Well, I went to 3 malls today and didn't lose my mind. It always helps to know just what you want and where to get it. It also helps to breathe deeply, smile, and be courteous when everyone around you is a little harried. Yes, in a role I'm unaccustomed to, I became Pollouanna. It helped my mental outlook. I got new workout shoes, blank videotapes and CD-Rs, and new books from the library (see sidebar).

This afternoon, I'll be scouring my tape collection to find the subtitled/undubbed episodes of Iron Chef I have; I'll be copying them for a couple of pals. After that, I need to sit down and make some tough choices on which voiceover classes I'd like to take during the next semester. (I took a break from classes this last semester for budgetary reasons, mainly. I also wanted to save up dough and start preparing to make a demo tape, but that didn't happen at all. Oy.) I'm also considering schlepping out to Concord to see Craig Gass, a comic I've heard do hilarious impressions (of Sam Kinison, Gene Simmons, and Al Pacino's baby) on the Howard Stern show.

It's a nice day so far. We had aerobics class this morning, and a bunch of folks showed up - whoo hoo! This evening, we're going out for dinner. It's a relatively new tradition we'll be observing for the third straight year. My mom could never cook just for 4, so we'd have a big production and leftovers for weeks just for we few in the immediate family. She just got tired of it. It's great fun; if there's anything I love about living in the San Francisco area, it's the deep selection of excellent restaurants, so I think going out for Thanksgiving will be the gold standard for the foreseeable future.

Tomorrow officially starts the period of time I like to call "peace on Earth and get the fuck out of my way." Well, at least my gift buying is done. I'll be steering clear of every mall for the next 3 weeks.

Henry Kissinger was named head of an independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks. Is this some kind of joke? What, you can't dig up Earl Warren to lead a fair and impartial probe? Let me pull a Kreskin and predict the commission's findings: The U.S. could not have foreseen the tragic events that happened. On a side note, Chile had a peaceful transfer of power in 1973.

Headway has been made in the bathroom fixes department. One of the handydudes came by and took measurements. He'll be getting back to us with an estimate by next week. We may have one bathroom done before the soirée. Allow me to be optimistic for a moment. OK, that's enough.

I've been feeling bummed out all week. Just a knot-in-my-gut kind of sadness. Is it a Seasonal Affective Disorder type of thing? I'm not entirely sure. There've been a few times in my life where I felt borderline, if not outright, depressed. The last time I felt that bad was 10 years ago. This isn't like that. It's hard to qualify. Let's just the use the catch-all "I'm still in a rut / need to self-actualize" diagnosis.

Today's topic: laptops or McDonald's coffee - which is more dangerous in your lap? Discuss amongst yourselves.

34 days before Kwanzaa, 33 days before Xmas, 31 days before Festivus, and one week before Chanukah and the start of the traditional time where ostensibly sane people beat the crap out of each other at every strip mall in America, I indulged in my first holiday-related item: a peppermint mocha from Starbucks.

I thought this year my Bad Jewish Pagan Xmas would be relatively low-stress: the family decided to forego gifts (except for my nephew), instead pooling our money for the much-needed bathroom renovations to the house (update: the handyguys have yet to show up to give us an estimate, ergo we're still in shabby-commode limbo). Next thing you know, we're making plans to have a bacchanal the weekend before Mangerpalooza™, inviting something like 40 people over, buying presents for guests' kids, and Mom's talking about renting heat lamps and erecting some Christo-esque barricade on the back patio. I'm very happy that my sister and nephew will be coming down from Washington state to visit us around that time (and no, I'm not just saying that because I know you're reading this and you're going to blab about it immediately to the rest of the family, Holly :-P ). I'd just think something a little more low-key would be preferable. Screw it; my family is pretty damn adept at party logistics. When these parties come together, I'm mainly responsible for getting food, staying out of the kitchen, and sleeping off a food hangover, so I have little room to complain, really. And the people who come over are old friends of the family whom I haven't seen since last year's holidays, and whose company I genuinely enjoy (except when they get into inappropriate and heated arguments about gender and appearance.) But still, I just sense things may get a little grandiose.

It's been a tired sort of week. Not that I did anything particularly tiring - I just think I'm still recovering from the L.A. trip. After getting 3 hours sleep Sunday night/Monday morning, I got up and schlepped to LAX for my ass-crack-of-dawn flight to San Francisco (because I was too cheap to take another day off). After dropping off my car and getting to the terminal, I had to wait in a horrendously long security line. It got down to the wire to where I had to haul ass to the gate and I was the last person who boarded. And then, for the first time, I was subjected to the take-off-your-shoes security check. So that was just a pleasant way to start the morning. Thank God I worked from home that day, so I could toil in a quasi-catatonic state. Tuesday was essentially spent recovering from Monday. Yesterday was a little livelier, with pub trivia in San Mateo in the evening. As part of a two-person team - every other team was multiple folks - we nabbed 4th place, not too shabby.

