No excuse.

So how is it that Dean, who has a million things going on at once, has time to write a worthwhile post, while I can barely find the energy to generate video links? This poor blog is a shadow of its former self. Has it come to this, that I need to start rerunning past hits, perhaps the Camel Toe extravaganza or some of the Cosmo 13s? Or would the stench of desperation become asphyxiating?

Here. This was good for a few laughs. Heaven knows I can’t seem to manage any these days.

D.

Niche market, all right.

From Huffington Post (more pix):

Watermelon, or giant green dice?

From The Associated Press: ANTON, Panama (AP) — A company in Panama is hoping to join in a small niche market of the fruit export business: square watermelons. The Panama Fruit Producer company has started “rounding up” the square fruit, sending its first shipment of 120 boxy melons to New York.

The company expects to produce about 3,000 of the molded melons this year, and will send them to the Netherlands and Germany as well.

Operations manager Gerardo Diaz said Wednesday that people are surprised at first because “it is not what they were expecting.” “Later they ask if it is a genetic experiment,” he said.

Diaz said the watermelons are natural. They are made to grow inside cube-shaped glass boxes and conform to the mold as they get bigger. The first melons cost about $75 apiece, but producers hope to bring the price down.

It’s all a plot to replace grocers with minimum wage slaves. If oranges and apples were shaped like that, anyone could stack the damned things.

Either that, or it’s a devious plan to convince us we need to spend $75 for fruit. Hey, they’ve convinced we need to buy water from bottles, right?

D.

A kaleidoscope of years

What I always forget about the LA basin is its scale. If I drive 20 minutes in Bakersfield, I get from one side of town to the other. If I drive 20 minutes in LA, I get from one suburb to another. On the map, they’re next door neighbors.

We knew our neighbors when we were kids. We knew everyone on the street. We knew their occupations, the names of all their kids; they had nicknames; each dad had a characteristic whistle to call his kids home for dinner. We even knew whose dad was pissed (the whistle changed pitch). The adults weren’t friends with one another but we knew them. And the kids hung out together, of course. Nowadays, I don’t know my neighbors. Yes, I’m as much to blame as they are. It was a little better in Crescent City and Harbor, but not much.

In Texas, we knew our next door neighbors. We met the wife when Sydney, my tortoise, dug under the fence to see if there were any female tortoises in their backyard. The wife liked to feed the deer; huge scads of deer came by for the free food, the parasites. The husband was an emeritus prof at the med school, in the Family Practice Department. Nice people. But we didn’t know anyone else there.

So I had in mind eating at Cafe Santorini tonight, since I have fond memories of their smelt appetizer — my “pile of little fishies,” as in, “Karen, I want a pile of little fishies tonight!” I was so eager to get there that I took the Colorado exit from the 210. Big mistake. I should have stayed on the 134. Not only did the 210 exit put me in the wrong place, it pointed me in the wrong direction. It has been so long since I lived in LA that everything looks unfamiliar now. The fact that I passed first the Eagle Rock Plaza and then the Glendale Galleria should have told me I was going the wrong way, but finally I had to come to a dead-end to figure it out. Fortunately, I found the 134 East, got myself turned around, and soon found myself in Old Town Pasadena. Huzzah!

Old Town Pasadena is a product of end stage gentrification. In my childhood, Colorado Blvd. was a string of seedy bars and pawn shops. You wouldn’t stop there, you would drive through. Fast. In the 90s, it went through a lovely in-between phase where pawn shops and adult bookstores intermingled with Il Fornaio and Gordon Biersch. Now Gordon Biersch lies vacant, and what was once a stodgy and ancient cigar-and-top hat restaurant on the corner of Fair Oaks and Colorado is now a Cheesecake Factory. Abercrombie and Fitch, Barnes and Noble, T-Mobile, an Apple store, Victoria’s Secret . . . I want to know who gutted a mall! I might as well be back in Walnut Creek.

But Cafe Santorini is still open, and my little fishies are still on the menu.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re still open,” I told the hostess.

“Oh, we stay open until 10 on weekdays!” she bubbled back. I suspect she was 10 the last time we ate here.

Overheard at Cafe Santorini: one twenty-something woman telling another, “I feel settled now.” I didn’t catch the details, but she proceeded to tell her friend how everything in her life had fallen into place. And maybe she is settled. Maybe she’ll still be in the same place, doing the same thing sixty years from now. But it struck me that it’s far more likely that she’s settled only because she has not yet become unsettled.

