Resident Alien

One More Dinner Party Tip

2006-04-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

As you know, one of the secrets of happiness is enjoying Flow activities as often as you can. Writing has always been the way I get my Flow on (along with cooking and, of course, shopping for expensive boots). Writing allows me to forget my worries or what time it is, and be completely focused on the moment, so happy I don’t even think to wonder whether I’m happy or not.

Recently I learned that groups as well as individuals may attain Flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Czech psychologist who coined the term, said that a creative spatial arrangement is one way to encourage Group Flow. For example, let’s say you’re having a brainstorming session with your work colleagues, you should have chairs and white boards in the conference room—but remove the table (or, of course, you can keep the table and skip the chairs).

Because of my continued scientific interest in the dinner party, I cannot help wondering how you could apply Group Flow principles when entertaining. Usually my method of inducing Group Flow is to keep refilling people’s wineglasses. Now I’m wondering whether all I need to do is hide their chairs.

But let me return to the subject at hand. A year ago I wasn’t doing enough writing, and so I started a blog. But now I’m writing a lot. Currently I’m getting my Flow fix from a piece for one of my favorite magazines, a new novel, and a couple of other projects. With so much to do, I have to make a choice about where my time and energy goes—and I’ve decided to take a break from Resident Alien. Until I return, I hope that you will Flow.

For God's Sake

2006-04-20T16:42:00.000-07:00

When they knocked down the freeway over Octavia Street, the prostitutes and crack addicts that used to hang out there were driven away. Now the Street is a Boulevard and Hayes Valley has at least four new eateries, including Sebo, where I went last night. Outside, the frosted windows proclaimed its exclusivity. Inside, the décor was understated and the sake menu overwritten. Each sake inspired a paragraph of purple prose. The description of “Heavenly Grace” made it sound better than Tantric sex with a mermaid: “Your palate will enjoy a rush of silky flavors that roll on a viscous fluid that has fruit forward goodness and ends in a watery goodbye.”

Then there was “Reformation”: “If it were a house, the first floor would have wood and straw elements; the second floor, young green vegetables, and the third, a dash of minerals and a refreshing bitter flavor.” Huh? What kind of house has young green vegetables on the second floor? I felt annoyed by this blatant abuse of extended simile, the comparison abandoned almost as soon as it was made. It was simile for simile’s sake, an empty conceit, a single rhetorical flourish that seemed to embody everything that is going wrong with Hayes Valley, and everything that happens once you turn a Street into a Boulevard. Soon, I thought miserably, our neighborhood would be the kind of place where every restaurant has a line and every cocktail has three storeys. I ordered the sake nonetheless, and climbed to the top floor, where I felt much more cheerful, reflecting: "If this house was a glass of sake, everyone who lives here would be drunk."

Transcendence, via the Tealeaf

2006-04-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

Ancient Moonlight.
Black Velvet.
Monkey Picked Iron Goddess of Mercy.
No, these are not the names of medical marijuana strains, but of teas served at Samovar tea lounge in Noe Valley. However, if the menu is to be believed, the teas are almost as potent. Monkey King is “A deep, lingering sybaritic journey,” Black Velvet will “radically improve your day,” and Iron Goddess promises to “penetrate your issues and dissolve them.”

Like most English people, I find the phrase, "a nice cup of tea and a sit down" to be one of the most beautiful in the language. There is nothing like tea to banish the five o’clock blues. Anna, the eighteenth-century Duchess of Bedford, one of the first Brits to serve afternoon tea, claimed that it banished a “sinking feeling” and I think that she was right.

My friend Bodhi, though far from British, is a fellow tea aficionado. She humored me by naming our Burning Man camp “the Desert Tea Lounge” and serving tea in assorted garage-sale teapots. (She sported a skimpy dress that would have shocked the Duchess of Bedford, made of secondhand lace tablecloths.) Last Friday, Bodhi again demonstrated her commitment to tea by venturing out in a downpour to join me at Samovar.

Tea lounges are springing up everywhere these days, aspiring to do for tea what Starbucks did for coffee. Tea’s popularity now doubt owes something to its touted health benefits, but there is another reason that tea is the perfect beverage for our age. Coffee suited the work-obsessed nineties, but tea, which calms you down as well as stimulating you, is more meditative, more suited for our slower-paced times. This is a more spiritual age, one in which we are supposedly more interested in fulfillment than in getting rich quick. I believe that tea, because of its association with Asian cultures, has a vaguely mystical appeal. It is no accident that at Samovar there are statues of the Buddha and of many-armed Hindu deities.

You’d think that I would be overjoyed by the tea-lounge trend, but in fact the English like to drink bad tea (one reason is that in the nineteenth-century, unscrupulous tea merchants adulterated it with dried leaves and chaff and we got used to drinking swill). Our preference for bad tea is a matter of temperament as well as tradition. A nice cup of tea is perfectly lovely, but a “sybaritic journey for all the senses”? Well, it makes a Brit distinctly uncomfortable.

As Bodhi and I scanned the menu, I realized another problem with topnotch tea: it costs six bucks a pot. But then, I reflected, I spent $6,000 on therapy. If Iron Goddess could “penetrate and dissolve my issues,” then at one-thousandth of the cost, it was pretty cheap.

The Haunted Bathroom

2006-04-06T16:26:00.000-07:00

I am feeling perky today. As we say in England, there’s enough blue in the sky to make a sailor a pair of trousers (or maybe it’s just my family that says that). After so many days of rain, a scrap of blue sky is a glorious thing. And so, I discovered yesterday, is a child. No, I’m not expecting one of my own. I started volunteer-tutoring at 826 Valencia.

The workshop that I’m helping out with is a journalism class. Over the course of four weeks, the kids, aged eight to eighteen, each write an article. Then we produce an issue of a newspaper, the Valencia Bay-farer. In the first class, a week ago, we had a brainstorming session. My friend Chris, who was leading the class, asked the kids to come up with as many article ideas as they could in fifteen minutes.
“Unicorns!”
“Britney Spears!”
“Ghosts!”
“My school bathroom!”
“Now that sounds promising,” said Chris. An investigative report on school bathrooms. What about your school bathroom interests you?” The kid thought for a minute, then announced:
“My school bathroom is haunted!” It's hard to teach kids what journalism is.

Marty Seligman, one of my spiritual heroes, says helping others is one of the keys to authentic happiness. This is one reason I volunteered at 826. Unfortunately, I haven’t been feeling the virtuous glow, the satisfied selfish selflessness, that I hoped for. The kids hardly need me, since in the journalism class at least, there’s a glut of tutors, with more than one per student. Plus, I was disappointed to see that the kids all appear to be well-fed and middle-class. Why can’t they get in some underprivileged offspring of crack addicts? Then I’d really feel good.

But while the kids can’t gratify my altruistic impulse, teaching them is profoundly entertaining. It’s really more about them helping me than me helping them. Yesterday evening, in the second class of the course, the kids did research for their articles. One little girl was writing about the Venus Fly-Trap. We listened on speaker phone while she conducted an interview with an expert, the owner of a local plant store.
“Do you have any Venus Fly-Traps?” asked the girl.
“No.”
The girl was flummoxed. The rest of the questions she had prepared were now irrelevant.
“Wing it!” someone whispered. We watched as the little girl thought. Then she said,
“Is it weird to be a plant?”
"I don't know," said the woman. "I've never thought about it."
"Well, what do you imagine?" persisted the eight-year-old reporter. "And is it weird to stay in one place all day long?"
It may not be weird to be a plant, but is very weird to be a kid.

Goodbye, Little Vienna

2006-03-31T16:29:00.000-08:00

While not as pricey as phone sex, therapy is expensive. I can’t bring myself to actually add it up, but I’d estimate that in the last two years, I’ve spent a little less than $6,000 on it. And I’ve squandered hours schlepping to and from my therapist’s office (which is on a block so crowded with therapists that a friend of mine calls it “Little Vienna”).

Therapy was sometimes exhausting, and sometimes boring, but I learned how to do what I call “inviting your feelings in for a cup of tea.” For an English person, that is no small thing. Many of my fellow Brits slam the door on feelings and think that therapy is self-indulgent. I was like that once. Now I think that people who say that therapy is self-indulgent are the ones who need it most.

My therapist was a cipher of a woman, who revealed absolutely nothing about herself. I have no idea whether she has children or how old she is. She has gray hair in a pageboy and clothes that I never noticed. She always remained sphinx-like and unfazed, whether I was crying, rambling, or ranting.

As therapy slowly helped me to change, I began to feel that I owed this woman a great deal. Once or twice I thought about our last session, and how I would bring her a bouquet and a movingly inscribed card or maybe a copy of my book. But when the time came, I couldn’t decide. What’s the etiquette for saying goodbye to your therapist? Should you bake cookies or give her a card or maybe a potted plant? Why doesn't Hallmark make a card for this? Our relationship seemed at once so intimate that nothing could be enough, and so impersonal that anything at all would be too much.

My compulsion to please others was one of the problems that drove me to therapy in the first place. By the time I was ready to end therapy, I was able not to give her anything. I felt that it was enough simply to tell her how grateful I am. And after all, I was paying for her services—enough to buy an umbrella for everyone I know, fly to Baja for a couple of weeks, or have phone sex for two solid days and nights.

The Hal Podger Society

2006-03-29T08:59:00.000-08:00

From now on, I plan to model my life on that of Hal Podger. Who was this Podger fellow? You haven’t heard of him because he was an ordinary man, who worked for General Electric for over thirty years. But Podger also achieved something more difficult than winning a Nobel Prize: he was happy. In fact, we should all hope to lead lives that deserve an obituary headline similar to his: “Hal Podger—a perennially happy man, married 65 years.” Podger married his high-school sweetheart and had six children. He loved cha-cha and home repair. In fact, if he was at a friend’s house for dinner and a door squeaked, “he’d run for his toolbox, humming and singing.” Whenever you asked him how he was, he always replied: “Faaaaaaan-TASTIC!!!”

OK, Hal was probably a bit annoying. No doubt, he was one of those people who won’t say a bad word about others behind their backs (people like that really irritate me). Plus sometimes you just want a friend to get drunk with while listening to Death Cab for Cutie—not someone who does the cha-cha while he unblocks your drain. And then there’s the biggest question of all: Was Hal truly happy? Or was Podger just a Pollyanna, like our friend Mr. Best-Ever, someone whose cheeriness masked loneliness and self-doubt?

I prefer to believe that Hal was indeed happy, and that in the picture accompanying his obit, his smile is genuine. In this rainiest of Marches, we need some inspiration. So in homage to Hal, I am starting the Hal Podger Society, a society of those who aspire to be Podgers—perennially happy people. The Podgers do not evangelize, they simply promote Podgerism by example. Next time you ask me how I am, the answer will be: “Faaaaaaaan-TASTIC!!!”

How to Stay Young

2006-03-27T12:32:00.000-08:00

In California, people often look almost eerily young, and I’ve always wondered what their secret is. Plastic surgery? Raw food? Energy work? Or do they all have ageing portraits of themselves in the attic? Whatever the reason, people here tend to age in California years. To calculate someone’s age in California years, according to the formula I have devised, you divide their real age by 1.3. Thus a forty-year-old who has lived all his life in California will look as if he’s in his early thirties. I came to California four years ago, when I was twenty-six. If you factor in those four California years, I’m actually about twenty-nine (which explains why I still like to go out dancing all night).

My friend Mindy, a glamorous creature with an enviable wardrobe and perfect skin, turned fifty this weekend, which makes her about thirty-eight in California years. On Saturday, I went to her birthday party, which was like a cross between Burning Man and The L-Word. Beautiful women rubbed shoulders with fire eaters, a magician, a candy girl, and a fortune teller. A towering transvestite in pancake make-up handed out miniature latkes with smoked salmon, while a woman in a belly-dancer outfit proffered a sulky boa constrictor.

At the end, guests were given boxes of cookies containing fortunes composed by Mindy. The first one I opened read: “The polish on your toes should never be darker than the polish on your fingernails.” I sat down on a couch and eagerly began disemboweling the rest, as if one might contain the secret to eternal youth.

Then a man leaned over and said, “I have to ask, is that dress vintage?”
“No,” I said. I was wearing an extremely colorful mini-dress that I had chosen because I did not feel very colorful myself.
“Well, it’s fantastic,” said the man warmly. “Honey, you have the tightest look of any woman in the room. I’ve been watching you and you upstaged every woman here, except for the fire-eating woman, and that’s because she was on the stage. Everything is perfect, your accessories, your hair...”

As he continued in this vein, a wave of euphoria washed over me. I felt as if my entire body had been dipped in warm honey. It was a revelation. Who needs mood elevators when you can be flattered by an attractive, well-dressed gay man?
This one was a master at the art of giving compliments, knowing, as so few straight men do, that it’s more important to be specific than to be effusive, that “Your hair is always so shiny” is better than “You look fantastic.” He finished, “And you’ve got just the right amount of make-up, not too much and not too little.”

Mindy was sitting on the couch nearby. “I love your friends,” I raved.
“They’re great, aren’t they?” Mindy said, smiling. As I looked at her luminous skin, I wondered if any of the cookie fortunes read: "Never be without a gay entourage."

Oysters and Dinosaur Eggs

2006-03-23T12:44:00.000-08:00

“I hate the way people talk in Santa Barbara,” said the woman, a slender forty-something in a black pantsuit who had just moved to California from Greenwich, Connecticut. She went on, "They say ‘totally’ too much. And they say ‘stokin’.’ What is that? They’re always talking about ‘stokin’’ and being stoked.”

Personally I like surfer speak. I think it should be used more, not less, and not just in reference to surfing. (For example, “Remembrance of Things Past is a gnarly book”). But just as I was about to tell the woman this, she turned away to find someone richer and more important to talk to.

It was Friday night and my friend Jonathon Keats had invited me to a cocktail party in a mansion in Presidio Heights. Original art covered the walls: a painting of a lobster, a portrait of a girl in a nightgown, listening through a glass pressed against the wall. A doddery butler was serving absinthe at a cocktail station set up next to a grand piano, and a vicar kept drifting from room to room, as if he’d wandered out of a nineteenth-century novel and couldn’t find his way back. Middle-aged art collectors admired the paintings while slurping plates of oysters.

Jonathon and I went into the dining-room in search of snacks. Gaunt women with artfully tinted hair were gazing lasciviously at a silver tureen of brisket. I noticed a box on the sideboard with a cannonball-shaped rock inside it. It looked out of place among the sculptures and figurines.
“What’s that?” I asked Jonathon. He is a conceptual artist whom I admire for many reasons, one of which is that he is always elegantly attired in a three-piece suit. Plus, he makes a mean martini, collects strange things like opium pipes and is that rare thing, a perfect gentleman.
“That,” said Jonathon, “is a dinosaur egg.” Then a friend of his explained that there is a subculture of rich people who collect dinosaur eggs and bones.
I stared at the egg, wondering what was inside it. Then I thought about being rich. Does wealth make people eccentric or do we all have a core of eccentricity that wealth simply allows us to express? If I was stinking rich, would I order custom-tinted M&Ms to match my decorating scheme and hire a personal stylist for my poodle? Or maybe I would start a utopia with my friends on a Caribbean island. Feeling annoyed that I could barely afford to throw a cocktail party, I touched the cold egg and said snippily:
“This is a priceless relic of our planet’s history, not an objet d’art. Shouldn’t it be sitting in a museum for everyone to enjoy?”
“Actually, dinosaur eggs are surprisingly cheap these days,” said Jonathon’s friend.

