# 01 Jan 2006, 12:48PM: Winds of Change: Happy new year!
# 01 Jan 2006, 03:21PM: MC Masala Mixes It Up:
MC Masala this week: job interviews are like dates.
I learned from the in-room literature that my minibar contained an "intimacy kit." Somehow I doubt that this kit contained an inflatable psychologist to help couples break down their emotional barriers.
Some other links. The disturbing Life and Death, a meditation on evil and forgiveness; read the comments, if you can. A tremendous NYT musing that advocates cultural contamination and gives new context for "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." And the wonderful Something Old, Nothing New, via the incisive Kenny Byerly.
Here is proof that I will never be sophisticated: I called up a bunch of friends to brag about the hotel room. It had a flat-screen TV and a bathroom with a tub next to a shower and a white-noise generator next to the unbelievably comfortable bed. I was, for that hour, more excited about the hotel room than I was about the job interview.
I can't believe it -- readers are emailing me to wish me good luck in NYC!
# 01 Jan 2006, 03:31PM: Self-Defense: Protect your privacy this year.
# 01 Jan 2006, 04:43PM GMT+5:30: Gotta Stand Up To Start Moving Forward?:
According to some estimates, every six months in the Bay Area, I've made some new amazing friend whom I am now leaving behind. I arrived in August of 1998 and met Seth; most recently (basically) Eric. He lent me Daniel R. Headrick's Tentacles of Progress, about the infrastructure that empires lay down in conquered lands.
This passage struck me. The leaders of France made hard decisions and plans, and ten years later they had an awesome artifact and tool. They made their bet and won.
I've been afraid to bet. I've been loathe to predict or plan, to even cautiously strategize a career or make any long-term commitments. And now I'm locked in for the next three years. I've discarded other options and shaken off paralysis.
I can't live like that anymore, second-guessing every move.
Joe is one of the friends I'm going to miss. Last night we saw a whole show of good comedy, in which none of the four comics disappointed; how often does that happen? It started with stand-up and so it shall end.
San Francisco's Bay Area was the first place I chose to move, and the first place where I made myself a home. Now it's the first place I'm leaving completely on my own.
From November of 2002: Sumana stands up.The Fashoda incident of 1898 (see Chapter 4), which had only a temporary impact on international diplomacy, was the turning point for Dakar. In response to the British threat, France decided to build a harbor in West Africa for its cruisers, submarines, and torpedo boats. The project took ten years and cost 21 million francs (£ 840,000). Deep dredging, over 2 kilometers of new breakwaters, and a dry dock made it a harbor fit for cruisers. By 1908 Dakar was the finest naval base between Cape Town and Gibraltar.
If you could save your mother, but at the cost of killing your father, would you do so? What if the situation were reversed? What if your great aunt would die, but your father would live, but he would have cancer, but that cancer would go be cured by a doctor, but that doctor eventually creates a supervirus which wipes out 1/3 of the Earth's population. Would you date that doctor?
# 02 Jan 2006, 10:13PM: Good Idea, Bad Idea:
Leonard kindly gave me a belated Christmas gift yesterday, making it a New Year's gift. He had surreptitiously transferred the first few minutes of several episodes of Law and Order from the TiVo to a DVD, creating an anthology of all the "du du du du du Oh My God A Body" moments (my favorite part of Law & Order). It was fantastic and amazing and I can't thank him enough.
I needed cheering up because I spent most of New Year's Day in bed, resting my knee. Returning from a New Year's party, just before getting into the car of a kind acquaintance for a ride home, I'd fallen and hit my knee on some broken pavement. Ow. It didn't break, but it's still not quite right. I wish I'd had a pratfall instead; my prat at least has some cushioning.
# 03 Jan 2006, 11:47AM: From Email To Editors:
I get to keep my weekly column in Bay Area Living even though I am moving to New York. My current miniseries of columns has to do with the move.
I believe I have succeeded in tricking the reader into thinking it's just a light column about domestic frustrations and then BAM! it's actually about the deep joys and sorrows of our inner lives! But even if it fails at that then it's still funny.
# 04 Jan 2006, 07:15AM: Comedy Carroll: "As we know now, space and time are really the same thing. Space is just time moving very slowly. So, if our time is slightly off and needs correcting, it follows that our space is also slightly off. What you call your "personal space" may in fact belong to Anthony Hopkins. We may all live in Nevada. We won't know until scientists figure it out -- and that could be a long time because most scientists are spending their time standing up at rural school board meetings explaining radio carbon dating."
