RainyDay

I don't understand the question.

MTV's Real World/Road Rules extreme competitions. Which of course means I watch Road Rules and the Real World. Although Road Rules has become less involving now that they vote people off. While I'm in the confessional, I occasionally watch the Great Race and Trading Spouses. I don't have musical guilty pleasures because I like what I like. But movies? Tequila Sunrise. Awful movie, great cast with great chemistry. Worst dialogue ever. I've seen Yentl about a 100 times. Papa, can you hear me? The first Batman movie. Purple Rain. The last 25 minutes of the movie is the best reason to see it. Poltergeist. Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. All four freaking hours of it. Bram Stoker's Dracula. Great score. Gary Oldman rocked. Godfather III. I thought Andy Garcia should have gone to jail for looking so good in this movie.

Miss Manners says it's okay to tip the owner 10% so I do.

Yup. It was crazy. Halfway through their set Day said "I bet you didn't expect to see me, huh?"

My memories of that day: Half awake, turning on the local news on TV, and as they were updating the first hit the second plane hit. I did something I never do in the AM, I turned off the TV and said out loud to no one, I can't deal with this, even before knowing what was going on. I turned on the TV after brushing my teeth and the story unfolded. I went to work like it was a normal day. Getting to work and the junior employees freaking out because SF schools had just closed and they needed to get their kids and no sennior managers had arrived yet so I sent them all home. My boss arriving at 9 AM and stating that the BART stations were jammed with people getting out of SF. My co-worker arriving and announcing the towers had collapsed. Leaving the office at 10:30 AM and watching quite disoriented tourists wandering the streets. Arriving at BART to a nearly empty station. Riding through the transbay tube while BART police in riot gear patroled the train, something I'd never seen in all of BART's history. Getting off in downtown Oakland, City Center nearly deserted, the federal building surrounded by Oakland police and federal marshals. Begging a marshall not to make me walk a quarter mile out of my way to get to the parking garage and he relented. Walking into the parking garage that was completely empty when it should be full. It was at that point that I became literally panicked and just wanted to be home. I remember that following Friday. We had tickets to see Joe Lovano at Yoshi's but he couldn't make it because air travel was still a mess. So we decided to go to Yoshi's anyway and have dinner. Yoshi was personally greeting people at the door and thanking us all for coming. The club was dark.

This has affected me on a subconscious level quite a bit and it took me a long time to figure it out. One of my co-workers and I, another woman, talked that week about how much we were bothered by it because no one at work really talked much about it after the day of the event. I think about it every time I go through the transbay tunnel on BART at the bottom of the Bay. I went through a period of having anxiety attacks every time the train left Embarcadero Station to go into the tube back to the East Bay. It's way better now but I still think about it. The first year anniversary, our office was asked to provide staffing to the City of SF for a commemorative event. I was very cynical about it and my executive manager put on his best puppy dog face and said he wanted us to be represented so I signed up. I was sort of sneering a bit about it because it felt phony for some reason, the Mayor's office wanting SF to look good. But that changed when I got there. At the top of the grand staircase in SF City Hall, there was a long table with large books for people to sign and comment. The books would be sent to NYC. The line of people who came to sign was amazing. One middle-aged Asian woman was so overcome she couldn't speak or even walk and we had to find a chair for her. A busload of very senior black church ladies came together. One woman was nearly blind and her friend had to help her with the pen. It was incredible to see some of the old folks who struggled up the flight of steps just to sign their name and tell NYC how hurt they were by what happened. I almost cried standing there. And, am crying now just remembering that day. People who were tourists came and signed, people from all over came and signed those books. It was so solemn, and it was clear that it meant a great deal to these people to come and show respect.

I posted a review over at JC (Dennis G's thread). I could post it here if anyone is interested.

I went to the Prince concert in Oakland last night, and man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man oh man...

I've always liked Juan Escovedo, Pete's oldest son. I've never seen him play with anyone except his dad, but he is hot. Pete on timbales is just the stuff.

Glad to see you back. Hope the celebration was a good one.

Nate & Al's in Beverly Hills for a rueben sandwich. Hey Goody, slumming? B-)

It's still hot. No fog in sight. It cools off in the middle of the night which makes it bearable but it is hot. Hey, Chris. You had a birthday and disappeared. That must have been some hangover.

I loved him too. I remember how shocked we all were when he died. It just seemed so wrong and so "unfair. " "Someday We'll All Be Free" always breaks my heart when I hear it. That song and Sam Cooke's "A Change is Going to Come" make me cry something awful. Kenny Garrett plays "Someday..." on African Exchange Student. Man it is so beautiful. Need to hear it now.

Hey Ubu: Is that your gallery? I love that painting. I have a friend who turned me on to California expressionism, Diebenkorn, Bischoff, those guys. I love that stuff.