Twenty minutes later Jordan came to pick me up. We had another party to get to, but I told him to come in so he could say hello to Jonathon and have a few oysters (Jordan loves oysters even more than I love vodka, and there were dozens left). Jordan strode across the room towards me. He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and hadn’t shaved that day. Then the hostess tripped after him, her body rigid with agitation.
“EXCUSE ME” she said, grabbing his shoulder. Everyone stopped talking for a second to look at Jordan. Apparently there are still places in San Francisco where jeans are considered inappropriate. They thought he was an intruder.

Before anyone could press the panic button, I introduced Jordan, apologizing for assuming it would be OK for him to stop by. The hostess apologized too, saying “Well, you can’t be too careful. I’ve heard there are a lot of drug deals going on in the neighborhood.” This only made things worse. I was angry. Of course, it’s understandable that she was a little suspicious: she didn’t recognize Jordan, and he wasn’t dressed for a party and perhaps I should have found her and asked her permission for him to invite him. But even so, she should outwardly have given him the benefit of the doubt. Instead of shouting “Excuse me!” in ringing tones, she should have simply introduced herself. (Even “Can I help you?” would have been better.)

But owning so many beautiful things had made her paranoid. She and her husband could admire the gorgeous paintings of girls and lobsters every day, but they could no longer allow unexpected guests to show up at their parties. What if he’d been black? Someone would probably have brained him with the surprisingly cheap dinosaur egg.

Jordan ate an oyster or two, but had lost his appetite. As the vicar slipped into the garden with one of the younger female guests, we thanked the hosts for having us. I glanced back before we slipped out the door and caught the hostess rolling her eyes.
“That was one gnarly party,” I said.
“Totally,” Jordan replied.

Catastrophe, and Cake

2006-03-14T15:32:00.000-08:00

Maybe it’s the endless rain, maybe it’s a surprise visit from Aunt Millicent, but catastrophe seems imminent. Global warming is upon us, causing apocalyptic weather, and my friends at the Grotto are convinced that a pandemic is approaching. They have organized CostCo trips to stock up on vodka and Gummi bears. They have planned their retreat to cabins in the wilderness (to me “wilderness” is anywhere outside San Francisco). And they urge me to do the same, sending me Cassandra-like emails with subject lines like “you have been warned.” To top it all off, on Friday, it snowed here. What’s next? Locusts raining from the sky?

When disaster approaches, you can adopt one of two strategies. You can rush about procuring canned food and water to stockpile in your basement. Or, like the violinists who kept on playing as the Titanic sank, you can act as if nothing has happening. Whether from laziness or lack of storage space, I have decided to take the latter approach. It has more grace, more elegance, more sprezzatura. Thus instead of buying Power Bars by the case and a battery-operated radio, I have been busy worrying about important things like how to fill a cupcake.

Chow asked me to write a how-to on the subject, and so yesterday I visited Citizen Cake, whose pastry chef, Luis Villavelasquez had agreed to give me a private cupcake-filling lesson. (If you think it sounds a bit kinky, then let me tell you that filling cupcakes is hard work, especially if like Luis, you have to squeeze your luscious buttercream into hundreds of holes a day.)

First I made notes as Luis injected chocolate-mint ganache into a cupcake. Then he tried to show me how to pipe a perfect rosette of lime-green mint frosting on top. But try as I might, I couldn’t master the technique. I wished for his Zen-like focus on the task at hand, but my hands trembled and I ended up frosting part of my notebook instead.

As I wielded the pastry bag, I tried not to think about the mute swans languishing on the shores of the Black Sea, about Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe, or about Aunt Millicent waiting for me at home. But it didn’t work. When I looked at the finished cupcakes, my mouth did not water. Instead I wondered how long Jordan and I could survive if we had nothing to eat but frosting.

The cupcakes I iced weren’t good enough to sell, and I thought Luis would let me take them home. Instead he stripped and re-frosted them. Then he added them to his cupcake army, lined up as neatly as the terracotta warriors buried in Emperor Qin Shi Huang's tomb. I thanked Luis for his help and hurried home in the rain, reflecting that although an all-frosting diet would kill me in a week or so, Jordan could probably live on it forever.

Mocktails and Mars Bars

2006-03-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

The British love to drink and I have always striven to remain true to my national identity and ingest at least the British Heart Association's recommended 1-2 drinks per day. Unfortunately, my freakishly low alcohol tolerance is a disgrace to my native land (three drinks and I get the spins). The nadir occurred one January evening in the Lower Haight, when a mere two (OK, four) G & Ts sent me reeling out of a bar and into a shop doorway. There Jordan up-ended a recycling crate so I could sit down on it and throw up. A homeless person who had stopped to watch said to Jordan sympathetically, “My wife’s an alcoholic too.” But even this experience did not make me give up drinking (although I did give up the vintage leather trench I wore at the time, realizing it was maybe a little too vintage).

Last Sunday, suffering from a particularly bad hangover, I swore to Jordan I was never going to drink again (or eat a deep-fried Mars Bar, but that’s another story). Then that afternoon it rained so hard that it did not seem like a good day to give up drinking.

Obviously, I needed a pep talk. I phoned my friend Bob. He never touches alcohol during the month of January, a regime he has stuck to for the past twenty-five years. Bob raved: “In January, I feel stronger and stronger every day and have so much more energy for sports and jump out of bed with a spring in my step.” But he admitted that his stint of sobriety depresses other people: “They freak out and project their own insecurities onto you.”

This is the fundamental problem with abstinence. It may energize you, but it will aggravate your friends. This is partly because it makes them feel guilty for indulging. But there’s another reason too. Since alcohol makes you feel better in the short-term and worse in the long-term, when you choose to drink with someone, you’re saying that the present matters more than the future, and that this particular evening, right here, right now, matters more than getting up in the morning. Thus, when you order a Shirley Temple, it’s a clear statement of your priorities.

Fortunately, although I have yet to finesse the details, I have hit on a solution. I will become a closet teetotaler, slugging back soda water and acting as if it were a vodka tonic. That way, maybe I can have my cocktail and not drink it too.

Sexual Chemistry

2006-03-04T14:36:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, San Francisco Magazine decided that a sex column was déclassé and dropped “Metropolust.” Fine. I never felt quite comfortable being a sexpert anyway (people always assumed I must be an adventuress). Then the editor asked me to resurrect “Metropolust” as a dating column. Although I met Jordan at the tender age of twenty and have scarcely been on a date, I agreed.

My first dating column was about the Quiet Party (you can read my description of the silent soiree that I attended here). I toyed with various theories about the event’s popularity. But I wanted to see what a sexual anthropologist might say. I phoned Helen Fisher, a professor at Rutgers University and author, most recently of Why We Love (2004). She said that bedroom eyes and body language play a part in the Quiet Party’s success. But according to her, the real secret is dopamine, a neurotransmitter that produces “focused attention, elation, and energy.” Dopamine soars when we have new experiences and also when we’re falling in love. Fisher said: “Studies have found that if you drive up dopamine by doing something very exciting, people are more susceptible to falling in love.” The Quiet Party is nothing if not a new, exciting experience. What could be more novel than writing instead of typing, and silence, instead of noise? If Fisher is right, the attraction of the Quiet Party is not silence itself, but the novelty of silence.

The dopamine factor explains a lot. I couldn’t understand why there are so many new variations on the singles mixer, for some seemed tedious and others borderline humiliating. But now it makes sense. Daters crave novelty, for dopamine is their catnip.

So what does this mean for savvy singles? Must you now tax your imaginations to plan ever more inventive and novel dates? Should you take your crush on a vampire walking tour instead of dinner at Delfina? Should you go kayaking on the Bay instead of relaxing with a nice cocktail? Happily, there is no need. Novelty may drive up dopamine so that two people find each other more attractive, but alcohol, of course, has exactly the same effect.

How to Downsize Your Social Life

2006-02-28T16:44:00.000-08:00

At the start of this year, I received a voicemail from a friend: “Helena, I just want you to know I love you deeply, I love you madly and I’ve made a commitment to spending time with you this year.” (This is how people talk in California. In England, only members of your family tell you they love you, and then only on your deathbed.) I called my friend back. He didn’t answer. I left a voicemail thanking him for his message and saying we should get together. He called back—three weeks later. He wanted to have lunch, but couldn’t pick a date. We swapped voicemails and emails, trying to come up with a plan. Finally, I emailed him, but he didn’t reply. A while later, he left a message: “Helena, I’ve realized I’m too busy to have lunch with you right now, but I love you truly, madly, deeply.” This reminded me of what they told me in creative writing workshops: “Show, don’t tell.”

My friend has decided he doesn’t have time for me right now. That is sad, but I’m OK with it. I’m not OK with empty declarations and half-hearted efforts to get together. This wastes both our time and makes me mad instead of sad.

The problem is that there is no protocol for dumping friends--perhaps because we've never desperately needed one until now. Due to increased mobility and job switching, we meet more people than ever before. And thanks to email and cell phones, it’s now simpler than ever to stay in touch with these people. It’s all too easy to acquire a surfeit of friends. But what do you do when you don’t have time for all of them? We live in the age of Evite—but no one knows how to “Dis-invite.”

There are in fact two ways to get rid of a friend. One way is to tell them directly that you've had enough of them. But then you'll have to explain why. "I feel that we're at different places in our lives right now" probably will not suffice. You'll be forced to insult them. And what’s the point of insulting someone you’re never going to see again? Your criticism isn’t going to change them (if you thought they were capable of change, you wouldn’t be ending the friendship). Honesty in this case is not the best policy.

But if you simply stop taking their calls, you don’t have to explain anything. That leaves your ex-friend free to make up his or her own reason for your silence. (Maybe you lost your phone. Maybe you went back to England for good. Maybe you’re a bitch. But whatever the reason, it’s not that you don’t value their friendship.)Thus although silence may seem a brutal strategy, in the end it is the most polite one. There may be fifty ways to leave your lover. But there is only one way to break up with a friend.

Jagged Little Pillow

2006-02-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

At ten to six yesterday, a crowd waited in Justin Herman Plaza. As the last few minutes ticked away, a nervous anticipation built, as if we were waiting for the New Year. Some people had pillows hidden in bags and backpacks, but others were whirling their pillows in circles as if warming up for what was to come. A mass pillow fight had been announced on Craig's List and on Laughing Squid. The news had spread rapidly and hundreds had gathered. I watched as one group posed for a picture holding aloft identical lime-green couch cushions. A woman slipped by holding a pillow embroidered with a skull. (In San Francisco, of course, a city dedicated to the pursuit of whimsy, it’s not enough to show up to a mass pillow fight, you have to have a creative pillow.)

When six o’clock struck, everyone rushed together and whacked each other with savage joy. I plunged into the melee and blows rained on my head. I quickly understood why some people were wearing crash helmets. When my friend Regan and I decided to go to the pillow fight, we’d imagined that it would be sexy and fun. But a pillow fight with sleepover guests in a soft bed is very different from a pillow fight with a thousand anonymous strangers in a dark concrete plaza. This was more of a pillow war. I’d thought that the pillow fight might attract those looking for a Valentine. Now it seemed that single people had come here to vent their anger at not having one. A poet once called San Francisco “the cool, gray city of love” but last night it seemed like the cool, gray city of sexual frustration.

Soon, drifts of feathers obscured the battle scene and people paused to observe the miracle—snow in San Francisco. Afterwards, there was no pillow talk. One by one, people staggered off, looking stunned and sated. On the way home, I passed one or two people who like me had feathers in their hair and eyelashes, and we looked at each other and exchanged a small, sly smile.

Primal Dumplings

2006-01-25T10:47:00.000-08:00

Would you like to taste my crocodile-wattle-seed dumplings?” This was not an inventive sexual proposition but an invitation to taste a line of fusion gyoza. I was asked to sample the gentleman’s dumplings yesterday at the Fancy Food Show, having finagled a press pass along with my friend Laura. Line after line of booths filled the Moscone Center, and eager sales reps vied to get you to taste their samples. I declined the gyoza, but I gorged on chocolate-covered champagne grapes and lemon-chiffon goat-cheese ice cream.

When I could eat no more, I concentrated on filling the large bag I had brought with me. I did everything I could to get free samples. I dropped the name of the food magazine I sometimes write for, and accepted armfuls of promotional material that I then discreetly ditched. Sometimes I resorted to shameless flirting. It wasn’t enough for me to get a miniature gift box. I wanted the salespeople to dig out the bigger gifts they kept hidden under the cloth-draped tables, the entire cakes and the bottles of olive oil, the industrial-size bags of chocolate buttons. I grew greedier and greedier, and soon I found myself accepting things I did not want, such as a box of Gourmet Seasoning Sheets. I didn’t want to eat any more, I just wanted to take. Grabbing stuff gave me a primal thrill and it is obvious why. Sitting at my computer all day is unnatural. We evolved to spend our days hunting and gathering. As I roamed the convention hall gathering gourmet goods, I was satisfying ancient instincts.

Then my eye caught a pile of beribboned bags of fennel-seed crackers stacked up on a table. I ignored the tray of samples and reached for one of the bags, asking “Can I have this?” as I did so. The handsome Italian running the booth hesitated. Instantly I realized I had violated some unwritten code. You had to be offered a bag. You couldn’t ask for a bag. Asking for a bag was like knocking on someone’s door and asking to join the dinner party you had seen through their front window. The look the salesman gave me was more shaming than a slap on the wrist. When he handed me the bag, I gave it to Laura. I knew that his disdain would make the crackers taste like ash.

On the way home, I felt disgusted with myself. I was a glutton who snatched things she didn’t deserve. And on top of that, I had wasted half an afternoon of writing. I decided that the best way to redeem myself would be to share my bounty with someone hungrier than I was. I rooted through my bag of overwrought tidbits but I couldn’t decide if offering lemon-scented miniature madeleines to a homeless person would be worse than offering nothing at all. When I got home, like a kid after Halloween, I emptied my haul onto the kitchen table and felt slightly nauseous.

Quiet Flirting

2006-01-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

A handful of people sat in a cordoned-off section of the Canvas Café, at tables bearing fresh white index cards and ballpoint pens. They were guests at a Quiet Party, where speaking aloud is forbidden. Instead, you must write everything down. I thought this was a brilliant idea. Here communication would be stripped down to the essentials. People wouldn’t bother with idle chitchat—they’d soon give themselves carpal tunnel. Instead, we would quickly discover how much of what we say about parties is really worth writing down. Maybe we wouldn’t use words at all. Instead we would truly get to know each other as human beings, gazing deep into each other’s eyes, the windows of the soul. Or maybe we’d just play endless games of Hangman.

My friend Chris and I sat down at a table with a pale man in black, and a pretty, curly-haired young woman. Everyone stared furiously at the blank paper in front of them, as if they’d just begun an exam. Then the curly-haired woman wrote: “Have you come to one of these before?” The man sitting to my right passed me a card saying “Hi! My name is Ed.” And a fellow with thinning hair tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a card saying in crabby handwriting: “You have incredible eyes. What do you do for fun?” My heart sank. Instead of distilling what they had to say to its purest essence, people were just saying exactly what they normally would at parties—only it looked twice as boring written down.

The dark-haired man opposite me wasn’t writing anything. Then he slid a message across the table: “Soon someone will crack and speak,” it said. I seized this opportunity to deviate from boring small talk. “Then they will be severely punished,” I wrote. “Sounds like fun,” was his response. I scribbled: “Their tongue will be torn out and fed to pigeons, and then they will be locked in a dungeon, and not the S&M kind.” He flinched. Unable to use my tone of voice to signal that I was kidding, my playfulness had fallen flat. After that, obviously believing me to have a violent, sadistic nature, he wouldn’t look me in the eye. I sat staring glumly into my lap, suddenly afflicted with writer's block.

