Borders does not have a "Commodity Aesthetics" section

Since yesterday was my only really free day to explore the city, I set off after checking and re-checking my bank account (there was about a $200 discrepancy between what my company said it was paying for and what it actually paid for. Fun.) Hopefully my math, which I repeated checked on two different calculators, worked out and I don’t run any over draft charges. Eek.

On to my mini-venture…

Apparently, the west coast has a rainy season. It’s lovely in the morning and then the rains set in and normal people take cover under awnings. I pick this time to take a 15 minute walk to Chinatown. Well, it would have been 15 minutes if my shoes did not repeatedly fall off my feet. My lovely, dependable Steve Madden flats that have only ever coyly dropped off my heel while sitting on the Metro, slipped completely off my feet crossing Geary St. San Francisco, you could imagine is about level with D.C. when it comes to “places I’d rather prefer not to be barefoot.” I elected to try and find a shoe store in the area. Chinatown does not have shoe stores. It has Hunan restaurants and a few head shops (how does one city support so many head shops?) and weird Chinese herb shops the likes of which I’ve only seen on travel specials…no shoe stores. I figured out a way to walk with my toes completely flexed so as to create a kind of hook to which my shoes could cling and made my way to City Lights to spend too much money and dry off. (Side note, I’m writing this in a Starbucks and one of the baristas just alerted everyone to a messenger bag left unattended at a table. The barista warned the person who copped to owning the bag that someone could steal it. Everyone else seemed utterly nonplussed. I immediately thought, “don’t touch it, it could be a chemical weapon.” I’ve been living near D.C. too fucking long.)

City Lights was magically. As magical as you’d expect a bookstore owned by one of the Beats to be. The building is old and in the rain smelled vaguely of mildew (booksmell mostly overwhelmed that but not completely.) The poetry room was everything I'd hoped it would be. Unfortunately, upon reaching the room on the third floor I completely forgot the name of every poet or poem I'd ever read and proceeded to wander aimlessly around the room until something popped out at me. I almost left with the collected poems of W.B. Yeats. Then I remembered that, unlike Borders, I may be judged for my book purchasing choices at an (anti)establishment of this magnitude. I picked up a collection by Philip Larkin (not particularly impressive but I love him and own nothing by him yet so I took the risk. Then I frantically flipped through my moleskine for any name that I'd come across but did not own yet. I found Robert Creeley and Dorothea Tanning. I went with the Tanning but later remembered that Mark had mentioned I should look into Albert Goldbarth. I stuck with the Tanning but not without a decent amount of back and worth.

When I finally left (it took a while to work up the reserve to stop smelling the Derrida, I left with one children's book for Kora about a duck who buys ever-expanding purple socks, the Larkin, the Tanning, the latest issue of Believer, Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland, 7 postcards ( a picture of City Lights, Joyce, Whitman, Heaney, Bukowski sticking his fingers in his mouth, the staircase leading up to the Poetry Room, and Ginsburg), and a bumper sticker that says "HOWL if you love City Lights".

Were it not for my shoes actively falling off (requiring an emergency pair of pumas) I would have stayed longer and bought more. As it is, I think I showed an incredible amount of restraint. I want to love San Francisco but there are things I cannot reconcile. The homeless situation here dwarfs D.C. They're really all over. Not pushy or aggressive, but problematic nonetheless. No one walks fast enough. Even in the morning. It's as if they have no where to be, even at 8:45 in the morning. My skin and hair are simultaneously dry and oily. I don't know how that happens, but there it is. This climate does not agree with my face.

Really though, I'm just not cool enough for this place. I'm barely cool enough for D.C.

The post got progressively lamer the more I typed...

Well, I made it. The plane took off and landed with relatively little fanfare. I don't particularly care for air travel (what very little I have done) but I had to be assured by the nonplussed looks of the other passengers every time the plane got a little shaky or the fasten seat belts sign clicked on that we were not actually about to faceplant (planeplant?) onto the ground 30 thou' below. They did their best (not knowing what they were actually doing) but I still spent the majority of the flight with my seat belt on and my tray table in the upright and locked position.

When I was checking in at Dulles, I entered my information into a kiosk and there was apparently another person with my name flying that day. only she was headed for Paris. It would have been poor form to take her place. Also I'd probably lose my job and might create some sort of pesky international incident. And I did not have my passport on me. Paris would be nice though. I wonder if it's raining there too.