# 04 Jan 2006, 08:47AM: Quote Of The Year 2005: From an executive: "It's a global world."
# 04 Jan 2006, 03:56PM: What Makes Me Cry: Ads for Monster.com where people celebrate their new jobs.
# 05 Jan 2006, 08:52AM: Last Day of Work: I feel as though my last day at Salon should get more thought and attention. I've been there since May of 2003 and it's the longest job I've ever had. But it was a job that never turned into a career, and never would. So -- bittersweet, like everything else.
# 05 Jan 2006, 09:58AM: Career Advice From Scott Rosenberg: Always work with people from whom you can learn something. Preferably people smarter than you.
# 05 Jan 2006, 02:46PM: More Last Day Magic: Finalizing a billion things before I leave Salon for the last time. A horrible day to discover Overheard In The Office.
# 06 Jan 2006, 11:16PM: A Long Goodbye:
A zillion people, including people who never worked with me or are no longer at Salon, came to my goodbye lunch at Taylor's Automatic Refresher and my goodbye party at Town Hall (a restaurant/bar on Howard). I was touched.
This weekend: a zillion people want to come over, to see us one last time before we go, to help us move boxes into other, larger boxes, to buy us dinner and drinks, to give back borrowed books and take away unwanted furniture.
We are so busy, so frazzled, and so lucky.
I'm listening to Vienna Teng and to the William Shatner/Ben Folds collaboration. I'm watching the house empty, pouring my life into cardboard boxes, keeping track of a thousand details, and convincing myself (with Leonard's help) that it'll all be okay.
Maxine Hong Kingston wrote in The Woman Warrior that it's tough to distinguish the layers of one's heritage. What comes from your parents, and what from theirs, and what from your village, and what from being your ethnicity, and what just from your own idiosyncratic history?
Saying goodbye is like that. All at once, I say goodbye to Salon, and to my loose affinity with Berkeley, and to BART, and to Northern California, and to almost all my friends, and to San Francisco, and to the futon I've had since 1999, and to the comfy brown chair I've had since 1991....
The rituals help. I sent the mass email, Subject: Farewell. There will be more. It's never enough.
# 06 Jan 2006, 11:23PM: Goodbyes: a Retrospective: Note to self: What kind of pretentious crap am I writing? "Blah blah blah, goodbyes, a single teardrop on the vividly portrayed barren wasteland of the nearly empty home." Come ON. Moving sucks but there's starving children in China, etc. Grow up.
# 07 Jan 2006, 09:15AM: Distributed Moving: I came up with an idea for how to move your stuff. You distribute all your boxes to your friends and tell/pay them to mail it to you after you've arrived at your destination. If your friends have cars or live near your old location, and they can schedule pickup by the postal service online, and you or a trusted associate will be home all day at the destination apartment, then this could end up being much cheaper and less concentrated hassle. Leonard and I decided not to burden our friends this way, but it sounds workable.
# 07 Jan 2006, 10:23PM: Read My Craigslist Post And Take My Stuff:
Bookcase, nightstand, pantry/media center. Update: All those are gone. New Craigslist post for the last remaining item to give away: free folding table. Further Update: That's gone too.
Friends coming by for last chances to say goodbye make me so sentimental that the word "poignant" isn't enough. Cameo appearance by... fear of the unknown!
# 07 Jan 2006, 10:26PM: The First Half Of Goohoo: I saw a headline, "Google's Page gives keynote address," and thought it said, "Google page gives keynote address." Leonard's joke: "Did you mean: to major in the hard sciences?"
# 08 Jan 2006, 10:52PM: MC Masala: On socks and forgetting.
# 09 Jan 2006, 06:48AM: From Goodbye Conversations:
"No, no, you're thinking he's dead, but he's Canadian."
"My great-grandmother was Irish." "Oh, really?" "No, O'Reilly."
"That mouse isn't fooled by that mousetrap." "Yeah, to him it's the equivalent of a Nigerian 419 scam." "Hello! I have a large piece of fruitcake that I wish to distribute!"
The weekend was relatively crazy. I think I saw four high school friends, a cousin, a neighbor, a Russia-trip friend, two Salon-related friends, three comedy-related friends, and four unrelated geeky friends. I'm sure I am miscounting. All these people came to my house, almost all of them after all the chairs were gone. They all gladdened and heartened me by visiting, but the logistics and the emotion of it all, oh boy.
Last night, Angel toasted to Leonard and me, for luck in New York "even though they won't need it." John toasted Fog Creek "for its impeccable hiring decisions." And I toasted Leonard, for being the best friend, boyfriend, mover, and logistician I could ever hope to know, and United Airlines, for channel 8 where you can listen to the cockpit-control tower chatter.
