hiking in tilden is good for the soul

i needed to be walked on sunday. i've needed to be walked a lot lately. i will be walked again this weekend. i think the general stress of city living is getting to me. but i am not the only one. some guy went ape shit and drove his SUV into 13 people today. most of this happened in my neighborhood. not good. not good at all. that's on top of the murder spree in bayview. *sigh* it's hard to live in these times. i'm sure everyone feels this way in their own time... but jesus, the freakinginformationsuperhighway has made things so overwhelming. the political climate is overwhelming. the cost of living is overwhelming. the fact that some idiot who lies about killing a little girl eats up this much media attention is overwhelming. burning man is overwhelming. global warming is overwhelming. headshots are overwhelming. factory farming is overwhelming. love is overwhelming. violence EVERYwhere is overwhelming. the lack of dogs in my life is overwhelming. the sheer number of electronic gadgets available is overwhelming.

now i am tired of being overwhelmed. i think i will go see Jen Weed. right now.

oh wow...so i'm not 16 or fat anymore...

ok. so i totally understand that i am 32 years old. i mean, i do. somewhere in this thick (well, actually kinda tiny) head of mine, i do understand. however, i don't understand what it means.... besides being another random number i'm supposed to remember, which i hardly even do, since i keep thinking i'm still 31 for no better reason than it was just really really busy around my 32nd b'day and i just don't even remembering it happening.... yeah - i have no conception of 32.

anywho.... my headshots were taken when i moved across the country at a wee 22 years of age and arrived in the insanity that is San Francisco all excited and bright eyed and bushytailed and ready to take on the fucking world. I looked like this:



i can kinda remember who that is. she was pretty confused and psychotically driven all at the same time. she liked to drink pink wine and talk to strangers. she thought a temp job that paid $10/hour was decent. she thought it was okay to drive an hour out of the city to go to an audition. ah. how things change.

So now I'm trying to figure out who the hell this person is:

http://www.creativeportraiture.com/proofs/arwenanderson/index.html

mr. dog

THIS WILL BE MY DOG.

quick serafina update

she's doing much better. another vet visit yesterday evening for another shot. bloodwork results came back very promising, but still no real diagnosis. More shots next week. But she's eating and flying and flocking and frolicking and preening and pooing and not limping or listing quite so much. *sigh* hopefully this is all a good sign. :)

another words, it's good to live on arugula when the goom is out.

so two posts ago i used the phrase 'another words' to begin a sentence. Oh yes i did. according to proper english, the phrase that i am really referencing/should be using is, of course, 'in other words'. however, as some of you may know, there is a whole dictionary of arwen that i use on a regular basis. Now- i can promise you all that i know this personal dictionary/word cauldron includes lots of things that are generally incorrect and/or flatly do not exist, but that is just one of the quirks that you will have the privilege to experience just by knowing moi.

But *sigh*, it is often brought to my attention that there are lots of people who do not know this about me and therefore, when they come across such an egregious error, they will make the ASS-umption that i am, well, lazy, sloppy or stupid or all three. Or perhaps eccentric. But anyway. The 'error' has been fixed. I decided not to leave it as my own personal inside joke with myself, because I have lots more of those and even though I do know the correct usage of that phrase, I can still certainly at times be lazy and DEFINITELY sloppy and yes, sometimes even blonde. It's all true.

HOWEVER – do not expect me to change my ways anytime soon. As far as I am concerned, Debbie and Michael live on Arugula Street and the phrase 'for intents and purposes' will always come out of my mouth 'for intensive purposes', the moon will be the goom and people will continue to do things awesomer and show their excellentness and i will continue with my anticipatoryness as well. Schweet.

bikes and cars and trucks and dear god highways and...ahhhhh.

just got back from San Rafael. Did a reading of a new play based on a book by Anne Lamott. Was checking out a theatre company whilst i think they were checking me out as I am going back on Thursday for a callback for their next project. It only took 25 minutes to get there, which was pleasing, but i really am not fond of commuting by any other form than bicycle.

