Runnin' Around.

Getting married is a real cornucopia of details, no matter how you slice it. You might say to that, "No duh." But somehow I figured that by avoiding a wedding party, a band (thank you iPod), assigned seating, a lot of guests, etc. etc., that would mean free n' easy nuptials. Not so much. Among the details: What do you say to each other at the altar?

I did not want to say "'Til death do us part." There was some momentary friction on that one. I'd rather ignore the fact that I'm going to die as long as possible. Doesn't "all the rest of our days" sound so much more noncommittal toward death? I thought so too. All the rest of our days... that's like zillions and zillions of days! Right?

Well, this is probably the least composed and most inelegant post so far. Please forgive me, it's my wedding week (quote from Sex and the City: "You get a day. One day."). After this, it's Hawaii for 10 days. Cliche honeymoon destination but easy (if bank-breaking) and I've never been.

More upon return...

Sur-Living.

Have you ever gone through periods where you're just a little too interested in someone else's life?

It brightens my day to surf on over to tha pbdotc or Verbungle and get some thought-provoking musings, and often a laugh -- that's fine. But lately, I've become a bit too zealous in checking Restaurant Girl and Viva La Vida.

I feel a twinge of discomfort when I read these blogs, because at the heart of my bookmark-check is a belief that these two people are living more satisfying lives than I am.

Like, while I crop yet another photo at work or take myself for a gerbilly jaunt on the StairMaster, Restaurant Girl is harvesting grapes and going to underground dinners and playing basketball until 4 a.m., and the author of Viva la Vida is making projects with palm leaves on a Honduran island with her boyfriend. It all leads me to the question: Where did I go wrong -- or did I?

When it comes to seizing the day versus ruminating about it, my track record is mixed. On the seize side, I have: lived in London for a year; gone skydiving; gone to work for Club Med; sung in front of 500 people; biked 60 miles in one day for charity; quit a job I hated even though I lived alone in NYC and had no other job lined up; ended my dysfunctional love-hate relationship with NYC by leaving; pitched aside (almost) all my fears to move across the country and get hitched.

On the stuck side, I have: failed to take a vacation anywhere cool in the last several years; put my immediate comfort over my long-term best interests; stayed in a line of work I have known for a long time is not for me; wasted time with people I didn't actually like all that much; put off learning to cook and play drums way too long; not bothered to really pursue writing.

So when somebody does exactly what they want to do, and has a ton of fun in the process, it makes me jealous -- but also confused. How did they do it? What sacrifices are they making?

Whose life do you most admire?

Updates: Wedding Hoedown, Mortified.

First of all, regarding the question of wedding music in the previous post, we have arrived at a somewhat happy compromise. The classical guitarist will play, but we put the kibosh on "I Can't Help Falling in Love," "Ode to Joy" and other offenders.

For the processional, I tried to make "Hallelujah" work (I'm partial to the Jeff Buckley cover), but it didn't suit the short time frame involved for the aisle-trotting. It did occur to me that a song containing the lyrics "Love is not a victory march/It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah" doesn't exactly say "happily ever after, babe," but hey, I like to keep it real.

In the end we decided to go with "Pavane," and here is the embarrassing admission for that one: I first heard that song on a Sex and the City episode.

Moving on, it looks like my flirtation with Mortified is done for now. Though everyone agrees it's hilarious how pathetic my obsession with Prince was, the SF show's producers seemed to disagree a little bit about what to do with me.

One of them was up for taking my entire diary and editing it into a monologue, saying she thought she could knit together all the funny stuff; her partner seemed to think there just weren't enough story threads there besides Prince, and that I needed to look into other diaries for more material.

I think I agree with the latter assessment, for the purposes of the show. What makes Mortified work is the way they turn everything into a little vignette, with multiple story threads and plenty of laugh lines. Entries that might be kind of funny to read to your friends wouldn't necessarily work as part of an onstage act.

Though a trip back to my other diaries is a possibility for the future, when it came to this particular purple polka-dotted diary, I just wasn't up for trying to turn a donkey into a thoroughbred of humiliation.