I was settled once, too. I had free food and rent, a girlfriend, a job that paid me enough for gas and date money, a certain amount of homework to keep my mind busy. Then I left home for college, and since then nothing has been the same.

It seems to me we live many lives, each in blocks of ten or five years, sometimes less. Certainly my first ten years felt like an eternity, and the next ten weren’t much better. Berkeley was only four years, yet it was and is a huge part of my life. Texas? Little more than two, but it made a big impression on me.

What fascinates me is the selectivity of memory. I’ve spent something like 40% of my life living in the San Gabriel Valley, yet I got lost trying to get to Old Town Pasadena. But once there, I walked straight to Cafe Santorini (which is a bit out of the way), and the place looked and felt like I had been there only a few months ago.

And my little fishies were just as tasty as I had remembered.

D.

Tonight,

I’m feeling tired and discouraged and down. I didn’t sleep well last night and there’s no obvious explanation why. I’m beginning to realize that my friend Mike is correct, and that I have no urge to write because I’m generally happy with everything, job, family, etc., except I miss the writing and I fear the complacency of comfort, but I dread upheavals and change, especially now that things are finally settling into a routine. I can’t possibly want to be miserable just to stimulate the muse, can I?

Mostly I’m feeling whiny.

Patients keep asking me what I do for fun. This makes me feel like a very boring individual because what do I do? I hang out with my family. I read, I surf the net. I work out (which isn’t exactly fun). I’m tempted to say that I raise spitting cobras, or I’m a mountain climber, or that I’m researching a book on Craig’s List prostitution. (I do read Craig’s List personals for the yucks — does that count?)

My patient who hates Bakersfield came back to see me today and wanted to know how was I settling in, how did I like Bako, what was I doing for fun. I think she wanted me to admit to being horribly miserable here. Truth is, now that the weather has cooled, my number one gripe has evaporated.

I’m not even coughing anymore. Took five weeks to get over that horrid bug, but Jake and I are finally back to full health.

I think I just need a good night’s sleep.

D.

An invasion of sorts

No telling how a teenage girl’s diary ended up at the bottom of our trash can. When I tossed out the morning’s garbage I saw it there, opened to a blank page. At first, I thought it was one of my many writing notebooks (you know, you get an idea for a new story, you have to write it down, but you don’t want it to rub shoulders with all those older crappy ideas that never went anywhere; THIS idea will be different, THIS story is going to go somewhere, so it damn well deserves its own notebook!) so I fished it out and looked at it.

Nope. Not mine.

It belongs, belonged, to a girl who was a high school freshman in 2008. There are no entries later than October 28, 2008, which makes me wonder if she came to a bad end. Perhaps her mother or father, cleaning house, came across the diary and could not bear to have it around (but why throw it into someone else’s trash can?) I’ve already googled her name hoping not to find news reports of some grizzly murder or car accident. She’s clean on Google. So the question remains: why?

It’s a multipart diary with sections devoted to prayers, goals, “trials and triumphs,” etc. The cover design is of a rather Duggary-looking girl in a pink dress that’s up to her chin, looking sweet enough to put ten diabetics into ketoacidosis.

Do I have any responsibility to honor the privacy of a stranger whose diary ended up in my trash? My compromise: I decided to read it but not reveal anything too terribly embarrassing on the blog. Nor would I reveal any identifying information.

With those ground rules in place, here’s what I’ve learned of our diarist:

She’s a thoroughly indoctrinated Christian, praying that this kid or that family be saved. She prays for that sort of thing a lot. (I wonder how many people have prayed for my salvation? At least one that I can think of, back at the Crescent City hospital. *Shudder*)

She’s a young Republican. On the back page is the draft of a letter she wrote to “Mr.” McCain.

She’s trying very hard to be a better person. Seems like her heart is in the right place.

She writes the usual angsty adolescent song lyrics and poetry.

She doesn’t have very lofty goals — “Be the person you meant me to be,” which I presume is addressed to Jesus.

By far, the most detailed section of the diary is “Prayers.” It’s remarkable how pushy some folks can be in their prayers. Not only does our diarist wish for the salvation of others, but she wants one woman to “stop dating and be worthy of a good man,” and she wants all the children to be taken out of one home and for their parents to be saved. Presumably, the kids would be allowed back into their home at that point, but she forgot to pray for that.

