flights

Apple has a new mouse. With RIGHT CLICK!

My friend MiLo called me yesterday during a trans-desert road trip to fill me in on his plan to confess his crush to a girl he’s been hanging with for a while. His manifesto of feeling.

In more than six months of fast friendship, the two of them had never wandered near the strange sea of romance, and he wondered whether he should deliver his manifesto as a prelude to a kiss, or whether he should kiss first and park his manifesto in the footnotes.

My advice wavered, so I told him I’d consult with my friend Bee, whom I was meeting for brunch that day, to get the chick’s point of view on the subject. Bee unequivocally said kiss first, talk later.

I called MiLo back later that afternoon, and the two of us hashed out a battle plan for his evening. He said the extent of the physical contact he’d had with her to date was when he “rubbed her arm” and when they exchanged hello/goodbye hugs. We talked through various ways to make the leap from talking and arm rubbing to kissing, always with some hand holding as a midway step. All very sweet.

The next day he called me back to report success. He’d softened the battle plan a bit, but it didn’t matter. It worked.

At brunch with my friend Bee, we talked quite a bit about crushes in general, and how at our age, the brain has to play a much bigger role in the whole game than it did when we were younger. Used to be that you would get a crush on someone, and you’d just follow it for a while. Now, that’s not enough. A while is not what we’re looking for. The next person has to be the person, and that requires a level of calculation and analysis. It’s not all about the heart anymore. Somewhat sad, but that’s the real deal.

Bee spent several years with a much younger man, and it ultimately didn’t work because she’s at a point where she wants to start a family, and he’s still jumping from thing to thing to thing. Recently she met another guy – same age as her ex – and they hit it off right away. They had a lot of fun for a couple of weeks, but in the end his age was the showstopper for her. Not because of the way things felt, but purely because when she took a cold hard look at the facts, she couldn’t feel sure enough that he was ready for the same kind of relationship she wants.

Sad.

I have my own dilemma to be sure, but I don’t know how much I want to confess here. Another time perhaps.

You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can’t win
And so it goes
Till the day you die
This thing they call love
It’s gonna make you cry
I’ve had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure…
Love stinks

Saw a t-shirt today that said:

Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas. Get over yourself.

word.

I suppose I’m home. I’m in my apartment (I won’t call it a “flat” now) in San Francisco, which is considerably more comfortable than my place in Singapore – except I don’t have housekeeping service or in-apartment laundry anymore.

Jet lag is a killer coming this direction for some reason. Last time I flew from Singapore to San Francisco, it took my body two full weeks to feel like it was fully in the right time zone. Going the other way, the adjustment is effortless. I’m ready to go as soon as I hit the ground.

I’ve been back a week, and I’m falling asleep every time I stop moving. For some reason, 4pm and 10pm are my worst times.

Anyway, I haven’t been writing much since my return, and it’s mainly because I just want to sleep all the time.

A while ago I lamented mildly here about how I don’t feel like I can be completely candid in this blog. My friends, colleagues and family are reading, and there are certain things I can’t – or shouldn’t – say. (In any case, they used to read my blog, back when I used to post often and write something interesting once in a while. But that’s another story.)

That post was in a way about honesty, and in it I sort of suggested I’m afraid of embarassing myself or shocking people who (think they) know me. But when I really think about it, that’s not actually what bothers me, inquiring emails from my mom notwithstanding :)

So much of my life occurs with people I know, and I’d like to be able to reveal more about my interactions with them. But with me as the common denominator, they would recognise themselves (and each other) in my vignettes and observations, even if I used pseudonyms. Many of them would not have a problem with that, but enough of them would.

This concern motivated me once to use just the initial “L” to refer to my friend Leilani in a harmless enough post. She sent me an email the next day that said basically, “‘L’ makes it sound creepy. Just use my name.” We laughed about it, but she was right.

I don’t have a lot of shocking or embarassing things to say, but I’d like to be able to say certain things about my clients or my employer, for example, without fear of repercussions. Again, even if I used fictional company names and pseudonyms, my colleagues and clients would recognise themselves because they know who I am.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend online. It was very late at night on her side of the planet, and I asked her what she was doing up so late. She told me she was posting to her blog. I didn’t know she had a blog, and I asked her for the URL.

“I don’t give that out,” she said.

She went on to tell me that she used to have a blog that all her friends and family followed, but she felt so constrained by the fear of freaking her parents and colleagues out that she abandoned her blog and started a secret one.

“It’s not hard to find, but don’t tell me if you find it.”

I had thought about doing the same thing, and possibly going so far to disguise myself and the people I write about. But in some ways that kind of anonymity feels like it would go against some unwritten rule of blogging. Of course that’s not true, and I think I’ll probably do it at some point.