One possible additional "thread" that came up in my second audition was my relationship with my brother, who crops up from time to time as a thorn in my side. Here, for your enjoyment, is an entry illustrating said relationship.


January 25, 1984

Benny. That's his name. The person that's making life worse. And, by the way, he happens to be my brother. Mr. Jerk, that's him. He makes me cry almost beacause he gets away with EVERYTHING he does to me. It's like, if he shot me, I'd get in trouble for being within his target range. Like tonight, when I borrowed a piece of tape from him. OK. I jokingly turn off his light, and next thing I know, he's off on a spaz. He sat on me and really hurt me, making me say that he was great, and that I'm sorry (the little bitch). I'd already told Mom, and she said we have to work it out for ourselves. Nyah, nyah, nyah. See what I mean? It bugs me. It bugs me because if I did that to him (after he got off me, he was actually cheap enough to take the tape back), I would be punished or yelled at. He gets away with murder and I'm sick of it. No more.

Veiled Threat, Part Two.

In a little less than a month, I am going to walk down a short, grassy aisle in a white dress and make some very important promises. Of all the details attached to this ceremony, there has only been one real disagreement: the music that is played during the aisle-walking.

Here are the options on the table.

1. Silence. This is the option favored by my betrothed. I imagine the sounds of sniffles, outbursts from guest toddlers, whispering and creaking chairs as I make my way toward the altar. Since I'm not going to deliver a eulogy, I'd rather have a little atmosphere.

2. Harp. This is the second choice of my opponent/life partner, because he thinks it would be amusing. I agree that it would be amusing, but since we're not going to film an '80s comedy where the harp gets upended by a loose pet or toppled into a swimming pool after a crazy mishap, I think the joke will be lost.

3. Classical Guitar. This is what's being offered by the ceremony venue. We are not allowed to have amplified music, which means no boombox. When I voice support for this option, I get characterized as a lover of classical guitar, as if I like nothing better than to kick back with some acoustic Bach or something like that. This is not true. I merely think the guitar option will be both pleasant and easy to ignore. "You KNOW I'm going to get shit for this from my friends," my poor fiance says. To me, that's just gravy.

As a way of making the whole affair less stilted, we're thinking about some musical alternatives for processional and recessional music. I, for instance, wouldn't mind walking down the aisle to an acoustic version of "Cherry Pie" by Warrant. Another suggestion was the theme to The Odd Couple for the recessional, when we face our guests as husband and wife. Any other ideas?

UMbox.

The e-mail inbox can be a capricious conveyer of fortunes, both good (Cake today at 3 p.m.!) and bad (VOLUNTEERS NEEDED: Holiday shifts). I'd like to inaugurate a new, semiregular feature showcasing life's electronic uncomfortable moments.

The motivation to do this came not from an e-mail, but from an IM conversation, where I learned that one of my employer's major show hosts refuses to direct his listeners to any Web URL featuring a subdirectory, because it would require him to utter the word "slash" as part of the address, and he will not say "slash," because he feels that is not "conversational."

It's true that for a radio host to say something like "Visit radio.com slash egomania" is, indeed, not at all conversational for listeners who happen to tune in from the year 1985 and have never seen the World Wide Web before. I imagine people across the country changing their dials, muttering, "I can't understand all that gibbity hoo-hah on the radio these days!"

This instance made me think about many other bizarre moments of inflexibility and pomposity I have encountered at said organization, much of it appearing in e-mail form. That, in turn, got me thinking about all the icky-feeling e-mails I have gotten in my whole life. There are so many, and it's time to start the healing.

The following e-mail is from another "on-air personality" who bristled when I asked her if we could have some of her show guests write an online companion to their conversations.

Look.,.. I fear that if they are asked to write something for you in advance, by the time I get to taping them, they will sound rehearsed and flat, and be reading from their notes. I want the sound of spontaneity -- of people thinking on their feet -- on the radio. So please .... Keep your requests for AFTER I have recorded my interviews.

