, knitting, who would knit this?

so i've never changed my own tire before (or anyone's tire, for that matter). when i was about 17 i remember asking my dad about changing a tire, and he told me i shouldn't bother learning, because if the lug nuts had been put on by machine, i'd never be strong enough to get them off. okay, case closed. i used that as an excuse for not knowing how to change a tire for the next 14 years. silly, right? (also lucky and surprising that i've never been stranded on the side of the road and forced to figure it out). and totally unlike me, to take the "i'm a just a wimpy girl so i wouldn't be able to do that anyway" anti-empowerment route anyway. as it turns out, that's silly. Ben walked me through it (showing off for a boy, how could i refuse to do jump in and tackle the project?), and changing a tire was surprisingly easy. and who knew that the car comes with a spare, jack, tire iron, and everything you need, all tucked away in secret compartments within the trunk? awesome. 15 minutes, some greasy hands, and we were on our way.

Labels: 101 in 1001

good script, Odets really has a sharp edge to his writing that i like. the production was...perfectly serviceable, utterly forgettable. B pointed out a number of design anachronisms that, in retrospect bothered me, but at the time were minor enough not to distract. the pacing was weird. acting uneven.

given similar budget constraints, i think we can do better.

Labels: theatre reviews

okay so a couple of nights ago this thunderstorm woke me up around 4am and freaked me the fuck out.

4am, sitting up through a thunderstorm, afraid of my hillside going up in wildfire. realizing i am NOT emergency prepared. if i had to leave...put on pants, grab laptop-phone-purse-keys. how would i get the cat? could i shove him into his carrier or would he sense my fear and run and hide? // do my smoke alarms even work? i haven't tested them. i haven't gotten renter's insurance yet. // am radio is talking about afghanistan, that's a good sign, right? power still on. no emergency sirens. // first drops of rain since i moved here almost three months ago. bang of thunder that shakes the house and sets off car alarms down the hill.

now, admittedly i have a tendency to be easily disoriented/frightened when i'm really groggy, but it was also a HUGE FUCKING STORM. i've lived in the bay area a total of five years now (4 college, .7 post-college, .3 since i moved here this past june) and have only witnessed two thunderstorms. they just don't happen. so i layed awake for more than an hour listening to the storm and fretting about how dry the hillside i live on is (later that night the first drops of rain fell...i'd been here almost three months, and no rain. how does anything green stay alive? ). Gene sent me the link to this photo later in the week and wow. okay, see? it WAS a huge scary storm.

the best thing about waking to a thunderstorm is burrowing deeper into the arms of a lover. waking alone, it underscores the loneliness sharply.

Labels: waxing poetic, weather

my mom made this bird house for me (and zeke) as a housewarming gift. the whole thing is mosaic'd in little tiny pieces of glass she cuts and places by hand. dude. awesome.

up close:

Labels: art, family, feathering the nest

another theatre closing -- Chicago's Apple Tree Theatre.

so it goes. for all my frustration over lack of budgets, salaries, materials -- at least the checks keep cashing here. sigh. it's a strange feeling to be investing everything i have in what often looks for all the world like a dying art form.

Labels: theatre closings

there has been a thief in the garden. a wildflower-eating thief. a few weeks ago i put new potting soil into several flower boxes on my porch and scattered a packet of california wildflower seeds onto the dirt. they started sprouting immediately.

until yesterday, both boxes looked like this:

now one of them looks like this:

i can't believe that some creature managed to clean out the box so completely. a squirrel? a crow? who loves to eat wildflower sprouts?

on the upside, this mystery creature has left my edibles container alone. the basil is thriving and begging to be made into a batch of pesto. in the smaller pockets i have cilantro, dill and chives. the chives, transplanted from teresa's garden, were doing great right up until zeke discovered how tasty they are. now if i don't watch him when he goes outside, he sits on front of the pot and just happily gnaws on the chives. they all have stunted ends.

rosemary, sage, and mint are are all meant to go in the other little pockets of the herbs pot. the amazing thing about california is how LONG the growing season is. it's september and i still have time to put some small plants (growing from seed now might be a bit ambitious) in and grow them enough to trim and cook with before winter arrives.