# 09 Jan 2006, 07:51AM: Goodbye, Will Franken:
The only DVD I hadn't packed: Will Franken's Good Luck With It, which I foisted on John, Angel, Michael, and Julia.
I'm sorry, Terri. I can't do it. I may be God, but I'm no miracle worker. In fact, last week, I accidentally made a rock so heavy that even I couldn't lift it.
# 10 Jan 2006, 10:43AM: Tiny Nostalgia Victory:
I get to keep the brown comfy chair because Leonard is the Sokoban master so it fit into the relevant crate. Yay!
Just saw Star Trek: Nemesis, which is in theory about loss, change, etc. Not nearly good enough.
# 11 Jan 2006, 08:08AM: Split: Leonard and I have left San Francisco. We looked in all the cupboards and shelves and found the obligatory forgotten thing, in this case a round pastry-cooling rack. This was after the move-out cleaners did their number on the place. They came from a service that advertises its use of only nontoxic, bioderadable, organic-type cleaning solutions. And they did, until they ran across some heavy gunk and one of the maids asked, "Ma'am, could I use 409? I have it." I gave the okay.
# 13 Jan 2006, 08:59PM: Last Night in California: Leonard and I are visiting his ancestral home (Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and environs). Tonight: dinner and bowling with his family. I need better upper-body strength.
# 14 Jan 2006, 01:07PM: The Final Countdown:
But not by Europe.
Leonard and I are visiting Kris, Kim, and Adam in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. I thought I didn't like cheese-infused crackers but evidently Trader Joe's makes a highly adequate version. I'm trying not to think about the giant presto changeo awaiting me a few hours from now.
# 14 Jan 2006, 06:50PM: Tougher Than I'd Thought:
Removing SFGate from my bookmark bar.
Restraining myself from ruining the backup vocals for Leonard/Kris/Adam songs with screams and melisma.
Listening to acoustic guitar without thinking I'm in a montage in a movie.
Staying on key.
# 14 Jan 2006, 06:53PM: "The opposite of QED":
More propositions within arguments should end, as did one a few nights ago, "So that's why I know I'm smoking crack."
Songs on the way to the
airport; right now Kris/Adam/Leonard are harmonizing on "Asia Carrera." Pretty poignant. Goodbye, California.
# 15 Jan 2006, 09:31AM: Made It:
Safely ensconced in temp housing. The plane had a pretty turbulent landing; listening to air traffic chatter on the audio channel made me feel better about it. Feeling informed made me feel more in-control even though I wasn't.
Soon, off to see Astoria.
# 16 Jan 2006, 07:21PM: MC Masala, Only Slightly Behind The Times:
I wrote yet more moving stuff because my editor loves it.
So I'm making headway on my own little insanities; the big leap of the cross-country move and job change bring my phobias, insecurities and superstitions to light. I'm afraid of death and of forgetting and of being forgotten, but all of those things will happen anyway.
The day I panicked over that mouse was also the day I crashed a car for the first time. I wrote a column a few months later, telling you that I hadn't driven since, and many of you wrote to encourage me to get back on the road. Since then, I have driven a car on city streets and even on a highway. I still hate driving and even riding in a front seat while a car is on a highway, but I can stand it.
# 16 Jan 2006, 11:22PM: Blogging For Choice Month: "And suddenly--if we have no doctors who are trained to abort pregnancies, even for health reasons; if doing so is illegal--we have women dying not only from illegal abortions, but from pregnancy itself."
# 18 Jan 2006, 01:01PM: The Golden Ticket:
I signed a lease on an apartment in Astoria, in Queens. Astoria feels like San Francisco's Ingleside/West Portal with a bit of the Mission, only lots of Greek instead of lots of Spanish. Many thanks to Fog Creek and to John for their instrumental roles in getting me the place.
The shipping container gets delivered Friday morning; anyone in NYC want to help me move boxes for an hour?
I am getting used to the tradeoffs of living in New York. Various protocols are byzantine and efficient. One enters it after many players in all the markets have brutally competed and iterated through a lot of opportunities and loopholes, and though "[i]t is usually incorrect to believe that you are on the efficient frontier", businesses in NYC seem nearer the efficient frontier than in other cities I've visited.
The best preparation I had for living in New York was probably living in St. Petersburg for a summer and visiting Tokyo for two weeks. I learned how to get out of people's way.