This is a pretty mild, yet adequately condescending and dismissive, example. Because of space, unfortunately, I have had to delete many other mails in which I was treated like a misbehaving (virtual!) pet. From now on, I am going to start saving anything objectionable, so that I can publish it. I would love to have others share their own examples of unpleasant e-mails, either workplace-related or personal. You can submit them in the comments or e-mail them to me and I will print them in a subsequent post.

Diet Aid.

Every morning I take a spin through the Haight Street Market and pick myself up breakfast (Fage Greek yogurt and granola), lunch (Amy's) and usually some kind of snack. Today's impulse purchase was Bug Bites. You can't do much better than two little squares of chocolate after your Amy's Palaak Paneer, that's what I was thinking.

I pretty much ignored the part of the package where it said "endangered species Chocolate," because what the hell does that mean? I'm just trying to have a sweet treat, and if it helps out a snow leopard along the way, then everybody wins. As long as it's not actually made of endangered species, it's just dandy with me.

Here's where the "Bug Bites" concept goes awry: Sitting on top of my square of milk chocolate was a picture of several fungus beetles. My tip to the Endangered Species Chocolate Company: Putting a picture of an ugly (cocoa-colored) bug on my chocolate does not make me want to save the bug OR eat the chocolate. It makes me want to kill the bug and not eat chocolate for a long time.

Shame and My Game.

As someone who doesn't do well with change, yet somehow constantly initiates it, I've been having a hard time with my move to San Francisco. On a recent visit home to D.C., people asked me how I liked living here. Everyone expected me to talk about how awesome it is, and were visibly surprised to hear me say I miss Washington. But I do miss it. I miss warm summer nights. I miss thunderstorms. I miss going out on U Street and Adams Morgan. I even miss the DelMarVa beaches, with their middling scenery, humidity and cheesy amenities.

Since getting here six months ago, I've made several shoreline visits: Baker Beach, San Gregorio, Ocean Beach, Stinson, Limantour, Half Moon Bay. All are indisputably beautiful, in their own way. Many tend to be windswept and sparsely attended; only one of the above (Stinson) has a snack stand and enough population density that you can smell the suntan lotion in the air.

It is breathtaking and amazing to stand on all of these beaches, but I was missing a certain kind of experience. "Is there a beach that's warm, full of people and cheesy? Like, with a boardwalk? Does that exist here?" I asked. "Sure," I was told. "Santa Cruz." We set out on Saturday, and were there within 90 minutes.

The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, first things first, is not a boardwalk. It is a cement-based amusement park that, unforgivably, serves only Pepsi products. It was not the string of stores and treats that I grew up on at Rehoboth Beach. On the other hand, it was a filming location for The Lost Boys, and it's a bunch of junk food and rides and video games next to a beach, which is almost never bad.

Going to the boardwalk is a sacred summer ritual for me, not least because it is a time to reconnect with the arcade. Many hours of my childhood were happily spent either in front of a Namco machine or our Nintendo console at home, which is why I have the knowledge base required to find videos like this one highly amusing, but couldn't tell you where Turkey is on a map.

Thankfully, Santa Cruz had its share of arcades; and thankfully, the sparse lighting in arcades makes it harder to recognize that the person hunched over Galaga while frantically cursing and banging the "fire" button, or entering her initials into the QBert player hall of fame, is a 35-year-old woman. I can spend hours in those places, and it's worse now that I have discovered a new kind of game.

There were at least three different types of drum simulation machines at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, something I'd never seen before. One of them, DrumMania, is from the makers of Dance Dance Revolution and has the same format: the screen dictates your moves as the song plays, and evaluates how well you manage to execute them (in this case by striking drum pads rather than stepping on a platform). I liked this game because at the right setting, it mimicked my real-life drum lessons, where I only play one or two elements at a time and get praised for my progress.

Another arcade featured MTV's Drumscape, a simulator that simply allows you to play along with the hit of your choice until the time runs out. It has more electronic pads and sounds realer. As I was contemplating whether or not to try it, some kid who looked to be about 9 years old sat down -- with his own sticks, not the ones attached to the machine. It was on.