My therapist once asked me why I wasn’t comfortable with silence. Perhaps she was bored with listening to me talk, but I think what she meant was that in silence I might find the real me. Instead of trying to entertain people with jokes and stories, in silence I might learn to just be myself, or better yet, just be. But persiflage was so much part of my personality that without words I felt as if I was fading away.

Next to me, Chris was flirting with the curly-haired woman, who was giggling like a schoolgirl passing notes. Although the Quiet Party wasn’t a good place to have a conversation, it was a great place to pick someone up. After all, when you’re flirting with someone, your body language matters as much or more than what you say. And usually when talking to someone, you take meeting their eyes for granted. But at the Quiet Party, where people spent most of their time looking down as they wrote, meeting someone’s eyes was a much more powerful experience.

I didn’t want to make bedroom eyes at some stranger. But if I couldn’t flirt, at least I could help other people do so. I started writing “You’re so hot!!!” on note cards and throwing them surreptitiously over my shoulder. When Jason threw a rock among the skeleton warriors, each suspected his neighbor and soon they were fighting each other. I thought my notes would be like his rock, only instead of fighting, people would be exchanging phone numbers. Sure enough, when I left soon after, people were scribbling furiously, index cards snowing to the floor.

Bus Stops and the Blitz

2006-01-12T10:09:00.000-08:00

Due to its versatility, the British word "bollocks" has been called “the Swiss Army Knife of andrological profanities.” Maybe I’m out of touch with the nuances of my native tongue, but I find “bollocks” rather limited. The term "bullshit" is both more pungent and more polysemous. Like “bollocks,” “bullshit” can mean “nonsense, lies,” as in “He’s talking bullshit.” But it can also refer to something that is unacceptable, as in “I’ve had enough of your bullshit” or “The war in Iraq is bullshit.”

The difference between the two terms reflects a difference in national character. The Brits don’t have a word for that which is unacceptable, because their nature is to accept. This trait can be noble (the Blitz) or foolish (the inefficient plumbing). But, for better or worse, Americans tend to expect things to go their way, and to be outraged if they do not.

Take the way people ask for things. On my visit to England over the holidays, a woman approached me as I was taking a shopping basket in the supermarket and said: “Excuse me, would you mind doing me a favor, please? Would you pass me one of those shopping baskets too?” She spoke as if she hardly dared expect her request to be granted, as if she was asking me for a kidney or my firstborn. An American would have used less than half as many words: “Would you grab me a basket, please?”

But perhaps because the terrible weather has forced them to be this way, the Brits are adepts at acceptance. A few years ago I was waiting for a bus in London. As it approached, the people waiting dug out change for their tickets and formed a line. Then we watched as, at the last moment, the rogue bus turned down a different street, trundling out of sight. Americans might have started fuming and saying “This is bullshit!” Without looking at each other or saying anything, the English, with resignation in their eyes, stiffened their upper lips and started walking.

Twelve Drunk Santas

2005-12-21T09:45:00.000-08:00

This is a dangerous time of year, these last weeks before Christmas, for it is the time of year when Santas run amok. Alone, they’re fairly harmless, but when they get drunk and form packs, there’s no telling what they’ll do. If you think I’m exaggerating, let me tell you that two years ago last Saturday a gang of them kidnapped me. Now this may sound rather jolly, part frat-house foolery, part fairy tale, like doing tequila shots with the seven dwarfs, or getting a lap dance from the Easter Bunny. Let me assure you it was not.

I was at Jordan’s office Christmas party at Bruno’s in the Mission. My friend Andrew had decided to come along as well, but he arrived without having had dinner, so we decided to get him a burrito. Jordan, who is always ravenous, wanted one too. When we got back to Bruno’s, a long white limo was parked outside. Santas piled out, including a lady Santa, who was particularly drunk. “Come for a ride with us!” they all chortled. I was torn. I wanted to deliver the burrito but the prospect of a Christmas joyride was too difficult to resist. “Maybe just round the block,” I said.

We piled in with the soused Santas, and in no time I found a glass of champagne in my hand and the outside world seemed much less significant, the way it does from a limo. We glided along, sipping our champagne while the Santas belted out amusing renditions of Christmas carols (“Joy to the world,/The Lord has gum”). A block slid by, then two.
“Turn around,” I said.
“We can’t turn around!” a Santa told me. I begged Andrew for help but he was having too much of a good time (a teetotal Buddhist, he wasn’t used to the champagne). He had decided to stay in the limo, come what may.
“Drop me off here then,” I said, resigning myself to a long walk back.
“Can’t stop!” they shouted. I asked where we were going but no one replied. I would have flung myself out at a stoplight but a particularly bulky Santa blocked my exit.

Tears filled my eyes. At that time I often went out drinking and stayed out until dawn. I couldn’t get a job, couldn’t sell my book, but I did know where all the parties were and exactly how much I could drink without being sick. My life was careening out of control, I felt in that moment. My life was a limo full of drunk Santas. And then it got worse.
“We’re going to the Marina!” they yelled. I gasped with horror. The only thing worse than being kidnapped by a bunch of drunk Santas was being kidnapped by a bunch of drunk Santas and driven to the Marina. The Marina, as locals know, is the LA of San Francisco, inhabited by women with ironed-straight hair and perfect pedicures, and by men in khaki pants who drive SUVs. The Marina is a terrible place. I would rather be taken to the North Pole.

I took a deep breath. “LET ME OUT!” I yelled. The limo screeched to a halt and every one of the Santas turned to look at me. They all had the same hurt, disappointed look, a look that said I wouldn’t be getting anything in my stocking that year.
“Let her out then,” one said huffily and I climbed over the mountainous Santa in my way and squeezed out the door, into the rainy winter night, a couple of miles from the Mission. I had a long way to go but I still had Jordan’s burrito, only slightly squashed, and I was free.

Dinner Parties and Darwin

2005-12-19T12:46:00.000-08:00

As everyone knows, sublimated libido is the engine of social life. It is for this reason that the traditional salon worked so well: the male guests channeled their frustrated desire for the hostess into sparkling conversation with each other. Thus when throwing a party, you should always invite people who are sexually unsatisfied—in other words, single people. Single people create what I call “Single Person Energy,” the magic ingredient in any successful soiree.

The phenomenon of “SPE” has a simple Darwinian explanation. People who are trying to get laid become funnier and more interesting. Thus singles sparkle in a way that most couples do not. (Sadly, many people lose their luster once they find a mate.)

But here is the magic of SPE: it doesn’t matter if the pursuit of sex is real or hypothetical. Even if they aren’t attracted to each other, your single guests will make each other more animated. The couples present are not trying to seduce your single guests (although in San Francisco, anything is possible). Nonetheless the presence of the singles will make the couples more convivial. Single people seem to induce a sexual competitiveness, a kind of biological reflex, making everyone burn a little brighter, drink a little more, stay a little later.

As bay leaves are to gumbo, so are single people to parties: you throw them in and let them simmer away, adding their savor. Just as you take out the bay leaves and put them on the side of your plate, so at the end of the party, you put the singletons in taxis. Of course, occasionally two of your singletons may hook up. While happy for them, this is sad for you. Then they may become another boring couple, and worse, yet, they may move to the suburbs.

Beatitude of the Boulevard

2005-11-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

Taking hallucinogenic drugs is a popular weekend activity in San Francisco. While many cities would discourage this, here the local authorities have provided trip toys. I am referring, of course, to the kaleidoscopes on Octavia Boulevard. I’m ashamed to say I only realized that’s what they were on Saturday night, when a friend ran up to one and put her eye to it. There are twelve in all, slender silver poles with cylinders on top. I’d taken them for speed cameras. But when I looked through one, it transformed the world. The Haight-Noriega bus opened into a silver lotus with a hundred petals. My friend Chris stuck his tongue out; it became a sunset. Octavia Boulevard metamorphosed into an ever-changing stained glass window. And I wasn't even stoned.

When this former “Street” became a busy “Boulevard,” I fretted because this meant I had to wait longer to cross the road. Now when I see the kaleidoscopes, I remember not to be in so much of a hurry. I inwardly thank Gavin Newsom for rewarding trippers and flaneurs, those who look twice at the obvious instead of racing past it. For even though driving gets you where you’re going faster, walking lets you see what speeding go-getters do not get: the heavenly pattern beneath the urban ugliness, the mandala behind the mundane.

But perhaps I'm being naive. It’s hardly safe to tempt people under the influence of drugs to wander around near heavy traffic. Perhaps the authorities see these people not as visionaries but as unproductive idlers, and the kaleidoscopes are a cunning plan to eliminate them.

Dread of Dining Solo

2005-11-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

There are two sorts of people: those who are afraid of dining alone and those who relish it. I’m not talking about fixing dinner at home. I’m talking about taking yourself out for dinner at a wonderful restaurant. Most people think that this is sad. As Epicurus said, “We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink, for dining alone is leading the life of a lion or wolf.” Or, as an Arab proverb puts it, “He who eats alone chokes alone.” (Why do I have so many dining-alone quotations at my fingertips? I have been researching the topic for an article.)

Although I love nothing more than eating alone (toast in bed, pizza in front of the TV), the thought of dining alone makes my skin crawl. But is it possible that I am missing out on one of life’s great pleasures? I asked around my friends and a few lone wolves claimed to love going to restaurants by themselves. “It’s a chance to people-watch,” said one. “It gives me a chance to truly savor the food,” said another. In An Alphabet for Gourmets, no less an authority than MFK Fisher proclaims: “I think human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love, or very alone [italics mine].” I decided it was time to overcome my fear.

Happily, there is a website for people like me, solodining.com, “dedicated to supplying you with all the information and tools you need to take charge of this all-important slice of life.” Apparently there is a name for my condition too: “D.D.S,” or “Dread of Dining Solo.” The inventor of this term, Marya Charles Alexander, calls herself a “solo dining maven”, and she has more than earned the right to do so. This prolific woman is the author of a newsletter, “Solo Dining Savvy” (sadly now defunct), two restaurant industry handbooks (150-Plus Tips on How to Attract & Keep Solo Diners and Solo Diners: The Untapped Mega-Market), as well as a handy guide, "75+ Top Solo Dining Tips", which I immediately ordered.

But as I perused the site, my DDS, rather than diminishing, grew. I’d thought that four or maybe five tips would have been enough to get me through lunch. But if the successful solo diner needed seventy-five of them, maybe solo dining was more challenging than I’d thought. In fact, the very word “solo,” so suggestive of a piano recital, filled me with performance anxiety.

I phoned Ms. Alexander to ask for her advice. “I suffer from DDS,” I explained. “It’s quite severe.”
The voice on the other end of the line was sympathetic.
“Can you share with me some of those feelings of nervousness?” she asked.
“I’m worried that people are staring at me and thinking I’m being stood up or I have no friends,” I confessed.
“Next time you’re out with family or friends,” Ms. Alexander said breezily, “take a look around and see if there are people dining alone and whether they’re enjoying themselves.”
I thought of the last two times I’d been out to dinner. One time, no one was eating by themselves. The other time, I’d had dinner with my husband in a small French bistro. A middle-aged man had sat at the table next to ours. He did not look as if he was enjoying himself.

What were her other top tips? “Take baby steps,” Ms. Alexander advised. She told me how she had become a solo-dining savant. Many years ago, newly divorced, she found herself with a shortage of suitable dining companions. Yet she loved to eat in restaurants. She decided that, rather than suffer through a tedious date, she would take herself out. “I started with lunch and took a magazine or a notebook,” she recalled. “Gradually I worked up to dinner. The whole process could take a few weeks.”
A few weeks? Solo dining was even trickier than I’d thought.

And it got worse. I’d imagined that I would simply show up at whichever restaurant caught my eye. Wrong!
“You should do some reconnaissance first,” Ms. Alexander advised.
Wasn’t she making too much of a meal out of solo dining? But I was determined to take charge of this all-important slice of life. I listened closely as she continued.
“You should telephone to make a reservation. This will set you apart as a discerning solo diner. At that time, you can ask important questions such as ‘Do you attract many solo diners?’ ‘Where do solo diners sit?’ And ‘Are there certain hours that solo diners tend to appear?’”

I was a little worried that this might make me seem like an escort looking for business, but Ms. Alexander was after all, the expert. As we said goodbye, she warmly wished me luck.

As I brooded on it, it struck me that solo dining is a noble thing. We spend much of our time alone, but mostly in private. What could be braver than taking this aloneness out in public, even flaunting it? To dine alone, it seems to me, is to embrace the fundamental solitude of the human condition. To dine alone is to face the fact that we die alone. No wonder I was so afraid of it.

Now I am finally ready to overcome my DDS. I see myself seated at a corner table and sipping a glass of white wine with serene poise. I see myself nibbling on a nice piece of halibut while contemplating the rich human pageant offered by the other restaurant-goers.

First, of course, I must reconnoiter. I have learned from the website that the most solo diner-friendly restaurants in San Francisco are Boulevard, Farallon, Zuni, and the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, where “the staff is ever at the ready with an array of reading materials”. I intend to phone all of them and find out through intensive questioning if they truly welcome solo diners.

Once I have selected my restaurant, I feel confident that my solo-dining experience will be a positive one. For now I have the right information and tools at my fingertips (and perhaps an additional seventy-odd tips if the pamphlet arrives soon). And of course, who knows, I may even solo-dine with someone else. According to Ms. Alexander, if I wish, I can tell the restaurant: “I would welcome sharing my table with another solo diner.” But doesn’t this undermine the whole concept of solo dining? Doesn’t it expose the “discerning solo diner” as a desperate singleton? No, Ms. Alexander assures me, it does not.

The Last Laugh

2005-10-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

These are dark days. Indian summer is over, and the fog and rain have taken its place. Newsom’s ad campaign warns us to be prepared for disasters, and on lampposts there are pictures of earthquakes and lightning attacking toy houses. Yesterday as I watched a Jell-O replica of this city tremble, it seemed a grim portent of the Big One. Trapped at home by the rain, responsible citizens may take the opportunity to review the contents of their disaster readiness kits, inventory their possessions for insurance purposes, or perhaps prepare backup photocopies of important documents. I, however, intend to work on my courtesy laugh.

The courtesy laugh is your fake laugh, the laugh you do when something isn’t really funny and you’re being polite. I used to hate the courtesy laugh, especially when Jordan did it. If my joke fell flat, I’d rather he just didn’t laugh. His half-hearted courtesy laugh, more of a courtesy chuckle really, seemed to add insult to injury.

Laughter has many positive effects, including strengthening the immune system and relieving stress. It also makes it easier for people to work together. It makes people like you more. And happily, it is contagious.

This is all very well, you say, but that’s real laughter. Fake laughter doesn’t have the same effect, any more than Smart Bacon gives the house that delicious bacon-cooking smell. Not so. This is one of those rare cases where the fake version works just as well as the real stuff.

And in any case, when you start doing a fake laugh, it quickly becomes a real laugh. I once accidentally found myself in a laughing yoga class. We had to roll around on the floor clutching our knees and chanting “Ho ho ho!” like demented Father Christmases. In a few minutes, we were all rolling around in genuine hysterics.

Thus the organizers of the World Laughter Tour, “a clearinghouse for the global grassroots laughter movement,” do not bother to amuse their followers. Instead, they teach you how to laugh without the aid of jokes, or even tickling. In these dark times, when nothing seems very funny (not even a Jell-O Frisco), this is a useful skill indeed.