Labels: feathering the nest

so i blogged a couple of weeks ago about seeing Happy Days at Cal Shakes. Happy Days is the Beckett play in which the main character, Winnie, is buried in dirt up to her waist for the entire play. the text of the play is mostly a circular, spinning monologue of post-apocalyptic despair. the set pretty much just a big mound of dirt, and Winnie is dug into the dirt about half way up the mound. Cal Shakes's outdoor amphitheater is set in the hills in Orinda, outside of Berkeley, CA. (whew! enough setup for what is a small news item)

so anyway, i heard through the theatre grapevine that last week there was a rattlesnake that got into the dirt mound during the first act play. the actress saw the snake coiled out of the corner of her eye, and then heard the rattle of its tail and knew what it was. in the end, the actress escaped injury (tho i'm afraid the snake did not survive the evening). but i can't think of something more like an actor's nightmare: she's buried up to her waist in dirt, delivering a meandering, circular monologue characterized by a desperation bordering on panic. had she screamed, 'oh god, a rattlesnake, i'm trapped,' i don't know if any audience member would have had any idea that she had deviated from the text! can you imagine screaming for help and having everyone calmly watching you, munching on their picnic dinners and shifting in their lawn chairs? to illustrate my point, at one point in the play, per the script, the umbrella she's holding catches fire.* well, that happened and no one jumped up to save the day, we sat quietly and politely and watched to see what she'd do next.

these are the things we do in the name of outdoor theare.

* how to make an umbrella spontaneously catch fire, by the way? garage door opener, model rocket igniter, flash paper. boom.

Labels: reasons why working at a theatre is awesome

the instructions say:

Easy to Grow CobraCo Egg Plants
1. Place plastic wrapped mushroom on plate.
2. Use a spoon to gentle crack the top of hat. (yes, hat. the mushroom-egg is wearing a hat?) Remove plastic wrap and broken pieces.
3. Add water to growing medium
4. Place in a sunny location

After this, apparently, a marigold will hatch out of my mushroom. Egg. My mushroom egg with the broken hat.

it's like a kinder egg for horticulturists. would this make more sense or be less funny if i weren't so sleep deprived? it's tech.

Labels: random

i've been looking for a way to introduce you all to my pal Scotty Iseri and his excellent web series Scotty Got an Office Job (SGAOJ) for a while now, but as the plot got deeper and deeper this spring, it got harder to summarize. fortunately, Salon.com did it for me!

go check it out.

Labels: links

i'm going to quote my own twitter feed on this one: (insert comment about hubris in blogging here)

Happy Days at Cal Shakes: Beckett's quiet desperation punctuated by the crunchcrunch of someone in the third row eating entire bag of chips.

i'm not sure that beckett was meant for outdoor theatre. i'm also not sure i was meant for beckett. i found his plays life-changing when i was in college in the same way that Thoreau and Emerson were life-changing when i first encountered them in high school (or Douglas Adams when i discovered Hitchhiker's Guide in the 6th grade). when you go back to revisit it later, it's not the same. the actress playing Winnie was tremendous, and holy shit how difficult would it be to perform a 90 minute monologue while buried up to your waist in dirt but still, i found myself totally unable to stick with the play, and instead wondering whether beckett actively or only incidentally hated his audience.

Labels: theatre reviews

it was weird that i had never seen this play, since it was so much a part of the collective artistic consciousness of the chicago theatre community. but you know how it goes...there are plays you keep meaning to see, and meaning ot see, and your friends talk about how good they are so you think, "i should definitely see that one," but when you spend all day devoted to the creation of theatre, and it's summer in chicago and the evenings are warm and beautiful, it's really hard to get around to seeing a play. then it's closing week and neither love nor money nor calling up the production manager will get you a ticket. so i missed August, and off it went to Broadway, and London, and eventually out on tour, and it put Chicago theatre a little bit more on the national map.

