Saturday, January 31, 2009

An uphill battle

So, I am sad to say that I did not quite reach my goal of running 40 miles in January, but finished just two miles short, at 38. It seemed a bit harder for me to get in the running groove this month and crank out the few days per week I needed to make my 10 mile weekly sub-goals. For one, I try not to run two days in a row; every other or every two days is better on my body. The writing class has eliminated Thursday nights, and my social life has monopolized the last few Fridays, so finding a balance has been more difficult. It doesn't help that I like to take yoga on the weekends, but don't like climbing onto the treadmill after exerting myself in a 75-minute class.

(I only take yoga on the weekends, by the way, because those teachers are phenomenal while the weekday teachers suck. FYI, Equinox.)

(I won't cut back on the yoga, either, because aside from the fact that I love it, I've found it actually helps with my running. It stretches me out more than I can ever do on my own, and after I missed it one weekend this month, I was in pain the whole following week. It may keep me from running once in a while, but it's also the thing that's going to keep me running for - hopefully - years to come.)

Anyway, I've decided to reinstate my 40 mile goal for February, but, to make things more manageable, only 20 of those miles will have to come from running -- the rest can come from the elliptical or the stepmill. I'm hoping this will serve me well, actually. I always marvel at the fact that I can run for an hour with little trouble, but can't walk up a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing and losing my balance as if I've never exercised a day in my life. Hopefully this will be easier on my joints, and still provide the benefits I am looking for.

You've probably noticed that I've installed an exercise ticker/tracker in the top right corner of the blog. (Thanks Jill!). It's not so much because I expect you all necessarily want to follow along; rather, I am hoping that by making my progress public, I'll be unavoidably more accountable. I also like that it reminds me of this:


Blank(There's supposed to be an audio player, by the way, which might not show up if you're reading this blog on a subscriber feed. The yodeling is the best part.)



Monday, January 26, 2009

Page fright

It's barely Week Three and I've already hit a wall in my writing class.

The assignment for Thursday is to "develop and outline a strategy for approaching and preparing a non-fiction project." Basically, we have to decide what story we want to write, and start thinking about what kind of research, interviews, and work it will take to get us there. We don't have to commit to the topic, which is nice, but, for once, commitment is not my problem.

As I mentioned before, many of my classmates have a story to tell. There is the girl whose husband was murdered, the woman with a relative from the Spanish resistance, the entertainment accountant who is planning a salacious industry exposé. Then there are the people who want to unearth touching stories of interesting family members - a hilarious grandfather, one woman's troubled relationship with her mother, a girl's family business running a kosher deli. Not all things I would necessarily want to read, but each idea has some serious legs.

What I've always imagined myself writing is a collection of essays, mostly about the guys I've dated but also my family and friends with a hefty dose of pop culture thrown in. I have 20+ years of journals to pull from, references and quotes and memories at my disposal, practically begging to be reframed into something greater. I've schlepped these things around the country - they should probably do more than gather dust under my bed.

But I just feel like the idea is so, I don't know, done? Exhausted? Cliche? That the people who have pioneered and made popular this genre, have no doubt done it better than me. And that compared to the more serious stories being developed in my classroom, this idea is such a trivial pursuit.

It doesn't help that, by all accounts, I am a very boring person. I avoid drama like I avoid bad cliches, such as the one that would have fit perfectly in this sentence, "like the plague." All of my relationships have been remarkably unremarkable - they've just shaped my life which, as a narcissist, I am compelled to share with the world.

So my challenge, then, is to make the uninteresting, inspiring. To pull some universal truth of out these personal memories, and avoid the Carrie Bradshaw cliche. While I don't wish for anything so dramatic in my life to happen only for the sake of a story, I am starting to rethink my commitment to "non-fiction."



Wednesday, January 21, 2009

One more way Facebook can control my life

Just as apartment-seekers might eventually check the obituaries to find a new home, I've decided that Facebook - which notes who, among my former friends, is ending their relationship - might be just as an efficient way for me to find a boyfriend.

Though I suppose I should wait til he takes the wedding photos down from his profile before I officially make my "move".

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Monday, January 19, 2009

On Facebook, actions speak louder than words

While Facebook often annoys me, sometimes it just baffles me.

As anyone on the site knows, you can download a seemingly endless assortment of "Superpoke" applications that provide inane interaction with other members. Just for fun, you can gift a friend with an (imaginary) imitation designer bag, plant a flower in someone's virtual garden, or throw a sheep at anyone and everyone you wish.