He played along to Queen's "Under Pressure." My jaw dropped, and a crowd gathered behind him as his little arms flicked this way and that, banging out fills and flying from pad to pad as if he had come out of the womb percussing. People applauded when he was finished. He walked away as nonchalantly as if he had just finished peeling an orange.

It wasn't until another kid sat down (one who sucked) that I could work up the courage to try the machine. I waited the amateur kid out. Then I waited for the arcade staff to fix the bass pedal when it broke. My companion was getting restless, having played all the skee ball he could play. "I just want to get one turn on this," I said, feeling embarrassingly needy and serious about it.

Finally, I got my turn. I had already decided I would play along with "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns n' Roses, since I couldn't find any Prince. I started spinning through the song choices, using the drum pad. Where was GnR? A time counter told me I had 30 seconds left to make my choice, as I continued to scroll through songs that I didn't know well enough to play. "I can't find Guns n' Roses!" I exclaimed, and tried to go back to the original menu. Instead, I inadvertently made a selection: Aaron Carter.

"Noooooo!" I yelled. "No! I didn't pick Aaron Carter! That's not what I want!" The Backstreet Brother blared deafeningly from the machine as I sat there. A few people were behind me, either watching or waiting to use the machine, but I was too ashamed to turn around. All I could do was try to play, but I didn't even know the song, was too unskilled even to bang out the right song selection on the pads, much less a real beat. It was too much: Somehow, openly standing in front of a Ms. Pac Man machine for up to an hour and trying to get past the banana level was OK, but my internal barometer said that drumming along with an Aaron Carter song in public was taking it all too far. I gave up the sticks in the middle of the song and walked quickly away from the machine while the amateur kid seized the opportunity to get back on the machine and suck some more. I went back to the other arcade and played another round of DrumMania ("Perfect! Great! Perfect! Perfect!") to console myself.

That's the trouble with video games: I'm now more interested in getting another turn at DrumScape than I am in my next lesson in front of a real kit.

Baby, Meet Bathwater.

When I was enrolled at Washington University, and not that happy about it, I apparently acted like I was going there for the rest of my life. I made it into kind of a disaster mentally; then I went to St. Louis, made the best of it and got good grades; applied to Penn and transferred after my freshman year.

My mom often raises this as an example of how I tend to be a tad hyperbolic in my view of things, a trait very much in evidence in yesterday's post. It's true that I need a change, and it's true that I don't like sitting around all day. But of course I could focus on finding a better environment instead of uniformly rejecting all forms of office work.

It might seem advisable to temper my disaster-style thinking, except that it's served me well on occasion. It got me out of one school and into another that I loved, and it got me finally to leave New York and go back to D.C., where I was very happy to be (and where my office really was kind of nice). Discontent can be useful, on occasion. So we'll see where it pushes me next.

I Read a Book.

I had not planned to read Killing Yourself to Live, by Chuck Klosterman. A promotional copy of it ended up lying around my residence and I picked it up. It was so entertaining and readable that I actually ended up finishing it, a feat that is rarer these days than I'd like to admit.

Klosterman writes for Spin and Esquire magazines, and who knows where else. He is one of the rare writers who can actually ramble significantly off-topic and keep you with him, partly because of his skill at declaring things that seem very true even if they're patently questionable (such as "Sexuality is 15 percent real and 85 percent illusion"). Pop culture, music and human relations are his domain. It's not surprising that he's made such a career out of magazine writing.

What's surprising is that Klosterman managed to publish and sell this book even though it has very little to do with the premise on which it's based. Killing is ostensibly the nonfictional tale of Klosterman going to visit various locations of various rock stars' deaths; it's actually about that and Klosterman's love life, random encounters, drug experiences and a bunch of other stuff. In other words, it's about nothing.

It's an exercise in ego, with very little restraint. And I ate the whole thing! Now, I feel kind of guilty, and a little annoyed... but I also enjoyed myself. It makes me think about Hal Niedzviecki.

Some months ago, I noticed in my Flavorpill newsletter that Hal was going to be in town, reading from his book. My first reaction was, "Hey. I went to high school with that guy." My second reaction was, "Hal Niedzviecki got a fucking book deal?"