so anyway, a free ticket came my way to see the tour, so I went on Tuesday. and it. was. amazing. i know i just wrote in my Equivocation review how i had no interest in kitchen sink drama. and this is, dangerously, close to being kitchen sink american family drama. (this was, in fact, a kitchen with sink on stage). but this was such a sweeping, excellently crafted piece. and the design was elegant, and the acting really tremendous, but at the end when i jumped out of my seat at curtain call, it was, for the second time this week, for the play. good plays are being written in this country right now. i just hope we can find ways to support the people who are writing them and producing them. (insert plug for the National New Plays Network here)

Labels: theatre reviews

last night i went out to Cal Shakes to see Happy Days (review of that and the other two plays i saw this week forthcoming), and since i was leaving straight from work, needed to pack a dinner i could eat on the festival grounds before the play.

thus i discovered yet another winner from 101 cookbooks:

Cherry Tomato Couscous (which really should be called couscous with cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, feta, basil, chickpeas and a citrus dressing, because, yum).

it assembled in about 10 minutes the night before, and as i am eating it for lunch today, i can say it keeps in the fridge pretty much indefinitely. just make the dressing separately and throw it on just before eating.

yay, california produce.

Labels: food

okay, so the thing is, every time i start to have one of those crises of artistic faith (why am i giving up so much of my life to this career/art form?) is about the time i see or work on one of those plays that makes me go, "oh, right. this is why." and i'm sucked back in. Equivocation was one of those. and i saw it on one of those days that i was have a crisis of faith. just like clockwork. any time i have thoughts of straying, it reels me back in.

of course, it was impeccably produced, because it was at OSF and, as non-profit theatres go, they have more money than god. the actors were excellent. some of the directing and pacing choices weren't what i would have made, but i can hardly consider those flaws. but i really love is the sheer theatricality of this play. this is the kind of theatre i want to be doing. never mind kitchen-sink dramas, save those for the movies where you can have better sets and closeup camera work. the stage is for something else, it's a different medium. you don't feed every detail about every blade of grass to the audience the way HDTV does. it engages the audience's imagination. and then a bare stage can become any location and every location, with addition of a piece of furniture, or maybe just light and sound. put on a new hat and a lisp, i'm a new character. do it well, and the audience will engage. by bringing the audience into the equation, you add new significance to the notion of collaborative art forms. it's not longer just the actors and directors and designers collaborating -- it's the performers and the audience, nightly, communing in a way that can only happen in a live performance. a film can exist exclusive of its audience. but if a play falls in the forest, and there's no one around to see it...well, then, it's no longer a performance. its no longer art. the art needs the audience. needs it not just to witness, but to engage.

so...yeah. it's not that it's a perfect play, but its my favorite kind of play. the sort that embraces theatre for the medium it is, rather than trying to be something it is not. my company is producing this piece next spring, so no doubt readers will hear more about Equivocation as the season goes in. it's a really good play. did i mention that?

also, there must be a patron saint of theatre-goers, because i left Marin at 1pm with 7 hours to drive to Ashland and drove like hell to get there before curtain. i blew through three speed traps going 80, and somehow got away with it, making it with just enough time to spare to sit down on a bench and appreciate the summer evening in Oregon for 10 minutes before going inside. still, i don't recommend the Ashland-and-back in 28 hours trip if one can help it. it was a LOT of driving for one three-hour play.

Labels: theatre reviews

okay, i have three questions to pose to the internet tonight:

1. do spiders get chopped up inside my vacuum or are they colonizing inside the dirt cup?*

2. can anyone write me a bit of code that will take tweets and turn them into blog posts automatically (which basically means, a bit of code that will take my twitter feed and turn each tweet into an email, which blogger can accept as a blog post)?

3. i have a kitchen window. i have fabric. i have a sewing machine, matching thread and mad skills. i want to turn said fabric and skills into curtains, but am trying to avoid country-kitchen-cute. who has a favorite apartmenttherapy sort of link for window dressings they'd like to share?