Today started off just wonderfully. For the second time in recent memory, the Linux class for which I busted my ass to get to work early to attend was cancelled with no prior notice whatsoever. Both me and my manager had to drive a fucking hour to get here for the express purpose of taking the class. Goddamn ridiculous. I've got the O'Reilly book on Red Hat Linux; I'm very close to just blowing off the class entirely.

I'm still in SoCal - just got back from a long and fun day. Quick recap: another deli brunch; seeing just how funny/wacky Alex Trebek is behind the scenes at the end of a two-day taping marathon of Jeopardy!; dinner at a tasty Japanese restaurant in Koreatown; a fanfuckingtastic night of comedy; and now, an extremely abbreviated period of sleep before I haul my carcass to a 6:20 flight to SFO and a drowsy drive home to telecommute. Uh, time to pack and pass out. It's been real - well, about as real as L.A. can get. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

Greetings from Los Ayn-guh-leez

I'm bleary-eyed and a little ragged right now, but here I go.

I arrived at LAX yesterday a little after noon. After getting lost trying to find the goddamn baggage claim, I managed to get my bag and rental car and wind my way to the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, where I killed some time by watching a few vintage game shows in their library. (If you're not a hard-core game show geek, this will mean less than nothing to you: I got to view the only surviving color episode of The Match Game from the '60s, one of two known extant episodes of Jackpot from 1974, and a couple of B/W kinescopes of You Don't Say! from 1964 and Let's Make a Deal from 1965. Quite fun.)

After getting, er, cultured at the museum, I drove west to Santa Monica to hook up with Mark, who was on the road from his job in Burbank. L.A. traffic being what it was on a Friday afternoon, we conferred via cell phone and agreed to hook up at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, to try to make sure we could get into The King of Queens. Be careful what you wish for; we got in for the 6:30 taping, and we didn't get to leave until close to 10:30. It was interesting to see what goes into the creation of your average sitcom - in this case, a fairly amusing Thanksgiving episode (so I guess it'll air on Monday 11/25, which is a hell of a quick turnaround IMO) - but on the other hand, I like to use the sausage analogy. OK, get your mind out of the gutter. Simply put, I like to eat sausage, but I really don't need to see how it's made. Though Kevin James impressed me greatly with the way he ad-libbed (I think) different jokes through multiple takes, just to give them lots of stuff to work with in post-production. Anyway, the taping for Jeopardy! on Sunday should be more interesting and less tedious - with game shows, they have to go live to tape as much as possible to accommodate five episodes in a taping day, allowing for the occasional stopping of tape to let judges make decisions on answers or to fix technical glitches. Once we were sprung from sitcom prison, we ended up back in Santa Monica, indulging in a late dinner and walking down the Santa Monica Pier, a terrific spot that reminds me a great deal of Santa Cruz's wharf and boardwalk.

Today's festivities started with an awesome brunch at Brent's in Northridge. (A wonderful deli in the Valley? I'm kvelling, yo.) A veritable load of lox, a huge schmear of cream cheese, a toasted egg bagel, scrambled eggs and perfectly prepared home fries (crunchy, even slightly blackened on the outside, fluffy good on the inside). Ye gods, what a meal. I got to enjoy it with Mark and Lee, another recent S.F. refugee and an old pal. From there, a quick walk to Target to get sunblock - forgot to pack it, as I didn't think it'd be, oh, 85 degrees in the middle of November - and then a trip south to Silverlake to hang with Seth, an old college pal of Mark's and mine who's also an actor of note. You may have seen him on Nash Bridges, The Big Easy, The Strip, or perhaps you saw him in this legendary film.

We ended up at an old-school beer garden in the neighborhood. Mark and Seth came up to our second-story table with a tale of an older Teutonic gentleman holding court at the first-floor bar. He was most obviously smashed and he started relaying, in a loud tone of voice that drew the attention of every bar patron, the proud story of Prussians saving George Washington's ass at Valley Forge. They forgot what he prattled on about after that, but they remembered his final words, about "...the enemies of the Germans. And we all know who they are." OK, genius, you're in L.A. - not exactly known as Aryantown. Still, it got a hearty laugh out of we three Jews indulging in hefeweizen. Later on, Baron von Shitfaced stumbled his way up to the beer garden on the second floor, yelling (in that warm, conversational bellow of his) to the female bar staff about how back in the day women volks... er, women folk didn't have jobs. How quaint. I hope one of the ladies put something special in his sauerbraten.

From Silverlake we went to Beverly Hills for dinner (just Baja Fresh, nothing chi-chi, thank you) and the Sarah Silverman show. A kind of short production - less than an hour, tickets priced at $40 - but still pretty fucking funny, in an amazingly raw sort of way. We ended the evening by hooking up with Lee again (he performed stand-up for a bunch of disinterested middle-aged patrons at an Italian restaurant in Culver City) and having dessert around the corner from Mark's place.