If you can laugh when nothing amuses you, in time you may be able to laugh when things actively alarm you. If you practice hard enough, you may even be able to laugh during a major catastrophe. Let’s face it, in the event of a tsunami or a terrorist attack, batteries, a radio and a few Power Bars aren’t going to help you much. Why not finesse your laugh instead? Unlike a disaster readiness kit, the courtesy laugh is free, and as a final gesture, it has a kind of elegance. Practicing it may not protect you from the apocalypse, but at least you can chuckle in its face.

The Scary Corner

2005-10-24T17:43:00.000-07:00

There is a corner of San Francisco where it is Halloween all year long. In the Outer Mission, my friends Bodhi and Jeff have created a ghoulish nook in their apartment. In the corner they have hung a lurid painting of a horned demon, as well as a ouija board and a collection of throwing stars. They’ve also nailed up a tiny mirror with a pewter woman gazing into it. If you peer at her reflection, you see that her face is a skull. In addition, there are various portraits and figurines of clowns, some sad, some grinning, all striking fear into the onlooker in the way that only clowns can.

When I first visited their apartment, Bodhi told me that this part of it was called the “Scary Corner.” The Scary Corner was a shrine to what frightens us most (and thus, ultimately, to death itself). The Scary Corner was a memento mori, like the skull in a still-life of fruit, or Corpse Pose in yoga.

At first I did not like the Scary Corner, and tried not look at it as I passed it on the way to the bathroom. But over time, the Scary Corner became less scary. It turns out that if you incorporate death into the décor, you transform it into something comparatively harmless—kitsch. In fact, the Scary Corner actually made the rest of the apartment seem cozier.

As a child, I tried to make my rocking horse less frightening by hanging a pair of knickers on its head. Instead, it looked more terrifying still. I learned that you should not try to conceal your fears, since that makes them even worse. But as an adult I’d forgotten this lesson. Now, instead of ignoring my fears, or worse, trying to hide them under a pair of knickers, I think I may create a shrine to them. I can only hope that one Scary Corner in my apartment will mean fewer scary corners in my soul.

An Affronted Adonis

2005-10-11T14:43:00.000-07:00

My friends Emily and Elizabeth had VIP tickets to a fashion show last Friday, and invited me to join them. It was in the Regency building on upper Van Ness. In the lobby, tense, beautiful women, rich men in suits, and male models were milling about. The air smelled of custom-made fragrances.

The woman checking names off the guest list wanted to know who I was.
“This is Helena from San Francisco Magazine,” Emily said briskly. Before I could say debate her use of the word “from”, the woman said:
“Well then, you must have front row seats.” Next thing I knew, Emily had swept us away to the front row, where every seat had a bag of presents on it. There was shampoo, moisturizer, a tiny soap tied up in gauze and ribbon, and an enigmatic utensil I decided was a designer bottle opener.

At the after-party, pink drinks flowed freely. The name of the vodka company sponsoring the event was etched into giant bottles carved from ice. Waiters glided through the crowd with trays of brooch-sized hamburgers that nobody ate. The guests were more interested in the cock rings that waitresses clad only in white teddies were offering round on silver platters.

The only place to sit was on white leather ottomans strewn with pink flowers. Technically I think they were for VVIPs, not just VIPs, but after a certain number of pink drinks, I felt myself to be a VVIP. A male model with impossibly long eyelashes recognized Emily and came to join us.
“What did you think of the show?” Emily said.
He pouted a little.
“I think the outfits were too revealing. Having your nipples on view might be appropriate for a sensuality event but not for high fashion,” he sniffed. I stared at him, thinking him a total prude. Then I thought about it. The show had been a little racy towards the end. You could see the models’ nipples through their diaphanous shirts. The last model sported only legwarmers, a turtleneck, and a thong.

I wondered if living in sex-positive San Francisco had made me blasé about this sort of thing. I’ve seen so much bared flesh at Burning Man, the Folsom Street Fair, and other places. I’ve seen people dressed as clowns having group sex and beating each other with a rubber chicken filled with whipped cream (I’ll explain another time). You can understand, then, why at this point I scarcely notice half-bared nipples. And the offer of a cock ring? No more shocking than a cucumber sandwich.

Towards Better Dinner Parties

2005-10-07T17:25:00.000-07:00

Now that I do not have a big project taking up all my time, I intend to entertain more. As I have said before, I am fascinated by positive psychology (the scientific study of happiness). And as part of my attempt to apply its lessons to my dinner parties, I am considering the introduction of a new ritual.

Before I explain, we must go back to my first Thanksgiving, back at Oxford in 1996. It was organized by some homesick American students that I knew. In those days I was severely malnourished, due to the Oxford student’s typical diet of custard and spotted dick. As soon as we sat down to dinner, I reached hungrily for the sweet potatoes. But before I could dig in, the hostess announced:
“OK everybody, let’s hold hands. I want to take a moment, go round the table, and all say what we’re thankful for.”

The English are a self-deprecating nation. The idea of publicly dwelling on all the good things in my life made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. I wriggled in my chair as one by one, the other guests held forth about the dinner, the other guests, their families and recent academic triumphs. (One woman was grateful for Bobby, her golden retriever whom she had left back in New Jersey.)

Here in California, my dinner guests often pause before the meal begins to give thanks. Well, thanksgiving is the wrong word, since there is no higher being involved to whom the thanks are being given. It’s more a moment of appreciation—sometimes just of the meal and the company, sometimes of other things in their lives as well.

I found this a little cloying until I learned that science has shown that expressing gratitude makes you happier. In one experiment at the UC Riverside, psychologist Sonja Lyuobmirsky asked subjects to keep a gratitude journal—a weekly record of things they were thankful for. Over a six-week period, her subjects’ overall satisfaction with life improved significantly (whereas the control group felt no better than before). And at UC Davis, psychologist Robert Emmons has found that gratitude journals improve physical health and raise energy levels.

It seems safe to assume that expressing gratitude will improve one’s dinner parties. Yes, it all sounds very new age, but that’s how people felt about meditation twenty years ago. Now it’s been shown that meditation has profound physiological and mental benefits. Could gratitude be the new meditation?

The problem is that, being relatively new, the moment of gratitude is not shaped by set conventions. Might I suggest the following?

Keep it short: Avoid the tendency to ramble.

Shun repetition: This is boring. If you’ve nothing new to say, say nothing.

Share: The first person to speak often takes all the low-hanging gratitude fruit (the meal, the present company), leaving others with little to say. Don’t be a gratitude hog.

When it came to my turn at that Oxford Thanksgiving, I mumbled something about being happy to be there. Repressed little soul in velvet trousers that I was back then, I did not imagine that I would one day move to a land where people regularly use “share” to mean “say.” And I certainly did not imagine that it would be a place where people like to give thanks all year round.

The Dread of Doilies

2005-10-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

My therapist is constantly urging me to feel my feelings, but I find that it is much easier to avoid them by channeling them into obsessive-compulsive behaviors. So, when at the start of this week, a mysterious dread crept into my heart, I decided to clean the apartment from top to bottom. I scrubbed the floors. I washed the sofa covers and the shower curtain. I got rid of everything I would never use, including a Candy Whip of uncertain provenance. (It wasn’t edible any more, if it ever had been.) I threw away a pair of boots I’d worn at Burning Man, too dusty ever to wear again.

At first, I felt invigorated by the gradual triumph of order over chaos. But the more I cleaned and organized, the more dirt and disorder I saw. I found one humdrum task after another, mending the torn binding of my favorite cookbook, dusting my computer keyboard. I was about to organize our nonfiction alphabetically by subject, when I discovered a little tome that I bought at a garage sale for fifty cents: Organized Closets & Storage, by Stephanie Culp.

Ms. Culp’s advice on vacuum cleaners: “Get rid of exotic attachments you know you will never use. Vacuuming is a chore, not an art.” Her thoughts on doilies: “Do remember that doilies were made to be used, and if you’re not really using yours, but can’t bear to part with them, they should be moved out of the active storage area and put away with other mementos and heirlooms.”

Ms. Culp seemed to inhabit a very different world with me, one in which people have state-of-the-art vacuum cleaners and get overly attached to doilies. In my world, it is vibrators that have exotic attachments and Burning Man costumes that I find hard to part with. As I stared at the photograph of Ms. Culp on the back cover, with pancake make-up, a weak smile, and a white blouse buttoned to her chin, I wondered from what dark place her lust for order sprang. I realized that I would never be truly organized, and I didn’t want to be. I would rather face the mysterious dread I felt than end up counting doilies.

Enlightened Abs

2005-09-29T10:17:00.000-07:00

When we moved to California four years ago, one of the first things we did was join Crunch gym. We just couldn’t help ourselves. We loved the state-of-the-art exercise machines and the spray-tanned sylphs doing Cardio Strip. The funky purple and yellow chairs were shaped like fists doing a triumphant salute. The slogan, painted on the wall, was “No judgments!” but in a place where half the clientele looked like extras from The Matrix, there was no need to judge. I particularly liked the staircase studded with sparkling lights that led to the changing-rooms. It was flanked by semi-transparent shower stalls, showcasing the sculpted outlines of people soaping themselves. Crunch cost twice as much as 24 Hour Fitness, and I didn’t have a job. But we couldn’t resist it.

After yoga class, I always chose one of the showers facing the staircase. I shampooed my hair, feeling an exhibitionistic thrill. But after a few weeks, I noticed that few people gave the shower stalls a second glance. At first I thought maybe they didn’t want to look like voyeurs. Then I realized they were too busy checking out their reflections in the mirror facing the staircase. It hit me why the showers were there: not so members could look at other people, but so they could enjoy the thought of being looked at.

Yoga classes at Crunch cater to this narcissism. The teachers there don’t waffle on about “drawing energy from the earth” and “feeling the fluffy cloud within.” Instead, they put you through grueling sets of crunches, knowing that what members want is not yoga minds, but yoga bodies.

I enjoyed this for a couple of years. Then I realized that yoga was more than just a workout. Yoga was something you do within. Slaving over my abs used to make me feel virtuous. Now it no longer satisfied me, and consequently, neither did Crunch. (Plus, after several changes of management, the place had gone downhill and frankly, the people there were just not as good-looking as they used to be.)

I asked the teacher, one of those yogis whose posture is so perfect they seem to float an inch above the floor, why we had to do so much work on our abs. He gazed at me serenely.
“It’s not so we can get better abs—we’re strengthening the core.” As he glided away, I realized I did not know exactly what the “core” was. But obviously it was different from abs—more internal, more profound. I’m always eager for short-cuts to spiritual growth. Now when we do crunches, I feel virtuous again, as if I’m working not just on my six-pack, but on my soul.

The Guidelines

2005-09-20T17:55:00.000-07:00

On the Fourth of July weekend, instead of hanging out in the city, slumped on the couch in front of our latest NetFlix, we decided to spend a couple of days in the country. A friend had told us about a place called Orr Hot Springs. It sounded perfect. By day we would swim in the freshwater swimming pool and catch up on back issues of The New Yorker. At night, we’d fall asleep in our little wood cabin listening to the crickets chirp. Our friend warned us that Orr was “clothing-optional” but I pointed out that at Burning Man we have seen people who have not only shed their clothes, but have daubed their genitals with gold paint and decked their nipples with clothes pins. Frankly, nothing can shock us at this point. In fact, I imagined that we might even make new friends, with whom we’d play board games, discuss our favorite Dylan albums, and prepare delicious healthful meals in the communal kitchen.

When we arrived, someone was strumming a guitar on the verandah of the main building. The reception desk was fashioned from a single glossy piece of redwood. An earnest, sandy-haired fellow called Leslie gave us the key to our cabin. At first he seemed a gentle soul who said “live” instead of “belong” (“the detergent lives under the sink”) and “share with” instead of “tell.” Yes, it all seemed idyllic at first. Then Leslie said, “I’d like to share our Guidelines with you.”

The Guidelines were set out in a leaflet, and we could have perused them on our own. But Leslie insisted on going through them with us, one by one. The Guidelines stressed the necessity of showering before entering the hot springs and cautioned guests never to address anyone wearing a “red silence bead” (available at the front desk). All guests had to keep their food in plastic bins, one for the pantry and one for the refrigerator, and all bins must be labeled with the owner’s name and the date. Guests were not to sit down to dinner without first washing their dishes. Most importantly, the Guidelines urged guests to report “inappropriate behavior” to the front desk immediately. Inappropriate behavior included “any action that creates an uneasy feeling, or that personally offends you, including persistent staring, [and] crowding of personal space.”
Feeling faintly stunned, we promised to abide by the Guidelines. I refrained from pointing out that since the Guidelines were compulsory, they were—strictly speaking—Rules.

The hot springs dampened our spirits further. They were small and tepid. Nearby, a stone crocodile spewed water into a murky swimming pool. On its concrete banks sprawled various people with abundant pubic hair. Some were deep in improving books such as Creative Visualization and The Scythe of Saturn. Others were busy doing plow pose or other elaborate exercises that showed they had no hang-ups about their bodies.

When we arrived on the scene, everyone seemed to turn and stare at us. I felt like the hero of an old Western, entering a saloon in a strange town. I knew why we were attracting attention. We were wearing bathing suits. (This was partly in deference to our friend Emily, who is from the East Coast and is not a fan of nudity.) Orr was supposed to be clothing-optional. But the hostile gazes we received made it clear that clothing was forbidden.

We didn’t make any new friends by the swimming pool. We didn’t make any friends in the kitchen either. The other guests had filled their neatly labeled food bins with quinoa and nutritional yeast. They looked supercilious when we unpacked our instant oatmeal and canned refried beans. “I’ve realized what’s weird about the kitchen,” Emily whispered to me as we struggled to locate the tequila we had brought with us. “Nobody is interacting with each other.” It was true. No one met anyone else’s eyes. But I felt as if they were secretly watching each other, waiting for someone to transgress the Guidelines. I told myself it was just paranoia from the pot I may or may not have smoked earlier in the day. Then a woman with free-flowing hair, an ample bosom, and Incan jewelry approached me as I was washing our dishes at the sink. I thought maybe she was going to offer me a homemade vegan cookie. Instead she said: “I like to rinse everything in water before I wash up—even if it just contained water.”

I was shocked. Why was she such a bitch? And why was no one looking at or speaking to us? Do nudists really hate the clothed that much? No, I realized, they were scarcely talking to each other either. The problem was Leslie’s Guidelines. They made you too scared to talk to anybody, in case they were sporting a silence bead you hadn’t noticed. They made you too scared to look at anybody, in case your behavior created an “uneasy feeling.” Most of what the Guidelines said was just common courtesy. Without them, everyone would have got along just fine. Instead, the Guidelines destroyed peace and love by making them compulsory. After dinner, I couldn’t help noticing that some departing guests had failed to scrub out their plastic bins and felt a strong urge to report them to the front desk.

Travel Weariness

2005-09-09T18:03:00.000-07:00

For the last few months I have neglected my blog disgracefully. This is because I took on a writing project for a travel website. I had to produce twenty guides to twenty places I have never been, from Baja to Zanzibar. For some deep-seated psychological reason, I took this job far too seriously, shunning stock phrases like “vibrant culture,” “land of contrasts,” "a friendly race," and “rich history." Instead, I filled my guides with local detail. How did I do this? Through assiduous research on the Internet. OK, maybe my imagination occasionally came in handy too. (Writing about places I have never visited may seem a trifle unethical, but if the number of errors in other online guides is any indication, it is commoner than you might think.)

