It's The Thought That Counts

* Today I received a birthday card from my company. Which was really nice, except for the fact that it was almost two weeks later. Oh well. At least I got a party four days after my birthday - the party was combined with that of another employee. Perhaps birthdays should simply become floating holidays. "I was born Octoberish."

* Incidentally, I'll be going on a cruise in early November. November 2nd is Election Day and I'll be leaving that same week. Which means I get to avoid the wailing and the gnashing of teeth when the Democrats take a hit in the midterms, as well as avoid one week of the mindless news cycle. Truly, this was a fortuituous trip. Furthermore, if one was really depressed about the elections - which I am damned well not - one could just get off the boat at a foreign shore and not get back on again.

* Ruth has volunteered - or is preparing to volunteer - to cook dinner for her best friend and our pseudo-goddaughter that live one state away. (Three people would have to die for such an outcome. Since the girl in question just hit double-digits, not very likely.) It's a very nice gesture, at the least, and guarantees that four people get a decent meal.

* Recently, we received some gifts in the mail from a married couple whom we hosted for a weekend visit. (Before our cruise departs, we go to Florida and attend their wedding.) There were some cute Halloween-themed mugs, coffee and cocoa, and...pumpkin-flavored gummi bears. Ruth thought that the bears tasted okay but she thought the texture of the candy was terrible. I had trouble with the whole concept.

* It appears that Malcolm, our black cat, likes fruit. Mangoes. Peaches. Grapes. Applesauce. Obviously, he can't eat human proportions - two grapes is a lot for him. I suspect that he's been leaving us a lot of "gifts" as a result - that's like high-fiber for a cat.

* The Chilean miners were rescued recently. I haven't paid much attention to the rescue porn that passes for news, as the miners seemed to be in fairly good shape despite the fact that they were several hundreds of feet underground. I'm glad that they got out - it much have sucked to be down there - but they weren't exactly starving, just horribly lonely and miserable. If this accident had happened in Appalachia, I suspected that the mine owners would have blasted the passage underground shut and told the government, "Miners? Who told you there were miners down there?"

* Work is holding a costume party on October 29th. I hate these bursts of planned gaiety - I think it's the curmudgeon in me. On the other hand, work is offering a chance on that same night to see the Atlanta Thrashers play the Buffalo Sabres at just $10. I thought that $10 was a bit much to ask (!) but Ruth and I have decided to go to "Blueland" as they call it. We'll let you know how it turns out.

Fatigue

My apologies for not updating the blog yesterday. Yes, my string of one-post-a-days has come to an end. Two days ago - Saturday - we drove about 300 miles to my mother's house, and on the exact same day drove 300 miles back, so that the cats would not get lonely. (Or at least, wonder where the foodbringers went?) That's 10 hours in a car, ladies and gentlemen, and the next day neither of us were good for much of anything.

As my pillow hit the bed, I told myself "You know what? I owe a blog post." But I was just too damned tired. I cursed fatigue and went right on to sleep.

The fatigue is not merely a product of the long trip. In my present weight-loss regimen, I've been trying to work out about five days a week or so. One of the devices I use is a treadmill at work. This treadmill has an aerobic setting where the goal is to get one's heart rate up to 140 beats per minute. The first week I worked with the machine, it wasn't a problem - I did this for thirty minutes. The next week, I increased the time to 35 minutes, also with no problem.

However, last week I set the machine at 40 minutes - and could not get my heart rate about 140. The two days I managed to contribute 40 minutes with a (mostly) 140 beat/minute heartbeat left me wiped out for the following days. I only worked out 20 minutes on Wednesday and Thursday, with nothing at all on Friday. I felt like a dead man walking during the latter half of the week.

As for mental fatigue, well, I have HHoF to provide some respite. But not recently. I'm about four or so installments ahead of my beta reader, and I've been working and revising various parts. I have a loose outline with which I work - keeping in mind certain things I'd like to see happen in each chapter. Generally, a chapter takes about 13-20 K as a text file.

The biggest a story has ever been is 39 K. The visit to the Fielding campus for unforced labor was that big. The trip to Atlanta was that big. And now, I have a story that is 74 K. And it is still not finished. What the hell? What am I thinking? The only person who writes stories that long is TAG, and I'm not as good as TAG is. Who is going to sit through 74 K of something?

Spanish women's basketball starts on October 10th. College ball starts in November. It's going to be a busy winter.

By the way, about "True Prep?" I read that - out loud - to Ruth to and from my mother's house. It's about 250 pages, and around 230 of them were read out loud. If you want to know my list of HHoF reference material, that list would include:

The Official Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbaum
True Prep by Lisa Birnbaum
The Debutante's Guide to Life by Cornelia Guest
Class by Paul Fussell
The Prep School Cafe at College Confidential

True Prep is scary, particularly given its list of prep school grads. Did you know Barack Obama and John McCain both went to prep school? You couldn't swing a stick in Washington without knocking someone's class tie off.

There! I think it would be easier to build a prep school from pine and twine and attend it for twelve years than to commit all that to memory. Although, reading me botch it up shall be hilarious to one and all.

Country Mouse, City Mouse

I have spent the past three days in San Francisco. This does not make me an expert on San Francisco. This only makes me the observer of the part of San Francisco near Union and Polk. However, this has never stopped me before from offering my unwanted observations.

* San Francisco seems to be like New York, but more clean.
* I have noticed a strange absence of black people. Maybe I’m just in the wrong part of town. However, I don’t see them in the crowds near Union Square, or in the part of San Francisco near Union and Polk, or really, anywhere else. Not as many as you would see in Atlanta.
* What I see is a lot of Asian people, particular on the buses. The average age of an Asian resident of San Francisco must be 65. All seem superannuated but Chinatown takes up several city blocks and in no way seems like a community in decline.
* San Francisco has its share of panhandlers, but we haven’t bumped into anyone really aggressive yet. San Francisco has about as many panhandlers as Atlanta has crazy homeless people in the middle of a psychotic breakdown, which is a lot.
* San Francisco is hilly. Very hilly. You had better be willing and able to walk up hills in San Francisco if you’re going to do any walking. This isn’t New York walking, where everything is semi-flat. San Francisco is a hilly city.
* My wife used to live in San Francisco – Oakland, anyway – but abandoned it. Two reasons. The first was that many of her friends died of AIDS. The second was the 1989 Earthquake, which gave her pause.
* I haven’t seen a lot of outré gay people, but as my wife says, we’re in the wrong part of town for that. We seem to be (temporarily) located in a little whitebread Yuppie part of town. Everyone looks very trendly. -1 Social penalty for being overweight.

What I saw, however, pleased me. Maybe it’s because I’m a fascist at heart (joke) but I like cities to be clean and providing foods that please me. (“How do you find a good restaurant in San Francisco? Open the door.”) I imagined myself relocating here, and all I’d need would be to make a quarter of a million dollars a year to afford it.

This got me thinking about the differences between living in a city – a big city, like say New York, and living in a suburbia. In each of them, you get a tradeoff.

First, big cities stand for excellence. While walking about today I stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall magazine store. Little did I realize that there’d be a cornucopia of magazines and world newspapers. You get off-the-beaten path bookstores. Every meal is delicious. If you wish to live a life that’s at a little bit of a higher level, the city – any big city that’s more that a Columbus, more that just an aggregation of population – is the place to be.

However, there is no convenience to city life. None at all. It’s expensive as hell. There’s no parking; a big city is usually no place for a car. If you want to go somewhere in your car, you’ll spend 20 minutes trying to find a place to park it. Which consigns you on most days to public transportation – which is well run, but you have to wait for it. Most of city life is spent on waiting for transportation. If you have no car, you have to replenish your groceries day by day. Waiting 10 minutes for this bus, 15 minutes for the crosstown, standing up in the bus all the way down because the aisles of the bus are already two abreast.

There are all sorts of aggravations that wear on your brain. The panhandling. The noise and the filth. The expense. It takes a strong physical – and emotional – constitution to live in a city; New York wore me out in about two years. (CINCGREEN was always at his craziest in New York.)

And second, let’s look at life in suburbia or in a well-equipped small town. Convenience is the hallmark. If I want to go and eat Chinese food in Atlanta, I climb in my car, drive around, and eat Chinese food. If I want an ice cream cone afterwards, I just pull through McDonald’s and get one. If I want new pants, I don’t have to walk six blocks – I just go to Wal-Mart which has several pairs of cheap and sturdy new pants. All of the staples of life are easy to obtain.

Unfortunately, there’s a dreary sameness to it all. If you want anything out of the ordinary, you won’t find it in the suburbs, or in the exurbs. It will always be the same movies, the same underpopulated bookstore, the same opinions and the same dull people. The land of fast food and “fast media”. It’s convenient, but it’s bland.

I skip mentioning the small towns, the places that my wife calls “a spot in the middle of the road”. The places that everyone with any ambition at all escapes, the places where it’s a good place to die.

I don’t know if I have any more years of big city life left in me. The big city is a great place to visit, but I don’t know if I would want to live there, even in Toronto. That old Jim Croce song comes to mind.

“I learned a lot of lessons awful quick
And now I’m telling you
That they were not the nice kind.”