Speaking of which, I was hit by a car today. First time ever. Very minor. Very lucky. Just sideswiped as we both tried to get through the pedestrian walkway on a yellow light. As I had to swerve to not hit the pedestrians that were starting to cross early, the car had to swerve to try not to hit me. Luckily, I didn't even fall off my bike. Just hit the left handlebar and my left boot. Was surprising. Felt a bit like Eric Idle in European Vacation. You know what i mean, if you saw it.... because when the nice ladies (who were probably tourists in a rental car) rolled down their window to see if I was okay, and I said oh yes, fine, fine, no damage and well, I guess we probably both shouldn't have been trying to make that yellow light and luckily no harm done la la la.

Last week I went down to Stanford 6 out of 7 days. It was for a new play festival and I worked on 2 of the 6 plays. It was a good experience all around. Good plays. Good people from all around the country (including the Magic from here, and Theatreworks), did some good work, met some really great new people (even some actors that didn't seem insane!) but I feel like all I can talk (complain) about is the commute . It was exhausting. Whether it was CalTrain or the car, it really tuckered me out. You know what? It's so lame. I will stop myself right here. Or I will launch into a huge anti-commute tirade. And I'm too tired.

Serafina ate some of her food today. Plus some carrot. And she's been flying around okay. I hope she's okay. She is the sweetest little birdie. For her birthday, I entered her name into an on-going “name the next new manatee baby” contest through the Save the Manatee Club. I thought that Serafina would also be a lovely name for a manatee.

so this is what my life is...

I've been meaning to ruminate on a most interesting notion that came up in conversation last month whilst out at a birthday dinner with Figgy's parents. I can't remember the specific topic we were discussing, but it was something about life, liberty and happiness and dreams and expectations and the changing face of all those things as you get older and you know, stuff and stuff.... and Figgy's mom, Sam, said "Oh yeah - I call it the 'So this is what my life is.' realization. She said they were sitting around one day and she just kinda realized that as a 30-something sitting with her husband and dog at home and who was in grad school and working on a myriad of other random projects that were in different phases of being done or not, she just kinda honed in on the fact that, well, she wasn't going to be the 'young genius' or the 'young prodigy' or that young person who excelled at and holy shit weren't they amazing and deserving of so much extraordinaryness! And having always felt like someone special and rather extraordinary, it was odd to realize that the idea of 'becoming something big' was not going to really happen in youth and that actually, the life that you are living is exactly what your life is. As in, “oh. So this is what my life is.” I've thought about this a lot since I first heard it and really like it for some reason. We all laughed about it at the time and over pomegranate margaritas it was certainly good conversation, but the more I've thought about it, the more it really sticks with me. I spend a lot of time telling people how happy and lucky I consider myself to be. And I do. And I am. But I think I have always lived a bit in the 'what will be' and 'what i will become' and 'what is still yet going to happen when the BIG thing happens'. In other words, living in sort of an amorphous reality that always has one foot in the present and one foot poking around in the 'what will be when i “grow up (and please god will someone tell me when that happens, because I don't think it ever truly does)”, “'make' it”, “figure out what I'm doing”, “learn all about ”, “get good enough at ”, “get good enough at in order to really try to ”, etc etc etc.' Well.

So. What touched me so much about this idea was the very simple core – that what you have/know/are/understand/do/see right now is exactly where you ARE right now and is exactly what life is and is exactly what your life is. Perhaps this is silly to some of you. Perhaps you've never had these thoughts. Perhaps you've already learned this. But, well, i confess that i did think for a VERY long time that there was some sort of special arwen life that I was going to fall into or was just going to happen to me and it was going to be so freaking extraordinary. Omigoodness, yes it was. Well, it didn't exactly turn out the way I expected. Had you shown me this mirror of myself at 32 way back at 13 or 18 or 22 or even 25, I would have been surprised. Because what I have figured out the longer I ruminate on Sam's amazing little words, is that holy shit... ok. The special arwen life door that i expected or dreamed of back then, did not open or fall upon me. But you know, the life that HAS been woven all these years to end up at this particular point in time turned out to indeed be special and extraordinary after all. Go figure. It just wasn't at all what i expected. Fame and fortune and genius it is not. But i expect that those things are WAY WAY overrated. My life is not. And this seems to be what it is.