*i have consulted a former vacuum-cleaner repairman, and even he didn't know -- his excuse being that vacuum cleaner technology has changed a lot in the past 10 years.

Labels: random

Labels: california

So I was supposed to drive to Ashland and see a show at OSF, but I discovered that the Pothole that Nearly Ate My Car last week actually really did nearly eat my car, and I need two new tires and a NEW WHEEL (wtf?) before the car is road-trip worthy. So much for saving up for a new tv...but, I decided to take advantage of a non-ideal start to the trip. Instead of dropping money on the car w/out having time to shop estimates around, I decided that the repair could wait till Monday. So I played hooky with the rest of Friday, burned some frequent flier miles, and hopped a last minute flight to Chicago.

Saturday morning I played in the Ultimate Frisbee Collective’s Finale Game*. As teams sports go, we were a scrappy group of theatre geeks, most of whom have some innate athletic ability but little or no talent for team sports. But for the past two years, we have played nearly every Saturday, rain or shine (or snow), and the ultimate game has often been the best part of my week.

For my efforts, and in recognition of being the only non-carnivore (also the only girl) on the team, I received a trophy shaped like a piece of tofu with arms and legs,** aptly named the “Facon [Fakon?] Award”. The winning team received a trophy with a piece of bacon on it, also similarly anthropomorphized.

In the afternoon Shinjinkai held the fourth annual fall-a-thon fundraiser, raising money for the zendo (rural retreat center) we are building in Wisconsin. I had planned to drop in, cheer and generally be supportive, but a minor injury sustained by someone in an earlier round meant that i got to jump in as nage for one of the later rounds. In 15 minutes I threw a contestant 305 times! The impressive feat isn’t the throwing – it was the guy taking the falls. Last year I took 206 falls and was pretty sure I was going to barf by the end. Anyway, it was so so so good to see all of my fellow aikidoka. Just being back in the room, the scent of the incense, the polished wood floors and textured mat under bare feet – it all felt so comfortingly familiar. I’ve been short on familiar and comfort, lately.

As I was changing into my gi in the locker room I looked at myself in the mirror and remembered how at first I felt so awkward in my uniform, it felt too big, goofy, poorly fit. I felt too tall, long-limbed, my balance too high in my body, i moved like a dancer, not a martial artist -- no grounding, my center of gravity up high in my chest rather than centered low in the abdomen. I know those feelings of impossible awkwardness weren’t just born of insecurity because I see that look in new students, in their faces, in the way their gi hangs on their body, in the way they move on and off the mat. I felt that way for a long time. And I’m not sure when I started feeling at home in my gi, in the dojo, in the martials arts. When i started taking newer students under my wing and helping them through the maze of confusing rituals, when to bow, where to leave your shoes, how to sweep the mat in a smooth, even rhythm in step with the student before and behind you.

I’m not saying I’m accomplished or anything. On the contrary, the point here is perhaps that it took me two and a half years of training just to be confident in the most basic of rituals. Any wonder, then, why aikido is a martial art that takes a life time of dedication and study to master.

Since I moved to California I haven’t made any effort to find a dojo yet – there’s just no time for training. And I know how frustrated I would be if I were training once or twice a week, never moving forward or improving, just see-sawing back and forth. Right now there is pretty much time for work, and running. But being back at Shinjinkai for the afternoon reminded me that this is not a part of my life that I want to leave behind in Chicago. I will need to be patient in order to find the time to resume a proper study of it, but I’ll also need to make the effort to find that time. My profession isn’t one that just hands over free time if I don’t make an effort to wrestle some away now and then.

