Promises, promises

Oh dear lord. Here it is Tuesday already, which means I'm a day behind on my entirely arbitrarily self-assigned blogging schedule. Egads!

The good news is that tomorrow I'll have a long story to tell you. It's about urine. You'll love it.

For now you'll have to content yourself with the knowledge that I saw the Blog Bully on Friday, which is always a delight, and we saw a really brilliant play, which, when it happens, is also always a delight. You know what else was delightful? The post-show gin I drank. On the whole, Friday really exceeded my expectations, which was fortunate since Pee Saturday wasn't that great.

Do you live around these parts? Are you amenable to Scots swearing a great deal? If so, you really ought to get yourself down to see Black Watch while it's playing at the Armory. It is theatre that takes full advantage of its own genre in a way that is very satisfying. By this I mean that the best plays could only be plays--not novels, not movies. They make full use of a theatrical vocabulary that requires a sort of collaboration between the audience and the performers to give it life. I realize that this sounds disgustingly pretentious while also being almost entirely unclear, which is not an ideal combination for any sentence, but it's the best I can do at the moment.
Short version: it's a great play. Go see it.

Now I'm off to the Roxie for a Noir double feature. Because, hey, I like movies too.

Tick tock

This morning, barely awake, the alarm penetrating the foam of my lousy drugstore earplugs for the fourth or fifth time, I had this conversation with myself:

"What time is it?"
Open one eye, squint at clock.
"It's not a tragedy yet."

Huh. For me, "it's not a tragedy yet" is a legitimate answer to "what time is it?" This is a thing I had not fully articulated before today. It made me realize that I employ a whole different time vocabulary from night to morning on weekdays:

Bedtime
Past my bedtime (when I usually go to bed.)
Insomnia (This spans many hours for which I am, thankfully, usually asleep, though not always.)
What the f*ck is going on with the neighbors (an hour or more before my own alarm goes off.)
Not a tragedy yet (from the first to, say, sixth time my alarm goes off.)
Tragedy (when I actually get up.)
Late

I'm not saying it's a great system, and I can't really recommend it, but there it is.


******


Oooh. Bonus. Breaking news.

NARROWLY AVERTED DIASTER
Just this second I realized that there is a glue stick on my desk at work in the same approximate position that there is a chap stick on my desk at home. While I am sorry to deny you the almost certain slapstick results, I am putting the glue stick in a drawer. Right. Now.

May your Friday be tragedy-free.

Life lesson

Here's a little something I picked up from an old movie last night. I'm not saying it will necessarily come in handy for you; indeed, I hope it won't. But imagine you did find yourself in this situation and I'd never warned you? I'd never forgive myself.

If you come to suspect that your fiance has killed two people (or three, depending on how you consider the unborn child of your sister), do not share these thoughts with him while the two of you are ALONE at a MASSIVE QUARRY.

Can I get some angst with that?

Before the alarm woke me, I had a dream in which I was abandoned by a famous blogger (who was very dressed up) and a successful artist (who briefly left some personalized plates for her wedding on a table next to me) in a hospital basement where I was looking after a baby who was in the so-called care of her alcoholic grandmother.

To this I say: WTF, subconscious? Give a girl a break, whydontcha? I realize that I have neither a thriving career, an imminent spouse, nor a baby, borrowed or otherwise, but do we need to trot it all out at once?

So, I'm exhausted, which is a nice way to begin the day. If you need me, I'll be under my desk, freaking out about my empty shell of a life.

**********

In other news, the fog is decidedly back after such an unusually long absence that I think we are obliged to greet it cordially, whether we want to or not.

As I was leaving the house, a Scandinavian nanny passed by with the requisite stroller. It was like spotting the last polar bear in the arctic--a formerly robust species, now nearly extinct. Who the hell does she talk to at the playground one wonders, when everyone else speaks Spanish?

Getting back

Remember how I went to LA one time for four days and then I talked about it for the rest of my life? Yeah. That's still going on. Sorry. Sometimes it takes two weeks to tell a story. This is the final exciting installment! (I am anxious about the summer when I will be gone for two whole weeks. It will take me six months to tell you about it. I am not a person with much in the way of "mobile devices." I can't imagine typing anything significant on an iPod touch, though I'm sure half of America is thumb-typing novels on their smart phones even as we speak.)

