Halloween

Some people are able to get really excited about this "holiday." I'm not. At least not like I used to. As a child, I looked forward to the insane amounts of candy and a costume to which I had given entirely too much thought. In high school, I remember coming up with some clever costumes with the girlz -- Kjerste, surely you remember your Miss Kitty costume. In fact, I remember in high school, and later in college, Kjerste and I investing a whole lotta time and energy into making costumes. One year, Kjerste was a Beauty Pageant Miss 5th Runner Up and I was a black-and-white movie star, inspired by Pleasantville. My costume involved painting me with white paint (and wearing a black dress) -- later in the evening, I realized I was leaving paint skidmarks everywhere I went. Oops.

There is something I really like about the idea of being somebody else for a day. And to get to go to some kind of party while doing it is a plus. Of course, my very serious job really doesn't lend itself well to willy-nilly costuming -- nobody wants to walk in to see their therapist dressed as the grim reaper or a chicken, for instance. Well, some people probably do, and that's a whole other session. So this means I have to wait until I go home to get into my costume. As I have no formal costume, I think that I'll just call myself Pajama Girl. Or better yet: Pajama Girl Eating a Microwave Dinner while Watching a Re-run of Seinfeld. Now that's a party.

Where are you from?

This weekend I was at a conference for work, and there were people from all over the country (and some from Canada) there. One of the main introductory questions that people were asking each other, of course, was "Where are you from?"

When this was asked of me, I wasn't really sure how to answer it, since I've only recently come from once place to live in another. Had I been asked where I live, it would have been easier. I live in Natick, MA. But I am definitely not from there. I've lived there for almost 3 months, and I still have pictures sitting on the floor instead of hanging on walls. And there's not a lot for us to do in Natick, except go somewhere else. I know some people love it here, and I think that's great. For them. We, on the other hand, plan to live here for the terms of our lease, and then move to a place where there are cafes that stay open past 3 pm. It's just not, ultimately, the place for us. We're city folk.

Where I really feel like I'm from is Oakland. Having lived there for several years, I really came to love it, despite all the shootings. And I guess it's a little strange to feel like I'm from a place that I wasn't born or raised, but there it is. It's my O-town, where people have a little peace march around the lake every week, and where Canadian Geese live and eat and eat and eat and never migrate. It's where a new Trader Joe's is going in. And it will undoubtedly sell the baked tofu I love so well. (As a sidenote, the proposed TJs in Berkeley is creating quite a stir -- get over it people!)

Not that Oakland doesn't have it's problems: The homicide rate, the rich-poor gap, the cost of living. These issues bothered me and I wanted to change them. But for a while it got to be my little corner of the world. I wonder if Tony Bennett would have left his heart here if he knew it the way I did.

Maine

This weekend, Todd and I went to Portland, Maine for an early birthday trip for me. On the way to Portland, we outlet shopped in Kittery. We bought more clothes than either one of us has bought in a single trip in a long time. Having some really good outfits makes me happier than it has a right to. In particular, I'm thinking of the cranberry red corduroy pants I bought, which I wore today. Life is good.

Portland is a terrific little city. I've determined this because it has a nice arts district and downtown, and a seemingly endless supply of vegetarian or veggie-friendly restaurants. I guess there is just something about Portlands, since Todd and I also love Portland, Oregon, in part because of the wonderful downtown and the tofu that rains from the sky. Well, the tofu is really for me, since Todd has yet to become conscious of his deep love for tofu. I'll break him down.

On the way back from Portland, we stopped in Kennebunkport, home of very rich people. We even saw some of them, although, luckily, we didn't run into any Bushes. We took some pictures there, including a few digital ones. I could post them now, but the camera is still in the car and I'm too lazy to go get it. And besides, patience is a virtue.

One of the best parts of this trip is the fact that it's fall. The leaves are peaking around here, and in the parts of Maine where we were as well. I feel a little like I'm living in a postcard. For instance, this morning while running, I passed a field that contained a red barn and was framed by red and golden foliage. A fog lingered on the grass in the early morning half-light. So I stopped for a while to take it all in. The fleeting nature of this makes it all the more beautiful: Soon the leaves will be off the trees and I'll be staring a skeletons in the snow. Which will probably be beautiful in its own way, although certainly more chilly. Natick may not be everything we would ever dream of for a place to live, but it does make for some nice runs.

My birthday always makes me reflect on the past year. Last year at this time, I had no clue that I would be living in New England, looking at leaves, and going to Maine for my birthday weekend. It's funny the way things work out. And I'm so glad that I took the risk to pick up my life and move into unknown territory. It turns out that the unknown is full of foliage and red corduroy pants.

Blue Monday

I, along with the rest of the world, hate Mondays. Ever since I was a small child, I have had a hard time sleeping on Sunday nights, just out the anxiety of Monday bearing down on me. And sometimes I'm not really all that anxious. Like now, for instance, when I really like my job. Sometimes I just lay awake in bed, as I did last night, thinking of my to-do list, mulling things over from earlier in the day or week, or other random thoughts. No other night of the week is like this. But there is something about Monday that exerts a vice-like grip on me. I can feel it creeping up on me on Sunday, as I witness the final day of the too-short weekend slip away, and the promise of another long week settle in. It's then that I think about how much I need a real vacation or a hobby or just a 3-day weekend (whatever it is that seems needed at the moment) to make my life a little better.

I guess it doesn't help that the last 2 weekends have been 3-day weekends for me, first for Yom Kippur, and then for Columbus Day. Although I don't consider Columbus Day to be a real holiday (and I'd rather call it Indigenous People's Day, thank you very much), and I've never before gotten it off of school or work, I took it gladly. But those weekends are behind me now, and I have nothing but a long stretch of regular-length weeks before me. Weeks of getting up at 5 AM, which gets darker and darker, to run. (Which reminds me how much I'm looking forward to the end of Daylight Savings Time, so it'll be at least a little lighter when I get up). Which also means weeks of trying to get to bed by 9 and being completely exhausted by Friday. Weeks of making my lunch to take to work right after I make dinner. Yada, yada, yada. And it's not like I can even try to get out of bed at 5 AM on days like today, when I didn't even finally drift off to sleep (and to dreams of airplane crashes and passport mixups) until 1:30 AM or so.

Actually, when I think about it, what I really need is a personal chef, a personal trainer, and a job that doesn't start until noon --but still ends at 5 or 6 -- and that pays me really well (so I can pay the chef and trainer). I wonder where I can get me some of that.

Vegetarian Hypocrite

It occurs to me that my last posting exposes my hypocrisy: Here I am, complaining about how I can't find the kind of tofu that I want, and then, in the same day, I go and try on coats made out of animal products. And I had such a hard time deciding on which coat I wanted -- wool or down? Sheep or geese? Yeah, I know it's not like I'm actually wearing a dead animal ("Wow, is that a scarf?" "No, just a goose neck."), but still. Of course, this all occurred to me as I was drifting off to sleep under my down comforter....

So there it is: I'm a vegetarian hypocrite. I'll comfort myself with the fact that nobody's perfect, and that it turns out that the wool coat I bought is too big and pretty itchy, so I'll have to exchange it. But what will I exchange it for? Down? More wool? Maybe something synthetic that is made out of a petroleum product? I can't answer this question. And that's because I'm a hypocrite.

Weekend Saga

This weekend was supposed to be something novel: The first weekend in a long time in which Todd and I were not going to have to unpack boxes, procure furniture, or put together furniture. We were actually going to have a chance to have fun in our new digs. Yeah, we had a few chores, like getting to the laundromat, hitting the grocery store, and buying me a winter coat at Burlington Coat Factory. But compared to the Ikea treks of weekends past, this was nothing.

Ha! On Saturday, we ended up going to 4 grocery stores. Four! First we went to Roche Bros., which we'd never been to before. And we could see why: They had Whole Foods prices, but not Whole Foods fabulousness. After putting a few things in our cart, we realized that it was ridiculous, abandoned the cart in the store, and left in a huff. Next, we went to the actual Whole Foods, so I could get tofu. This appears to be the only grocery store chain in the entire state (at least in my limited experience so far) where I can find blocks of baked, seasoned tofu, of the kind I could find in every damn place in the Bay Area. C'mon Boston! Get with the program. Maybe Boston actually is with the program, and I'm just experiencing the joy of the 'burbs. I don't know.