The trip at once was good for me to shake me out of my all-work-all-the-time routine here and remind me that I am more than the sum of my days and nights, that my life is bigger than the work I am doing here now. But I was confused all weekend that I was on vacation in Chicago and returning to San Francisco. I’d forget which airport I was coming from or going to, invert “back home” and “out here” when I was speaking about my new home or my old one. While waiting for my connecting flight in Denver, I had a moment of confusion when a Chicago-bound flight was directly across the hall from a San Francisco-bound flight. I’m headed home, but where is that? This weekend was restorative and troubling all at once. Restorative because it was a reminder that work is not me. I am not my job. I spend long hours at work, and when I’m there I work hard and care passionately about it. But it does not define me any more than any other single thing defines me. I am a sum of many parts, of preferences and fears and activities and plans for the future. I am martial arts and running marathons and making theatre and crafting things with my hands and wanting to explore the world. I am staying up too late and never getting enough sleep, hating to wear shoes and carrying around deep fears of vomit, spiders and mediocrity, a love for fireflies on Chicago summer nights and lingering over after-dinner coffee after a good meal. I am a terminally off-key singing voice and an aunt and someday maybe a parent, someday maybe a very good production manager. Right now I’m mostly working on the career part. But all in good time. My friend Callie handed me a bit of wisdom a few months ago when she pointed out that the great thing about getting to your thirties and facing big life-changing unrest like moving is knowing that you are not defined by your place. That you are still your same self no matter where you wake up in the morning. She’s right, and it’s a good feeling to realize that.

And it was troubling because being back in the community of Chicago makes me feel more sharply the lack of community in my new life. I’m new here, of course, and I know it takes time and work. But it’ll be an uphill battle, I think. Mill Valley is not a community where I am going to find like-minded artists or people my age. It’s an adorable and ritzy little Marin County hamlet that eschews chain stores and has polymillion*** dollar mansions in the hills where successful doctors and lawyers who commute to the city for their jobs raise their kids, disaffected spoiled teenagers who slump around downtown and congregate on the lawn in front of City Hall after it closes, looking as bored as one can possibly be in a town filled with the most spectacular weather and nature that one could ask for. I will have to go further afield to find my community.

* For some reason, the west coast is responsible for breaking up the band: at least four of the core players are in the midst of either executing or contemplating moves to various west coast cities.

** which seems to be working at cross-purposes, doesn’t it? Anthropomorphizing the thing that people eat who don’t like to eat things that have legs or eyes?

***I'll make up words when I want to make up words. This is my blog. Bug off.

Labels: aikido, california, chicago, random, travel, waxing poetic

i am slammed at work, and it's going to be like this for a while. like, a yearish while, possibly.

in place of an actual blog post, i offer some links:

1) this makes me super totally happy: clowns defeat nazis.

2) i made these marathon cookies from 101cookbooks this past weekend. keeping in mind that they are not actually cookies but rather are healthy, cheaper-that-cliff-bars, make-big-batches-and-freeze post-run snacks, they are pretty darn good. i recommend them, and don't be put off by the fact that the recipe calls for beans. seriously. recommended tweaks: double or even triple the amount of dates it calls for, don't be shy with the lemon zest, and don't forget the aniseed like i did.

3) had brunch this past sunday with newlyweds (yay!) P and J at the very excellent La Note in Berkeley. i know a thing or two about brunch.* and this was good brunch. i will definitely be back.

4) continuing on the subject of gastronomic orientation in my new home, i finally located a place to get thai takeout on my way home from where my running group meets in wednesdays. a little pricey, but yeah, i live in marin, so that's part of the deal. but delicious delicious vegetable/tofu panang curry (slices of pumpkin!) and super nice people running the place. i'd link their website but...they don't have one?! anyway, it's R'Noh Thai in Larkspur. yum.

*brunch in food-destination cities can be a competitive sport (nyc, chicago, san fran, i'm looking at you). and i take it seriously as such. if the food is good enough i will out-wait you, no matter how long the wait for a table for five or how cold it is outside the restaurant where we cluster in little groups, hands wrapped around mini paper cups of free coffee. as long as the coffee keeps coming in the mean time, my brunch-table waiting stamina is quite impressive.

