You've Never Been Ice Skating??? Unforgiveable.

It's gearing up for winter and everyone is gearing up for their favorite winter sports. Once the snow hits, flocks of eager snow enthusiasts will grab their boards, boots, gloves, and skis and take to the snow like Miley Cyrus took to twerking.

Snow twerking!!!!

Although I am not a fan of winter sports, and I do not or "jib" or "half-pipe," (# 3 is the only one that fits in this scenario, I swear), there is one winter activity that can always make me smile like the village idiot: ice skating.

Last week, I planned a company ice skating outing for one of my coworker's birthdays. Upon sending out the invitations, I was surprised to learn that most of my coworkers had never indulged in this ice activity. I was shocked and appalled... an unlikely reaction from someone who's from a place where it never even approaches freezing temperatures.

But... ice skating is something that I thought everyone did every once in a while... like not paying for MUNI, or buying edibles off a woman dressed as Little Bo Peep in Dolores Park. It's just one of those experiences you have.

This is what she looks like after you eat her homemade edibles... so I've heard.

When I questioned their obvious shortcomings, they said that ice skating is "just something that people in San Francisco don't do." I found this hard to believe.

One of them (who had grown up in the bay) claimed that there are no ice skating rinks in San Francisco. Please. We have a whole warehouse filled with trampolines in the city. We most definitely have ice skating rinks.

The one we went to (after I had shunned and then convinced most of the non-believers) was the Yerba Buena Ice Skating and Bowling Center. Let me just point out that this one in particular IS OPEN YEAR-ROUND, and the majority of my coworkers had still somehow manage to evade the cold, slippery joy of ice skating. Unforgiveable.

Word.

The one upside to taking a group of novice ice-skaters to an ice rink is the pure, unadulterated  hilarity of watching people hurt themselves. Or, in an attempt to save themselves a few bruises, cling desperately to the wall like a person stranded at sea, clinging to the only life-saving device they come across. Our skates were the Titanic, and we were going down.

Just hold on to this wall, buddy. We're gunna be ok.

Of course, after a week of teasing my coworkers and telling them how much fun it would be for me to see them fall on the ice, I had it coming when I took the hardest fall of all.

There was a moment where I was skating, and then there was a moment when I was very intimately acquainted with the ice. The moments in between consisted of me waving goodbye to my pride and hoping none of my coworkers had seen. They all did. Oh, also, did I mention we had been drinking before we got on the ice?

Don't skate and drink, kids.

Turns out I had taken a pretty bad blow to the ribcage (because apparently I'd rather risk my internal organs than the smoothness of my palms). So... one diagnosis of "inflamed intercostal muscles," a tightly wrapped ace bandage to restrict my breathing, and a warning take 10 deep breaths an hour lest I develop pneumonia later, and my coworkers my have me retracting my statement that "ice skating is fun for everyone!"

But I will never. ICE SKATING IS FUN FOR EVERYONE!!!!

Check out these cool rinks in San Francisco:

Union Square
http://unionsquareicerink.com/

Yerba Buena
http://www.skatebowl.com/

Embarcadero Center
http://www.yelp.com/biz/holiday-ice-rink-at-embarcadero-center-san-francisco

That's Not How Being Homeless Works

An old Simpson’s episode comes to mind every time I think of the homeless. In an effort to win office once again for the town of Springfield, Mayor Quimbly designs a campaign that demonstrates what his efforts will do to make Springfield a place worthy of praise. One of the images was of a homeless man being turned into a mailbox. How they were to accomplish this was beyond me, but the image always stood out in my mind, the point being that the homeless were to be hidden from sight or rid of altogether.

Ok, now just imagine that this used to be a homeless person.

And then I moved to San Francisco. It occurred to me that Mayor Quimbly’s office campaign would never fly in the city. San Francisco does not hide its homeless.

What with our relaxed homeless laws, granting them the right to sleep on sidewalks and solicit donations (among other things), the many food distribution programs, and innovations for the benefit of those without homes, such as turning old San Francisco buses into showers for the homeless (no joke) it is no wonder why San Francisco is a Mecca-of-sorts for those sans home. (Literally Just Googled "homeless mecca" and this was the first thing to pop up.)