Because Whole Foods is so expensive, tofu is about all I can afford to buy there. Which is sad. But given that produce is already generally expensive here (the short growing season and all), and we eat lots of it, we are spending more for groceries than we ever have. Luckily, next door to Whole Foods is Trader Joe's, which, in California, was the light of my life. It was cheap, it was good, and it had tofu. It didn't let me down. Unfortunately, the Trader Joe's near us is disappointing. A tiny produce section. No baked tofu, as I mentioned before. And the prices in general seem higher than the TJ's I went to in Emeryville. Well, except for the wine, which is still cheap. And this is one of the few TJ's in the state with license to sell wine, so I guess we lucked out there.

This week, TJ's produce section appeared to be especially skimpy, so we couldn't get everything we needed. Which meant we had to swing by Stop and Shop on our way home. Stop and Shop, we've found, is so far the least disappointing of all the stores near us, and has the best prices, so we were able to find the last few items we wanted. We then trudged dejectedly home.

In the middle of all of this -- I think in between Roche Bros. and Whole Foods -- we went to the Burlington Coat Factory, where I actually bought a few clothes that might keep me warm this winter, along with a winter coat. This was not an easy task, because they have a gazillion coats, and I don't know what the hell to get. It's hard for a coat virgin like me to tell what is going to be warm enough and what will be too warm. After much debate, it came down to 2 coats: a lovely gray wool knee-length number, and a mid-calf down extravaganza that had me sweating in the store. I could probably live outside in Alaska in the down coat, so I thought it might be a bit much. I went with the wool, but still wonder if the other one might have been better. I don't know! I need a personal fashion advisor! I tried to make Todd into this person, but it didn't work so well. As I was trying on the coats, and going back and forth between the 2 chosen ones, Todd was sitting on the floor of the store, looking like he might fall asleep. I should have let him lay on one of the coats.

All of this meant that we didn't get to laundry on Saturday, which we had wanted to do so we could spend the entire day in Boston (having fun!) on Sunday. We decided we would just get up early and wash our clothes, so we could then head into the city.

So we got up on Sunday, and Todd turned on the computer. Or, rather, he tried to. It was dead. Dead, dead, dead. We're not sure what happened. It never even said goodbye. But it did take my iTunes playlist, and several of Todd's files for work, with it. Being Columbus Day weekend, there was a sale at CompUSA. Todd promptly ran out and bought a replacement machine on Sunday morning. We then spent all of the morning and the majority of the afternoon not in Boston, but huddled in our office, setting up the new computer. And trying to figure out how to get my music from my iPod back into iTunes, which can't be done without some kind of software that we need to download. We tried several different programs, and nothing seemed to work. Really, this shouldn't be so hard. Apple just wants people to suffer. I was so frustrated. And also pissed off at myself for not somehow foreseeing this and burning a CD or 2 of my iTunes playlist.

We finally headed into Boston around 3 or 4, tooled around the North End and had dinner. As we were heading back to the T, we decided to go to a slightly farther stop and walk along some of the Freedom Trail. As we did, we came across the Holocaust Memorial, which we had been wanting to visit. It consists of glass columns in a row; they are hollow in the middle and you walk through them in a straight line. Etched on the glass, reaching up to the sky, are numbers like those that were assigned to people in the deathcamps. There are so many of them, they completely cover the glass. Also etched on the glass, on the inside, where you walk, are quotes from people who survived, and others, about the experience of the Holocaust. As you walk through the columns, warm steam rises through grates in the ground. Underneath the grates are flickering lights. The crematorium. I couldn't help but cry.

Being there was unbelievably intense and moving. And it put into perspective all my frustration about my iPod and the computer crash. I mean really, who even cares? And going to 4 grocery stores? How privileged I am that I have 4 that I can go to. My worries are so mundane. It's so easy to get wrapped up in these everyday stresses that I can forget that there are more important (and worse) things that have happened, and that continue to happen. In the midst of my weekend saga, it was good to have a reality check.

Thickening up my Blood

Today, the high temperature was in the mid-fifties. Which really doesn't sound all that cold until you stop to consider that this is the temperature that one might expect on a January day in Oakland. Of course, earlier this week, it was about 80 degrees, so you can't say that there's no weather variety here. Which you can definitely say about O-town.