The trickiest part of this whole business travel deal is the eating alone. I've been given $75 per day. I just don't know if I can walk into a fancy restaurant and sit by myself. I just don't see it happening. I realize that no one around me would care or even really notice that I was alone but the prospect of sitting at a table by myself at anything fancier than a sandwich shop isn't terribly appealing. I can do it there (and did earlier today). Coffee shops too. But a place with cloth napkins? I just don't see it happening.

Tomorrow, we're setting up the booth for the conference and I have the rest of the day to myself. I'm going to try and find City Lights, the bookstore started by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Let's see if I can negotiate mass transit on the other side of the country. In the meantime though, I think I'm going to go to the gym before I fall asleep.

Ways I have attempted to organize my bookshelf*

*Ordered from most to least efficient

1. Alphabetical, regardless of book category.

2. Book Catagory (poetry, style guide, philosophy, etc.) then alphabetical.

3. Publication Date (first, not most recent reprint or publication of most recent addition[for books containing introductions not found in previous editions]).

4. Publishing House (imprints fall in line alphabetically behind larger house).

5. Class for which work was purchased (Only worked at school and even then only for part of portable library).

6. Biographically (problematic because I do not know why I own a copy of Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do : The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country.)

7. How impressive would I seem at a party if I casually mentioned having read it? (Most to Least.)

8. Brilliance of opening line. This method falls flat unless you are working only with novels and short stories.

9. Mental Illness/Major Vice that served as author's undoing. (ex. Hemingway, Burroughs, and Thompson: Guns; Poe: Mournful, never-ending remembrance...and liver failure; Woolf: pocket full of rocks [so far, she's there by herself])This method is wholly ineffective when the author is still alive and has no known addictions.

10. My own raging jealousy.

Bring on the fanny packs, I think I just hit tacky and classless.

Walt requested that I honor his birthday in some way, presumably with a phone call or card. I did that. Except last week he apparently told the only two people in the in the area who were speaking to me on a semi-regular basis that I no longer required their acquaintance and they listened. This brings the "friends with in a four hour drive" count to a whopping 0. I also finally went to the dermatologist and was prescribed multiple creams that have, so far, only succeeded in make it look like my chin spent a week in Tahiti without packing sunscreen. Compounding this, not only have I not heard back from the therapist my mom suggested I make an appointment with, I'm also now being ignored my the nursing home at which I volunteered to be a reader. To recap:

1. Net loss of friends thanks to my exceedingly helpful ex-boyfriend.
2. face actively rejecting top layer of skin
3. Denied by both medical professionals and old people.

Owning to this most spectacularly shitty week and half I was not feeling particularly honorable, I sent Walt this:

http://www.someecards.com/viewcard/fc76abfbfd3a8d1e090c6239e169bb29

And I'm done.

And that's just what they'll do...

Yesterday, while working on an endless stream of errands (which included going to the dry cleaner to pick up a dress, a skirt, and a pair of pants for which my mom did not have a ticket and had already paid for but insisted the owner had kept because of a stain that required special attention, leaving the dry cleaner with only my dress and skirt because (not completely unsurprisingly) the dry cleaner had no memory of the previous pants-related interaction and then going back to the dry cleaner after mom called the cleaners and promised not to yell...Given the number of bowing apologies made by the dry cleaner when I came back for the pants, I don't quite believe her), I walked into Starbuck(')s for a pick-me-up. I'd hoped to try the espresso truffle, which looks tasty but I never order because I usually get coffee on the way to work and only have time for the ready-to-pour-right-now variety. They were, of course, out of whatever is required to make the espresso truffle and I ordered a Venti Americano instead. But this is not the point of the post. The point is that when I walked in, the barista told me I reminded him of a snippet from the trailer for Pretty Woman. Apparently, something about the way I walk reminded this man of hookers.

I knew I shouldn't have tried the whole jeans tucked into boots thing. I was worried that with my coat it would make it look like I was recruiting for a reformed Nazi party (according to Ian, my coat is alarmingly Teutonic.) I didn't realize that my outfit made me look like I could make a living on Craigslist (I'm like 3,000 roses.) To be fair, he meant it as a compliment and told me I had a good walk. All I could think to say in return was "Well, I've been doing it for about 22 years now."

move along, nothing to see here.