In between completing these guides, I took a couple of vacations of my own. But now I look back on the summer, I realize that the places where I didn’t go remain most vivid: the jaundiced face of Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed corpse in his Hanoi mausoleum, the scent of cardamom and cloves drifting from the spice plantations of Zanzibar, the tumbledown pavilions of Wat Phou in Laos, the guinea-piggish dassies scuffling on the slopes of Cape Town’s Table Mountain. I feel almost as exhausted as if I had actually visited all those places, but I’ve earned myself a couple of months to write what I want to write. It feels good to be home.

Flattering Jotting

2005-07-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

We should all do our part, however small, to make those around us a little happier, and often we can do this easily and without spending any money. One way to do this is to carry a small notebook, preferably leather-bound (which makes it look more important). I have several friends—artistic types—that carry these notebooks, and occasionally when I am out with them, something I have said inspires them to make a note. Then I feel very proud. Sometimes it is a word (once it was “dandle”). Other times it is the name of a book or movie (last night my friend Lev carefully wrote down The War of Art). Even if everything else in my day has gone wrong, even if I have lost the war of art that day, I feel that I am of value if I enriched someone else’s notebook.

Last night, as I dandled a cocktail on my knee, Lev recommended a book to me too, possibly called The Persistent Cockroach. Unfortunately, I did not have a notebook in which to record the title, but only a crumpled receipt, and so do not remember. From now on, I intend to carry around a small notebook, because whether or not I ever use any of the things I write down in it, I will certainly give my companion a small feeling of triumph. And if I particularly like them, I may get it out twice.

Sex and San Francisco

2005-06-22T09:35:00.000-07:00

I am about to start writing a column for San Francisco magazine that will follow the romantic lives of 10-12 characters on an ongoing basis, and I am looking for people to be in it. They will represent a sexual spectrum of San Francisco. They could be gay, straight, bi, polyamorous, or polymorphously perverse. They could be married, single, or living in a “quad” with another couple. They could be looking for love in the online personals or striving to perfect their orgasm in weekly sex cult meetings. They could be a long-established couple looking to spice up their sex life with a course in Tantra, or they could be a teenager who has signed up to True Love Waits. I think of the column as “Sex and the City” meets "The Canterbury Tales".

Will you tell me your secrets or do you know anyone who will? (Please note that it’s more important for you to like telling stories about your sex/love life than for you to have wild adventures.) If you are interested, please email me: helena.echlin@gmail.com.
One last thing: it is completely anonymous (only I know your identity). You get the exhibitionistic thrill of baring all--but without having to move to another city.

Selfless Sleuthing

2005-06-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

Kids, unfortunately, require regular attention, and blogs are the same. So it was very wrong of me not to blog for a month. I admit that. But I expect to be forgiven every peccadillo when I explain the selfless endeavor on which I have now embarked.

Ever since I married a New Mexican salsa addict, who loves salsa the way I, an Englishwoman, love a cup of tea, I have been searching for the perfect salsa. Papalote’s, a little Mexican restaurant on 24th and Valencia, is famous for its salsa, which has an incomparable rich, deep tomato flavor. One online review opined, “Their salsa is like crack.” I now plan to unlock the secret of Papalote’s addictive salsa. I don’t want to diminish the profits of the Escobedo family, the owners of Papalote, so I have no plans to manufacture the salsa for sale, or even publish its secret on the Internet. I simply wish to delight Jordan and my friends with this piquant condiment.

Of course, the Escobedos have ignored requests for the recipe, which means I have to figure it out on my own. Happily, with the advance of modern technology, reverse-engineering recipes need no longer be a matter of trial and error: DNA analysis will unveil a dish’s ingredients. But although I hunted high and low on the Internet, I could not find a US lab that would analyze my salsa. Europe, it turns out, is far ahead of the US in food DNA analysis. I won’t go into the reasons here, but it’s to do with GMOs, BSE and foie gras.

After a little research, I located a French company called Gextrack that specializes in food analysis. They will tell you if there are traces of pig in your pudding, or whether that fillet of cod is really scrod. They are also experts in exposing fraudulent foie gras (contaminated with pork or chicken). But can they figure out the riddle of my relish? A fellow named Monsieur Robert has been kind enough to take an interest in my mission. This morning I sent him a detailed email asking him if Gextrack can identify the DNA of, say, a jalapeno. If so, I will immediately overnight several pounds of the enigmatic salsa to France, where I imagine men in white lab coats will pore over it as if it were semen from a crime scene.

If Monsieur Robert and his colleagues do uncover the ingredients of the sphinx-like salsa, the implications are revolutionary. In the future, no recipe will remain mysterious for long. There will be no more secret sauces, closely guarded through generations, and Colonel Sanders must finally reveal his blend of eleven herbs and spices.

I eagerly await my answer from Monsieur Robert. Although of course, even if his team can identify the salsa ingredients, I still have to figure out how they were cooked. I may have to divorce Jordan and marry one of the brothers Escobedo.

Sacred Nook

2005-05-10T21:23:00.000-07:00

The weekend before last I was given a sacred talisman at a housewarming party. Well, first I was given a sausage. Yes, I’m vegetarian, but I really needed that sausage. I had partied too hard the night before and was feeling extremely weak. My head was throbbing and, frankly, there are times when nothing will do for a girl but a sausage. I begged Jordan to bring me one. Sure enough, it revived me somewhat. Seeing that I had perked up, my friend Caroline asked me how my work was going.
“I still haven’t sold my book,” I said.
“Have you been visualizing?” she demanded reproachfully.
Caroline is one of the toughest, smartest women I know. She was a firefighter for thirteen years. Yet she once hired a psychic to help her figure out why her cats weren’t getting along, and she believes in lighting a candle and visualizing the future you want. She is one of those types so common here: otherwise hugely intelligent people who turn out to cherish some wacky belief—in reiki, say, or numerology. When you meet them at parties, you have a fascinating conversation and then they use a phrase like, “My life coach says…”, or “Let me guess your sign.”
“I haven’t been visualizing,” I admitted to Caroline.
“Do you have an altar at your house?” asked our friend Jeff. Jeff is another one of these people. He is a wonderful writer and storyteller, but he has not one but several altars. I don’t know if he believes in astrology, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
“I don’t have an altar,” I confessed.
“What you need is a lucky talisman,” Jeff said wisely. “In fact, I think I’ve got one with me.” He removed a folded square of brown paper from his wallet. Then he hesitated.
“Do you at least have a place for sacred objects?”
I do not believe in talismans but for some reason—perhaps I thought it would cure my hangover—I desperately wanted whatever was inside the brown paper. So I improvised.
“I have a sacred nook,” I said grandly. Actually it was an empty window ledge where I’d been planning to put a Buddha, when I got around to buying one. I decided not to tell Jeff that there was nothing in it at the moment except for a dead fly.
Jeff opened the paper and showed us the thinnest square of gold leaf.
“Gold can be hammered to the thickness of a single molecule,” he explained, “and this piece of gold leaf is lighter than air. If I opened this piece of paper, it would float upwards.” He told us that he had acquired the talisman at a Buddhist temple in Thailand, where locals stick these scraps of gold onto statues of the Buddha with KY jelly. This practice is supposed to bring good luck.
I thanked Jeff warmly for his generous gesture then we went home and fell into a profound slumber. By the time we woke up that evening, my head had stopped throbbing. We ordered a pizza, ate it then went back to bed. I forgot about the talisman, and my sacred nook sat empty, although someone left an empty whiskey bottle on the ledge on the other side.
I don’t believe that the Buddha can control my destiny, any more then I believe the psychics can resolve disputes among cats. But the following week, I was assigned a wonderful travel-writing project out of the blue. I started work on my third novel and a children’s book and my head swarmed with ideas. For the first time in a long while, I was happy.

Sans Blog

2005-05-09T16:47:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday morning a fire knocked out about 2,500 phone lines in the Market/Octavia area, and since then we have had no phone and no Internet access. Thus, although I have composed new blog entries, I have not been able to post them (I write now in a coffeehouse where I have to pay by the minute for Internet access). Being without home Internet access does not bother me as much as you would think. It means that I cannot fritter away my time researching frivolous topics such as who made the world's biggest rubber band ball. Since you ask, it was a Welshman, who was then paid by an American TV company to drop it from a plane flying over the Arizona desert to see if it would bounce. (It did not.)

Detached from the Internet, I have been extremely productive, and I've realized that ninety percent of the email I send is mere idle chatter. But being without my blog is painful indeed. I feel as if I hardly even exist. I am as forlorn as a Welshman without his rubber band ball, wondering what he will do now. Hopefully they will restore phone service on Wednesday as they have promised. Otherwise, I may fade away altogether.

The Zen of Telemarketing

2005-04-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

In the fall of 2001, I couldn’t get a job. The economic slump, which hit San Francisco particularly hard, meant that there were no jobs. I tried phone sex, but it didn't pay. Then I tried phone sales. Five evenings a week, I attempted to sell season tickets for the San Francisco Symphony, calling anyone and everyone who had ever attended a concert there. I worked at a plastic desk in a windowless room with fluorescent lights and, this being California, a plug-in Zen garden in the corner.

But despite the soothing sound of trickling water, selling tickets was a tough job. Michael Tilson Thomas, the director of the Symphony, favored jangly modern music over classical favorites like Beethoven and Mozart, 9/11 had made people frightened to travel into the city, and because of the recession they were reluctant to squander money on symphony tickets. Morale sagged. Some of my fellow telemarketers stopped trying altogether, since even if you didn’t make sales and earn bonuses, you still got the base pay of $10/hr. In theory, at some point they would kick you out if you made no sales, but as far as I knew, this had never happened. People sat around drinking the free Swiss Miss and reading the celebrity gossip magazines concealed in their laps

Doug, our boss, was depressed too. He was a tall, pale man with fidgety hands, perhaps from punching in so many phone numbers over the course of the years. Then one day, he read a book called The Zen of Selling: the Way to profit from life's everyday lessons and had an epiphany. Everything we needed to know, he declared, was contained within this book. He insisted that we all read it. The book was written in a cryptic style that seemed very wise, with advice like: “Forget the selling. Let the customer do the buying” and “Most of the time we don’t communicate; we just take turns talking.” The essence of the book was that salespeople should stop treating customers as adversaries and start treating them like people.

I could see why Doug liked this idea so much. He was a gentle man who brought his own camomile tea to work and was incapable of firing anybody, out of place in the ruthless world of telesales. Of course he loved the book, which portrayed the relationship between customer and salesperson as compassionate and mutually enriching, and selling of any sort as a noble calling. In its last pages, the author rhapsodized thus: “When your eyes greet those of the customer as surely as a light in a reflection, and when smiles pass between you like a gentle breeze, then you know you are where you should be and want to be.”

Unfortunately, Zen was no more help with telesales than wabi sabi with retail design. Even when we started treating them with compassion and respect, people still weren’t interested in the symphony. Apathy descended over the office again, but I was determined not to give in. I went to the library and got out a book on how to sell the old-fashioned way. There was nothing in it about your eyes greeting the customer’s eyes. It was blunt and to the point. Salespeople should flatter the customer and let him do most of the talking, since people like to be listened to. Also, they should reflect back or “mirror” the customer—agree with everything they say, like everything they like. “People will see through this,” I thought. But amazingly, they didn’t.

From then on, I flattered customers shamelessly, so much so that one man asked me out. I listened to people’s stories, because some people want to be listened to so much that a telemarketer is better than nobody. But the best trick of all was mirroring. At the start of the conversation, instead of asking people right out whether they wanted to buy tickets, I asked them what music they liked. And whatever they liked, I claimed to like too. On one call, I’d agree: “Yes, I love Beethoven and Mozart too—there’s just so much passion in the classics. Modern music is dry and inacessible.” On the next call, I’d say: “Yes, I love modern classical music too. I find it so much more intellectually challenging.” One woman told me that she didn’t like the symphony because “I’m overweight and the seats are too small.” I mirrored right back: “I totally know what you mean. I’m a large person myself. But what I do is sit in the aisle, that way I feel a little less constricted.”

That was my first sale. It was pure ecstasy. No one had ever told me how incredible it feels to make a sale. Adrenalin flooded my veins and I tingled all over. Often working in the phone program, I felt a little hopeless, worrying if I would ever get a better job or even succeed in that job. But for one delicious moment, even though there were no gentle breezes and I could not see myself reflected in the customer’s eyes, I knew I was where I should be and wanted to be. Soon after, Doug quit, the miniature Zen garden died from lack of natural light, and I left to take a slightly better job.

The Breakfast Pizza Omwich

2005-04-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

I decided to move to America soon after I discovered American poetry. I loved its restless quest for the new. I loved innovators like Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Lowell, who trampled on convention and wrote in novel ways about things that had never been written about before. I longed to live in the land which had fostered such dazzling originality.

Sad to say, soon after I moved here, I lost all interest in poetry. But I developed a new interest: fast food. In the fast food industry, I saw the same relentless creativity that I had admired in American literature. Barely a day passed, it seemed, without news of some new creation: Pizza Hut’s Twisted Crust Pizza; Burger King’s Fiesta Whopper Sandwich; McDonalds’ McFlurry Sundae. And then, in 1999, Dunkin’ Donuts unveiled the Breakfast Pizza Omwich. This magnificent sandwich was to obsess me for months.

At that time in the industry, portmanteau words—such as “omwich” and “croissanwich”—were in vogue. But the Breakfast Pizza Omwich went one step further. It was a hybrid portmanteau. It was a sandwich and an omelet and a pizza and you could eat it for breakfast. It was so daring as to be virtually inedible. How on earth did they come up this thing? I brooded about this day and night. Probably this obsession was a symptom of some unsatisfied psychological need. But I had not been through talk therapy back then and had no way of knowing this. All I knew was that I had to know—I had to know—how they came up with this baroque flight of fancy they called a sandwich. Finally I could stand it no more. I telephoned the Dunkin’ Donuts headquarters, which were in Randolph, Massachusetts, within driving distance of Somerville, where I lived at the time.

I told them I was a British journalist and they put a PR woman on the phone.
“British readers are fascinated by product innovation in the American fast-food industry,” I informed her confidently, “and I would love to be a fly on the wall at one of your product brainstorming sessions.”
I waited for her to invite me to company HQ, where I would sit in a conference room stuffing myself with free donuts while snack-food masterminds bounced around ideas like the “Cajun Cornbread Gumboburger” or perhaps the “Breakfast Crumpet Frittatwich.”
Instead, there was a chilly silence.
“Impossible,” she said finally. “Our concepting techniques are highly proprietary. We absolutely cannot reveal them to a journalist.” She was worried, it turned out, that industry competitors would discover their special methods and use them to invent an even better breakfast sandwich. I badgered her for a while, but she stood firm. Then I insisted that she have her superior give me a call.

Several days later, he did so. I grilled him for information, but he wouldn’t give me any. He refused to answer when I asked if they had ever thought of fusing a doughnut with a hamburger.
“I’ll give you a quote and that’s it,” he said.
“That’s better than nothing,” I said sullenly.
“The Breakfast Pizza Omwich,” he announced grandly, “is revolutionizing the breakfast sandwich landscape.” He hung up before I could ask him what the breakfast sandwich landscape looked like.