She’s not the sort of person I would have talked to in high school (although, oddly enough, one very like her friended me on Facebook). But there’s such a desperate earnestness in her writing and such modesty in her own personal prayers that she strikes me as a genuinely good person, and I can’t help but hope she’s okay. It worries me, though, that the diary ended up in the bottom of my trash bin.

Why?

D.

18.5, and the heavy lifting

18.5%: that’s my current body fat measurement. Solidly in “good” territory and close, very close, to “excellent.” I suspect this means I’m close to my target body weight . . . body mass index be damned.

After my last session with the trainer, I rented a truck, came home, and loaded up all the cardboard and packing paper. I suspect I had a couple hundred pounds or more of cardboard — maybe more, since I’m terrible at guessing weights. I know I filled a ten-foot truck and that it took four or five hours to load and unload.

Unloading was the real bitch. The recycle bins are designed to discourage dumping; you have to fit your cardboard through slits and holes and smallish squares, so there’s really no chance of depositing boxes in their natural boxlike state. I had a couple dozen boxes jam-packed with packing paper, and I had to unload all the paper then break down each box. That’s in addition to the dozens and dozens of boxes I had already broken down.

So what it all amounts to is several hours of an almost total body workout: not much on the abs, but lots of leg and upper body work in 90 to 100 degree weather. I’m bushed.

Here’s what I want to know: is there a mitzvah for recycling cardboard and paper? Our rabbi back in Crescent City, a lefty if ever there was one, once tried very hard to find some basis for environmentalism in the Old Testament. He couldn’t. Nevertheless, Judaism is if anything a flexible religion, adaptable to changes in technology and social mores, and so he felt one could exercise great liberty in declaring that certain practices are, indeed, good in God’s eyes.

As an agnostic, this is little more than a passing curiosity for me. I guess I’ll have to be content with the fact that I had one hell of a workout today.

In other news: we received Jake’s midterm grades, and he’s pulling As in everything except his theology class. I suspect this is because he missed an important test, and the teacher probably had to count it as a zero until he makes it up. Or at least I hope that’s the reason. He makes up the test on Monday, and I think we’ll email the teacher to make sure that’s the reason for the low grade.

D.

Barely dented it

At least, that’s how it feels. Yes, there are a number of emptied & collapsed boxes, and the kitchen is almost serviceable (or at least it will be, once I find our flatware), and I’ve unpacked and broken down all of those big boxes where they hang clothes — what are those things called? But I haven’t managed to clear a room yet, and I haven’t found our bedding.

Add to that, our problems keep multiplying. We gave away our old gas dryer when we moved from Oregon, and wouldn’t you know it, this place needs a gas dryer. Our old electric dryer won’t adapt. Either we would have to get an electrician to change out the wall socket, or we would need a new (gas) dryer. Our dryer is 12 or 13 years old, so who knows how long it has to live. And I know how much electricians charge. They’re worse than cosmetic surgeons. So I went with the cheaper option and bought a new gas dryer.

Anyway, I’m thoroughly wiped. Dehydration will kill you in this climate. I won’t drink the tap water (it’s heavily chlorinated) and two sodas, decaf though they may be, will not cut it. So I got dehydrated, my allergies have been bugging me all week, and the air quality today was miasmal. And if miasmal isn’t a word, it should be.

Goals for tomorrow: move the tarantulas; find our bedding; finish the kitchen; take receipt of the new gas dryer; wash and dry all the bedding. That’s not so much, is it?

Have I mentioned how much I hate moving?

D.

The damage

We have a three-car garage, one-third of which is mostly full of boxes and assorted junk. By stowing the low priority boxes in the garage, I was able to keep the number of boxes in the house to a minimum. That means I really ought to be able to make our house box-free by Monday.

The garage is another story. Back in Oregon, I never did succeed in ridding the RV garage of all boxes. It became an impromptu storage unit. Some of those boxes were simply ridiculous — about half a dozen packed solid with ten-year-old issues of Nature and Science. What, exactly, did I mean to do with them? Cut out the pretty pictures and use them to make mobiles for hyperintelligent infants?

When we moved south, I managed to rid myself of most of that stuff. Things are better now. Really they are! We never could have fit our belongings from 2 years ago into our current space. The guy who moved us said we weren’t all that bad. He could itemize all our belongings on four pages; some families’ belongings fill fifty pages.

Tomorrow, I start unpacking. Tonight, I need sleep.

D.