Now, Hal was on the same literary magazine with me at Winston Churchill High School. I think he was in a different class, but to be honest I really can't remember. I can't remember anything about his writing, either, or what he did for the magazine. The only things I recall about Hal were that he had glasses and kinda poufy hair and that he seemed like an affable guy.

Hal's book is called Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity. This is from the description on his Web site: "In chronicling his singular encounters as an editor and pop culture explorer, his meditations touch on everything from religion to Karaoke, from declining birth rates to Celebrity Worship Syndrome, from Mississauga's famed Backyard Wrestling Federation to Friday night Sabbath in Atlanta, Georgia."

Ignore the dangling modifier and kamikaze capitalization here and note that Hal is basically a self-styled Canadian Chuck Klosterman, and that apparently it's possible to call oneself a "pop culture explorer" with an entirely straight face and get away with it.

My reaction may sound like sour grapes, and that's because it is. My whole life I've wanted a book deal. But no one has ever called me up and said, "Gee, Christina, we really love your writing. Can we publish it on paper, in bound form, and pay you to do so?" I suppose I could try to do what Hal and Chuck must have done, the old "get an agent" and "fashion a book proposal" route. But that would mean risking failure, something I'm unwilling to do.

When I lived in New York, my friend Jackson and I used to sit in bars and talk about writing. Jackson wrote short stories. I would read them, and give him feedback over whiskey sours. His work was usually in the noir and/or sci-fi vein, and he had a keen mind for plot. He would try to describe how easy Hollywood conventions are, and encouraged me to create outlines of stories that I wanted to write. I would argue that literary fiction shouldn't be so formulaic -- I wanted to write something organic, something that evolved as it went along. Accordingly, I do not have one piece of finished fiction to my credit to this day, and Jackson has written (and possibly published) several stories.

It's easier to feel less jealous of Jackson -- or of, say, Cathy Yuspa, a Churchill alum who became a successful Hollywood writer -- because these people are actually working on plots and dialogue, and I have never tried much to excel at that. It's the Chucks and Hals and David Sedarises that get me, because they give the impression that they just sat down one day and blurted out whatever they happened to be thinking at the time, and next thing you know they're on book tours and doing interviews for major media outlets.

I mean, I can blurt random thoughts out too, I do it all the time! Sure, Chuck and David are more talented than I am, but that's beside the point. (I didn't think this through before writing it, so I'm not sure what the point is.)

Considering the fact that people have even managed to publish books about how many books there are in the world, maybe it's time to lower my book proposal standards. Maybe, as pb dot c suggests, I should shoot for UncMo: A Novel. I have other proposal ideas floating around, too. Stay tuned for Hey, Some Things About Health Food Stores: My Year of Shopping in the Organic Age and Jigga Who? My Batttle to Keep Up with Pop Culture in My Mid-Thirties. Other ideas welcome.

Aging Gracefully.

This blog celebrates its one-year birthday today, with an apple martini and a check in the mirror for new wrinkles. Here is how it began, if I may quote from the introduction:

For me, when it comes to the creation and/or perception of socially painful situations, there's simply one thing to do: hold on to them, burnish them, and involuntarily relive them from time to time over the next several hours, days, weeks, or years. I guess this comes naturally to someone whose earliest conscious memories involve wetting herself at points well past potty-training age.

Is there any way to exorcise it all? Probably not, but I can share the discomfort with you. Isn't that what the Internet is all about?

Here's to many more uncomfortable moments. And maybe, as tha pb dot c suggests, a few comfortable ones. Opinions on the matter are welcome.

The title of this post is meant to be ironic. If you get mistaken as the "new intern" on your first day of your job when you are actually 33 at the time, that is not "aging gracefully." That is called "a failure to evolve."

In any case, I have informed my employers at said job that I am going my own way, after two years there. The bosses had very kindly allowed me to keep my D.C.-based job as I moved out to San Francisco, even though it was a concept that, in reality, appealed to no one, except for my insecure bank account.

The question is, what to do now. I tell people I'm going to freelance, and that I want to write more. This is true. I imply that I actually know what I'm doing. This is not true.