Labels: food, links

the actor playing Sebastian fell off the front of the stage during his big dance number.

that might be all i need to say re: this particular production.

but i'm going to say a little more, i guess. oh, community theatre. you are the reason i went down this crazy-ass career path. when i was 19, and home from college for a summer, i attended the Boise Actors Guild's (BAG) production of Three Penny Opera. it was so bad that, well, it was the moment i decided that if i was going to do theatre, i'd have to do it right, do it professionally. hobby theatre would be worse than not doing it at all.

it's like running. running is an all-inclusive sport. there's room for super fast elite runners, and for middle-of-the-packers like me, and for joggers/trotters/run-walkers, and everyone else. and there's room in this world for all kinds of theatre. even hokey community theatre. it's just that me personally, i don't want to get stuck in the start corral behind the women who are going to link arms and walk the entire marathon 4-abreast any more than as a theatre artist, i want to see plays that have awkward pacing and timing, a gaudy concept hung awkwardly on the framework of a play that, while perhaps not his best, is still shakespeare, sets painted by interns and design concepts clashing with one another, overall aesthetic abandoned in favor of each designer, each moment being served individually, equity actors with classical training struggling gamely through scenes with community players for whom shakespeare simply eludes their tongues and hearts.

uh, yeah. that's how i really feel. i do love shakespeare under the stars. but my standards are high. i'm not a purist, by any means. put rollerskates on hamlet if you want, whatever. just create a concept that serves the play, rather than trying to force the play to serve your concept.

next weekend, oregon shakespeare festival, and the week after that cal shakes. i'm feeling more optimistic about those ventures.

Labels: theatre reviews

as i mentioned before, i live in a tree house, 142 stairs from the street to my front door. not surprisingly, UPS doesn't deliver up here. neither does the pizza guy or the mail man. garbage and recycling must be packed down the hill to the cans at the bottom. moving men must be bribed with large cash tips. late night thai food must be sought out on foot.

on the other hand, i can see all the way to san francisco from my front porch. there are trees on every side of my ramshackle little house, blackberries growing out back, and baby deer in the front yard most mornings and again at twilight. spiders consider my house a modest inconvenience on their route from one side of the forest to the other, and make frequent appearances, but i am slowly adapting.

the thing about living alone is that there is the same answer to every "who used up all the...." question. who didn't change the toilet paper roll? oh, right. who used up all the butter? ate all the cookies? forgot to wash the dishes again for three days in a row? ah, yes. me. i frequently quiz the cat as to why he hasn't done the dishes when he's home all day long and i'm at work earning us both a living, but he seems to feel no guilt. the upside to living alone in a tree house is that i can crank music up at any hour and make coffee in my underwear if i want to. i confess, internets, that i'm excited about finally getting a DDR game - no downstairs neighbors to torture with my awkward dancing and stomping.

it's lonely, some nights, coming home to no one but the cat. chicago exists out there, 2 hours' time difference but still only a phone call away. the light on the city fades while i make dinner, then a few hours of sleep, and miles to run in the morning. the trail running here is breath-taking. i don't even have to drive to a trailhead; it's right outside my front door. i wake to fog most mornings, but as i run up the side of mount tam, i run above to fog level and into the sunshine.

outside of marathon training, my job is taking everything i've got, so there hasn't been a lot of energy left over for building up a new social life. it'll come, in time, and i knew this first year was going to be like this. i'm doing good work. i believe in it. every day is a series of victories and insurmountable challenges that, the next day, i somehow figure out how to handle and move on to the next one. there's some serious character building going on here.

but if i haven't returned your call, or your email, or fb message, just know that i don't have much left over at the end of the day right now. but your love is much appreciated, and much needed.