This cooling will, of course, be a trend. It will lead to snow and ice and me toying with the idea of keeping a flask of bourbon in my coat. I realize that I need to get serious about winterizing my life. Really, the only discernible step I've taken toward this goal is buying a treadmill on Craigslist. Now I can count on not freezing to death when I'm running early in the morning in the wintertime. (I should say that getting this treadmill home and up the stairs was very difficult, as it seems to weigh approximately 1,000 pounds). I've also looked at a few winter coats, but haven't bought anything. I've counted my long-sleeved shirts, and I think there are something like 8. And at least 2 of these shirts really wouldn't keep me warm in the winter since they're basically summer shirts. That's right: I used to live in a place where long-sleeved shirts were for summer.

Mostly, I haven't really thought about the impending winter. Which is easy to do when you have a few warm days that make winter seem like a myth. And I've taken care not to wear too much clothing. No, I am not walking around naked. But I'm not wearing as many layers as I would in similar temperatures in California. I'm trying to thicken up my blood, which I'm told I must do. And what's with that expression, anyway? I have a hard time believing my blood will actually get thicker -- I'll probably just grow an extra layer of blubber. I could fact-check this online, but that would require me to exert some minimal amount of effort. I just don't have that kind of time or energy, with all the winter clothes shopping I'm going to have to do.

Plus, I need to become hardcore freeze-proof. There are just too many people who told me before I moved that I was going to freeze to death in Massachusetts (and if you're reading this, you're probably not one of them). They warned me that it gets cold there, as if I wouldn't know that because I lived in a (well-insulated) cave. They seemed to forget that 1) People already live in New England, so living with the cold has been done, and 2) Coats are widely sold in stores. So thickening up my blood is also a way for me thumb my nose/flip the bird at the people who wanted to tell me I couldn't survive and (implicitly or explicitly) that moving here for my job was a bad idea. They should watch out, because I'm gonna learn how to throw a mean snowball.

Not So Fast

Today was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Every year during the high holidays, Todd and I try to figure out what to do to make the holidays our own. Last year for Yom Kippur, we both took the day off work, ate Chinese food, and otherwise loafed about. Technically/traditionally, what someone is supposed to do on Yom Kippur is fast for the 25 hours between the sundown of the beginning of the holiday and into darkfall the next day, when the holiday is over. And fasting means not only eschewing food, but also drink. And one is not supposed to engage in other comforts, such as showering. Also, nearly the whole day is supposed to be spent in temple, repenting and otherwise trying to distract oneself from dehydrated starvation. At least until the break-fast, where everyone gorges and is generally relieved.

Not being the traditional types, Todd and I have never really done all this (Though Todd does vaguely remember fasting when he was about 15). So this year, we decided to give the fasting a try, although I refused to give up water. I also drew the line at the not showering thing. We were also going to attend a service at a Humanistic Jewish temple, which said something about being in tune with the cultural traditions of Judaism more than the religious ones. This seemed different, so we thought it would be an experience. And attending the service was free/donation requested, rather than the several hundred dollars per person to get tickets at some synagogues.

I would definitely say that today has been an experience. The service was strange in that there was no religious element whatsoever. No Torah. Very little Hebrew. No mention of God, even. It was a "family" service, and featured children reading various poems and quotes, one of which was from Mr. Rogers. It was well-meaning but hokey. And the lack of anything religious was disconcerting. How can there be no Torah? On the high HOLY days?! No. Also, the whole service lasted about 45 minutes, rather than the 3+ hours one might expect for a morning Yom Kippur service. This was hardly enough time to distract us from our hunger.

And our hunger was great. It was distracting us from the purpose of the day, which is self-reflection and amends-making. At one point this morning, I was saying something to Todd but then lost my train of thought because I was thinking about yogurt. Last night, as we were drifting off to sleep, Todd suggested that we might eat some banana bread together after the fast was over. You know, as a fun activity. And this was just the yearning for food. I had no coffee this morning. And for someone who usually starts her day with 2 large mugsfull, this is bad, bad news.

By the time we returned home from the temple (which was actually a Unitarian Universalist church) it was basically lunch time. In the car ride home, we had been discussing how the fasting was not helping us be more self-reflective, and so seemed like pointless pain. We also drove by many restaurants and bakeries. I was beginning to feel nauseated from all the acid rolling around in my stomach. And so we did what people do: We ate. The fast that was supposed to be over around 6:30 or 7 tonight ended at about noon. We decided that we are just not the fasting type. I don't know how so many people all over the world do it. Maybe they know something I don't. Maybe they're in temple all day, so there are no bakeries to look at. I don't know. But they get my utmost respect.

Next year, maybe we'll go the Chinese food route again.