get well serafina pekkala....

poor little serafina had to be rushed to the birdie doctor this morning because she was limping and listing from side to side and making funny weird head motions and other strange and yucky things PLUS the other birdies were ganging up on her and attacking her. it was terrible. dave took her to the vet, where he actually had to leave her for the day while they ran blood tests and did a birdie x-ray. poor serafina. so much stress for her little body. we don't know too too much, but the vet said she had enlarged organs, which is never a good sign. she was given a shot of antibiotics and sent home where she has to be kept in a cage alone (so the other birdies cannot bully her) with lots of quiet and resting time and a heating pad. she's not eating very much and she's very lethargic and it's all very sad. she is a wonderful little beta bird and dave and i love her very much. please think good thoughts for her and we hope she pulls through....



here she picks out cd's with the wogdog.

so many things to report on...but in the meantime, CLIMB ON!

i know that i have some heavy duty catch-up to do (MOMWOW - I know that I am supposed to give you Mia and Dave wedding details...). In the past week, it seemed like every time I had a snippet of free time to start to write, something would magically come up and need to be taken care of ASAP. *sigh* it's kinda the way the whole summer has been. do the thing that is most critical and then re-evalute. do the next thing that is most critical...and so on and so forth... and then again, there's that whole thing with getting home at night and not wanting to spend what little free time I have typing... ;) yeah. i do have to admit that.

Dave and I went to an outdoor rock climbing/anchor clinic this morning at Split Rock in Tiburon. it was cold. it was windy. but we perservered. i felt much less nervous this time. :) did some fairly tame climbs, some traversing. had some fun, learned some new techniques about anchor set-up and seem to be in pretty good shape to start to do it ourselves, which is pretty crazy. we can tell you all about cams and water knots and overhand knots and equalization and clove hitches and trees as back-ups and blah blah learning blah.

Dave taught me how to make my own guitar cords last night. it ended up being our 'date'. we got supplies from an undisclosed location and came home and set up shop on the living room floor and hall closet (i.e. soldering station). Dave showed me how to use some new tools, strip the cable, trim the ends, unweave fancy cross-hatched wiring and prep these cable ends for the soldering station. We then moved into the closet/soldering station, where he showed me how to clean/tin the iron, tin the cables and connectors, not leave the soldering iron anywhere stupid, prep the cable for connection, reheat the solder points and connect the positive, negative/ground all to the right places, crimp the connector to the cord and finally, I could pull up the protective sleeve and connector housing and screw it all together. et voila! guitar cords. we made three in varying lengths. I am so pleased to report that at band rehearsal today, they did indeed all work. :) sweet. good date. although I hope I did not inhale too much cancer. or get it through my skin.

also had the chance to quick stop by and say bye to Kati Farkas before she and her husband and baby (!) leave for Illinois.... but that will be saved for next entry.

the best time wasted ever....

so. the one thing i forgot to mention below is that on saturday night, when dave went out with james to a gig, i stayed home with grand notions of cleaning and getting shit done and making piles go away and catching up on e-mail and playing guitar and all kinds of great ideas, but i spent every single minute on this website:

The Best Legal Advice

please go. it will be so worth it. if you need a pick me up, try "The Final Countdown". oh man it's, um, awesome.

we have dave to thank for this one. thank you dave. :)

tired. not as tired as sarah. but tired.

I am soooooo tired. I wake up tired. I drink coffee and still feel tired. I drag my ass to various forms of exercise and feel tired whilst doing it. This tiredness is growing old and needs to pass!

I’m about to go meet dave at the climb gym. It’s been awhile since we’ve both done a real top-rope session, so this should be interesting. Time to battle the stupid heights fear AGAIN.

