Thoughts While Listening to Hail Stones Falling on a Tin Roof

When we first moved to San Francisco, six years ago this past Sunday, Brian and I were completely befuddled by how green it was, when it never seemed to rain. We'd come from just outside Boston, leaving behind two feet of snow and freezing rain that seemed to blow in horizontally from underneath the railroad bridge two blocks from our house. Green was a revelation. Sunny was another.

By the time we'd lived here a full year, we had figured out San Francisco's secret: nonstop rain from November to February, leaving green hills that slowly turn to gold as the summer extends dryly into fall once again. This year, the rain's been lingering into March, with blue-sky sunny days that suddenly turn into hailstorms, and long cold days like this one, when the sun only makes the briefest appearance.

I've been doing very little lately. Freelance work has dried up, and I've somehow forgotten how to do all the things I wanted to do back when I was working a job and a half while New College was crumbling around me. Every night I fall asleep with schedules running through my head: I'll get up at eight, start writing at nine, and not stop until I've found my groove. I'll walk to the library and research Turing, or Steinmetz, or some one else who will get me excited about ideas again, get me thinking and working and doing, and not just staring at puppies and daydreaming the day away.

It's been a year since I left my job. I've forgotten what it's like to be busy, to fall asleep with a head full of ideas and to wake up scrambling madly to get them all accomplished. Is this just a part of a natural cycle of fertility and fallow-ness? Or do I need to get off my ass and start getting shit done?

At the very least, I should probably clean my room.

Weird.

Just a few minutes after our dinner guests left tonight, Brian and I heard what sounded like someone screaming. Brian ran outside, I called the police. When they arrived (4 cars!), no one was to be found. Brian says he heard someone yelling up the street from us, then nothing. We both heard them say, "Help." Brian heard them say, "Leave me alone."

Living in the city, you get used to hearing scraps of other people's lives, their drunken yells and their early morning car doors. But this cry was weird. It reminded me of the coyotes we used to hear some nights when we lived in Vermont. It was so distorted that we couldn't agree if it was a man or a woman.

The police didn't find anyone, though. Which makes me wonder if we made the whole thing up. Maybe it was someone who'd had too much to drink, and didn't want their friends to walk them home. Maybe it was a couple having a fight. But the weird thing is how strange it makes the nighttime street seem no longer like a friendly block of people and dogs and stained-glass makers, but instead a wall of houses, where every dark window could hide a secret danger.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAH! ... Oh. Nevermind

So yesterday, I got a letter in the mail from my insurance company. The letter, which had looked so benign in it's bulk-rate envelope, contained the surprising news that my insurance had been canceled on September first of this past year.

Now, as all two and a half of you readers out there know, I've had a rather exciting few years, medical history wise. And it was absolutely not my intention to have canceled my health insurance. So, I was a bit surprised.

I called the 800 number listed on the letter, and spoke to a very nice woman who let me know that "all my policies" (dental and life) were current, and that nothing had been canceled "except for that old policy that was canceled earlier this year."

As the conversation unfolded it turned out that the health insurance policy had been evaporated due to lack of payment. Over the summer, you see, I had this whole snafu with my credit card involving weird charges and fraud and such and culminating with a new card being issued, and when I called the insurance folks to change my automatic billing information, they somehow had changed the billing information on only two out of my three policies.

"This is kind of frustrating," I told the nice woman on the phone who of course had had nothing to do with this course of events, "because the woman I spoke to this summer assured me that all three of my policies had been updated, and that everything was fine."

"I can send you an application if you'd like to re-apply for health insurance," she replied.

And then I had to get off the phone very quickly before I started sobbing and/or forgot the manners I learned on my mother's knee.

So I stayed up late last night, staring into the darkness and trying to figure out how I could get health insurance, when here I've had three surgeries in as many years and have handily used up my $3,500 annual deductible without even trying, and now I've got a note on my record stating that my previous insurance was canceled because I up and stopped paying for it and oh my god I'm going to end up paying an insane amount of money for even the eenseyest bit of coverage and die toothless and alone of, I don't know, consumption or something.

Finally, at about four in the morning, I decided that I wouldn't panic (any more) until I'd called again and tried a bit more forcefully to get the folks at the insurance company to see things from my perspective.

So I called again today and spoke with another nice lady. She offered to send me an application so I could re-up my policy, and I explained how that wouldn't really work for me, because of my medical history and the whole not-my-fault "non-payment" issue, and did I mention that it wasn't my fault? And she went and talked to her supervisor, who looked back at my file and saw that, oh, oops, there had been a computer foul-up that they'd discovered in a bunch of other people's accounts but had somehow missed in mine, and it never should have been canceled to begin with.

So I'm insured again. And the good news is, if I survived the past twenty-four hours, my heart must be pretty darn healthy.

Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn't Mean They Aren't Out to Get You.

Brian and I had very half-assed plans for Thanksgiving, which fell through as such plans are often wont to do. This is actually kind of awesome. Even though we basically spend every waking moment together, we'd both been secretly harboring the desire for some quiet holiday alone time (with each other that is), away from the bustle of friends and family. So we've planned for a perfect him-and-me day, a day of Lord of The Rings movies topped off by far too much food for two reasonable people and some snuggling. I picked out some recipes, and tommorrow we'll enjoy our quiet and romantic holiday of dork movies and comfort food. Perfect.

So anyway, today I headed out to do my Thanksgiving shopping, figuring, it's just the two of us, how hard could it be to find and buy the ingredients for our simple yet Thanksgiving-y meal?

Answer: absurdly. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a cornish game hen in this town, the day before Thanksgiving? Five stores and a trip across town, that's how hard.

But that isn't what I wanted to tell you about. The most interesting part of my shopping excursion happened at the very beginning: I was walking down our street (in the direction of Bi Rite, my first fruitless foray). It was raining, so there I was, yellow boots and rainbow umbrelly, when I looked up and noticed a small group of French tourists ahead.

The reason I noticed them was that one of them seemed to be taking a picture. The reason I noticed that was because my nose was itchy, and just as I looked up and saw the camera, I was sort of schnirrfing it against my mitten. There was no penetration, mind you, it was a perfectly acceptable outside-the-nose schnirrf, but still: not the pose you'd like to be sporting in some random (French, no less) stranger's holiday photo.

Anyway, we passed one another, and after we passed, I wondered what had been so scenic that they'd decided to take a photograph in the first place. I walk down this particular street everyday -- it is, in fact, my street -- but I'd never noticed it as being particularly aesthetically pleasing, other than in your basic no-place-like-home kinda way. So I turned, thinking maybe this is my opportunity to see the street anew, as others see it: a scenic, quintessentially San Francisco, view.

I turned. And, Reader? They were taking a photograph again. Back the way they'd just come. Of me.

So it got me wondering: am I famous in France? I have no illusions about the readership of this here blog. If Maggie Mason is "famous among dozens," then me, well I'm famous among multiples of zero. My readership consists of close relatives and former college roommates on a good day. But could some small cadre of Gallic blog enthusiasts count me as their hero? Does my writing translate better somehow, into French? Or did they just like my umbrella?

P.S. I have invented the best pizza ever: roasted fennel and shallots, with sage pesto and apples. I am a genius. Notify the French.

Fasting

I'm tired of talking about myself. That's the hazard of freelancing: I sit around all day in my own company, then go out into the world armed with nothing but anecdotes about myself and my own little adventures. I am my own crazy co-worker, my own flaky boss. I find myself wondering: could I give up the first-person pronoun for a week, converse soley about other people's thoughts and the world of abstract ideas?

Would it be really annoying if I tried? Or would it be the best thing, ever?

Some Beans

So much depends on the pretty blue bowl in the avocado sink.

