Update on my blindness

My doctor called my symptoms "confusing" - not exactly what I wanted to hear. But she doesn't think it'll happen again. I'm going to choose to believe her latter comment and ignore the former.

Up next: opthamologist and neurologist. Yee haw!

Dolores

We spent a good amount of time this weekend sitting in Dolores Park, drinking beer and wathcing the people. And oh man, there are some serious freaks in this city. Most are the garden-variety freaks: they of the weird hair and ugly clothes and little dogs with hair and clothes as unfortunate as their own.

But there are acrobats. Sometimes they are acrobats with hula hoops and boomboxes and lots of hippie lycra (if you don't know what that is, you obviously haven't spent enough time in San Francisco), and sometimes they are homoerotic dudes who wrestle and throw each other around in a skilled manner. On Friday this latter group was also smashing each other into bed of empty PBR tallboys. 

And then! On Saturday! There was a man in a poofy blouse! And a chick with a six pack and visible thong! And they were acrobats! 

When we first sat down next to them, they looked like a normal couple. They were cuddled up and reading Spanish poetry to each other. Fine. But then the guy laid on his back and put his feet up, and then the girl placed herself and all her weight on his feet, from whence she did not descend for a long long time. It looked like this.

He kind of lazily twirled her around in the air, all while reading Spanish poetry in his man-blouse and capris. Occasionally they would do some kind of complicated shift-around trick thing, and at one point a guy with his camera phone ran up to them to take pictures. He had an absolutely epic plumber butt, and one of his friends ran up to take a photo of him. 

So, of course, I took a photo of them all. It looked like this.

Check out that ass crack! Eventually the butt hubbub subsided and the couple went back to their romantic acrobat poetry reading in peace.

Eventually, though, a small man went up to the couple and apparently asked if he might be held aloft. In my mind he tapped the lady acrobat on the shoulder (or six pack) and asked, "May I cut in?" And the couple obliged. It looked like this.

You may be asking, "Surely that is not the acrobat lady that is taking a picture of her lover man holding aloft a small hipster?" But it is, my friend. It is. She also photographed them later, when the small man gave the blousey man a massage that made even the crackheads and the can collectors uncomfortable. 

Oh, the glories of a weekend in Dolores Park.

Earthquake!

Just a wee one - like sitting on a very firm water bed. But still - my first earthquake!

Larry Summers is a jerkwad

But we already knew that, right? Feel affirmed by reading this NYT article from 1999. 

"This history legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy."

Or, you know, destroy the new economy. Either way.

(Also prepare to feel bummed about losing Wellstone all over again.)

Spring

I'm not sure it's really called Spring in San Francisco, where the temperature only ever varies 20 degrees and the recent "rainy season" was pretty much a misnomer. In any case, though, I am feeling invigorated by the sunshine and the warmth. The great views from my new office don't hurt, either.

So: what is on the schedule for this weekend? So many options! I would like to

• hike
  
• eat and drink outside
  
• picnic
  
• go for a bike ride
  
• see friends
  
• not go blind again

This all seems do-able, right? Also there are some apartments having open houses - apartments that are just out of me & Mike's price range, but which I'd like to torture myself by seeing nonetheless.

Oh, Wellesley

(the town not the college)

Apparently the Bank of America on Route 16 was robbed at gunpoint yesterday, and two "suspicious devices" were found nearby and exploded in some vague intentional manner by robots. I found this out via Facebook, where the two comments on this article were:

"I can't believe Wellesley has a bomb squad."

and

"I can't believe Wellesley has a robot."

Word. The best quote in the article is from a 16 year old girl, who said, "I know you aren't supposed to be excited about a bomb scare, but it's the most interesting thing that has ever happened here." 

You are right about that, sister. The only other diversion that town has is staring at lesbians holding hands in CVS.

Tribute

On Wednesday, Meg and Ed drove off in their Uhaul for Arkansas. Arkansas, for serious. So on Tuesday night we got really drunk at Fly Bar: an appropriate sendoff.

This superclassy iPhone photo is their tribute.

San Francisco will miss them.

Famous

My cousin's girlfriend Angelique was featured on the CBS Early Show this morning! She's an editor for Latina magazine, and she was asked to talk about fashion. Or abs. Or something. She did a really great job, except that I think the clothes were kind of ugly. She, however, is freaking gorgeous.

Blinded by the light

This morning I started to feel a little sick a few minutes into my shuttle ride to work. I got seriously nauseated, and then I started sweating. Profusely. I got pins and needles all over my body, and started seeing spots. This was all in the course of a couple of minutes.

AND THEN I WENT BLIND.

I had closed my eyes because of the nausea and the bright spots, and when I opened them again, I couldn't see anything. Dark. Black. I actually touched my eyeballs with my fingers just to prove to myself that they were actually open. They were.

So I silently flipped my shit. Terry Gross was yacking in my earphones, I was sweating in actual streams - seriously, I soaked through my clothes and made puddles in my boots - and tried to figure out at what point I should get the attention of the girl next to me and tell her that I could see absolutely nothing at all. It was absolutely terrifying. 

I was too panicked to get real about what being blind would mean, but I did have time to figure out that I'd lose my job, Mike would probably not dump me, and I really did not know if I wanted to live without my sight. That might seem silly now, but I was really in the shit, man. It was bleak.

And then...after ten minutes (a loooong ten minutes), it came back. It was kind of like a Magic Eye poster, where the blackness resolved itself into light and dark spots, then fuzzy shapes, then good old regular-type sight. The sweating and the nausea stuck around to kick it with me a while longer, but the blindness didn't come back. Thank freaking goodness.