Shortly after I first started on Facebook, I made a conscious decision to blackball all of these "pokes". You have to download each application in order to accept or return the gifts/sheep/roundhouse kicks, and it would take too long and be too annoying to bother with each one. More than that, with each "gift" comes grief and guilt, should you not wish to return that tennis serve or blow a kiss back to the annoying girl who sent it. Every "poke" becomes an exercise in etiquette, as we all secretly wonder if a Fuzzy Navel is an appropriate exchange for that Makers on the rocks, or if the initiator will notice (and take to heart) if we ignore the action entirely. If I avoid every application across the board, though, I'll never be accused of playing favorites or have to explain why I helped build a playground but didn't further the Orangemen wave.

I don't get too many Superpokes anymore, but every once in a while, one will come through. Today, someone apparently downloaded the "Snowball fight" application, because I got a - are you ready for it? I got a Pee Snowball sent to me.

A Pee Snowball.

I assume that's what I think it is? A snowball with pee on it? (In it?) Not only is that terribly gross, but how random! I can't even see the humor in it - I am just so baffled that someone would even think of creating that. What puzzles me even more is that the girl who sent it to me is someone I have not even talked to since about the first grade. Oh, we went to high school together, but we were in different groups and she was always very quiet and shy. I can't imagine why she would want to break the ice, all these years later, with this.

Technically, semantically, it wasn't even sent to me - it was thrown at me, which has the implication of being a little bit hostile. Like somebody would actually choose to wet their hands with pee, if it meant seeing a snowball hit me! I'm sure it wasn't malicious, of course, and that she either meant to send it to someone else or meant to send me something much more... um... normal, but this is yet another way Facebook has managed to make me feel bad about my neck.

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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Back to School

On Thursday night, for the first time in more than ten years, I stepped into a college classroom.

Well, "rushed" into the classroom is more like it. I had spent 15 minutes driving around campus looking for a visitor parking lot, and then another 15 on foot trying to find the building, so by the time I actually arrived at the classroom, I was ten minutes late and just kind of fell into the room, heaving a sigh of relief. What can I say? I know how to make an entrance.

(Did I mention I had been wearing my work heels while walking all across campus? And that I was lugging my laptop the whole way? I definitely didn't need to worry about missing the gym. Thursday nights from now on will be giving me a perfectly adequate full-body workout.)

As I made my way towards the only available seat, which, naturally, was in the front of the room, I scanned the crowd. Lots of pretty girls. No boys. One older man, that looked to be around 50. Now, it's not like I took this to meet anyone of the opposite sex, but I won't lie and say I wouldn't appreciate a little bit of eye candy. What do you think was my motivation for going to class the first time around? Later, two more guys arrived, both single-looking, both seemingly around my age. It'll do.

Once I got settled and looked around, I felt very much at home. There were no less than six people in that room that I would swear, I have met before. I have racked my brain and really don't think I have met these people before (one is 23, one is around 43 - we don't really run in the same circles) but I immediately felt a kinship and knew I was in the right place.

That "familiar" feeling was reinforced when the instructors introduced themselves. The teachers are a married couple, around 65 years old, Jewish yentas from New York. The woman, particularly, struck a chord, when she mentioned that one of her first jobs was as a writer for General Hospital. I kind of died in my seat. Then she started telling us that she worked in advertising for a while, and I died a little bit more. I may have only worked in advertising for 15 months, but I studied it for a long time and find that it has provided a major foundation for the work I do now.

If I wasn't nearly dead already, she put the nail in the coffin when she explained that her recent work has focused on the spiritual. I won't go into her beliefs and fields of study here, but suffice to say that she, as a person, is very magnetic, almost ethereal, and I felt like I was in the room with someone very in tune, someone who could see through me if she tried. So, basically, I'm in love with her.

We went around the room and introduced ourselves, talked about why we were taking the class, what we hoped to get out of it. The class focuses on creative non-fiction; that is, true stories told in a creative way, be it a memoir, a biography, or anything, really, that isn't fiction. So a lot of people in the class have these major stories from their lives that they want to immortalize on paper. One woman, who was about my age, saw her husband murdered two years ago, as part of a white collar crime that she believes goes all the way up to the government. She's just now at a point where she is ready to start going through his things, and thinks the truth lies in the boxes in his home office. That's her story. Another woman has a distant relative who was part of the Spanish resistance and the French army and had something to do with the Holocaust. She is doing major investigatory work and interviews with people abroad and intends to write that story.

As for me? I really just wanted to find more exciting ways to write my stories from eighth grade or about that time my senile grandfather surprised us all at my graduation. Suddenly, those feel a little too trivial. Of course, I'm glad not to have a tragic tale to tell, and I'm one of many without a bigger plan in mind. But I do feel a greater pressure to churn out stellar writing, knowing that I lack a compelling story.