Last night I wrote him a letter I had no intention of sending, mostly because it snarkily outlined his less appealing points. I have a copy on my computer, where it will invariably remain despite having briefly considered posting it anonymously on Craigslist. I, if only for a mili-second, considered posting it not so anonymously here too. That would have been beyond the Pale. Also tacky and classless. I'm trying to avoid both with actively decreasing efficiency. Part of me wants to cop to every accusation and hurt feeling. To take responsibility for all of it and apologize again for all my shortcomings. The other part, when thinking about the last two or so years and especially this last month, wants to run screaming from all of it. The only problem is that I have a decent job, just got accepted to grad school and don't quite know how Bagel would fare on the lam. She does not like to walk for long periods of time and I'm get tired carrying her. I couldn't very well leave her behind though. I suppose I'm stuck.

What's difficult in all of this is how little I can actually say. I told Nicole a lot this weekend while she was in town. The problem is that she isn't in town anymore and I've only really started talking about it beyond vagaries--we grew apart, we just want different things out of life--it's hopeless bullshit and does not begin to get at the point of the thing. The only problem, and it's a rather large problem, is that the way I tell the point of the thing does not put him in the most attractive light. It's downright ugly. It's also ultimately an inaccurate picture because even though I'm the one who did the ending, it's still hurts a lot. It had hurt before and it still does. One of our mutual friends equated the way Walt feels right now to having just had an incredibly large band-aid ripped off. It makes sense, he never really saw this coming... except that that band-aid had been there for a while now and it was starting to gather fuzzy bits on all sides. Maybe he really did not see the bluish outline form around the bandage, but it had been discussed. As much as I want to believe his absolute ignorance when it came to the fuzzier bits, it hurts just the same to think maybe (and contrary to all his recent rantings) he just didn't care enough to to at least spruce it up with a new band-aid, maybe a a little rubbing alcohol, some Neosporin. Stupid is easier to forgive.

I wish I could actually explain this to my friends (the two or three I see in person on a semi-regular basis), gory details included. But they're all his friends too. Actually, they're his friends first. I wish I could talk to them, explain everything and have them tell me I did the right thing and deserve much better than I'd been handed. But I can't and they wouldn't. Even if they did sit through the tirade I've choreographed in my head, I'm not entirely sure they think I did remotely the right thing. I don't blame them for that. It makes a lot of sense. I just can't talk to them. We went out on Sunday afternoon and I had to buy boots afterwards to cheer myself up. It was nothing they did or said but there is a palpable distance and it's sad and I don't need one more reason to sit in my room and be sad.

Before I met him, I spent most every night at home. I'd run out of homework and rent DVDs from the library. Early on in our relationship, he told me he felt bad because we always hung out with his friends and that he'd like to meet some of mine. I didn't know how to tell me that I didn't really have any and that I only went out when my roommate let me tag along to whatever party she' was going to. He'd already met my roommate. Now, I can't get over how it's his friends (really, thats what they've always been) I'd have to explain all of these gory details to. I can't do that. It goes back to the tacky, classless thing. I've already let too much slip around them. I shouldn't; it isn't fair. I get mean and petty when I'm mad and hurt. Even saying this here, knowing full well they can and have already found this, seems hideously passive-aggressive. But I don't have a paper diary. I've never been able to keep one going. I'm sorry about that, the passive-aggressive part that is. I don't mean to be and can only hope this will get ignored. I just had to get out some snippet of something. I've kept it in too long, it's giving me stomachaches and acne.

I had been keeping a list of things about the relationship, things that marked our ultimate undoing. I had hoped it would be cathartic but mostly it just felt pathetic. I've re-read the list and I don't hate him so much (although, I can't help but hate him a little...it will pass, probably quickly) as I hate myself for letting it all happen.

On Saturday night, for a few minutes at least, all they wanted to do was take my picture. I hid to the best of my ability because my skin is worse than it's been in years and I really don't want evidence of that floating around when this is all over. It's hopelessly vain but when you feel like shit you really don't also need to be reminded how closely you resemble it. I should have stayed home. I have the special edition of Hamlet. An evening with a melancholy Dane would have put things in perspective, I think.