People who are in sufficient mental and/or emotional pain that they want to kill themselves generally don't have the full capacity to make appropriate decisions about their actions. I'm sure Donny Hathaway didn't stop to think he might kill someone when he reached the pavement. These people don't make a conscious decision to hurt or kill another person. This could be someone suffering from untreated depression, or schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder. All I'm suggesting is that there be some compassion for these people and to consider that what they are doing has nothing to do with you. It is horrible when someone chooses to die and they harm someone in doing so. The cops and paramedics who respond; the transit workers who have to go home for the day or longer; the person walking down the street who witnesses someone fall from a window and land in their path of travel. Calling suicide selfish is unfair. It suggests that people have an obligation to live their lives in pain so as not to discomit anyone else. When your mind is broken, you can't make the right choices. We live in a culture that celebrates the individual and we often wrongly think that when something bad happens, it's all about us. Sometimes shit happens that doesn't have anything to do with you but you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Actually, LA can have spells of uncomfortable humidity in the summer. The remnants of tropical weather waft up and can make it muggy and very miserable. Sometimes it even makes its way up here. Today in SF it was 90 degrees. My house is going to be an oven when I get home. No sleep tonight. Ice cream for dinner.

...commentary on the REALLY important issue...

Don't know about old-fashioned, but stuffy for sure! Brat.

Woody Allen was making fun of himself, not some stranger who landed on the pavement in front of him. RDK nailed it. It's always funnier when you have no investment in the dead person. If you can find humor in the suicide of a loved one, god bless you. I hope I never "evolve" to a point where I can do that. And don't confuse my comments with roasting a dead loved one at a memorial. I'm talking about blaming the dead person for their shortcomings, making fun of the act itself, it's tacky and tasteless. I call this culture gap. We live in a culture where everything is material for a joke. Respect and honor are considered old fashioned and stuffy. I'm okay with being old fashioned and stuffy.

I'm glad J is okay also. As fucked up as J's day was, the person who killed herself was apparently having a much worse day. I'm a little taken back at the lack of concern for someone who died in such a terrible way. My guess is that she didn't intend to take anyone with her. I certainly wouldn't want to be held to my first comments if this had occurred in front of me since I'm sure I would be in shock. But I would hope that at some point, I could dredge up some compassion for someone who took their life and not think such an awful event was just all about me. I still don't find anything funny about suicide. We all have our experiences with it, I suspect, and I didn't find humor in the deaths of people I knew and I don't find any humor in this one either even though I didn't know her. It's America, free country. It's quite okay to make fun of tragedy but don't get your panties in a bunch if someday you are the butt of a joke after tragedy strikes you.

Excuse me? Are the few preceeding comments supposed to be funny? It's okay to make fun of someone's suicide because they are anonymous? I can't believe anyone would make a comeback comment like that about Ms. McCorkle.

I once bought a ticket over the phone for a fund raiser from someone who was supposed to be cop. I should have known when he asked me to leave the money under the doormat. Only time I was ever taken for anything and I got suckered because he said he was a cop. Later I read about this guy and how he scammed a lot of people out of money. The ticket was bogus, of course. Oh, yeah, and once I bought something from a kid for a school fundraiser when I first moved here. The kid took the check and never came back. I later read about how adults use young kids to collect money for bogus organizations and then take all the money except some change for the kids. They are ususally poor kids and the adults who use them sometimes physically abuse them. Pretty sick, huh? So I don't give money to anyone on the street (except musucians) and I pick my charities carefully.

Funny you should ask. Another long weekend when RainyDay was planning to hear some sounds at a music festival, another heat wave. I missed Los Lobos yesterday because when I came out of the health club form my massage, it was 93 degrees in downtown Oakland, heat bouncing off the sidewalk and the asphalt. Instead of walking over to a stage to hear music, I crawled back to my car ran every errand I could think of that would take me to an air conditioned building and went home. At the festival, I walked by a mob of people cowering in the shade from the federal building instead of shopping for art, eating food, or listening to music. And today, the smooth jazz line up was a good one. I love Ray Obeido and I missed hearing him too. I've spent too much of the weekend holed up in my cooler-than-outside-but-still-pretty-warm house. Did I mention I hate hot weather? I feel like a prisoner. All I've done is exercise, eat ice cream, watch the Trio Channel, and read Bill Clinton's autobiography. The place where I get ice cream isn't air conditioned and it has all these freezers that throw off MORE HEAT. So getting ice cream yesterday was like a punishment. I'm hot, I'm cranky, I haven't slept, I have't done the fun things I wanted to do. Arrrrggghhhhh. I need more ice cream.

Oh, shiiiiiiiit!