In conversation, Adam and I decided that living in New York City is a skill with a big learning curve, like knowing Unix. Many people use it all the time without really mastering it, which is fine, because you only need to know the bits you use. And having a goal, or a set of tasks to accomplish, directs and facilitates one's study.
Off to change my address in a billion places.
# 20 Jan 2006, 01:20PM: Moved!: Huzzah for having moved. Huzzah for ABF U-Pack and for LaborReady. Huzzah for easy access to a subway station and to cheap restaurants that deliver. And a giant huzzah to Leonard for not only following me to New York but doing almost all the heavy lifting.
# 20 Jan 2006, 02:50PM: Availability: Leonard and I will have only intermittent access to the Internet for the next week or so.
# 22 Jan 2006, 02:53PM: Confusion While Unpacking:
Leonard: I have the nails, now I just need to find the hammer.
Sumana: But doesn't everything look like a hammer to you now?
Leonard: No, no, it's the other way around.
# 25 Jan 2006, 07:37AM GMT+5:30: Readings:
As I was going through a cold this week (am currently 90% over it), I read Jane Austen's Persuasion, whose title I love. Persuasion is very fun for the first 90 percent of it but then once the endgame becomes obvious it is less compelling.
I also read Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which is fantastic. Anna Karenina revealed to me why people love epic soap operas, and Casterbridge is smaller in scale but no less epic in the scope of human emotion explored. And it is funny.
Casterbridge couldn't happen today, I think, what with all the bureaucracy and open access to information the First World enjoys. It's like Jane Eyre in that way.
The town of Casterbridge is a minor town somewhere in England, like Stockton. Now I live in the equivalent of London. A weird thing to get used to.
At the Friends of The Library store in San Francisco's Fort Mason, I bought a cheap Blues Traveler CD, entirely because it has "Hook" on it. "Hook" was my first experience, possibly aside from Weird Al and songs from Broadway musicals, with meta songs. It blew my little teenage mind. I still like it.
# 25 Jan 2006, 08:26AM: Welcome Back!: John-Paul Spiro is blogging again.
# 25 Jan 2006, 08:47PM: Fog Creek Stuff:
In preparation for my first day on the job tomorrow, I just watched the Project Aardvark movie, which was enjoyable but made me glad I won't have a film crew following me around as I get settled. The DVD has silly extras in the chapter menu.
Now that I've met Joel, I read his essays and hear his voice. His most recent essay includes a section on "Administatrivia," which UC Berkeley folks always called "Administrivia." This reminds me of John Hodgman's excellent Daily Show appearance:
Anyway, I am nervous about my new job, and then three years from now it will all seem like a blur. So it goes.
Stewart: It's Hodgman-mania!
Hodgman: Actually, the correct term is Hodgmania.
# 27 Jan 2006, 03:11PM: Sort-of-Paid Advertisement:
My first and second days on the job have been a dream. I'm installing, learning, reading, conversing, and generally having a ball. When the workday ends I'm wrung out but in a good way, and can't wait for the next morning.
Today I got my business cards. How cool is that?
# 28 Jan 2006, 06:14PM: Request For Recommendations:
I want to take night or weekend classes in accounting and finance either this semester/quarter or this summer -- ASAP, anyhow. What colleges should I consider? There's a surfeit of opportunities and I'm not sure where to look.
Also, are NYU's MS in Management & Systems or Columbia's Executive MS in Technology Management any good?
# 29 Jan 2006, 09:15AM: Two Weeks' Worth of Columnity:
Actually published last week: On the mini-International-House I lived in, years ago.
That experience four years ago helped me define my criteria as I looked for an apartment in New York this month: dishwasher: yes; elevator: yes; four roommates: no; proximity to booze hall: no.
"Earthquakes!" he said simply, shaking his head, even after I tried a cheap-shot argument balancing the threat of earthquakes against the threat of terrorism. I hadn't realized I was a Californian until I found myself explaining and defending California to the guy who was
helping me move to New York.
I have to make MC Masala more Dave Barry and less Carrie Bradshaw. That is, more absurd-funny, less ninth-grade essay slogging through obvious analogies to a sappy conclusion.The Frenchman, The Italian, The Mexican, The Texan and I had all answered an ad on Craigslist.org for rooms in an apartment in Berkeley. You couldn't beat the price, but the location -- across the street from a pub -- was a mite sketchy.
We made conversation while waiting for the freight company. Jésus, a longtime New Yorker, shook his head at the thought of living in California.
You can hire me through Changeset Consulting.
This work by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sh@changeset.nyc.
