Glum

Rebekah has observed that I don't seem to like to spend time by myself, that I'm always trying to go hang out with someone. This is true, and has been especially true since I moved out here and seem to have a more active social life.

However, my social life is very "planned", around things that we know several days ahead of time will be happening, or perhaps a Bridge session or something that we put plan during the work day. It seems like I almost never do anything spontaneous. Certainly it's fairly rare that someone calls me to do something on the spur of the moment, and equally rare that I call them. (Not only does calling them require that I overcome my reluctance to bother people, but if I call someone and they're not home or not available, then it's a profound discouragement for me to try it again anytime soon.)

This is something that happened in Madison, too; pretty much the only person I'd get together with on the spur of the moment was Karen. I think it's further exacerbated by living 15+ miles away from nearly everyone I know.

I also rarely have visitors to my home, partly - admittedly - because I rarely invite them, but also I think because I'm so far away. And also I rarely invite them because I am so far away. So when I'm socializing, it's usually happening somewhere else. But, I want to spend some time at home because I don't want to leave my kitties home alone all the time except when I'm asleep. So this is a source of much internal stress (and I recognize that I could start to resent the cats for this, and I'm trying hard not to do that).

So some of these problems might be fixed by moving to a new apartment, closer to where all my friends live. But, I realize, my obsessive need for a social life has been conflicting with this, since I spend most of my time out doing things, that doesn't leave much time to look for an apartment. Combined with other factors that make apartment hunting not perhaps the chore I'm best suited for (having to make phone calls - I have mild telephonephobia, wanting to get everything exactly right), I've been dragging my feet for months now. And now I think it's starting to catch up to me, since I've been feeling terribly alone this weekend. (And, if I feel down on the weekend, then it's difficult to motivate myself to go out and look for an apartment.)

I'm also feeling in the dumps about my prospects of finding an apartment I'll like at a rent I can afford. For almost my whole life I've lived near a some sort of downtown area which has at least a few stores I enjoy visiting. Madison was great for this, since I lived a 15-minute walk from a wonderful downtown, and when I felt glum I could go down and look in stores, or walk along the lakefront, or go for a bike ride on the nearby path, or whatever.

But I've seen hardly any places out here that meet even one of those criteria. Most of the scenic places that would be worth walking or biking along seem to require a drive to get to. The really nice downtown areas in the area are either really expensive to live near (Palo Alto) or perhaps farther north than I'd like to live (Redwood City). Mountain View seems like a medium between the various extremes, but driving around the city I haven't felt terribly enthusiastic about living there.

The urban sprawl of the Bay Area is really hard to live with. I'd like to live somewhere where I can step outside my apartment with the intent of going somewhere other than my car. Somewhere that there are actual pedestrians that I could encounter and maybe get to know casually; a neighborhood I could be part of. That may be an unachievable goal around here.

Also, looking at the prospect of buying a house is terribly depressing. The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the two or three most expensive places in the country to live in. In Madison, I was looking forward to buying something nice to live in, but here I'd be looking for something reasonable that wasn't too small. I'm finding it hard feel like I'm putting down roots when it's not clear that I can afford the ground to put them in.

So, I'm feeling pretty glum about living in the area right now. I know that I need to finally take the step to move up to the peninsula, somewhere, and then go from there. I have this bad habit of often looking too much at the forest and not paying attention to the next few trees. I realize that this should be a manageable problem as long as I don't try to tackle it all at once. And, I even know that I do have friends out here who will help me with some of the work (like moving).

But, it's still very hard. Right now, I actually look forward to going in to work, and rather dread the arrival of the weekend. And that's not good.

Meanwhile, as I spent most of the day turning all of this over in my mind, it never occurred to me that maybe I should buy candy for trick-or-treaters for Hallowe'en! This is the first time in my adult life that I've lived in a place where kids actually come around on Hallowe'en; in Madison I lived first in a college student district, and then in an apartment with a locked front door. I did in fact get a few trick-or-treaters who I sadly did have to turn away. I feel bad about that, thinking of Joe DiMaggio's line about always playing hard because someone out there might be seeing him for the first time. I know lots of kids love Hallowe'en, and this feels like I missed an opportunity to do something nice for them.

I remember enjoying Hallowe'en when I was a kid, but when I went to junior high school I somehow left it all behind me, and eventually developed my strange sense of hating to dress up, in either formal clothes or in costume. Last year was the first time in probably 15 years that I dressed up for the holiday.

I also had a bad experience on Hallowe'en back in junior high or high school: A friend of mine and I were walking around on the evening, and we were accosted and chased by several older boys in masks. We were cornered by them briefly, but managed to get away. (We later had a couple of eggs thrown at us by some other jerks in a car. The only hit they scored was to my hand. Raw, cold egg. Yuck.) The experience scared me pretty seriously, and ever since I've never felt safe walking around on Hallowe'en.

Despite all that, I still enjoy carving Jack O'Lanterns, and I enjoy the various trapping of Hallowe'en. But, as you can see, I have pretty mixed feelings about the holiday, overall.

I phoned my sister Katy tonight, to wish her a happy birthday, belatedly. It turns out that she received two different books by Nick Bantock from different people - one of them me - for her birthday. Quite a coincidence. I think we each independently saw his latest book at a bookstore, but I decided to check Amazon.com to choose the book that looked the most interesting, rather than buying the new book. A good idea, as it turned out, for reasons I couldn't have foreseen.

My sister and I are not particularly close - we fought terribly when we were kids, and even somewhat into adulthood - but I've called her for a couple of her last few birthdays, and we seem to get along okay now. She's made noises about coming to visit me sometime - I think she's long been interested in seeing San Francisco.

I coined another term during lunch on Friday. Have you seen those ads - often on buses - which look like Marlboro cigarette ads, but have some blunt statement about the dangers of smoking? Such as, two cowboys riding into the sunset and one says to the other, "I miss my lung, Bob." Someone at lunch suggested that this is a sort of counter-advertising.

I called it "subtractvertising".

Later, explaining it to someone else, I refined it a little more: "unvertising".

I wonder if I should start registering Internet domains with these terms?

Jefferson seems to have found a new spot to snooze: On top of some exercise shorts that I've (get this, folks!) outshrunk, on top of the bookcases holding my comic books. Here's what he looked like yesterday: