Navigation mishaps, gaudy linens, and karaoke: my life in a nutshell.
So it took me 90 minutes to bike into work today, but I think I can shave off some time tomorrow by not going 6.2 miles out of my way.*
First I forgot my cell phone. That cost me about a mile, but the real problem was when I forgot that Arastradero doesn’t start until after you cross El Camino, and failed to turn left on Charleston. Because I had written down directions for myself off the Gmaps Pedometer route I plotted over a map of bike lanes in the area, I was TOTALLY SURE that I was not supposed to turn left on Charleston, despite the niggling doubt in my mind as I sped through intersection after intersection with no sign of Arastradero. This is the peril of documents,** even ones that we ought to know are not exactly 100% reliable given that we created them yesterday and are notoriously bad at navigation in general. They just seem so authoritative. Oops.
So I didn’t lift any weights when I got in as I’d originally planned; just showered and changed and came upstairs to my office. At least I know how to get from home to work now, and am in good enough shape that I can handle a 6.2 mile detour.
As you may have gathered, I am safely in California–mostly moved in, even, largely thanks to the tireless efforts of my friends Greg and Stevie, who let me ship my many, many belongings to their apartment, helped me get my luggage and packages from my motel to my summer lodgings, and even took me in to the bike shop to get my bike reassembled this weekend. The house where I’m renting a room is pretty nice, and has pretty much everything I could ask for in the kitchen; I’ve already been baking up a storm. I’m hoping to finish organizing all my crap this week, so that my room doesn’t look so much like a dozen boxes of clothing, jewelry, and office supplies exploded in there. And I’m also planning to actually update again; I know everyone will be so pleased.
AMAZING CALIFORNIA DISCOVERY: There is a box karaoke place in Cupertino*** that has Belinda Carlisle’s “Summer Rain”**** in their catalog. This is like the holy fucking grail of karaoke for me; now I just need to find “Season of the Witch” and “When U Were Mine.”
And Stevie even took the best karaoke photo ever, as a bonus.
BEDSPREAD UPDATE: So Stevie took me to Target to pick up all the random stuff I still needed despite having shipped a dozen boxes of my crap to California, and I got a new bedspread to replace the one that, you may recall, I jettisoned in Boston because I hated it. At first I wasn’t seeing anything that really appealed to me in Target Housewares, but then I realized it was probably because I was looking in the adult bedding section. In the children’s section I found a comforter in PINK CAMOUFLAGE. Naturally I pounced on it. Now no one can sneak up on me when I’m sleeping! It is, after all, when I am at my most vulnerable.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR COMMENTERS: If at any time you ever posted a comment here and it never showed up, it’s because it got lost in comment spam. I had like 10,000 of the freaking things and just mass deleted them all, so I’m sorry if I accidentally trashed any legitimate comments along with the rest. I’ve just enabled a special spam-busting plugin that will hopefully solve this problem, though.
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*Yes, that pretty much doubled the length of the ride.
**I am reading David M. Levy’s Scrolling Forward: Making sense of documents in the digital age for work. He gets a little crazy mystical hyperbolic sometimes, but given my own feelings for the internet I can understand. It’s a little weird sometimes, though, as the book was published in 2001 and obviously the virtual world has moved on quite a bit since.
***Of COURSE I have been to karaoke. I’ve been in the state for over a week, you know.
****No one ever knows this song. Belinda Carlisle is probably best known for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and possibly “Circle in the Sand”; at least these are the two songs you can expect to find at every karaoke joint. They NEVER have “Summer Rain,” except in Cupertino. Lyrics here.
June 5th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
No, Belinda Carlisle is best known for being the lead singer of the Go-Gos.
Well, to most of us anyway.
June 5th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Whenever I think of Belinda Carlisle, I always think of the person who, I really and truly believe is her number 1 fan, a 6 foot 6 Israeli man, Aviad, who introduced himself to Rich (who I had recently started to date) as someone who has “killed 5 men”. You wouldn’t believe it, but he’s really a sweet guy. And he loves Belinda Carlisle. You can hear him shout it at her on one of her concert DVDs, to which she answers “How can you love me? You don’t even know me!”
But, yes, Summer rain is a fantastic song, Aviad’s denied love notwithstanding.
June 5th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Finally. You know how I feel about Summer Rain.
June 6th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Well, congrats on getting to work, even if a little inefficiently. It’s all exercise, right?
October 6th, 2007 at 1:39 am
Welcome to God’s country — and thanks for the Belinda Carlisle tip!
“Mad About You” is one of my favorites … still cannot sing it with any precision, not that that keeps me from trying. (As my tolerant friends will undoubtedly be quick to mention!)