Tomorrow begins Mia and Dave’s wedding extravaganza weekend. Dave and I will be going to their respective bachelor/ette parties, followed by more festivities throughout the day on Friday and then the real deal on Saturday. Mia and Dave asked Dave (my dave) to write original music for the processional and recessional. I think it was really sweet of them to ask and he’s come up with some good stuff. I’m pretty excited as this will be my first Jewish Wedding and they are doing close to all of the traditional Jewish things to do at a wedding…and I’m so excited to see what they will all be! (although I guess I don’t get to see the 15 minutes in the closet part…) ;)

Did a staged reading on Monday with Word for Word (the 4 Adverbs people). It was really fun. It was a short story called “Preparedness” by Judy Budnitz – it was about a good ole boy tongue tied president trying to prepare his unnamed country for possible attack by an unnamed nation. It’s VERY funny. I got to play a gajillion characters, which was also rather fun. :)

On Sunday night, Jim took us out to dinner for watching his birds. It was awesome. We were going to go to Pauline’s Pizza (which totally rocks and even though we lived a half a block from it for years, it took Mia and Dave to introduce us to it…), but I guess they are closed on Sundays (whatever) and Jim said someone had recommended a place called Ramblas on Valencia (b/n 16th and 17th). It was tapas, which I go back and forth on, but this place kicked ass. I highly recommend it the next time you want/need tapas. I don’t think it was JUST the white wine/nectarine/blueberry/peach sangria talking…it was super yummy.

We also had dave’s friend James in town from the weekend. He was up escaping LA for a wee bit with his friend who had a gig downtown (strange!) on Sat. night. He ended up coming along to Dave’s farmer’s market gig in the morning and then to the afternoon Unity Café gig (where I ended up playing an hour by myself! Which was nice to know that I could do, but I wasn’t totally prepared to give that much Arwen at one time!)

After the gig, we met up with Jeremy and Linda. This time I actually got to meet her (I sort of missed her at Dave’s B’day party) and we had a lovely tasty time at Neecha Thai. They seem so happy and it was good to finally be able to chat with this old friend of Mark and Sarah’s.

Speaking of – we swung by and caught them and Daisy and her gramma-the matzo ball and beth late on Friday night. I got to hold daisy for awhile and have some special singing time with her. She’s really rather amazing, even if she does feed constantly from poor sarita’s tired bosom. Got to see their new apartment for the first time as well.

Before that we had a sort of impromptu dinner at Pizza Orgasmica with Deborah and Michael (which is kinda funny because we were there with them exactly one week prior when they were mere boyfriend/girlfriend and now we dined with them as husband and wife. ;) thankfully, they seemed pretty much the same. Got to do some wedding debrief….find out how the first few days of post-wedding had been and eat some good pizza to boot. Nice.

This was good, as I was sooooooo hungry from my three hours of circus in the morning. I’ve been taking a handstand clinic. Perhaps I’ll talk about that some other time. It’s hard. It’s fun. Afterward, I had to put a few hours in at work and then zoom back to the house to take the fig for a walk. Well, I was rather tired from my classes, but took her out for about 45 min to an hour and when we got back to the house, the goddamn property manager’s car was in the driveway and I had no one to check if it was clear to bring the fig in. I ended up having to hide out in the park in our neighborhood in the cold for almost another 45 minutes. Figgy and I sat on a bench for awhile as I tried to tell myself that it was stupid to get mad about such things and maybe the universe was giving me an opportunity to step up and be a little zen about something. So I tried to enjoy zen-ing out on this park bench, but after not too long, who should wander by, but, SHOCKER – an insane homeless man. He kept mumbling something about ‘my guard dog…don’t sick’em on me…guard dog…mumble mumble…don’t attack…’ and then sat down on the bench caddy-corner to me and totally ruined any kind of zen thing I had going on by continuing to mumble crazy paranoid political crap to himself, which was also working nicely as a running commentary as he packed his bowl. *sigh* I stayed for longer than I wanted to, just to be stubborn, but finally decided to leave when I could tell that I was getting angry again. Dave finally got back from the climb gym and together we were able to get figgy back into the house undetected. go us. :) by then I was not very much fun as I was very cold and totally protein deprived. But somehow, I survived. ;) and lived to tell the tale....