After speaking to the breakfast-sandwich revolutionary, I burned with even more curiosity than before. What were these proprietary concepting techniques that were so coveted by their competitors? I was determined to find out. I read industry press releases, and learned that over at Pizza Hut they were revolutionizing landscapes too: “Innovation Transforms Pizza Landscape,” crowed the press release for their “Revolutionary Twisted Crust Pizza.” I read What Were They Thinking: Marketing Lessons you can Learn from Products that Flopped by one Robert McMath, a product-innovation expert who maintained a museum in upstate New York of over 73,000 failed products, from Clairol’s Yogurt Shampoo to Gerber’s Singles, a baby food for adults. (Sadly, the museum allows only corporate visitors.)

Finally I chanced on the Web site of a Kansas-based company called New Product Insights, Inc. They listed Dunkin’ Donuts among their clients. As luck would have it, New Product Insights, Inc. explained their special concepting technique right on their Web site. Aha! Finally, the truth! The special technique was something called “Mega-Brand Modeling”—a way of extrapolating new-product concepts using computer modeling based on similar current product attributes. Mega-Brand Modeling, in other words, was a way of turning out minute variations on the same thing. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? The Omwich, the Crossanwich, the Pizza Omwich—they were all basically the same sandwich. The fast-food industry managed to create a constant slew of new products without actually introducing any novelty.

McMath , the owner of the failed-products museum, had noticed this widespread dearth of originality. His new-product research firm, Marketing Intelligence Service,gave a special Innovation Rating to products it considered “new and different.” In 2000, of the 13,373 new items lauched, only 6.6 percent of them were considered genuinely new. Part of the problem was that while it was easy to come up with a genius idea like the Chicken McNugget in the 80s, now people were running out of ideas.

But in any case, fast-food moguls aren’t that interested in originality. New ideas cost money and in a competitve market, they can’t afford to go wrong. Besides, if they introduce something too different from their previous offering, they risk brand dilution. Avoiding actual novelty, they aim instead for the appearance of novelty.

Why bother even maintain this appearance? Launching new products attracts customers to stores. And new products produce a “halo effect” in the category, regardless of whether they sell. Whether or not people bought the Breakfast Pizza Omwich, after its launch, they bought a lot more breakfast sandwiches. In the years that followed, Dunkin’ Donuts would roll out the English Muffin Spanish Omwich and the Biscuit Pizza Omwich and the Maple Cheddar Breakfast Sandwich. Yet no matter how many times they revolutionized it, somehow the breakfast sandwich landscape always looked the same.

Admonitory Finger

2005-04-15T17:11:00.000-07:00

In England, people signal meticulously when changing lanes, so when I moved to America, I was shocked to see how few people bother. In a public-spirited attempt to correct them, when I drove I began using a gesture called the “Admonitory Finger”—wagging my index finger back and forth as if scolding a small child. Unfortunately, this gesture did not work as well as I had hoped. Sometimes people mistook it for the Finger (although technically I used a different digit) and responded in kind. Sometimes, people did reform their signaling (but only if I chased them up the highway). Mostly, they just ignored me. Then, one suffocating, humid day in Boston, I used the Admonitory Finger on a middle-aged man in an SUV. Already frustrated by the heat and traffic, he snapped, turning the Admonitory Finger into a malicious dance. Stuck by his side in the gridlocked traffic, I was forced to watch as he waggled both index fingers and waved his arms in the air, a fiendish grin on his face. His satirical pantomime seemed to go on and on. I never used the Admonitory Finger again.

At that moment, I gave up my naïve belief that I could change other people’s behavior and make America more like England. Later, I adopted a new gesture, “Existential Hands.” One turns one’s palms to the sky, perhaps with a slight shrug, as if to say: “You ought to signal when changing lanes, but since life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, it matters little whether you reform your ways.” People didn’t like Existential Hands, but they liked them a lot better than the Admonitory Finger.

When I moved to San Francisco, I rarely got a chance to use Existential Hands, since I walked nearly everywhere. From time to time, when I was crossing the road, someone would nearly run me over, usually a driver talking on their cell. As a civic contribution, I invented another gesture, “Disapproving Hand Phone.” I paused in front of the vehicle, put my hand to my ear in a phone shape, and raised my eyebrows. Of course, most people just carried right on with their phone conversation (although one or two revved their engines).

As I became happier, more relaxed, more tolerant—more Californian—I wondered if I should drop the Disapproving Hand Phone. After all, you can’t change other people, you can only change yourself (and then only with extensive talk therapy). If you try to change other people, all you do is annoy them. Besides, I told myself, these people would be punished in their next incarnations.

But this morning, my faith in annoying hand gestures was restored. As I was crossing the road on my way to yoga, a man in a sleek sports car noticed me at the last minute and screeched to a halt. Of course he was on the phone. Automatically, my hand flew to my ear in a phone shape, but for some reason, instead of raising my eyebrows, I smiled. To my amazement, instead of ignoring me, he raised two fingers from the steering wheel and gave a tiny, apologetic nod.

The Art of Elegance

2005-04-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

It is well known that when times are hard, one should take more, rather than less, care with one’s appearance. Last year I worked as a proofreader in a junk mail company, a job I hated. You should have seen the lovely tea dresses I wore to the office every day. Dressing up made me feel less down, and my dresses-only policy lent structure to what seemed a formless life. I hated my job but needed the money. I wanted to write a third novel, but lacked the courage to begin. My office work left me too drained to make a plan that would allow me to earn money and write. I had no idea what the future held. Elegance was my weapon against entropy. I did not know what I would be doing in six months time, but I did know that I would be wearing a nice dress.

Elegance does not come naturally in this era of down-dressing, of jeans and baseball caps. Fortunately I discovered A Guide to Elegance (1963) by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux . In the Introduction I learned that Ms. Dariaux had honed her expertise working in a Parisian couture house. “From my earliest childhood,” she wrote, “one of my principle preoccupations was to be well-dressed.” Quite right too.

Reading on, I learned that the well-dressed woman is a dressed-up woman. She avoids trousers and always puts fashion before comfort (“comfort is the Public Enemy Number One of elegancy”). Elegance, for the most part, means dressing with restraint and discretion. Career women in particular should avoid “frilly trimmings, printed materials, aggressive colors, shaggy woolens, very lightweight fabrics that are certain to wrinkle, and skirts that are too short.” Shocked, I realized that a full ninety percent of my wardrobe was not Elegant!

I have always thought of myself as a reasonably Elegant person, but apparently I was wrong. I was ignorant of all these sartorial truths:

 The size of your handbag should be in proportion to your own: “it is just as comical—and needless to add, inelegant—to see a tiny woman lugging about an enormous satchel, as it is to see a portly dowager clutching a tiny purse to her ample bosom.”
 “Make-up is a kind of clothing for the face, and in the city a woman would no more think of showing herself without make-up than she would care to walk down the street completely undressed.” (How I shuddered to think of the many times I had showed myself in public with a naked face.)
 Never shop with girlfriends: “Since she is often an unwitting rival as well, she will unconsciously demolish everything that suits you best.”
 Your raincoat, rain hat, and umbrella should match, as should your dressing gown and bedroom slippers.

Nobody said elegance was easy.

Genevieve would have been horrified by the apparel anarchy of San Francisco, where in the course of a single day in the Upper Haight, you might see someone in a clown suit, someone with a single spike piercing both eyelids, and someone in a crinoline made out of plastic forks. The fashion ideal, in San Francisco, is Originality, not Elegance.

Genevieve admired Originality too, but in her view few women can pull it off. Rare is the woman whose fashion sixth sense inspires her “to unearth an old egg basket in the attic and transform it into a beach bag, or to wear her grandfather’s pocket watch around her neck on a long chain.” Most women, in attempting Originality, simply achieve “comic effects,” which, Genevieve warns darkly, are “justifiably feared.” In fact, pulling off Originality is easy—one sees it in San Francisco every day. The challenge is to be Elegant too. It is one thing to be Elegant, and another to be Original, but few manage to be both.

Profound Parties

2005-04-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

At a dance party a couple of years ago, I saw these words on the wall: “Who are you? You are what has always been.” This was not a drug-induced revelation, but an actual motto, hung up on the wall, its frame decorated with plastic flowers. As I drifted round the club, I found other maxims on the walls. In the main room, a table draped with a velvet cloth formed a makeshift altar. On it sat the Buddha and other Eastern deities, candles, a crystal or two, and a couple of owl feathers. The party also featured a “midnight ritual.” The music stopped, the revelers were told to form a circle, and a fire dancer gyrated in the middle. Then a tall, imposing man stepped out of the shadows. He told us that “conscious partying” (surely a tautological phrase) could bring about “world change.” In short, he believed that partying ought to be taken very seriously.

The man, I came to learn, was known as Dr. Syd. His Opel parties belong in a San Francisco tradition of what one might call parties with a point. In the sixties, for example, the Diggers staged processions in which they proclaimed the death of money and gave out free food at mass picnics. There were be-ins and love-ins, whose fuzzy idealism was continued in rave culture. Then there’s Burning Man, the ultimate party with a point—for some people claim it is about much more than frolicking and foolery. One newsletter quoted an anthropologist, Rob Kozinets, arguing that Burning Man is part of an ancient religious tradition of “transformational gatherings that catalyze political and social change.”

The West Coast is supposed to be the antithesis to the buttoned-up East Coast. But there’s something profoundly Puritan about the idea that even fun ought to be good for you. You’d think that such high seriousness would dampen Syd’s parties, but it doesn’t. They are amazing events—lovely people in fancy dress, beautifully decorated chill spaces with furry pillows and silken canopies. At every party, people go up to him to thank him. Yet somehow he never seems very happy. In a sea of happily dancing ravers, Dr. Syd towers above them, with a slightly mournful look in his blue eyes, as if brooding on the difficulty of bringing about world change.

The Come Dancing Smile

2005-04-04T18:31:00.000-07:00

Until recently, since I could not smile on cue, and as a result, I always looked glum in photographs. No longer! Earlier this year I resolved to overcome this deficiency and develop a camera-ready smile. The result—an expression I call the “Strictly Come Dancing Smile”—has been a magnificent success. In photo after photo, I look almost revoltingly happy.

The Come Dancing smile was inspired by a popular English television show, "Strictly Come Dancing" on which professional ballroom dancers are paired with minor celebrities. The professional teaches the celebrity a flashy dance routine, and the couples then compete against one another. While watching this show in England when I was home for Christmas, I noticed that the professional dancers maintained a radiant smile at all times. After studying this smile for several shows, I realized that the secret was simple: just show your teeth. However fake this smile may feel, it looks genuine. (In my case, it looks more genuine than my real smile.)

Smile experts, it turns out, have already discovered the Come Dancing smile, and given it a name. They call it the “Pan-Am” or “Pan-American” smile (named after the grins of flight hostesses in ads for that now defunct airline). I learned this from a book called Authentic Happiness, which I am reading as part of my ongoing pursuit of nirvana. According to this book, there are two types of smile—the other is the “Duchenne” smile, named after its discoverer Guillaume Duchenne. I’m not sure how you can “discover” a smile, which is not the kind of thing you find lurking in a Petri dish, but apparently he did. The Duchenne smile is genuine. The corners of your mouth turn up and the skin around your eyes crinkles. The Pan-Am smile, by contrast, is an inauthentic rictus, in which the lips part and the corners of the mouth are stretched out to the sides, rather than up.

According to Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychology professor and savant of smiles, the English do the Duchenne smile more. This led to a gloating article in the Times, in which the English smile is lauded as “restrained but dignified,” and the Yank smile is decried as “far less expressive.” In fact, I suspect that the Americans do the Duchenne smile just as much as their British brethren. But in situations when the Englishman might look glum, the American opts for a Pan-Am. And what is wrong with that?

By the way, I hope you were smiling in your college yearbook, and I hope it was the right smile. This is an accurate predictor of whether you will be happy. As recounted in Authentic Happiness, Keltner studied 141 senior class photos from the 1960 yearbook of Mills College. All but three of the women were smiling, and half of the smilers were Duchenne smilers. When the women were contacted 30 years later, Duchenne women were on average more likely to be happily married and satisfied with their lives. The book does not say what happened to the non-smilers, who perhaps became the trio of homeless crack addicts outside my window. And what lies in store for those who, like me, did not bother to contribute a yearbook photo? Apparently, a fate too horrible to mention.

Disco Buddy

2005-04-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

Adolescent as it may be, Jordan and I both love dance parties. Most people get this out of their system in their early twenties; we did not and thus must make up for it now. On Saturday, we arranged to go dancing with our friends M and R. We were driving to the party, when M phoned to say they couldn’t make it. They were canceling, literally at the last minute.

Sadly, this is common behavior among my friends. In this case, they canceled for a good reason and are forgiven, but most people bag for flimsy reasons, often claiming to have a sore throat or headache. In fact, the problem is a “disco cold”—a psychosomatic ailment they have developed because they don’t really want to go dancing. Sometimes this is because they feel depressed about not having a job, sometimes they don’t like the job they have. Sometimes they feel depressed about not having a girlfriend or boyfriend. I try to explain that the function of dancing is to distract them from these woes. But when they choose to languish at home, I always have my disco buddy.

My disco buddy is a man I hardly know. I call him my “disco buddy,” because he loves to go out dancing. He always wants to dance and he always knows where the best party is. He calls us in the middle of the night with music throbbing in the background, insisting that we join him. When I run into him at parties, he’s always a whirling dervish of energy, a tireless Pan in a blue feather boa. This is not the result of that insidious condiment, “disco salt,” but of his natural joie de vivre.

Our shared passion for dancing is the sole basis of our friendship. No doubt we would find more in common if we got to know each other, but that is not necessary. Being disco buddies is enough. Besides, the relationship between disco buddies has set parameters—like that between “friends with benefits.” Suggesting to my disco buddy that we get to know each other better would be a terrible faux pas, like one of the friends suggesting that they date.

Jordan and I went to the party without our friends and danced for an hour or so. Then, I am ashamed to say, our energy flagged, perhaps because we had failed to take a disco nap earlier in the day. And we didn’t see my disco buddy, even though he’d planned to be there. Was it possible that even he had finally succumbed to a disco cold? Had he let his problems crush him, instead of turning to the one thing that could distract him from them? The very idea chilled me to the bone. But sure enough, at 3 AM, he called, having just arrived at the party.

Two Theories of Dinner Parties

2005-04-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

I am having a dinner party this evening, and one of the couples who are coming will be particularly hard to impress. They both work in the wine industry, and they are used to eating fancy food in fine restaurants—sea urchin fritters and foie-gras-stuffed quail—cooking that I cannot hope to rival. Since they are both charming and well-mannered people, no doubt they’ll say they like everything, but will they really? I intend to apply a simple psychological principle to ensure that they do.

The "peak-end rule" says that how positively you remember something is dictated by a) The peak moment of the experience and b) The end of the experience. Take the loud noise experiment: One group had to listen to a piercing loud noise for eight seconds. The second group listened to the same noise for eight seconds, and then a slightly quieter noise for eight seconds. This latter group rated their experience more positively—even though they had to listen to an unpleasant noise for longer. Another experiment often cited involves subjects receiving a colonoscopy, but since I am of very delicate sensibilities, I will refrain from giving the details.

My dinner party, of course, will not resemble a colonoscopy, but the same principle can be applied. According to the rule, instead of having a consistently good quality of food and conversation, you should aim to have a magnificent high point and finale. You are thus better off serving boxed macaroni and cheese followed by a flaming, brandy-doused pyramid of profiteroles than, say, a pleasant main course and dessert. And instead of being moderately witty throughout the evening, you should aim to tell a single brilliant anecdote.