This is what happens when start ups fail.

My friend and I have a problem with this, and it’s not what you think. If you’re expecting me to get all political now, I’m going to disappoint you.

No, the problem my friend and I have is not with politics… it’s with the weather.

San Francisco is just too cold to be homeless. You may point out to me that in the winter, homeless shelters spring into action and open their doors to welcome the homeless into the warmth all over the city. Even so, this is the foggy city we’re talking about… named thusly for good reason. Even in the summer it’s a tad bone chilling.

It’s not uncommon to see the homeless on their chosen street corner, door jamb, or staircase, wearing five layers of clothing, smoking their cigarettes through cracks in their blankets or sleeping bags. I even saw a girl the other day in SOMA who had made a cozy little fort out of blankets and shopping carts.

Cozy AND fun!

The point is… although San Francisco laws are very conducive to living without shelter, the weather kind of negates it all.

Then again, this is coming from an OC girl whose uncle once said, when I introduced this problem to him: “If I was homeless, I would buy a plane ticket to Hawaii and live on the beach.”

I explained to him that that’s not how being homeless works. That being said, here’s the three things my friend and I decided would be a must if we were going to be homeless:

1.       Location, location, location. Every realtor knows that a good home is all about location. I believe this remains true even if you have no home. My friend and I decided if we were ever to be homeless, we would make our way to Florida or some such place where the air was never cold, the ground never frozen, and our cigarettes would be uninhibited by blankets or sleeping bags.

2.       Have at least one set of nice clothes so you can get into nice places and use their restrooms. Because, hey, everyone enjoys the comfort of sparkling clean porcelain beneath your bum (no pun intended.)

3.       Live near a source of water. The ocean is a good choice because beaches usually have outdoor showers to rinse off in and collect drinkable water. Lakes and rivers are good because you can wash yourself off in the water and MAYBE drink it… depending on the quality. The Calaveras River in Stockton, for example, is a poor choice. You may end up with a third eye after washing in and drinking that water (and not the metaphorical, insightful third eye, unless your insight is that you shouldn’t have drunk the water in the first place.)

No joke, Calaveras translates to "skulls."

San Francisco clearly has none of these (except nice clothes. San Francisco has plenty of those.) And the ocean doesn’t count because we are once again faced with the problem of cold weather and water. PLUS I’ve never seen an outdoor shower on any of the beaches BECAUSE IT’S TOO MOTHER LOVING COLD TO SWIM HERE.

Is that a beach? I can't see it through the hypothermia-inducing fog.

My other friend and I (the one I go to the gym with… sometimes… when I go…) decided also that it would be prudent to have a membership to Bally Total Fitness, since it’s only $9.99 a month (and now here I am advertising for them… oops) and you could TOTALYY beg that much money off of passers by each month. And with that money you could...

A.      Have a nice, warm place to hang out in when it's cold if you don’t want to be surrounded by all the other homeless in the winter shelters.

B.      Have full access to showers.

C.      BE TOTALLY FIT. (Because yeah, that’s what you worry about when you don’t have a home.)

Homeless, need money for gym membership... and steroids.

Final Scenario: a bum living in the sunny rays of the Florida sunshine, frolicking in the warm southern waves of the Atlantic, rinsing off in the public showers, collecting shower water in basins to drink when he or she is parched. He or she spends the days begging money off of passers by to pay for his or her monthly subscription to Bally Total fitness. In the evening, he/she spends at least one hour at the gym, getting totally fit, and then using the showers to wash once again. He or she has obviously brought the basin to the gym, and collects more water there. He/she then dons the one set of fabulous clothes to his or her name (and looks AMAZING in it because of all the working out) and hits the clubs (the free ones) to have a warm place to sit and, of course, to use the public restrooms.

Homeless chic.

After all this thought about the ways in which you could successfully be homeless, I realize it is now I who must be reminded that this is not how being homeless works…

And in that spirit, here's some links to donate to the homeless:
http://www.stanthonysf.org/

http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/

Let's make San Francisco a better place for everyone :)

You Should Write a Book

Ahhh a writing workshop. This is what I had been looking forward to all week. A place where someone throws out prompts and says “GO!” and you hear the precise clack of keys and the furious scribbling of pens and pencils as we all take off on a race of the imaginative. Happiness is a warm pen.