I will say this - at the very least, it is going to be an interesting semester.



Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Things that boggle my mind

- Why this one woman, in response to my dining room table ad on Craig's List, keeps making plans to see/buy it, and then flakes on me every. single. time. After the second time, I would have been too embarrassed to reschedule; however, shame seems to be in short supply among the Craig's List crowd.

- How companies can spend money on throwing an event, and then forget to put the address on the invitation. This would be the same company I had problems with before. They have problems with every piece of printed collateral I've ever seen - and they are a magazine. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that they're being run by a six-year-old. What does surprise me is that better media outlets are dying by the day, and yet this one keeps plugging along.

- That we have this amazing technology called GPS. I admit, when I first bought my iPhone, I felt a bit guilty and frivolous - I never spend so much money on gadgets. But if anything helps me justify the purchase, by far, it's having a navigation system. I've used it a number of times, mostly as a back-up to another set of directions, but tonight, it really came in handy. I was driving home from the gym when an accident on the 110 closed all three lanes of traffic. Police were routing everyone off one of the exits, and I had no idea where I was. Fortunately, I was able to use the GPS, figure out my location and subsequent directions, and I was back on track within ten minutes. Without it? I'd likely still be driving around in the dark, somewhere in the vicinity of Dodger Stadium.

- That LA can have a seasonal high of 80 degrees while the rest of the country suffers from subarctic temperatures. How did I ever get so lucky?

- Chuck Bass Fridays. This doesn't so much boggle my mind as make me all hot and bothered. The idea of a bunch of people in a room that just look like Chuck Bass? My ovaries just might explode.

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Monday, January 12, 2009

Don't knock these boots

They say that if you're old enough to remember a trend from the first time it was popular, you're too old to wear it the second time around.

I don't know who "they" are, but I've found at least one exception to this rule.

My freshman year of college, I was friends with this girl who, hands down, had the coolest clothes. Hidden behind the heavy wood doors of her dormitory closet, she stacked various washes of vintage jeans, countless cropped T-shirts from Contempo, and shoes that made serious statements. I envied her style and borrowed what I could, but there was one item I loved so much, I had to make them my own: her motorcycle boots.

That either of us would be into motorcycle boots was bizarre. We were both nice Jewish girls from the suburbs who had never even been on a bike, let alone required the footwear to ride one. But there was something so sexy and bad-ass about these boots, all scuffed and steel-toed, that added a bit of bravado into otherwise unassuming steps.

Around Thanksgiving, we went to purchase my first pair. Rather than go to the city's large Carousel Mall which held all the chain stores, we headed to the second-tier shopping center that was home to the low-rent, independent retailers. There, we found the biker store on the ground floor, and for $50, I purchased my prized possession. I can't be sure, but I imagine I wore them out of the store, and returned to campus legally drunk off a cocktail of sass and swagger.

I wore these boots throughout my freshman and sophomore years, but slowly started filtering them out as the styles changed. When I was short on closet space in New York, I asked my mom to hold onto them for a while. I wasn't wearing them at all, then, but had a feeling they might one day make a comeback.

That day, according to the LA Times, is today.

For once actually ahead of a trend, I started rotating them back into my wardrobe about a year ago. At first, I secretly worried that I might be too old to be rocking the boots, but - no joke - Every. Single. Time. I wore them, I'd get a compliment.

"Love your boots!" "Where did you get those?" "Are those Frye?"

I was relieved to pull off the look, of course, and took some weird pride in the fact my boots weren't Frye. It sounded much cooler to tell people that I had gotten them nearly 15 years earlier, at a little motorcycle shop in Syracuse. The age officially qualified the find as "vintage," while the biker shop implied the real deal.

A year later, people are still coming up to me nearly every time I wear them. I love it, of course, but it baffles me a bit. If motorcycle boots are that popular - you can find them in every department store - why are mine getting so much attention? I have to wonder if the hard worn scuffs and scratches hint at the boots' authenticity, or if some other difference subtly suggests their fifteen years of history.



Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Which came first - the chicken or the deficit?

I usually bring my lunch to work, but there is a make-your-own-salad place I frequent on the 1-2 days per week I don't pack a sandwich. Basically, for $5.95, you get a choice of lettuce plus five vegetables or legumes tossed and dressed. For $2 more, you can add chicken or tuna, so the total cost is around $8.

Being a creature of habit, I order virtually the same thing every time - chicken, broccoli, cucumbers, bell peppers, corn, and carrots. When you order a protein, the employee making the salad is supposed to put a sticker on the lid so the cashier knows to charge the extra money. My work friends and I realized long ago that the young guys who make the salads often leave off the sticker - whether they're intentionally giving us a break or just being lazy, who knows, but I've learned to shut up and just put the gift salad in my mouth.