Of course, your guests might enjoy a consistently pleasant evening more than a mediocre evening with a high peak and end point. However, they will remember the latter as being better. One could debate for hours whether a lovely experience or a lovely memory is more valuable. But it is definitely in your interest for your guests to have the lovely memory—that way, they will be sure to write you a thank you note.

On the other hand, if you want to ensure that your guests enjoy themselves at the time, regardless of how they look back on it, you should encourage them to smoke pot. That way, they will declare everything you make sublime. The next day, of course, they will not be able to remember much about it.

Millinery and Mortality

2005-04-01T15:20:00.000-08:00

My thirtieth birthday is approaching. And recently I found my first gray hair. As a result, I have been contemplating my mortality even more than usual. I hate the prospect of growing old, of becoming staid and dowdy. I hate the thought that at some point I’ll have to stop going dancing all night and give my sequined butterfly top to charity. I was delighted then, when I discovered an organization called the Red Hat Society, a group for women over fifty devoted to the pursuit of fun. Inspired by Jenny Joseph’s poem, “Warning,” which begins “When I am old I shall wear purple,/With a red hat that doesn’t go,” members wear red hats and purple clothes and they go out on jolly jaunts. (Women under fifty, who occasionally want to join, must wear pink hats and lavender clothes, and are known as Pink Hatters.) These gaudy grannies are dedicated to “growing old disgracefully.” Yes, I thought, these are my sort of old ladies: over-fifty party animals. I decided to write an article about them.

A local chapter, the Babes on the Bay, invited me to join them at Betelnut, an Asian restaurant in the Marina, for a meeting last Tuesday night. The Marina? That didn’t sound too promising. As you know, the Marina is the LA of San Francisco, the home of rich, boring people, where the men wear clothes from the GAP and the women have perfect pedicures. But, I assumed, the fun would probably begin after dinner. What zany adventures were planned? Perhaps we would go to a strip club in North Beach and demand lap dances from alarmed nymphets. Maybe we would streak through the Financial District in nothing but our hats. Maybe we would go to Asia SF, and join the transsexuals cavorting on the bar. With daredevil dames such as these, who knew what would happen?

When I got to the restaurant, the Red Hatters stood out like a field of poppies. One middle-aged woman wore a crimson cowboy hat; another sported a scarlet beret. Another wore a tulle-trimmed affair that looked suitable for Ascot. The light on her plastic ring flashed on and off as she gobbled the cherry from her piña colada. They chorused a greeting and admired my pink hat and lilac dress (I’d thought it only polite to don the costume of a Pink Hatter). One handed me an amuse-bouche from a silver platter.

But when I started talking to my companions, it was like being trapped at a wedding with someone else’s elderly relatives. While some sat glumly silent, one woman would not stop talking. I heard all about why she should have chosen a different career, why Charles should apologize to Camilla’s husband, and why she had moved from New York to look after her grandson. She spoke unceasingly about herself, and her eyes were lonely. As she talked, I squinted at the amuse-bouche, which was disturbingly hard. It was round and brown with brightly colored speckles in the middle. Maybe it was a brooch? The other ladies, I noticed, had set theirs neatly by their water-glasses. They weren’t bothering to listen to my garrulous neighbor, but were too busy wrapping beef in lettuce leaves. In fact, I noticed, they were barely talking to each other. Were they even friends? When I asked, they said they hardly saw each other outside their monthly meetings. The Red Hat Society was supposed to be all about fun and friendship, but didn’t seem to offer much of either.

I went to the bathroom and looked at my reflection, relieved to see that I was still young. A woman putting on her lipstick grinned at my pink hat. On my way back to the table, I noticed that the other diners were staring at me. I liked the thought that they were wondering who I was and what my strange costume signified. This, I thought, is what these women get out of it: the frisson of attention. Women over fifty become invisible, and the red and purple ensemble is their way of forcing people to notice them.

When I was seated again, the creator of the mystery items demanded when I was going to eat my “Easter nest.” So that’s what it was.
“You can eat it?” I asked doubtfully. “What’s it made out of?”
“The nest is chow mein noodles stuck together with melted marshmallows, and the eggs are sugar-coated sunflower seeds.”
I wrapped the imaginative combination in my napkin, insisting,
“It’s too pretty to eat.” Glumly, I feared that self-absorption, loneliness, and handicrafts would be my lot. Instead of being inspired by the Red Hatters, I felt disillusioned. Instead of flouting stereotypes of middle-aged women, the Red Hatters enforced them. They preferred tea rooms to tattoo parlors. There was nothing madcap about them other than their millinery. For all their talk of growing old disgracefully, they did not paint the town red on Tuesday night. They refused a second piña colada, and by 8 PM the evening was winding down.

On the way home, I took a wrong turn, and found myself in Pacific Heights, staggering up a steep flight of steps in the dark. I thought of becoming old, of a future in which climbing stairs would be more and more difficult. I had to face the fact that perhaps one day I would lose my appetite for adventure, and, in the end, prefer high tea to high jinks. But even then, I promised myself, I would never force-feed seasonal handicrafts to my guests.

An Easter Tale

2005-03-28T22:52:00.000-08:00

A book I am reading advises people to keep a “gratitude journal” as part of a program of conquering the culture of materialism, the idea being that instead of wanting more and more, you are content with what you have. Since this is a very intelligent book in every other way (The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz), and since I am always interested in my own spiritual advancement, this morning I gave it a shot. You keep a notepad at your bedside and every morning when you wake up, you write five things that happen the day before that you’re grateful for, such as, Schwartz suggests: “the sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window.” Since nothing streams in through my bedroom window but the shrieks of homeless crack addicts, I had to look elsewhere. The first thing that came to mind was my victory at the Easter egg hunt, which took place yesterday in the backyard of my friends L and R.

From the minute I heard of the hunt on Friday evening, I was determined to be the victor. I’m not usually competitive where games are concerned, but I am very partial to chocolate eggs and Sunday was my last chance to stock up on them for another year. That Friday night, I refused a third cocktail and made my excuses, saying that I was tired. In fact, I didn’t want a hangover, since I was in training for the competition. On Saturday afternoon, I made a point of not missing yoga, hoping my enhanced flexibility might give me an advantage. On Sunday morning, at the brunch beforehand, I ate lightly to avoid weighing myself down.

When the time came for the hunt, I was disappointed to learn that the eggs in question were ordinary hardboiled ones and not, as I had thought, made out of chocolate. But since I had already told everyone I was going to win, honor bound me to do so. As soon as we were told to start (well, slightly before in my case) I grabbed the two or three eggs nearest me. Then something possessed me, a savage elemental force that I will call Bad Bunny.

This only lasted a few minutes, but when Bad Bunny departed, I was hunched protectively over my hoard of eighteen eggs, while one of my friends lay panting in the mud, another was yelling “Cheater!” and a third advanced with an empty basket shouting “Give. Them. Back!” I tried to explain that they obviously were not listening when the referee announced beforehand that there were no rules, which meant there was no such thing as “cheating.” Meanwhile, Jordan, shielding me with his body, ascribed my behavior to “too many mimosas.”

Unfortunately even winning the hunt did not get me any actual chocolate eggs, but merely the first shot at the piñata, a cardboard girl with carrot-colored hair and beetroot-colored cheeks. I attempted to knock her to the ground, but was severely hampered by my blindfold. Then, as a thunderstorm brewed, my savagery seemed to infect my friend M, who is usually a charming and gracious woman. M snatched the stick, swung it round her head and then, as one guest later put it, “she went ape-shit, freestyle.” Was it my imagination or did I, for a second, see, in place of M, a giant bunny, silhouetted against the greenish light? The victim did not stand a chance, although for a while her head hung on by a string.

As the first drops began to fall, M finally disemboweled our makeshift Jesus. But I stood back and let the others scrabble for the plunder. Victory was hollow, and not filled with chocolate eggs, as I had imagined, but mostly chocolate in plain old bar shape and, since this is San Francisco, sachets of ginseng tablets. Yet somehow I was not downcast, still throbbing with adrenalin. The referee shook a flaccid Kit-Kat at me (it had broken as it fell) and said: “You fought so hard to win and yet it wasn’t what you thought. There’s a life lesson for you in this, isn’t there?” Yes, I thought to myself, it's fun to beat people, and I mentally inscribed “Bless Bad Bunny” in my gratitude journal.

Power Trip Yoga

2005-03-24T17:25:00.000-08:00

When I first moved to San Francisco, I refused to "om" in yoga. It made me uncomfortable. I would sit there with my mouth shut, daring the teacher to comment, much as when, back in my schooldays, I refused to sing hymns. In the handful of yoga classes I’d taken in Boston, I never had to om. There, yoga was just a workout. In San Francisco, it was a spiritual practice, with Indian deities painted on the walls and burning sage scenting the air. In Boston, the teacher said “Press your feet into the ground”: in San Francisco, the teacher said “Feel the earth’s energy.” In Boston, the teacher said “Lift your chest”; in San Francisco, the teacher said “Feel the fluffy cloud inside.” But no matter how hard I tried, I never felt a fluffy cloud. It was bad enough that I wasn’t as flexible as the other students; now I had to put up with not being as enlightened too.

Then I invented Power Trip Yoga. PTY is designed to show your fellow yogis that, while you may not be able to do a headstand, you tower above them spiritually. While it takes years to achieve many of the poses in Power Yoga, you can learn everything you need to know about Power Trip Yoga in five minutes:

1. Always sigh rather than say the word “yoga” and pronounces it in an overly emphatic way. “Yog-ahhhh.” This indicates reverence, and possibly that you know Sanskrit and are using the original pronunciation.
2. Use the word “practice” a lot, as in “My practice is evolving every day.”
3. While waiting for the teacher to arrive, do not pick at your toes, but instead adopt full lotus in the exact middle of your mat.
4. At the start of your practice, you may get the option to send the “energy” from your practice to someone else. Always send it to yourself.
5. Throughout the class, keep your “dragon breath” as loud as possible, and maintain a beatific smile.
6. At the end of the practice, when everyone lies silent during Savasana, give a quiet chuckle, as if tickled by the absurdity of the cosmos.
7. The piece de resistance of PTY is the Power Namaste. When, after the final blessing, you bow down for namaste, stay there for as long as possible. You could even take a power nap. While the other students are rolling up their mats and wondering what to cook for dinner, you have triumphed over them, for you are still communing with the divine.

From Hair to Eternity

2005-03-23T13:17:00.000-08:00

Recently I have been wondering why instead of becoming a writer, a thankless profession, I did not become an international hair growth expert, like Riquette Hofstein. Riquette was educated at the Schwarzkopf Institute of Hair Research in Munich and the prestigious René Furterer Institute in Paris. You, not having attended Europe’s finest hair-growing academies, probably think there is nothing you can do to make your hair grow faster. Wrong! The problem, you see, is not on your head but in it. Riquette uses hypnotherapy to “redirect the subconscious to correct the erroneous beliefs that aging, genetics, or the environment are keeping them from growing hair.” In her latest book, Grow Hair and Stop Hair Loss(2003), Riquette devotes a whole chapter to “Mind-Body Techniques for Manifesting Hair Growth.” (She does not say whether with sufficient mastery of these techniques you can manifest hair on other people.) I am envious of Riquette, who has published two books, has “countless fans worldwide” and doubtless makes more money than I do. And who cares that she is a snake oil merchant? Even if she can’t give her clients the hair they want, she gives them something nearly as good: the belief that they can get the hair they want through the power of the mind. When so much of life is beyond one’s control, what is more seductive than the idea that you can at least control your hair?

How to Be a Great Dancer

2005-03-17T14:06:00.000-08:00

Many people are insecure about their dancing and will only do it when propelled by drugs or at least a few drinks. But the secret of dancing is simple. If you want to learn it, go to 111 Minna on Wednesday night where, gyrating in the center of the stage, you will see Hamid. A paunchy middle-aged Indian gentleman in shirt and slacks, who looks as if he has a day job at IBM, Hamid loves to boogie. He's there every Wednesday, dancing so hard that his shirt's soaked with sweat. He raises his arms over his head with the enthusiasm of a twenty-two-year old on his first hit of E and he twists his hands with the grace of a flamenco dancer. His signature move is the Playful Point, in which he points and wags his finger at a chosen member of the crowd. And somehow, he maintains a priestly dignity, so that no one wonders why he’s cavorting on stage and not at the office finishing a Powerpoint presentation. This unlikely avatar of Terpsichore shows us all that to be a great dancer you don’t need to have professional training, the perfect body, or even the perfect outfit—you just need to really, truly love it.

The Death of Etiquette

2005-03-11T21:43:00.000-08:00

This morning as I was on my way to yoga, a man approached me on a street corner and asked:
“Excuse me, would you like to make out with me?” A generous offer indeed, and naturally I gave it careful consideration, before replying:
“I’m married—but thanks for the offer.”
Afterwards I wondered whether that was the right response. I could have shouted: "Do I look like the kind of trollop who would make out with strangers at the drop of a hat?" (OK, maybe I do—but not on my way to yoga, with my hair in the same ponytail I slept in.) I could have told him to fuck off. Or I could have simply stuck my nose in the air and marched onwards. But after a couple of blocks, my esprit de l’escalier evaporated. I like to be polite, even in response to impolite requests. In fact, I’m proud of it. I am a great believer in manners.

Sadly, as everyone knows, manners are in decline, particularly in California. I have two pet peeves:

1. Thank you notes: A note should be sent not only when a gift is received, but also after a dinner party. A brief phone call or email is acceptable, but the ideal is a handwritten thank you note, preferably one that does not begin with the word “Thank you.” Sadly, nowadays handwritten thank you notes are going the way of white gloves. Many people don’t bother with the phone call or email either and, worst of all, some people don’t thank you at the time of the dinner.

2. Voicemail etiquette: One should respond to a friend’s message within twenty-four hours (forty-eight in a pinch), unless one is out of town. This doesn’t seem much to ask, but I’ve noticed that these days, people are responding several days after the message—or, in some cases, not at all. Now if these people did not want to be friends with me, I would understand. In fact I would applaud their graceful friendship exit strategy. But sadly, these are good friends with bad manners, friends who do call, but not necessarily in response to a message.

Evidently, we are in the midst of a national etiquette crisis. A simple solution would be to introduce the etiquette equivalent of traffic school. Attendance would be compulsory after three violations. There, students would attend classes such as “Small Talk 101” and learn advanced thank you note-writing skills, such as how to write a note for an unwanted gift (without using the words “unique” or “conversation piece”).

So I think I was right to be courteous to my sidewalk lothario. Although I wonder what would have happened if I’d said coyly, “Well, since you asked so nicely…” or just: “OK, buster, let’s go!” Would he have kissed me? Or would he have sidled away, muttering: “What kind of strumpet kisses a man on a street corner?”

Aunt Millicent

2005-03-11T21:37:00.000-08:00

I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been too depressed. I’ve suffered from occasional bouts of severe depression since I was eleven. When I tell people this, they sometimes look at me as if to say, “Everyone gets depressed—get over it.” But this is different from what most people feel. It’s not an emotion. It’s something that descends on your brain and makes it hurt to think. Yesterday, in hopes of making it less scary, I decided to give my depression a pet name. I named it “Aunt Millicent.” I thought it wise to pick a pretty name. Sylvia Plath had a pet name for her depression too—“Johnny Panic”—but it wasn’t a pretty one and look what happened to her. Meanwhile, Aunt Millicent has outstayed her welcome and I've told her to pack her bags.