On that note, it’s interesting in my previous post that I singled out Sarong Party Girl as the quintessential fearless blogger. Some things went down with her recently that made me look more closely at that pronouncement.

At that time she was fairly careful about her privacy. She uses pseudonyms like “Mr. Big” and “D” for the people in her life, and she is happy to be known only as SPG or Izzy, the name she uses to sign each post. So, anonymity.

Recently, though, she posted some nude pictures of herself – really lovely, tastful ones and not really anything I’d call porn – and the Singapore press jumped all over it. There were at least two articles in the Straits Times and at least one in the New Paper.

As a side note, it’s pretty funny given the life she leads and writes about that one tastful topless picture was the thing that crossed Singapore’s line of decency.

So she’s essentially been outed now, and that hasn’t stopped her or even slowed her down. I’m guessing that even her parents know everything at this point.

After an obligatory two weeks of responding to stir and scandal, she’s back to writing about the things that make her blog great. It’s better than ever in fact.

Fearlessness.

Before I embarked on this second trip to Singapore, I enrolled in a scuba diving course through Bamboo Reef diving school in San Francisco. Because I’d procrastinated, I had to take my lessons during Memorial Day weekend. This meant I had to go with private lessons instead of a group class, which would have cost half the money. But it also meant I got undivided attention from the instructor, an enormous Irish bartender named Paddy.

Paddy hurried me through the instructional DVD, let me skip the medical disclosure form, fed me the answers to the final exam. This worried me a little, because I actually want to know what I’m doing when I hit the water.

But all this allowed us to spend extra time in the pool – learning by doing. He made sure I understood the important stuff about breathing, ascending, understanding the dive tables.

Now I’m in Singapore, and I’ve booked a three day trip to Malaysia to get my open water certification.

At the Mexican dinner on Saturday night, I spent some time playing catch with James, the five-year-old son of my colleague Judy. He asked me if I would hang out with him sometime and started to propose a slew of activities – the Fraser Suites playroom, miniature golf, ice cream…

Eventually, he said he’d make a list and call me at 10:30 the next morning. Too much, this kid.

And on Sunday morning, he actually called me.

Judy dropped him off at my place, and we started to chat about what we might do for the rest of the day. It turned out he actually did make a list (with his mom’s help), but he’d left it behind. So of course we had to go get it – after a quick breakfast of beans and rice.

Ad Judy’s place, we consulted his list:

- Breakfast
- Playroom
- Mini Golf
- Lunch
- Ice Cream

I managed to negotiate Mini Golf off the agenda until next week, and we headed to the playroom. We played some video games, built a fort, pretended to fix a car.

Next was lunch and ice cream, but before we headed for home, James wanted to stop at Bread Talk to buy a surprise for his mom and dad. We picked out a few sweets, including a sugar donut, and James gave me the following piece of advice…

If I were to buy a “sugary donut” like that, he said, I should give half of it to my “life”.

“My life?” I asked half innocently. “What do you mean?”

“Like my mom is my dad’s life,” he explained.

“Ah, I see. But what if I don’t have a life?”

“Well, then you should get one. Or else you’ll eat the whole donut and get a belly ache.”

Randomly at Lizzie’s birthday party tonight, I met Joe Jarrell, a tallented writer who has been working for my company for a while in a freelance capacity.

He recently accepted an offer to join my group as a permanent employee. I’ve enjoyed reading his work on his website. He’s interviewed a really impressive lineup of musicians and artists, and I’m excited to work with him.

Sunday, I participated in Bay To Breakers, a world class foot race that has morphed over the years into a kind of ad hoc parade. Some people still run the race, but many more people “celebrate” the race.

They wear costumes or nothing at all. They build contraptions for carrying and serving beer.

I travelled with my friend Jeff and a group of people whose theme was a made up pharmaceutical called Placebox (“Pla-cee-box”), the underachiever’s drug. We were semi-linked to a group of stewardesses for Mile High Airlines.

Our time for the race was in the six-hour range.

When people from most places dress in costume – for Halloween say – it’s an opportunity to take on a fantasy identity. San Franciscans see dressing in costume as an opportunity to reveal their true hidden nature.

That’s my theory anyway.

I’m in the middle of my sprint to the finish line on this project, and my blog will have to continue to take a back seat to my work for a little while longer.

I haven’t had an actual weekend since the first week of January, and I haven’t logged anything less than a 65-hour work week so far this year. I did take a little time on Saturday for a much-needed massage though. 45 minutes on my back, then 30 minutes of foot reflexology, and damn, it hurt! Good pain, but when my masseuse finished my left foot, I almost wanted to stop her from launching her attack on my right.

Anyway my friends, I’ll be back soon, so don’t go too far away.