I was the second one to show up out of a grand total of 26 writers who came, when there was only room for 15. Only 3 had actually signed up. (Writers are so unreliable. Did I sign up, you ask? Oh, let’s not bother with trivialities…) Not wanting to deprive anyone the right to write, the facilitators graciously accepted everyone. Dedicated writers sat on table tops, carpets, and stairways when all the chairs were taken up.

I forgot to take a picture, so here is a picture of a loft.

One of the women there was one whom I had seen at the Death and Dying discussion earlier in the day. I recognized her by her signature socks-in-Crocs that I had seen hogging the bathroom stall for a good 20 minutes as I and a line of other women waited eagerly with crossed legs, each taking our turn to peer under the stall door to see what the holdup was.

 

Because… who could forget something like that?

She smiled at me as if our brief and sordid encounter earlier in the day made us comrades-in-restroom-arms. No, lady… you inconvenienced me. I am not your friend. But I smiled back anyways, because, well… I’m a nice person.

The session went for an hour and a half and covered a range of prompts such as “write about a character that just woke up at the end of a public transit line without wallet or phone” and “write about something significant from your childhood home” or “write about the things that DON’T flash before a person’s eyes moments before they die” or “write about a character who realizes their home is being broken into,” etc.

Apparently there are very few things I can take seriously. In evidence of this, here is what I wrote for the prompt I mentioned last:

You never expect to have an intruder while you’re doing your laundry. You never expect to have an intruder at all. That defeats the purpose of intruding. Yet, there I was, being intruded upon with nothing but my dirty socks to defend me. I thought of the indignity of it all… being robbed or raped or murdered in my “laundry day clothes”… and all before I had even gotten to the rinse cycle.

My fright instincts took flight and my heart beat hard enough to make me think it was trying to escape out the door ahead of my feet.

I just googled “dirty hipster” and found my laundry day outfit…

Further evidence was witnessed in the “write an instruction manual for something.” I chose How to Fool People into Thinking You’re a Professional, as this pertains to my daily life:

To appear professional, it is imperative that you make people believe that you’re a busy woman. To achieve this, simply make an excessive amount of phone calls in the office. Call the guys who deliver the office’s fruit every week and ask them in a condescending voice, loud enough for everyone to hear… “Did you update our order to the medium size box?” And just for good measure, throw in words like implement, synergy and optimization. For example, “Oh yes, fruit guys, we are implementing the optimization of our ecommerce plan. It’s going to be synergetic!” If you say it belligerently enough, no one will care that you don’t know what those words mean.

At the end of the session, we all got up and mingled. I heard a voice say,

“If anyone would like to write some flash fictions pieces and have them published on our website, I can give you a business card.”

I turned. It was socks-in-Crocs. Good thing I smiled at her
earlier despite her egregious restroom faux pas. I introduced myself and gladly accepted a business card as we chatted about non-restroom related topics.

At the very end we were told to each grab a fortune cookie and use the fortune as the beginning to a story.

This was mine:

 

And my story went: Once upon a time, an aspiring young writer opened a fortune cookie that told her to write a book…

My House Plants are Sarcastic

My second literary stop of the day was “In Our Nature” at The Green Arcade.

It’s adorable in there!

This discussion, as detailed in the 2013 Litquake Festival Guide, centered on “human nature, the unrestrained nature that surrounds us, and where they meet.” The Fresh Ink, a group of Bay Area Writers, began the discussion with some quick writing exercises. The first prompt was “In my previous life, I was your…”

I was stumped. I started writing about being someone’s pen and how they used me to express their thoughts, opinions, and innermost desires… until it occurred to me that I was writing about myself using myself as a pen. PENCEPTION! And then I was like “I was your shoes…? I give up.”

I was stumped by penception at a discussion on human nature…

My second attempt was more successful. We had a few different prompts to choose from, all with the theme of nature, and I chose “What would your houseplants say to you if they could talk?”

