| December 22, 2003 | Jeff's 30th Birthday in LA |
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"I wanna be your Thurston Moore wrestle on the bedroom floor." -- Sleater-Kinney "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"  I just got back to SF from Los Angeles around 1a.m. this morning, completely drained. Earlier that afternoon I had dropped Jeff off on his flight from LAX back to JFK, and then hopped back onto the 405 heading north. If you subtract the total 14 hours spent driving up and down California -- I spent 19 hours this weekend in Los Angeles, and somehow 15 of those were spent awake. I think Jeff enjoyed the celebration. He kept trying to keep it low-key, and then I would announce loudly, "It's Jeff's 30th birthday -- aren't we gonna kick it 'till dawn? Who's in on this?!?" Doesn't he understand that "low-key" isn't even a remote possibility when I'm around? After dinner with Paul, Anne, and Raj at The Galley in Santa Monica, I kidnapped Jeff and Andy and fed them Sparks and other stimulants and drove them up on Mulholland Drive at 4a.m in my rented convertible with the top down and heat on full-blast. Sleater Kinney's "Call the Doctor" was blaring from the speakers as Jeff and I screamed along with the lyrics. As we drove down Beverly Glen, we came down the hill to Belle & Sebastian. Then I drove east on Sunset Blvd through Beverly Hills and into Hollywood so that Andy could take a photo of the neon Yahoo sign. Jeff, Andy and me (and Bocce!) slept on one inflatable mattress on Hillary's living room floor. We slept across the mattress the wrong way so we could all fit, but our heads and feet were hanging off. They're both over 6 feet tall, so I don't think it was very comfortable for them. I went into the fetal position in the middle, so I was perfectly fine. I had a dream that night that we were sleeping in a rowboat out in the middle of a lake. Labels: andy, birthday, bocce, dream, jeff, la posted by Jess Barron @ 5:52 PM 
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| December 17, 2003 | Sunrises over Sunnyvale and the Painted Desert |
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It's still in the forties here in the Bay Area. Maybe the low fifties, and I'm using a space heater to try to warm my room. (Like most old Victorian houses in San Francisco, ours doesn't really have central heating.) And to all the people who are telling me I'm such a wussy complaining about the cold weather -- I'm sorry, but I just think it's my god-given right to wear open-toed shoes year-round OK? That's why I live in California. I have delicate kitten heel shoes and pretty pedicures I'd like to show-off, thank you very much. Yesterday evening Allyson and Jacqueline and I were watching an incredible sunset out the window of their shared cube over the drab gray windowless Lockheed Martin compound next door. It started dark pink and and red as if the Santa Cruz mountains were leaking blood into the sky. It was completely post-apocalyptic. (For visual assistance, here is a photo I took of the sunset over the Lockheed Martin building last year one night after it rained. I took the photo out the same window, and you can see the florescent lights and our office's paneled ceiling reflected in the glass.) "The poor Lockheed Martin workers don't have any windows so they can't even look outside at all," I said, before quickly following up with, "I suppose that's what they get for building bombs." Yeah, I guess we can feel smugly satisfied because we're building virtually harmless internet products. "Do they have sunsets like this anywhere else in the country?" Jacqueline (a Bay Area native) asked. Before Allyson could respond, I said, "No, definitely not. I can't remember sunsets like this in Massachusetts or New York." Jeff called on my cell this morning as I was driving into the office. He flew from New York to Los Angeles yesterday to spend his 30th birthday in the promised land. He's staying at Chris and Hillary's new place, which I was overjoyed to learn is in our old neighborhood near the big-ass Mormon temple on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles. "It's beautiful, Jess!" Jeff practically gushed. Jeff can be a rather stoic guy (we were raised in New England, after all), so I love it whenever he gets excitement in his voice. "It's 75 degrees, and I was watching the sunset from their deck last night. It was really amazing!" "We were watching the sunset in Sunnyvale last night at work too, and one of my co-workers asked me if the sunset is as pretty in other parts of the country. I told her I was pretty sure it wasn't, but is that true, and if so, why?" "I do remember some decent sunsets in Brooklyn, but I think the sky is just always clearer here, so you can see it more," Jeff said. I'm driving down to Los Angeles on Saturday morning so I can help Jeff celebrate his 30th birthday properly. We've been friends since we were 15-years-old, and now we're both about to turn 30. Crazy, huh? Weirder still is the fact that we've both felt like we were 30, as far back ago as when we were 25. (Budding blog archeologist Esther dug up this 1999 blog-post and forwarded it in an email to Jeff and me a few weeks ago, asking, "Do you both *still* feel like you're 30 every day when you get up?" My answer: "No, now I feel like I'm about 22." Jeff and I actually hated each other when we first met first semester of our freshman year in high school. We ran against each other in a student council election. Jeff won (he's a much better politician than I am), and I'm a bad loser. But sophomore year we were two of the only brave students who signed up to take Latin class, so we bonded while translating Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Here is a photo I took of Jeff in front of one of the parabolic dishes at the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico during our incredible "South by South by Southwest" road-trip in March 2002. During that trip we saw one of the most incredible sunsets over the painted desert driving West from New Mexico into Arizona. Labels: allyson, jeff, sanfrancisco, siliconvalley, sunrise, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 7:00 PM