Every once in a while, the cashier will look at the stickerless lid and ask, "Protein?" I'll answer honestly and pay the extra money, but figure if they don't ask, then I don't tell. It's not my problem the employees don't follow protocol.

Except now, I think it is my problem.

Apparently the salad place raised their prices, because I got charged for protein today, and the cost was $9.50. And I had to wonder: Did the management finally crunch the numbers, and realize they were coming up short? Has my comped chicken caused them to cross the cost-efficient road? Are higher prices karmic payback for years of dish dishonesty?

Or is this just what people mean by "free range"?



Sunday, January 04, 2009

Holiday wrap-up

Happy new year, everyone!

Before I talk about the things I did this week, I want to address what I didn't do.

Unlike many bloggers, I didn't write a reflective post about what I learned or how I grew in 2008. I wrote something similar to that on my blog anniversary, and I think after four years of this thing, the subject of my maturation has started to get a little stale. But I have been personally reflecting, and it occurred to me that while nothing major changed in 2008 (same job, same apartment, same social status), I made a lot of smaller personal changes I think will have some impact on the future.

On that note, I also didn't make any resolutions. I thought of all the things I did in 2008 that I never could have predicted I'd want to do back in January - take up yoga, go to Peru, sign up for a writing class - so I didn't think it made sense to come up with something now. My whole life, the biggest changes have occurred practically without warning or any planning on my part, and right now, it seems appropriate to just keep my eyes and mind open to opportunity.

Finally, I also didn't go to the gym! Since I met my December mileage goal more than a week early, I gave myself the week off from running, and did yoga only three times in ten days. It was a nice change not having that obligation in the back of my mind, and opened up so much time in my schedule! It was also nice not harboring guilt on the couple of days I was hungover and sleep-deprived and really just wanted to lay on my couch. My mind hasn't been so guilt-free in years. It was like taking a vacation from myself!

As for what I did with all that free time?

Most notably, I got a dining room table.

My dining area is pretty small, so when I moved into this apartment, I purchased a two-seater highboy with matching bar stools. It sounds like an odd choice now, but I wasn't throwing dinner parties back then, and, after coming from a 300 square foot Manhattan studio, I was excited just to have a dining room. I couldn't begin to overthink the furniture.

The highboy was also where I kept my laptop and did all of my writing. It wasn't uncomfortable, per se, but the stools had no back support and the table wasn't wide enough to hold much more than my computer. I've wanted to upgrade for a while, but I figured I'd be buying/moving soon, and I should just wait until then. Well. Now that I have this writing class coming up, I really wanted a more comfortable space in which to work. I'm likely not buying a condo until the economy stabilizes, so I figure I can get at least a semester of classes out it.

I didn't want to spend a lot, so Friday morning, I dragged my friend Lauren up to the Burbank Ikea. The last time I went to Ikea, I was still living in New York, and the crowds and the kids and the chaos at the loading dock made me swear I'd never return. Oh, how time forgets. No. Actually, this experience wasn't bad at all. There was no traffic, parking was fine, and we got there early enough as to avoid the masses. The lines were long and furniture maze was still annoying, but, all-in-all, it was a fine experience.

Until.

I got home and had to put everything together. And realized I'm way too old for make-your-own-furniture.

Lauren came back and we both set up the table. It was mostly simple, save for a few screws that didn't want to go in, but we managed okay and I'm fairly confident I can eat and work at this thing for a few years without incident. I can't say the same for the chairs. We each took a turn trying to assemble the chairs, and we both agreed that there is no way the front legs will ever be stable. The directions call for a wrench to secure the washers on the screws, but I got a wrench and I applied elbow grease and nothing changed. Except the angle of the legs when I sit, which probably doesn't bode well for their future.

It turns out, I also got the wrong slipcovers. I was devastated when I realized this. Yes, the Ikea experience had been okay on Friday morning, when half of LA was still on vacation or back at work or maybe even just sleeping in. But returning once the city was back to normal? Fuhgettaboutit. I'm going to have to wake up early one day next weekend and just be there when it opens. That's the only way I can deal with doing it again. That, and maybe a sedative in my Starbucks.

When I wasn't working towards home improvement, I was having a lot of fun. New Years Eve was spent with Nicole, first at a dinner party, and later, at a house party. Friday night was another late night with Miya, partying at Foxtail, and later, at the SLS Hotel. In between, I had two (mediocre) dates, watched two (bad) movies, ate lunch with two (good) friends, and started one (very good) book. I did a lot, and yet feel very relaxed.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and a satisfying start to the new year!

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