The Rose

I've been getting this great "natural spirituality" publication for a few years, The Rose, since my friend Kat worked at Emmanuel Episcopal Church where it's published. I don't quite know how to work in synchronicities and other psuedo-Jungian terms into a sentence. They feel a little like business jargon: "Don't be so siloed! We should synergize to work together". But throwing away some of the loaded language, it warms my heart to spend an evening or two a quarter pondering dreams and connections to the divine, and other things I can't quite explain.

So recently they had an article about how everything is connected. It was pretty technically advanced - Fourier transforms and the holographic content of quantum fields - but I think the gist is that we're connected in ways we can't quite comprehend (but almost can). The one twist on this is that now science is beginning to see the evidence of this connection.

Anyway, I love that I read this article just this weekend, and then this morning called a dear friend who was just going through old negatives from high school and thinking of me. In a non-local, non-temporal holographic plane (that connectedness we can't quite understand), that's basically the same thing as tapping me on the shoulder. Well, almost. :)

Tired

Sometimes sleeping makes you more tired. Why is that? You sleep and sleep and then you wake up and you're far more tired than you were when you went to sleep.

I slept far too much last night, and now I'm paying for it. Go figure! My only saving grace is that I ran for an hour yesterday. Maybe I tuckered myself out...

Anne of Green Gables

A friend of mine from way back - we may have been in choir together when we were 6 years old - put a quick note up that I happened to catch this weekend: "feeling more like a Marilla and less and less like an Anne."

It took me a moment to realize she was referring to Anne of Green Gables. And then it all came back. Many many rainy Saturdays spent watching the 6 hour mini-series with my mom, and when he was little enough not to protest, my brother.

I can't say that I've ever been a Marilla. Practical, rigid, caring in her own "I know what's best and you'll do it!" way. She was maybe a lot like my grandmother, who I adored.

I have very much been an Anne. Impractical, lost in reverie, dreaming big, frequently hot-headed. So much an Anne that for the longest time I simply hated my hair (Anne hates her hair passionately). I believed for many years that my hair was permanently on a bad hair day - even though it never really was.

The funny thing about all this, though, is that of the two, I think at this point, Marilla is a far more exciting name. In comparison, Anne is just plain vanilla.

Surprise, Surprise

I've gotten elaborate with my surprises, recently. I went away for a weekend women's retreat with my church this weekend, but got a little under the weather about half-way through and came home. Maybe I was homesick, or Arne-sick a little too. I thought I'd surprise him, and boy did I. He thought I was an intruder, and I had to wait about 15 minutes before I could even give him a hug!

Then, Wednesday, Jennifer Kain and I cooked up a good surprise for our guys. We surprised them with reservations at Range, our favorite restaurant in SF, to celebrate the release of the Girls Rock DVD. We'd planned to meet at a little Burger Joint around the corner, with our men, and let them in on the surprise (and the fact that we'd *all* be having dinner there). So I lolligagged at Little Otsu, and when we got to Burger Joint, I insisted that since this date was my idea, that I order for us at the counter (so I could just order us fries). Then the fries came! What to do?

I told Arne that we had reservations at Range. He had the biggest smile on his face, but when Jenn and Shane came in, mass confusion ensued. I had to tell Shane that I had reservations for four 3 times before he figured out that we hadn't just happened to run into one another...

Regardless, dinner was delightful, the service was stellar, and our men were truly surprised (and perhaps also a bit bewildered)... :)

The Tour

I got a fun tour of MobMerge this morning very early. Basically, it's a quick and easy forum for using judgments from real people (a la Amazon's Mechanical Turk) so you don't have to do them all yourself. In technology, and search in particular, it seems pretty obvious that there are some good applications. But what I'm breaking my brain over right now is how to design a study with MobMerge that could be valuable for Non-profit Evaluation (which is what I'm currently mixed up in - and really enjoying)...

I can tell that I've most likely gone off the nerd deep end. It's just pretty fascinating. I like all that technology leveraging human intelligence business.

Hair!

Went to see a rough cut screening of what is tentatively called "The Beard Project" yesterday. I quite liked it once I got there. Getting there was all about me trying to turn the wrong way onto one-way streets, but the popcorn I had made and ate nervously while driving helped make it all ok. By the time I'd arrived, all the popcorn was gone, though. I'd hoped to bring enough to share.

I like how good stories are about one thing, and invariably another. This movie's story was obviously about beards, but it was also about being on the margins of society, about how men are asked (or demanded) to conform, about the little things we all do to protect ourselves and about the filmmaker herself.

I can't remember, or better yet, I don't remember because I've never actually seen it, but I feel like the musical Hair might have some of the same themes. How is it that it can mean so very much to do something as simple as not shave your legs (think of the country song "Did I shave My Legs for This?!?")? I remember cutting my hair very short within a month after I moved to San Francisco from Athens, Georgia, in part because I wanted people on the street to leave me alone. It worked, or the attitude that I wore that haircut with worked.

Now that I think of it again, though, I could very well have been cutting my hair when I moved here as an act of mourning. At the time, I didn't have any large bowls of olive oil and brewers yeast covered popcorn to keep me sustained as I kept trying to turn into oncoming traffic.

Scared of Mike

I'm scared of Mike. He makes people vomit. At my wedding, he made about half of the extended bunch of wedding party and party wedding beg for mercy... Well, they would have begged for mercy if they had been able to breathe.

I have totally miscalculated my husband. I now believe that he told Mike that I didn't think his class was super hard. I did forget to mention that I *am* absolutely walking most of the hills and that I'm being very easy on myself, but it has to do with the following. For about five years now I haven't been able to run more than 20 minutes without only being able to walk at a shuffle due to I.T. band problems. (Turns out, the trick is rolling your hips and thighs out on a foam roller. Hurts like the dickens!) So when I posted last that the SF Outdoor Fitness class didn't kill me, I meant that I was still able to walk. What I hadn't yet experienced was the calf soreness that was so intense in the following days that I revolved my entire schedule around how often I had to go up and down our one flight of stairs. And I do *like* to sound badass, even if I'm not.

And now we're off to class, where all my terror come to fruition. If you see me hobbling down the sidewalk in the next few days, know it is *definitely* my fault. I never should have stared/blogged the dragon in the face! Didn't I know when it vomited back at me it would vomit fire!?!