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| December 12, 2003 | The P-Dawg is Not for Pussies |
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"I'm not expecting to grow flowers in the desert but I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime. In a big country dreams stay with you like a lover's voice fires the mountainside. - Big Country "In a Big Country" When we woke up on Sunday, it was sunny. We went to the Ebb Tide for breakfast (I had a goat cheese and spinach omelette), and then drove to his house so he could change his shirt. We watched Trogdor and all the Radiskull episodes on his laptop, until the afternoon sun heated up his tiny room. Then we opened up the windows, I took off all my clothes, and the sunlight trickled in and made patterns across my legs and back. He read me Nietzsche's "Geneology of Morals" while we listened to the Velvet Underground. I watched his eyelashes skim across the pages and his mouth as his lips sculpted out the sentences, and somehow I still managed to follow some of the ideas. When the sun went down we headed to Zeitgeist where we sat outside in the back and shared a pitcher of Anchor Christmas Ale with Andy. After Zeitgeist we stopped at a corner store and picked up some cheese, Syrah, and unfiltered sake and headed to Andy's place where we proceeded to consume all of the liquor, and most of the cheese, but did not have enough combined attention span to finish "The Big Lebowski" or even a single episode of South Park. Andy told us stories about all-boys' boarding school, and when we got tired, we created a new drink by mixing Pernod with Red Bull. We called it the "P-Dawg," and it's not for pussies. Sometime after midnight we were back in my bed, and he read me some Rilke and then we fell asleep. It's cold today -- it was like 42 degrees outside this morning when I woke up. This is about as cold as San Francisco gets, and I can't really take it. Makes me want to move back to Los Angeles. I dunno how I'm gonna handle Christmas in Boston next week. I think it's in the twenties there and no doubt there will be snowstorms. I'm not physically or mentally prepared. I think the next season of "Survivor" should be held in a small, cold Massachusetts town in December or January. The frigidity would surely drive those contestants insane. Another version of "Survivor" I'd like to see would send twelve Mission hipsters to live for one month entirely in the Marina. Yes, that would be entertaining. Labels: andy, august, sanfrancisco, sf posted by Jess Barron @ 9:17 AM
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| December 10, 2003 | SF Mayoral Milkshake |
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"Matt Gonzalez's milkshake is better than mine. And Larry Harvey's Harvey Milk-shake may be the best damn milkshake of all." -me (who else?) Owen and I voted together this morning. We walked across the street to our polling place (an elementary school) at 7:45 a.m. When we put our ballots into the counting machine, he was number 24 and I was number 25. And then the polling people offered us donuts. It was so cute. Matt Gonzalez's milkshake just might might bring all the girls (and boys) to the yard. One of my male friends (somewhat jokingly) said, "I like Matt because he's a hipster guy, and he kind of reminds me of myself." And Selena, who was visiting SF from Los Angeles for Thanksgiving, noticed all the Gonzalez posters hanging up as we walked around the Mission and said, "I wish I lived in San Francisco, you guys have such a cutie running for mayor!" I was listening to one of the big local alternative rock radio stations over the weekend and they were talking about the mayoral race. "This race seems to be all about hair," the DJ said. "I don't feel like I really know anything about where the candidates stand on the issues. It's really more like 'Gavin Newsom has slicked-back short hair, so he's a total Yuppie big-business guy' and 'Matt Gonzalalez has cool messy hair and he's in a band, so he's into supporting San Francisco's artist community.'" Labels: gavinnewsom, milkshake, owen, politics, sanfrancisco posted by Jess Barron @ 10:21 AM
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| December 5, 2003 | My San Francisco Milkshake |
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"My Milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, And they're right "It's better than yours." Damn right, It's better than yours. I can teach you, but I have to charge." -Kelis, "Milkshake" (You really should go and watch the video right now. Really. I mean it.) I'm so busy with work and writing and drinking and kissing that sometimes I barely remember to eat or to breathe. There is so much going on that I'm not even sure how to document it all. My housemate Ric helped me paint my bedroom bright cartoony colors. Microsoft transferred Andrew to Seattle, and I threw him a going away party. Heather and Eugene got married. Allyson started working with me at Yahoo as my co-producer on the broadband portals' content. Selena and Carlos visited from LA for Thanksgiving. Jen had a birthday. Lana got a chihuahua puppy that she wanted to name "yogurt" but she ended up naming "Agent Dale Cooper" after the man we all love. And everyone around me has been so damn productive in their art. As a new friend of mine says, "It's hardly worth noting. That's just something San Franciscans do -- we make stuff." Labels: art, milkshake, sanfrancisco posted by Jess Barron @ 12:26 AM
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| December 1, 2003 | Red Russian Rockabilly Rendezvous |
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Saturday night I went to see a Russian rockabilly band at Slim's. I wore bright red lipstick (for the commies), and I didn't have to wait until the encore before the most adorable boy in the club kissed me. When I saw the blood-red smudge across his lip and chin, I remembered why I like wearing red lipstick so much. Labels: sanfrancisco posted by Jess Barron @ 11:28 AM
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