Roman Holiday, Sabrina - and Adrienne

Saturday I spent the morning and early afternoon doing laundry and catching up on some chores at home. Adrienne came by a little after 1:30, and we drove up to Russian Ridge open space preserve. I've been there before, and thought Adrienne might appreciate it. She enjoys walking around, though she doesn't get into the "power hiking" that John likes and which I do on occasion. (I like the satisfaction of braving some substantial hill once in a while.)

We picked up sandwiches and drinks from Togo's and ate them while sitting around the nice pond across the street from the parking lot. We continued to learn about each other - always one of the nice things about the early part of dating someone.

Afterwards, we were examining the bushes nearby, and Adrienne discovered that many of them were blackberry bushes! She loves to pick berries, I now realize, and she picked many, many of them (and I picked some too), and they made a nice dessert. The bushes were quite extensive, and in varying stages of ripeness (some berries, although fully black, were sour, while others were very sweet). It was fun!

We also went in to the little educational center by the pond, which Adrienne seemed to quite enjoy. I could see the gears turning in her mind as she wondered whether this would be a place to bring her first graders on a field trip when she starts teaching. (I think her verdict was that first grade would be a little young.) But she picked up some info from the center anyway, and I donated a couple of bucks to the place. (It's actually very well maintained considering it's all volunteer effort!)

Then we went off hiking up a hill to the south of the center, and got a good look at the lovely views from near the peaks of the hills. Really very pretty. However, it was really extremely hot and we didn't hike too far, as most of the trail was directly in the sun. So we headed back to the car.

Adrienne was not feeling so well; we didn't bring enough to drink, and she felt dehydrated. So we came back to my place. Worse, it turns out she was really dehydrated and does not react at all well to dehydration. She collapsed and rested for a while on my bed (no comments from the peanut gallery!). Then she decided to try relaxing by taking a bath, and ended up getting ill in the process. Finally clean and somewhat refreshed, she conked out for a couple of hours. I did my best to support her during all of this, but of course there wasn't a lot I could do except bring her water, and offer her towels and painkillers and such and let her decide which things I offered she needed.

Not a great end to the day, in objective terms, and I think Adrienne felt bad about it. But these things happen (I think I recall I got quite ill about three weeks into dating Colleen, and she waited on me while I slogged through whatever it was), and it was nice to spend time with her.

Fortunately, she called me Sunday and told me that she felt completely recovered. Yay! We made plans for me to go over to her place so she could cook dinner (and I could see where and how she lived), and then we'd go to the Stanford to see some movies. I spent the afternoon reading and catching up on this journal, which had not been updated in a week.

Adrienne lives in a really poor part of the area. Very Hispanic, and not in great repair. Have I mentioned how expensive it is to live in the Bay Area? Teachers here only get paid a little more than anywhere else, and her current administrative job pays about the same, so it's quite difficult to make it here. There's a serious problem with teacher retention here, but just as the cities are unwilling to do anything about the ridiculous housing, there aren't any plans to do something than token raises for the teachers. This problem will not be solved anytime soon.

Despite this, Adrienne has a very nicely decorated and set up apartment, and clearly knows how she'd like to live. And I guess it's a safer area than it looks (there are many houses in the area with expensive cars out front, for instance).

The only downer of the afternoon was that dinner didn't turn out as planned, and we ended up going out instead. Adrienne was really upset about this, having wanted it to be really nice. I think between this and the illness she felt kind of disappointed in the weekend, and I sympathized with her, although mostly I had a very nice time, and basically felt that the things that didn't work out were just bad luck. It happens.

Adrienne did seem really taken with the Stanford Theatre, and I expect it won't be too hard to persuade her to go there again. (She confesses to being a bit of a movie buff, though she prefers foreign films.)

Tonight was an Audrey Hepburn double-feature, which I missed when it came around last year. First up was Roman Holiday (1953). Hepburn plays Princess Ann of an unnamed European country who is in Rome on a goodwill tour of Europe. Frustrated with her endless duties, she sneaks off one night to spend some time seeing the sights (naturally sending her parents and their advisors into a panic). She meets up with American reporter Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), who figures out who she is and sticks with her to try to get an exclusive story about her along with his photographer friend Irving (Eddie Albert). The film is about their day together.