Mark, Lee and Seth have all tried to warble the siren's song to me, exhorting me to pull up my deep roots in NoCal and come cavort with them full-time. (They even said they could get set designers to create a replica of my NoCal bedroom, horrible faux-wood paneling and all, in my future L.A. digs.) Mark said last night that I'm in a rut and I should really make a clean break and try to pursue my real loves (acting / voiceover / writing) more earnestly, rather than biding my time at the day job. Deep down, I do agree with him. But anyone who knows me knows that I handle big decisions with Mario Cuomo-esque deliberation and glacial action. And I honestly don't know how I'd fare living here. I love to visit - I've come down here regularly since childhood to visit my mom's family. It's a pop-culture funhouse, which appeals to the innate pop-culture slut in me. I may be one of a very few native Northern Californians who doesn't possess a visceral enmity for the Southland. But joining the circus? Or should I say, making the sausage? I don't know if I have the figurative stomach.

I leave for an extended weekend in L.A. tomorrow morning. Have I packed yet? Ahhahahahaahahahahahaha!

It's going to be a fun three days. Staying with my pal Mark (not newlywed Mark, but another pal Mark), who just moved down to Santa Monica after losing his job up here (hmm, haven't heard about those circumstances lately). We'll be seeing a couple of TV tapings (The King of Queens and Jeopardy!, which I'll be scouting) and attending a couple of great comedy shows: Sarah Silverman's one-woman show, Jesus Is Magic, and a mega-show with Janeane Garofalo, The Kids in the Hall, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross of Mr. Show, and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (the one I'm most amped to see). I might even throw down on some low-limit hold 'em at Larry Flynt's Hustler Casino. OK, time to pack.

Ah, the Army: don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue, don't understand a word of Arabic because you just sacked nine linguists based on their sexual preference. Today's homeland security advisory is pink, a new designation which means the people in charge are too fucking stupid and homophobic to care about homeland security.

"Too many people... up in your business!"

My cousins are visiting, eventually winding their way down to their home in SoCal. My mom prepared a pot full of coffee for them this morning, of which I partook a couple of hours ago. This has to be some of the strongest stuff I've had. I am tweaking really hard right now. I'm not a regular coffee drinker anyway, so it may be hitting me more than it would the normal person, but damn. I'm all jangly and I can't concentrate to save my life, which doesn't help when I'm working. Ugh.

This is why I use a Mach3 razor. Well, maybe not, but it sounds good, anyway.

New feature: the permalinks at the bottom of each entry. In case, you know, you ever want to permanently link to me talking about how lousy my love life is. Speaking of which...

For a few weeks now, since around the time Caesar ended, I've re-immersed myself in the "ambivalent about dating" mindset I've occupied now and again for a good 5 months. Until I put up personals ads late last year and the opportunities soon presented themselves, I never truly realized how tedious and soul-killing dating could be. The thought never crossed my mind it'd be such a chore. The women I've dated have been, by and large, really nice and attractive, so that's not the problem. It's just the constant recapitulation of my life with each new date, the mutual sussing-out dance, and the perpetual chemistry experiments that tire me.

Then again, the whole process of dating gnaws at the glaring holes in my social skills. Namely, I can't small-talk if my life depended on it. I just can't. I don't have the schmooze chromosomes. I don't watch The Bachelor or Survivor or The Anna Nicole Show. And then with each new potential relationship, I have to pick the time - or more accurately, have the time pounce upon me and leave me no recourse - to disclose my living arrangement, namely the "Yes, I live at home with my mom, sister and brother-in-law; no, I don't know why I haven't moved out yet; yes, I'd like to move soon; so, do you have your own place?" monologue. I haven't been in touch with my last few personals contacts in weeks. They haven't called or written me, either. I can probably assume those links are kaput. Though I do feel like I should have been more vigilant about staying in touch, why do I not feel at all bad about things playing out like they have?

So: I find myself post-play having to re-assess my priorities. Seems like one (a durable relationship) won't happen (or at least won't happen quite as easily) until the other (moving out) does. So: when will I move out? My friends have asked that for 8 years. They've pleaded, cajoled, ribbed (and not for my pleasure either), taunted, threatened an intervention, you name it. But they gave up a good long time ago. Monetarily, I'd like to save up more and chip away at my credit card debt a little more efficiently before moving out. But I've been saying that for years, too.

And then there's been a sort of oral covenant between my sister and me; that if we move out, the house should be in good enough shape to bring on boarders. A renovation of the bathrooms is coming up - when, I don't know. The whole nebulousness of the timelines and the budget (I'm a part-owner of the house - long freakin' story - and thus will be responsible for a third of the reno costs) kills me. I've just been too tired to ride the rest of my family on getting this started. I think the guys doing the work will be by on Monday evening to assess the bathrooms and give an estimate. Once that happens, I'll have more tangible guidelines on what needs to happen in my budget.

Oh for fuck's sake, this should never have happened. I have the feeling that the Giants will tank next year, and Dusty will tank in Chicago.

We were untriumphant. Placed around 5th or 6th, I think, in a field of 23 teams. Respectable, but not the brass ring. So it goes. Dinner was nice, at least.

Tonight is Trivia Bowl 2002 in South San Francisco. I'll once again be representing Molloy's Tavern, defending the title we won last year. It's a dead day at work. Too bad I forgot to bring the trivia book I just bought.

Here are some shots of me in my costume: 1, 2, 3.