An Inspirational Parking Lot

2005-03-04T17:19:00.000-08:00

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.” Yes, a thought-provoking apercu, but I think you will be surprised when I tell you that it did not come from a fortune cookie but from a parking lot on Powell and Vallejo. A week ago, Jordan and I were trudging to our car one night, tired and hungry, when we noticed that every parking space proffered a painted motto. One assured us: “Your relatives adore you.” Another promised playfully: “Happiness is trying to catch you.” Yes! Maybe if I just stopped trying, I thought, happiness would catch up with me. Why are sagacious mottoes confined to fortune cookies? Why not paint them where people are most in need of them, like in this grim multi-storey parking lot—or at the DMV or the INS? But one space darkly reminded: “One day you won’t be here.” Humph. It was one thing for the lot to offer Hallmark platitudes, quite another for it to proffer a memento mori. “We’ll contemplate our mortality if and when we want to!” I told Jordan.

Shameless Sausage Shill

2005-03-04T16:43:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, if you were driving down Market St at around 5 PM, you might have seen someone standing on the median and waving a packet of sausages at approaching traffic. That, I’m sorry to say, was me. On the median there was also a photographer, who was snapping me to illustrate the article I just wrote on word-of-mouth marketing, specifically on BzzAgent, the Boston-based marketing firm that uses ordinary people to promote its clients’ products in everyday conversation. BzzAgent uses these volunteer hucksters (they don’t get paid) to talk up everything from soap to sausages. They do so any way they can: in bus-stop banter, hair salon chitchat, and even pillow talk with their spouses. (Usually they don’t reveal that they are BzzAgents.) Although BzzAgent only compensates its volunteers with free stuff (such as a books or jeans), people are stampeding to sign up. As I write, there are 77, 342 BzzAgents among us (according to the Web site), and BzzAgent has plans for international expansion.

Eager to discover the appeal of Bzzing, I volunteered as a BzzAgent for a few days, promoting a product called Al Fresco Chicken Sausage. (That is why I was waving the sausages for the photographer.) Although the manufacturer described this as an “award-winning” sausage, it was not very good. (Although I am vegetarian, I sampled them in the interests of research.) Actually, the sausage made me feel slightly sick (and it wasn’t because I’m vegetarian—I’ve eaten sausages before when extremely drunk). But undeterred by nausea, for a week I neglected my blog and spent every spare minute gabbling on about Al Fresco Chicken Sausages—in grocery stores, at parties, in bars, and even at a sausage brunch I hosted. (If anyone is interested in a fuller description of my activities, I will post the article on my site when it’s published.) Did I charm anyone into purchasing Al Fresco? No. Did my ravings about sausages alarm my friends? Undoubtedly.

Gypsy Madness

2005-03-03T10:12:00.000-08:00

Back to blogging again! Previously I limited myself to two posts a day for fear of looking as if I had no life. But for the next couple of days, to make up for my week off, I will blog without limit. (In my next post, I will explain why I abandoned my blog readers, all four of them, an explanation that involves undercover advertising, and sausages.) Anyway, to herald the return of blogging and signal a new phase in my life, I have changed my cell-phone ring. My last ring was called “Espionage” and did not summon thoughts of espionage. My new ring is called “Mountain,” and is nothing like a mountain (unless perhaps they meant a mountain encircled by a funicular railway with a hurtling train driven by a lunatic). “Mountain” would be more appropriately named “Carnival of Freaks” or “Bedlam Boogie.” It is such a crazy, helter-skelter little tune that I can’t help wondering who composed it. Is there someone who does this full-time? Perhaps a frustrated musician with a phone in his head that never stops ringing, someone whose great dream is to write a piece that lasts longer than five seconds? Every time I hear my new ring, I imagine this man, channeling all his pent-up frustration into composing it—then doing a wild dance before running away to play his banjo with the gypsies.

The War of Art

2005-02-21T10:01:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend I figured out why I have not yet penned a masterpiece: I do not have enough lucky items. Take Steven Pressfield, the successful author of two historical works of fiction, that heartwarming novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and a little book called The War of Art: Break through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. Mr. Pressfield has lucky boots and lucky cufflinks, a lucky charm and a lucky nametag. On his desk he has a lucky miniature cannon that he points towards his chair so it can fire inspiration into him, and he also has a lucky acorn from the battlefield at Thermopylae. For good measure, before he starts work, he recites a lucky prayer, T. E. Lawrence’s translation of the Invocation of the Muse from the beginning of The Odyssey.

The War of Art is an inspiring book, teaching us that every Artist is a Warrior battling Resistance. Resistance is whatever stops the Artist-Warrior from creating his Art—whether self-doubt or dirty dishes. You may think you have a sensible reason for not pursuing your art—an empty bank account, for example—but you must banish it, for Rationalization is the spin-doctor of Resistance. As if sent by the Muse herself, this book entered my life at exactly the right time. On Friday night I was cursing my chosen profession, childishly shouting at Jordan, “But I don’t WANT to have a good attitude!” On Saturday a friend lent me this book, which I read in an afternoon. And today I am a Warrior marching into battle.

The final section of the book has a plot twist akin to that in the last book of The Chronicles of Narnia, in which Aslan reveals that he is actually Jesus. Pressfield tells us that the ultimate goal of the Artist-Warrior is to summon the Muses—and these are not metaphors for the imagination, but actual angels, emissaries from above. Ultimately, works of Art are created not by the Artist-Warrior but dictated by God Himself. Angels? I felt betrayed, much as when I get absorbed in some made-for-TV movie, only to realize I am watching PAX. Then I realized that my sense of betrayal was merely a form of Resistance. After all, it is surely not for me to say that if God, the Son or the Holy Ghostwriter were to pen a novel, it would not be The Legend of Bagger Vance.

Mr. Best Ever

2005-02-18T17:08:00.000-08:00

Last December, I worked in a cubicle, proofreading junk mail for a junk mail company. (Actually, they called it “direct marketing,” and avoided the phrase “junk mail” as assiduously as actors shrink from saying “Macbeth.”) In this unlikely setting, I met the most joyful person I have ever encountered: Mr. Best Ever, as I shall call him. Mr. B never had a bad day. When anyone asked him how he was, he always said: “I am the best EVER!”

This must be one of the most irritating sentences in the English language. It was particularly galling to the people working in that office. Since their work was often dull, none of them were the best ever. And it was not at all clear why Mr. Best Ever felt so much better than them. He was a junk mail salesman. His job was to persuade other companies to pay the junk mail company to run their junk mail campaigns. He was an ordinary-looking man on the cusp of middle age. He wasn’t in love, in fact, he lived alone. What was his secret? One day someone asked him. Mr. Best Ever paused for a moment then announced:
“Raw food.”
He also claimed to sleep a mere four hours each night, and to meditate for two hours each morning.

It was an impressive regime, but would it make you feel that good? I was suspicious. I felt that either he was lying, or he was simply wrong. He might think he was the best EVER, but I knew better. After all, don’t you need pain to feel pleasure? I accosted him at the company Christmas dinner:
“If all you feel is ‘the best EVER,’ doesn’t that mean you’re simply, well, numb?”
“Not at all,” Mr. Best Ever replied, munching on his special plate of salad. “I am in a state of constant bliss, moment to moment. Right here, right now, talking to you, that is the perfect place to be.”
“Well, if you’ve discovered the secret to eternal happiness, maybe you should write a book about it,” I replied, desperate to ruffle him.
“I am,” Mr. Best Ever replied. “It will be called ‘The Best Ever.’ It will have different chapters, ‘The Best Day Ever,’ ‘The Best Dinner Ever’—“
“The Best Job Ever?” I interrupted. Surely he didn’t think that was being a junk mail salesman?
But apparently it was.
“The best everything,” Mr. Best Ever said firmly.
Whatever I did, he would still be the best EVER, this annoyingly enlightened junk-mail bodhisattva. Even if I force-fed him some Kentucky Fried Chicken and demanded "And how do you feel NOW?", he would reply, through his mouthful of cooked food:
"The best EVER."

To-Did List

2005-02-18T15:09:00.000-08:00

Cousin of the to-do list, the to-did list is, as you might expect, a list of things that one has done. I began keeping one a couple of years ago, when I was slipping into depression. I was looking for a part-time job and trying to do freelance journalism, and not having any luck with either. Although I worked hard, sending out resumes and pitching articles, at the end of the day I had nothing to show for my labors. So when I crossed items off my to-do list, instead of consigning them to limbo, I began adding them to a "to-did" list.

At first the to-did list didn’t help much. In fact, it made things worse, reminding me how much work I was doing to get nowhere. But at least it distracted me from my to-do list. It stopped me from fretting about the future, about the seeming impossibility of the things I wanted to accomplish. Instead, I concentrated on completing whatever small task was at hand, in order to shift it to my to-did list. And then, because I was more focused, I began to get things done. I started to sell articles and I got the part-time job I needed. But that’s not really the point. The power of the to-did list is that it enforces a Zen-like focus on the now, the task at hand, the sentence on the page, the sweet spot that lies somewhere between the to-do and the to-did.

Ba-Curious

2005-02-17T14:14:00.000-08:00

OK, I admit it. I’m bacon-curious. I am a vegetarian who is having a love affair with bacon. I love bacon all ways—spaghetti carbonara, wilted spinach salad with a warm bacon vinaigrette, bacon sandwiches, and, well, just plain bacon. My vegetarian friend S insists that because of my bacon flirtation, I am in fact a carnivore. I resent this. I have been a devout vegetarian for nearly fifteen years (ever since an unfortunate incident with a chicken). I would argue that I am no more a carnivore than a straight woman who occasionally frolics with other women is a lesbian. Just as she would be called “bi-curious,” I am “bacon-curious.” Just as she lusts after her husband, I lust over a head of organic broccoli. Just as on occasion, she meets a particularly delicious woman, so, on occasion, I meet a particularly delicious plate of bacon.

New and Used Sandwiches

2005-02-17T10:59:00.000-08:00

I recently got a gmail account (mostly for the name, reminiscent of G-spot, G-force, G-string, and other sexy things) and am intrigued by one of its features: the ad links placed in the right-hand margin next to your e-mail messages. These are chosen using the same technology that Google uses to select ads to place alongside search results. As an example, take my recent correspondence with a friend involving the word “sandwich” (actually it was a code word, but we won’t go into that now). One of the links enticingly promised “New and Used Sandwiches,” available on eBay. Naturally I clicked on it. I am a penniless writer desperate for money, and if people are making money by selling used sandwiches on eBay, then I certainly want in on it. (As some people know, I used to be a phone sex worker, so there is no limit to how low I will sink.)

Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that there were no “used sandwiches” to be had, and in fact there were not even any actual sandwiches. However, I whiled away a good twenty minutes perusing the pages of sandwich-related products, such as a 1974 copy of Allen Ginsberg’s work, Reality Sandwiches and some charming “Handmade Dollhouse Miniature Egg Salad Sandwiches.” At first I was annoyed not to have discovered a new source of income (if people are selling panties, then why not sandwiches?). But it is pleasing to discover that the people at Google have such a delightful absurdist sense of fun.

Octavia Boulevard Flaneurs

2005-02-16T16:18:00.000-08:00

Octavia Boulevard, previously Octavia Street, is nearly finished. I am disappointed. When they said they were changing it from a “Street” to a “Boulevard,” I envisioned sidewalk cafes, grassy verges, perhaps even people with parasols and poodles. There are some elegant lampposts, but mostly, it’s just concrete. I have been doing some research on the matter, and if they really want to make it a boulevard, they should get some flaneurs.

Flaneurs, as you know, are people who aimlessly wandered the boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris. They strolled purely for the sake of strolling, with no destination in mind, and they often stopped to admire details—an intriguing shop window, a well-trimmed poodle. Some of the flaneurs liked to take pet turtles or lobsters for a walk—in part to epater le bourgeoisie and in part to ensure a suitably languorous pace. The flaneur is an idler, a loafer, a slacker, but also someone who scorns the ideology of capitalism, favoring walking not working, process not product, and aimlessness over achievement.

It seems to me that San Francisco—a haven of anti-capitalist sentiment and home to thousands who shrink from nine-to-five jobs (including me)—would have no shortage of willing flaneurs. Furthermore, the Lower Haight is a medical marijuana Mecca, where you can hardly walk a block without getting a pungent whiff. Some believe that, as one Web site puts it, “Baudelaire's flaneurs were stoned out of their heads from hashish. It was under the influence of this drug that they took so long to go nowhere and found so much hilarious interest in even the most boring aspects of things.” If the flaneurs of old were indeed stoned, Octavia Boulevard may become home to a new breed of super-flans.

Coyos

2005-02-16T15:40:00.000-08:00

An article by Kate Spicer in the London Sunday Times announced that a new social type has emerged: “the cocaine yogi.” Strangely, the writer did not take inspiration from words like “Boho” and “Bobo” to come up with the obvious coinage, “Coyo.” Anyway, the Coyo likes to take drugs and party—and then atone for it with yoga and healthy food. These poor souls follow “a punishing regime of feast and famine, detox and retox, binge and purge” (Robert Downey Junior, a Bikram practitioner, is apparently the ultimate Coyo). Several things annoy me about this article, but the most annoying is the idea that yoga practice and healthy food constitute “redemptive hell.” The writer seems to think that they are just something people do to offset the effects of too many martinis. I practice yoga every day and I’m a vegetarian who eats mostly organic food. This lifestyle is not hell, but rather a wonderful privilege. I also commit plenty of weekend sins—but yoga is not my way of atoning for them.

Tofitti

2005-02-15T14:58:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I noticed the word “TOFU” spray-painted onto a U.S. mailbox in Presidio Heights. A few weeks ago, I also saw the phrase “2004 TOFU” daubed on a step on Corona Heights. I was intrigued, in part because I am a lover of tofu and also because tofu and graffiti just don’t go together, any more than hip-hop and alfalfa, or yoga and break-dancing. Is this a sign that tofu is now mainstream, relished by hoodlums and health nuts alike? Or maybe it’s just in San Francisco, city of vegan cookies and soy lattes, that even vandals love tofu.

The Stop Scribbling Society

2005-02-15T12:45:00.000-08:00

Recently I met a lovely woman who makes her living by curing other people of writer’s block, through her organization, "The Red Room Writers' Society." The euphoniously named Ivory Madison does this chiefly by offering a time and space apart from everyday life that is dedicated to writing—in this case, the elegant red dining-room of a Victorian mansion in San Francisco, where clients must sit and write for “one solid hour,” followed by “tea and hot hors d’oeuvres.”

I don’t suffer from writer’s block, but I really wish I did. In fact, I would pay someone to induce it. I don’t mean I would pay someone to stop me writing. That would be easy—just take away my laptop. I mean that I’d pay someone to stop me wanting to write. I’m not sure what this would involve. Perhaps my not-writing teacher would wire up my keyboard so it administers a mild electric shock every time I touch it, or maybe I’d have to copy out some of the more chilling passages from the journals of Sylvia Plath one hundred times each. Maybe I’d have to sit in a room for an hour with other aspiring non-writers and do nothing, followed by hors d’oeuvres.

In any case, I would pay someone at least ten thousand dollars to stop me writing, an amount I would earn back many times over by spending my time in gainful employment instead of idle scribbling. Let’s face it, writing is a very bad career choice: even if you’re good at it, there’s no guarantee that you will sell your work, and even if you sell your work, you’re unlikely to earn money. If I didn’t write, I would probably be much happier, and definitely much richer. Instead of helping people to conquer their fear of the blank page, it would be more humane to encourage it, perhaps via a daily affirmation, “My life is rich and full without writing,” to be repeated three times before a mirror and with conviction.