My friend lives comparatively close to LAX, so we left her house at 6pm for my 8:20 flight. All was well. By the time I got through security, I had about an hour before boarding which gave me plenty of time to hem and haw about what, if anything, I might want and/or need to eat. I finally decided I would spend too much on pizza, only to be told that it would take about thirty minutes to be prepared. I guess it's kind of a fancy airport. I feared the pizza preparedness and boarding times risked being simultaneous, so I got a $17 yogurt instead.

Waiting to board? Fine.
Boarding? Fine.
Waiting to actually leave the ground? Fine.
At first.

We sat on the ground for about an hour. When we finally made our first hesitant backwards progress from the gate, we were immediately met with a very loud CLUNK. The sort of CLUNK that makes you look to your neighbor and widen your eyes. Then we did some more sitting. Then the captain came on and said, "When we began taxiing, you might have heard a noise. We don't feel good about that noise at all, so we're headed on back to the gate to have it checked out."

Now, I'm all for having loud CLUNKS about which the captain has no good feelings checked out while we are still safely on the ground, but it was at about this time that I began to feel quite bitter about that pizza that could have been. It was also at this point that I discovered that my seatmate was one of a large group who were traveling from Colombia and for whom LA marked their third layover of the day. I am sorry, Colombians. We didn't mean it. There is something extra vexing about sitting on an unmoving airplane for longer than the duration of the flight. I don't enjoy the drive from Los Angeles, but I enjoy it more than sitting on an unmoving airplane. Mainly because when you get really hungry, you can just get out of the car and eat something. It's very empowering.

We took flight around 11pm, which is a perfect time to leave LA if your goal is to juuuussst miss the last BART train which, as it happens, is the means by which you get home from the airport. I arrived at the station at exactly midnight, to be met with a sign that said the last train had departed at 11:55. The next train would be at 4:30am. Remember that whole shuttle-bus to Beverly Hills thing? And how I don't like to spend fifty bucks on a taxi? Yeah. I like spending fifty bucks on a taxi even less when I'm in my own town. I was not delighted. I considered a dubious city bus. I considered a hotel shuttle to downtown and a cheaper taxi home. However, I was A) tired and B) hungry and concluded that sometimes grownups just have to take the damn taxi. Fine.

The BART station at the airport is in the same zone as the parking garage, which is to say, nowhere very useful if you need a taxi. I needed to get back on the Airtrain and back to any ol' terminal. I turned back to the very train I'd just gotten off, only to be informed that the Red Line was going out of service and that I needed to take the Blue Line, which, allegedly, also would go to the terminals, despite the signage to the contrary.

There were three other BART refugees. We shuffled over to the Blue Line and waited. I boarded an empty car and marveled as we went farther and farther from what I might call the airport part of the airport. We were running alongside the freeway at one point--the same freeway that, had I been in a damn car, would have led me home. The first stop called was actually a street name as though we were on some less specialized form of public transport. The next stop was Car Rental Kingdom--a place I didn't even know existed because I have no reason to rent a car in San Francisco. That is where the Blue Line went out of service. I did some swearing, I'll admit it. I wondered if some family of vacationers might be willing to give me a ride home in their rental car if I pitched it as a "true San Francisco experience" or if, ultimately, I would have to just rent a car myself. It was explained that--no, no-- there would be another Blue Line train if we just waited. It was only the perfectly good Blue Line train that we had just been on that was now mysteriously dead to us.

I began bonding with two other refugees. They had agreed to split a taxi into the city and suggested I could get in on that action. Finally, after a full 30 minutes on the Air Train, we were set free at the International Terminal and eventually convinced a taxi driver that he would love to take three strangers to three completely different neighborhoods for one fare.

I did feel bad that I horned in on the other refugees' plan at the last minute and yet was the first one to be dropped off, but as I walked into my house at 1am, I didn't feel that bad. Plus, I got out of that cab for twenty-two bucks. Thanks, strangers.