Hola. Spies is back on line. Finally. I started jonesing very badly last night, checking about every 35 seconds to see if Spies was back up. It wasn't. I went to bed and had nightmares about my mail being bounced all over the internet.
If you've tried to send me mail recently and couldn't get through -- I know you; you have; send it again (pretty please?) -- the reason is the famous power outage. Power went out in patches all over the Bay Area, and Palo Alto, home of Spies, was one of the places hit. The machine had to be rebooted manually -- in this wonderful day of electronics taking over everything, there will always be a job for someone to show up and flick a switch.
Friday I had lunch with Judy. We discussed writing and my move to LA. Judy was this wild bohemian writer-artist-academician back in New York City, before she moved out here, studied programming, and became a straight-arrow technical writer. She gave up creative writing -- poetry, fiction -- completely, because it overwhelmed her, but now she's getting back into it because she has more of a balance in her life.
Friday night was the birthday-birthday-birthday-housewarming party at Rob and Laura's. I brought mixin's for margaritas. Greg and I were the first people there and we had to wait for enough people to arrive before we could make margaritas -- otherwise we would have drunk it all and then where would the party have been?
Actually, the party was very nice and low-key, like all our other gatherings. The only downside was that Darin didn't show up until 9:30 or 10 (I haven't had a watch for over a week now and I'm completely time-insensitive), because he was trying to finish something at work. Or, as I put it, "The message I got was that he's off saving the universe." Because most of the people there have worked with Darin at some point, they knew exactly what I meant.
I had three glasses of margarita and was nicely toasted. Then Rob mentioned doing tequila shots. Okay, I said; how bad could that be? (How I could have gotten through Stanford without learning the answer to that question is beyond me.) We salted our hands and held our lime wedges and did a shot each.
Whoa nelly.
For the rest of the evening I only drank water, which didn't help, because I just got drunker and drunker. Shots are evil. I ended up laying on the couch with my eyes closed not because I'd passed out or was tired but because it was physically difficult to keep them open. I learned to keep them open, however, because the room started spinning, a sign I did learn was important to be aware while I was at Stanford.
As you can probably tell, I'm not a very good drunk. I can't imagine why artists feel this condition is artistically freeing. As Natalie Goldberg wrote, "Writers don't write because they drink, writers drink because they're not writing."
Darin took me home at about two. Darin had had nothing whatsoever to drink, and the only behavior he's made me swear to while I'm in LA is that I won't drive after consuming any alcohol whatsoever. Which is going to cut down on having wine with dinner, but hey, wine is expensive and I'm going to be a student anyhow.
Once home I drank more water and then went to bed. About the only thing alcohol is good for is that it makes me fall asleep faster. I woke up at 6am and drank more water. Which was good, because the hangover the next day was mostly being tired and dehydrated, not having a headache or anything.
Saturday our happy home was a hive of activity all day. I went out to get Deirdre at the train station at 1pm, and we went off to have lunch at Cho's Dim Sum in Palo Alto. Then we got our hair done by the world's greatest hairdresser (no, you can't have his name), which is always a blast because he's so funny. Of course, right now I can't remember anything particularly amusing, but maybe it's more of a situational type of humor anyhow.
We drove home, taking a slight detour so that Deirdre could drive home my car from Rob and Laura's. My parents had just arrived at my house. My dad was reading an issue of Variety that was lying around because the cable was off -- our power was on (thank God, otherwise the fan couldn't run on an obscenely hot day), but the cable company's was off. Periodically it came back on, so he could watch some of the 49ers game.
GregA., Deirdre's boyfriend, showed up with the cake and a bouquet of flowers. I turned to Darin and said, "Look and learn." Deirdre says Greg brings her flowers all the time. (Note to Greg: now you have to keep bringing her flowers forever. Heh heh heh.)
My mom, who likes doing things like replacing watch batteries herself rather than paying someone else to do it, went out one time with Deirdre to go get a watch battery for my watch, which had stopped on the 2nd. The store was closed because the power was out. Later, when my mom saw that the 49ers game was on (and, ergo, power was on where it wasn't before) went out again to get that damn battery, and she got it just before the store closed due to the power outage again. So now I have a working watch.
Deirdre did most of the work preparing dinner: making the salad, cooking the lasagne, checking the toastiness quotient of the garlic bread. She asked if we could use the china for dinner rather than our usual plates, and I said sure -- Darin and I have been married for almost three years and hadn't used the china yet.
We sat down for dinner and opened a bottle of '82 Krug champagne. This is good stuff. Deirdre had two bottles of it; she gave one to me and opened the other one for her thirtieth birthday. It seemed only fitting to open it for my thirtieth (obligatory shudder) birthday because it was a special occasion. Also, since Darin and I never drink by ourselves it was never going to get opened.
The cake afterwards came from the bakery that's in Deirdre and Greg's apartment complex in San Francisco. The bakery that makes the world's most fantastic lemon meringue pie also makes a killer chocolate cake. I couldn't eat it quite as joyfully as I wanted to, because my stomach piped up and said, "Aha! I haven't bothered you for days now! That's not going to last!" I started retching, always a charming thing to do at dinner. This was due as much to the emotions that started flooding through me as to the fact that I'd overeaten.
After dinner, we called my parents' and Deirdre and Greg's answering machines in the City to see if their power was on. Since they were, we felt it was safe for them to head back.
Right as they started to head out, the next wave arrived. CJ and Lance had called at one point and Rob and Laura at another -- their power was out. Ours isn't, we said, come on down. So after the family left the party continued.
Rob made another batch of margaritas and asked if I wanted any. Ugh. It'll be a while before I have any more of those, thankyouverymuch. (My internal nauseometer is not quite as active as it was the morning -- and the year of mornings -- after my college roommate and I split a litre of Ernie's charcoal-filtered vodka one night. Yes, I got very, very ill and had the worst hangover of my life. I was not able to stomach the smell of vodka, let alone the taste, for many, many moons after that.)
Rob, CJ, Lance, and Darin played Settlers of Catan until midnight, and then we watched some silly industrial films from the Fifties, like "A Date With Your Family." Pretty soon after that we called it a night. Thank God. I'd been partying pretty much non-stop, and after a while you just have to say, "Hey, enough fun already."
Today Darin and I have been taking it easy. We went out to pancakes, then we went to Computer Literacy to buy some books. Then we decided to go to the movie theatre and see either Eraser or Chain Reaction. Turned out they were both playing at the same theatre. We walked up just as Eraser was starting. When it ended we walked into the other theatre and watched Chain Reaction. Darin was going to pay a second time, but the 14-year-old in me (my inner adolescent) made us sneak in. The air conditioning was barely on in either theatre, so the experience was only barely tolerable anyhow.
We got the feeling with both movies of, Haven't I seen this movie before? They both felt like retreads from other movies. Eraser was better but that was mostly because Chain Reaction was so lame.
Stupidest moment in either flick: in Eraser the bad guys find out where Vanessa Williams is by tracing a call made to her pager. Uh, you can't do that. Bzzzt.