This was Hepburn's first starring role, and apparently Peck persuaded the studio to give her top billing, predicting that she'd win an Oscar (she did). Hepburn is charming, funny, and of course beautiful. While some of the humor is a bit forced (being based on embarrassment, which I loathe), for the most part it works perfectly. The ending is at once hilariously funny, and tearfully heart-wrenching; it's actually rather bold considering the light tone of the film overall. This is a terrific film and well worth seeing.

I can't give the same endorsement to Sabrina, in which Hepburn plays the title character, the daughter of the chauffer of the rich Long Island Larrabee family. Having fallen for the younger son David (William Holden), Hepburn goes to France to learn French cooking, and becomes a sophisticate. She returns to America where David falls for her, which deep-sixes elder brother Linus' (Humphrey Bogart, in a rare turn as a straight romantic lead) plans to marry David off to the heiress of a sugar magnate for business purposes. Linus thus goes about romancing Sabrina away from David, which proves to be a dangerous game for Linus' heart.

The main selling points to Sabrina are Hepburn standing around being cute, and Bogart delivering his witticisms in his trademark deadpan manner. To be sure, this makes nearly any film worth seeing once, but beyond that Sabrina is a thin piece of work. The humor is often broad, Bogart doesn't seem well-cast as Linus, and the story meanders all over the place to a rather unbelievable conclusion. I would say that this is the weakest of the six Hepburn films I've seen so far (the other four being Breakfast at Tiffany's, Charade, Love in the Afternoon, and The Nun's Story).

After the films, Adrienne was completely wiped out, so we drove back and she dropped me off and went home. But it was a nice time anyway. And by the way, Trish and Michael ran into us there, and Adrienne comments that now there's "evidence" that she's not just a figment of my imagination. That's right, I'm not making this all up, folks!

There was one further development this weekend which is sticking in my craw: A letter from my landlord that my rent is going up by $275/month.

That's right - nearly 25%.

Holy shit.

This puts my in-my-opinion decent (but not remarkable) two bedroom apartment in a fairly lame location right at the limit of what I want to pay for housing. And you'd better believe my income isn't going up 25% anytime soon! I'd been hoping to pay about this amount for a similar apartment in a much better location, but that seems ridiculous now.

Why is this happening? Simply because thousands of people continue to move into the Bay Area and yet not much new housing is being built. Apparently a couple of months ago in Sunnyvale, there was a week when there were two vacant apartments in the whole city (and Sunnyvale is apartment central around here). Ludicrous!

What's also happening is that lots of recent college grads come to the Bay Area, and being used to living with roommates in small, sparse apartments, they're willing to share apartments like mine. So 30-somethings like me who want to have a nice place to themselves, who want some space and some location, are getting squeezed out. Unless you've been here long enough to have some capital to buy a place, but I think that that's way beyond me right now.

I'd really been hoping to spend another two and a half years out here, to vest all my initial stock options and experience as much of the Bay Area as I can. Plus I have friends here and I like my job. But it's starting to look like that might not be possible. If my rent goes up to $1700/month a year from now, what am I going to do? This place isn't worth that. And I'm not willing to live with a roommate unless I can get a good place for less money, or a better place for the same amount of money (and $1700/month is still too much to pay). If I'm putting all my money into living, and not much into savings, and have no realistic prospects of putting down long-term roots here, then why do I have a motivation to stay? I can move almost anywhere else, make good money, and pay far less to live there.

I bet a lot of people like me will make adding up the same numbers in the next few years. And if housing costs double by 2004, then even the college grads won't be able to afford to share a place. Labor is already tight out here. The cities and companies are going to have to do something sometime, or else they're going to lose a chunk of their work force.

it sucks. I'm depressed.

I won't even tell you about Adrienne's similar dilemma. It's just insane.

Grump.