Labels: california, random

day off! i've been working very very long hours at my new job, but i am trying to keep the weekends work-free as much as possible, for my sanity's sake more than anything. today's trip to the san francisco farmer's market and Renegade craft fair(check it out tomorrow, july 19, too) yielded the following spoils:

1. free samples from tcho chocolate factory
2. orange and green heirloom tomatoes (courtesy of teresa's garden omg i'm so jealous i want to grow tomatoes too...next year i will)
3. bouquet of wildflowers (for the cat to eat, as soon as my back was turned)
4. a half pound bag of fresh string beans
5. this t-shirt
6. a new purse (the girly, tuck-under-the-arm sort of handbag is a new thing for me. i'm more a messenger bag kind of girl, but...i'm trying new things.)
7. a two-tone (red and black) woodblock print of three bicycles (i'm in nesting-mode at home, it's hard to resist art right now). it was, however, due to the artist's heavy quebecois accent, considerably more expensive than i thought it was going to be. damn that negotiating in non-compatible dialects!
8. a sunburn

i'm pretty sure the art of letter-writing has all but been abandoned by my generation. after college there were a few attempts amongst friends to send hand-written letters, but those were few and far between, and with one recent exception, it's been years since anyone has hand-written me a letter now. even my grandfather, who wrote a letter to each of his five grandkids every week for all the years we were away from home for college and beyond, he too switched to email about five years back.* i'm not complaining, mind you, because in this modern world we have email and facebook and twitter and cell phones and text messages and blogs and as a result i talk to so many more far-off friends than i would if we had only the post as a means of communication. the same thing that bugged me about my own hand-written letters - their imperfections, my inability to edit and tweak the language after i'd written it - are the same things that make me totally cherish letters i receive.

handwriting is like fingerprints; no two people have exactly the same writing, and the shape of the characters speak of so many things: years of schooling, an impatience with or attention to detail, an aesthetic, the emotional state of the writer, the time of day or place or writing surface, even the physical musculature of the writer. it's all in there. there's something so personal (and increasingly rare) about something penned in a person's own unique writing. the handwritten letter is like an artifact from someone's life, that paper, that pen, that moment is captured and preserved in the paper in a way that defies the world of electronic communication. the drip of diner coffee hastily wiped off, the slightly greasy stain from writing on the kitchen counter, the worn edge where the letter, half finished, served as a bookmark for the writer between paragraphs.

in the tradition of japanese calligraphy, the qualities of each line on the paper reveals the state of the artist's spirit. to paint a single stroke correctly, the student of calligraphy must be completely focused, centered, their breathing controlled, energy concentrated in the hara. the trained eye can see when all is not centered; the line is weak, the ink turns grey and thin, the line does not have the robust energy it should. i imagine that probably everything we do/make/create might reveal the same things about us if were trained to see them; without a focus of spirit and intent, nothing we do holds the same meaning. the intention is revealed in the form and qualities of a thing.

*i'd always know when his computer was broken, because i'd receive an envelope in the mail that was his email, printed out and folded up and mailed.

Labels: waxing poetic

success in the kitchen tonight! the original inspiration was this asparagus stir-fry recipe from 101cookbooks. but i didn't have about half of the ingredients it called for, so when i got home i just started improvising, and i have to say i'm rather pleased with what i came up with. so:

tofu asparagus stir-fry with peanut sauce

chop and prep all ingredients in advance because it cooks quickly once you start cooking.

ingredients:
two cloves garlic, minced
about 1" of fresh ginger root, minced
vegetable or sesame oil
sea salt
red pepper flakes
3 tbs peanut butter
1 lime, juiced and zested
extra firm tofu, cubed
1/2 bunch asparagus, chopped into 2" pieces
1 cup spinach, de-stemmed
about 15 large basil leaves, rolled and sliced into strips
brown rice, prepared according to package

peanut sauce:
heat a small amount of vegetable or sesame oil in a small frying pan. add half the garlic and half the ginger and saute for a minute or so (don't let it brown). add peanut butter, the lime zest and the lime juice. thin with water as needed, and whisk into a creamy sauce. take off the heat and set aside.

saute tofu and veggies:
heat some oil in a frying pan. add the remaining ginger and garlic, and a few shakes of red pepper, and tofu. add a couple of pinches of sea salt. saute for 3-4 minutes, until the tofu starts to brown. add green onions and asparagus and cook until the asparagus is tender-crisp. add the peanut sauce. add the spinach and cook for about 30 seconds until the spinach starts to wilt. add the basil, stir, and take off the heat.

serve over brown rice. yum!

Labels: recipes