We had seven minutes to write, and this is the drivel that I scribbled on my paper:

If my houseplants could talk, they would say…

1. Now that you’ve put me on this hard-to-reach shelf, how do you propose to water me? I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but you stand at a staggeringly unimpressive 5 foot 2. And don’t give me that “I’m 5 foot 2 and a half BS.” Real talk… you’re a shrimp. Oh, and don’t try to compensate by watering me in your high heel shoes. Heels are not step ladders and you are not a green-thumbed hussy.
2. You know… I feel quite at home in your bedroom. Your carelessly strewn clothes on the floor are like the grassy hills my ancestors used to know… before we were painfully uprooted and moved to the nursery. Sometimes I think I see movement in the autumnal heaps of clothing. I think you may have an animal living in here. Or perhaps it is YOU who is the animal.
3. Why did you place me in an old bourbon bottle? I’m not an alcoholic beverage, BUT if you keep ignoring me long enough, I may actually ferment.
4. Have you ever heard of the sun? From what I’ve been told, it’s a pretty fantastic phenomenon, some might even call it life-giving. I hear it’s warm, provides light, and helps living things grow. However, I would never know…. Ahem.
5. I know you think the cat is a doll, but let me set you straight. When you’re not looking, let’s just say she thinks I’m her territory… and she likes to mark it. But since you never water me, I’ll take what I can get.

Apparently my houseplants are snarky and sarcastic and they hate me. Who knew?

Molting, dried up sarcasm.

After our writing exercises, we listened to the featured poets read their work. I must say I was absolutely BLOWN AWAY by one in particular: Tung-Hui Hu. He was pure poetic genius stuffed into the form of a little Asian man.

His work was hard to find on the internet, for copyright purposes, and for good reason too. This man’s words are like gold and must be treated as such… guarded diligently, traded for cold, hard cash to those with the presence of mind to seek it. That being said, I found some excerpts online:

http://www.minepoems.com/

After that incredible reading, I was off to a writing salon to write some gold (hopefully) of my own.

Death and Dying on a Saturday Morning

Saturday morning I awoke to a rare sunny day in the permanent cloud that is Ingleside. The sunlight glowed with stubborn enthusiasm through my bedroom window as I stretched, yawned, donned my “I’m an intellectual” outfit and cheerily contemplated the first Litquake discussion I had chosen for the day: Death and Dying, presented by Lapham’s Quarterly. Yes, I had chosen to begin my gloriously bright morning with one of the darkest, dreariest subjects: our imminent doom.

It’s too early, Death. Go back to bed, you look like hell.

The panelists, John Crowley, Kira Don, Timothy Don, and Jeff Sharlet, affectionately joked that death was a subject they had wanted to cover since the inception of the magazine, but feared that others would shy from the imminent topic, and that their magazine would go the way of their subject… to its grave. Thus, seven years later, they held enough confidence in their magazine to present the subject of death and dying to a bleary-eyed public at 11am in the lovely Hotel Rex.

Sometimes I take really pointless pictures. I apologize.

The panelists read works ranging from the 17^th century to the present, all relating to our inevitable end. One thing became strikingly clear throughout the readings… though styles, opinions, technology, language (insert cultural item here), may change… the presence of death and the fear of it never will.

My favorite poem was the work of a 20^th century poet, Philip Larkin. The poem, written in 1977, is entitled Aubade, which is a song or poem said to a lover when departing at dawn. You can draw your own conclusions about the title after you read the poem.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178058

If you’re lazy, here’s a snippet of Larkin’s introspective poem:

And so it stays just on the edge of vision, 

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill 

That slows each impulse down to indecision. 

Most things may never happen: this one will, 

Wonderfully spine chilling, is it not? We may never get to see the Eiffel Tower, go sky-diving, swim with blue whales, walk on the moon, eat rocky mountain oysters, or sprint naked across a filled stadium, but there is one thing we will, without question, all eventually do… and that is to die.

Here’s a piece of the very last stanza of the poem:

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring 

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

And so this, too, is inevitable… that we must all wake in the morning to our lives and our jobs. Telephones wait to be answered, bikes wait to be ridden, MUNI drivers wait to yell at you, and lovers wait to kiss you upon your return. The simplest yet most significant thing I took away from this seminar was… while you’re not dead, remember that you’re living.