Coming up short

Tthis is a week that sneaked up and applied its mighty boot to my posterior, hard and repeatedly.    Ouch.

I've been trying to write something about my acupuncturist (yep. I have an acupuncturist now. I, too, find it hilarious) that is worthy of her. I've been trying to finish something about how I did a fun show on Saturday and was, surprisingly, not tossed out of Berkeley for having bad vibes.   Then it turned out that I needed to apply whatever writerliness was available to me to the project of trying to convince a singularly delightful man not to break up with me.

I regret that it's left me anecdotally challenged. So, instead of reading about the actual events that I am (non-contractionally) meant to be describing for you, I invite you to envision an epic battle between the acupuncturist and the bad vibes. I think it should involve light sabers, but you may employ whatever defensive mechanisms you like. It's your imagination, after all.

Tomorrow I'm off to Los Angeles where I will soon be squeezed into some foundation garments and a dress that I've rented without knowing whether or not it will actually fit me (cliffhanger!), to witness one of my dearest friends wed his dream girl.  If you think I'm not going to cry, you're nuts.  Worst case scenario, the dress does not fit, so I wear a sheet and the fancy rented necklace, which would allow me to forgo both the foundation garment and the tissues (what is a sheet, really, if not an enormous tissue?), On reflection, maybe that would actually be the best case scenario. We'll see.

When I get home, I'll tell you some stories. 

Fishy

There are often little signs posted in the girls' bathroom at school. Usually, these are about upcoming dances or plays or club meetings. Sometimes, they are health tips, e.g., Wash your hands!  Don't share hats!  Lately though, there has been a little flurry of signs about sharks. More precisely, about not killing them.

I don't doubt that this is a worthy cause, but I have been secretly amused. I suspect that teenagers at a small private high school in San Francisco are not culpable in too much shark killing. Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe it's the big weekend craze. 

The sign in my usual stall says, "Shark fin soup has been described as tasteless.  Don't kill sharks!" And so I've continued my lifelong not-eating of shark fin soup, much like the majority of others in the building. 

But then...yesterday [cue ominous music]...the sign was not only taken down, but  crumpled up and thrown on the floor. Ominous indeed.

If you are a shark and you are reading this: hide.

Rager

Halloween in my neighborhood is quite a to-do, not in the drunken "my costume is I'm barely wearing clothes" vein, but in the "my, what a lot of small children live around here" vein.  [For those of you who are keeping track, the Upstairs Baby was dressed as Elmo.  I am unconvinced that he even knows who Elmo is, not so much because he is small, but because his parents are French. Do the French care about la Rue de Sesame?  I couldn't say.] 

There was a lot of very loud "Halloween music" (which I compelled to put in quotes because I disagree that it even exists as a genre) blasting from across the street for many hours and a veritable parade of small costumed citizens and their tall minders passing by. In my curmudgeonly fashion, I was opting out of the candy-fueied revelry, drowning out "Monster Mash" with a second viewing of "Prime Suspect" on Netflix, and trying to sear a pork tenderloin in preparation for the arrival of my dashing, uncostumed dinner guest. 

Because the children in my neighborhood are very small indeed (there is a joke that goes like this: Q: What does every kid in Noe Valley get for his 5th birthday?  A: A house in Marin.)  Halloween simmered down early, leaving us to enjoy our tenderloin in comparative peace.  I sort of forgot it was Halloween after a while.

This morning though, the never-ending windblown trash pile that accumulates around and beyond our front gate included evidence of a big night.  In addition to a curious amount of torn up newspaper, there was the telltale bright orange of a Reece's peanut butter cup wrapper (fun size) and,  in the middle of my driveway, more surprisingly and rather disturbingly, a pair of men's underpants.

Awestruck

Yesterday I bought some makeup from a woman at Macy's who told me that my choices in lipstick colors were awesome, that my certainly I would have tragic results if I tried to apply eyeliner with a brush was awesome, that the pen sort of thing I bought instead was awesome, that I was awesome, that meeting me was awesome, that she hopes I have an awesome time at the wedding I'm going to next week, and that, in the meantime, she hoped I had an awesome night.

Perhaps she doesn't get out much.

Breaking news

I heard on NPR that there are now mosquitoes in California that carry dengue fever. 

Seeing as how I appear to be the only person in San Francisco who has ever had a mosquito infestation, or, indeed, is ever bitten by mosquitoes at all, I interpret this to mean that I will be contracting dengue fever. 

I am not looking forward to it.