White Wine

Ok, my thoughts on life as I know it now:

1) One must always have a chilled bottle of white wine on hand. Or two.
2) Obscure artwork is always good.
3) It is essential to live within walking distance to a liquor store. (See #1)
4) Oakland is pretty much the best and only place to live in the Bay Area.
5) Once you realize that something you have is perfect, it will cease to be so.
6) Numbered lists are gay.
7) While you think you may have friends, know that you are alone and only alone. Operate as such.
8) Those who are dead may be always gone, but should still influence your life in ways you don't understand.
9) Work is what you do during the day. Those hours need to pass somehow, but we seem to think that passing them while doing something miraculous is better than simply passing them. Adjust your meaning of "miraculous" to mean "passing time without working as if enduring torture". This broadens horizons without that feeling of selling out.
10) Fake tans are retarded. If you can pay to sit in a tanning bed, you have the money and the time to get a real tan. Do so. Please. The rest of us don't want to stare at your orange face and wonder how you got your teeth so white.

King of the Road

I got into a conversation with my cousin tonight about our Grandfather. She had the fortune to live with him for a while, and was telling me about the kind of music he would listen to during dinner. I always knew Louis Armstrong was one of his favorites, due to a 6" tall figurine of the man himself that was always displayed in the living room of casa grandparents. But I never knew he loved Johnny Cash or Roger Miller quite as much as he apparently did. I suppose it would have been nice to sit around a bottle of wine with my grandpa and listen to any of the above...which is as close to missing him as I've come in a long time.

I wonder if he would be proud of me as I'm living my life as I know it now. I wonder what we would talk about with a few whiskeys in us and a spare moment during a family gathering. He died before I was old enough to know what I was missing with him leaving so soon. And now all we have are these memories and assumptions of a man who lived a life that we'll never have explained in retrospect from the one who lived it looking back upon the years past.

I remember him as very stylish. He would laugh about my sister and Mom and I traveling around, calling us gypsies. All of us grandkids were turkeys - he was aloof enough to be able to pass us all off as such but not so much that he wouldn't take us into his lap for a few minutes of quality time with the gramps. I think he enjoyed being a grandfather more than a father, which must have been interesting to watch from my mother or grandmother's perspective.

He was a player, I remember meeting his secretary - who I later found out was one of many mistresses he kept throughout his life. I can't figure him out - and really have no tools for doing so. I'm not one for dwelling on things that can't change, but it's compelling to think about how my life would be different if my grandfather hadn't died in the early 90's.

I do know that he drove across country to meet up with my grandmother and cousins when they all moved in with us back in the day. Pretty sure it was them being broke and needing a place to live while grampy died. What I wouldn't give to know what was going through his head when he drove from Connecticut to California during that trip. He obviously knew he was going to die, leaving a few daughters and 6 grandkids, not to mention his wife and perhaps a mistress along the way. Did he stop for a drink somewhere and talk to a bartender about it? He took the Buick, was always very intent on keeping that symbol of 1950's American success along with him. Did he chain-smoke the entire way, all the while hoping that the cancer would be quick and kind? Was he angry at the end? Tired? Was he ready to die or did he fight to try and keep going?

I know I'll never know him in the way that I know anyone now that I trust my powers of first impression. But perhaps I'll find him at the end of a Johnny Cash song.

And stuff

Wow, I find myself completely uninspired to write for this thing most days. I blame TV, which I have sworn to swear off for the immediate future, an endeavor yielding 30% effectiveness. I have also decided to mellow out on the drinking, which has proven much more successful. It helps that I relegate my after work activities to the gym, I guess.

In other news, I am not going to be buying a house. I decided not to grow up quite so fast, especially considering my credit. A work in progress, my friends.

I'm re-reading Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I rarely read books twice, because there is just too much else to read that I have yet to get to. But this book is amazing. I first read it when I was 23 or so, and it's kind of enthralling to read it again from a slightly different perspective. Every once in a while when I'm reading it on the bart into work my iPod will shuffle upon a song I listened to heavily when I first read it, and it's like warping back into that point of my life in a major way. Cool. Dave Eggers is a genius.

Also slowly gearing up for the GRE. I took the verbal portion of the practice test available online and scored pretty high. I saved my pathetic math skills for last, so hopefully I don't completely bomb that part of it and panic about my lack of understanding of high school level math.

Mostly I'm looking for inspiration. I don't seem to have much of the creative gumption that I used to - although perhaps being content instead of deeply introspective is a good thing, eh? But I do feel a tad restless without a clear understanding of why or what I can do to scratch that particular itch. Feeling directionless without feeling useless is a new thing. I'm hoping academic pursuits will satiate.