I just went to a doctor on campus, and she said it was an extreme ocular migraine - so no headache, but an eyeball shitshow. It's nice to have a diagnosis, but I do not want it to happen again, ever. I'm not sure I could handle it.

What a day, man.

Back in SF

But still craving margaritas and queso.

!!!!!!!

I am in Austin and it is sunny and gorgeous and I went for a run and it's SXSW!

Also so many friends are here, and Mike has a show today, and I am about to eat a breakfast burrito. 

Throw in Barton Springs and margaritas later, and I cannot even handle it.

Contentment overloaddddddddddd.

If RISD ran the world

Apparently a large number of Twitterers in the publishing world thought that this article about RISD students taking over Random House was for reals. 

HA!

Highlights of San Francisco's St. Patrick's Day Parade

As attended by my mother and myself on the 14th day of March, 2009.

• The crackhead gentleman who lay down on the parade route, in front of a vintage fire engine full of firefighters and small children throwing Troll dolls.
  
• The all-Asian Boy Scout marching band playing stirring Irish tunes.
  
• The old people marching band that was dressed in ridiculous costumes and played non-Irish songs about bananas and taking your best gal out for a walk (you can sort of see them below). My mom knew all the words.

• The Vietnamese barbecue we ate while watching tiny girls in wigs and capes step dance.
  

Other things that delighted me this past weekend:

• A very small boy carrying a very long skateboard (longboard, I know) and cursing heartily into his cell phone about and f***ing b**ch in his class.
  
• A very drunk and scary man cursing heartily into his cell phone while I walked home alone late Saturday night (Sunday morning?).  While passing me, he continued to curse, but also tipped his hat.
  
• My mom.

I'm with #9

Attendance list from a party I attended on Saturday at the former home of Mike/Laura/Beth, the Yellow Vic. Now populated by 22 year old girls and their attending frat boys. Felt strange, but I enjoyed the list nonetheless. Maybe it was the beer?

Growing a tastier tomato

I pretty much agree that it is a solid aim to want to identify and destroy small-return bullshit (citation ganked from C. Winner's tumblr). 

I'm not quite at the saturation point - I like a little small-return bullshit to break up the day - but I get what this dude is saying. I'm definitely ready to grow a tastier tomato, as it were.

Nothing

Someone else's thoughts on the newspaper business:

"Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke...It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."

(Related)

Ketchup

I am getting bad at noting what I am actually doing with my life. This probably does not make you so blue, so let's just say we're coping and move on.

OR I could give you a very quick summary! I love summaries, because they are easy, and make me feel like I am busy and important.

• Last month Mike and I went to Steamboat Springs, where we met my group of friends from Boston, commonly referred to in the collective as 155. We drank and skiied and Mike broke his ribs. Except for this last bit, it was fantastic.
  
• Last week I went to DC and Boston for work. In DC I visited publishers and gave a talk that I was disproporionately nervous about. It went fine. In Boston I met with more publishers, had fantastic catch-up sessions with people I had not seen in a while, and ate and imbibed at many of my favorite places.
  
• I spent a lot of time in planes. At least the views were good.

• This past weekend we drank way too much, as there were many social engagements. It was entirely worth it - particularly as it meant we got to watch a drunk and belligerent individual try to play Wii on Sunday.
  

Because my memory is crap, I can totally fill you in only on the last two days: Teppi came to lunch at Google because she got lost on the way to REI, and Meg came over for dinner. I cooked so damn much that Leslie is going to help me finish it off tonight, and then we're going to see Bartender Russ do a reading (of his...poetry?) at a bookstore.

And that. is. that.

Fractals

For those of you who have ever had the pleasure of hearing Beth read her high school paper on fractals and how awesome they are: you may enjoy this "game".

Cheesy tagline of the day: Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts.

I'm pretty skeptical of claims that certain contemporary events are watersheds of humanity. I don't know what Johannes Gutenberg's buddies said to him when he started cranking his press, but I doubt it was, "Holy scheisse, dude, this is going to change EVERYTHING." 

As such, I think Thomas Friedman's claim that 2008 is going to be looked back on as the year that the hoomins woke up and decided to alter the course of society is overstated. I do, however, think he has a damn good point when he says that things cannot just keep growing for growth's sake. I get that the economy is in the shitter, but whenever I read that it is because there was only slight positive growth in a particular sector, my eyes to do not well up with tears. I get that more people are being born, and therefore that we should be on an up-and-to-the-right trajectory on the Chart of Life, but how much growth is enough? Can't we just kind of keep pace, and expect some stops and starts as population numbers change? 

In short, what's the deal with the supposed necessity of constant and exponential increases in consumption? I am pretty damn consumption-focused, and I still think we need to chill out.

But then again, I did go pass-fail in Econ to avoid a D. So.

BYOP

Please go to the pie fight at the Powell St. cable car turnaround tomorrow, as I cannot attend, but I would very much like to. It is at 5:39 p.m., which should cause the maximum amount of befuddlement in both the tourist and commuter crowds. 

Formal wear is encouraged.

It's a game, maybe?

I do not know what this is, but I know that it is neat. I have sent it to Caitlin, who will likely report back on exactly what it is. She is up on these tech-interactive-arty things.

Behold the Coconut!

I appreciate the NYT's semi-comical take on the settlement advertisements. I would also like to go to the Micronesian island of Niue. Or any Micronesian island, really. Because they sound fictional. And tiny.