Now that I've quit my job (oh did I tell you? I quit.), I'm determined to spend more time cooking. Not that I haven't been cooking up until now, but have I been making beans and currys and katsups from scratch? I have not.

In other news, why do I feel guilty for leaving a job that has not paid me in over two months, and as far as I can tell can't pay me, ever again? Hm.

How did the reading go? I honestly can't tell.

And this article from the Chronicle for Higher Education explains why not:

"It's like we have this trick scale... Here's how that scale works: Self-doubt and negative feedback weigh heavily on the mind, but praise barely registers. You attribute your failures to a stable, inner core of ineptness. Meanwhile, you discount your successes as accidental or, worse, as just so many confidence jobs. Every positive is a false positive."

And the worst part is? It's annoying. I become annoying, socially inept. I can't trust praise. I can't trust people. And so I end up this stuttering misanthrope, rushing out the backdoor after I'm done reading, afraid to confront, or even acknowledge, my audience.

Stupid cat germs.

Not Good at the Busy

Oh, I am just not good* at being busy. This semester I'm working full time in addition to teaching a class -- that's 43 hours out of the week that I have to be someplace and be working, never mind the unstructured class prep hours I need to work on top of that.

Now, technically, there are enough hours in the day to get everything done. But my brain just can't stay in work mode long enough to make it happen. I keep napping on Saturdays, or sinking into a novel for just a minute, only to look up and realize hours have passed.

This morning, walking to work, I kept looking longingly into coffee shops, at people sitting in the corner with a notebook and their coffee, at teachers reading stacks of papers and hipsters with their dork-glasses and laptops. O, for an unstructured day!



*I started this post a few minutes ago, was called away, and came back to an entry that said "Oh, I am just not god". What an awesome excuse for not getting stuff done. Thanks, id!

Socks and Monsters

For a few months now, Brian has been contemplating the aquisition of some argyle socks. As with all major life changes, this sartorial switcheroo has been carefully pondered, researched, discussed with friends and significant others. "I've been thinking about getting some argyle socks," he said to me one day. "I think they'd go nicely with all the corduroy I've been wearing."

Of course, not everyone was supportive. Our friend Jason called them old man socks. I just teased and brought it up (repeatedly) over dinner with friends.

So the weeks went by, and like many people finding themselves at life's crossroads, Brian stalled out for a while. H&M's socks had skulls on them. The socks at the fancy shoe store near our house were twenty bucks a pop. Then he needed a new hard drive, and then a new planer. And the Search for Sock fell by the wayside, for the most part. So far, he only has one pair (selected for him, as a gesture of support, by the aforementioned Jason). But argyle remains a funny little obsession with him, and it's become one of our little rituals: window shopping wherever we go, looking for argyle socks, and then judging said socks on various criteria to determine whether or not they are in fact the argyle that he is looking for (pink and brown argyle will not do. Neither will argyle impersonaters that lazily substitute mere diamond shapes for the more complex traditional pattern. I'm looking at you, Donna Karan).

Anyway. That's that.

Today Brian and I went to the grocery store twice -- once for dinner things and once for juice. On the way back with our dinner things (pasta sauce has been on sale lately, it's all we eat. Well, we put it on pasta), Brian and I started talking about cats, and how he'd read this article about this parasite common in domesticated cat poo that causes "mass personality changes" in affected populations, the most consistent being "guilt proneness (a form of neuroticism)." Apparently when this same parasite makes its way into rats, it causes the rats to become "active, less cautious and more likely to be eaten by a cat, where the parasite completes its life cycle." And Brian was telling me that this isn't the only parasite like this! There's another one that affects ants, and needs to complete its life cycle inside a sheep. So it actually causes ants to climb up stalks of grass so that they'll be chomped up! Just like that!

So, yeah. Apparently Brian's infected with some sort of argyle parasite. It's just not ready to complete the cycle yet. And pink and brown just won't do.

Poor Brian. This is what he gets for bugging me to update my blog more.