Satuday!

-AC and I illegally ran in the 8th Annual Downtown Anaheim 5k Run, which we arrived too late to actually register for. It was a flat, easy course, and I shaved about two minutes off of my time in the Saddleback 5k! Hooray! Because I didn't have an official bib, they didn't let me actually cross the finish line, though. Instead, some old guy waved me to the side and yelled "If you didn't register, you can't finish!" I was maybe 2.5% sad. I was more much more upset that there was a big construction project going on right next to the course and the air quality was pretty sad. The best part about running a 5k race is that when you tell people about it, they almost always go "Oh wow! That's amazing!" because no one knows how long a 5k really is. It is 3.1 miles. That is not *that* far. It feels good though. Goodness, I can hardly believe that I've become the sort of person who talks about these sorts of things.

-We went to the Irvine Spectrum later that morning after AC bought hisself a bike from a garage sale. He had to talk to the cell phone people and I had to talk to the Apple people. Apple is supposed to make everything, but that has not been my experience. My laptop has not worked 100% correctly since I purchased it a year ago, and I'm going to have to go into one of their little mall stores at least two more times before I can get it in working order. argh. The Irvine Spectrum was not as terrible as I thought it would be, though. I mean, it was terrible, but the architecture was clearly inspired by the Alhambra, and there weren't a ton of people, and I didn't want to smash anything. Which is rare for me in a mall. I AM A MALL SMASHER!

-For lunch we hit up Tandoori, an Indian restaurant close to the sushi bar where I used to work that I had never visited. They had a cheap lunch buffet, clean table cloths and a crazy Bollywood movie on their flat-screen TVs. Also, our server was latina. It was great! I ate so much that I couldn't do much but lay around for a few hours afterward.

-Back at home, I read some comics and watched an episode from the first season of Northern Exposure, which I borrowed from the Chapman library. My parents often talked fondly about that show, but I had never seen it. It's a really good show, but beyond that, it's interesting to me because it's about a doctor who is only a few years younger than my dad would have been when the show was on the air. I wonder how much of himself he saw in the character. At any rate, it is much more interesting than procedural doctor soap operas like ER and even (gasp!) Grey's Anatomy, AND it has 100% more moose.

-Went to The Abbey in the evening to see The Cobalt Season play, which was really enjoyable. The band appears to have started as a husband/wife thing, and now they have something of a band, and also a baby! The baby was asleep during the show, strapped across the mom's front, which looked like it made maneuvering around the small stage a big difficult. I had a beer and a bunch of cookies, which was my dinner. Basically, that is the best dinner ever!

All in all, a pretty great day.

one man operation

Almost everyone I know has someone to go home to.
A lot of my friends still live with their families, even though they're (mostly) grown up.
Others have roommates or housemates, usually about the same age, to hang out with.
A growing numbers have spouses and families of their own.

I've lived basically on my own for about a year now. In some ways I don't mind -- it has taught me a lot, and I'm perfectly able to function on my own. Being alone seems like a great environment to work and write and get things done. But when I leave work in the evening and don't have a real conversation with anyone until I get back to work in the morning, it does tend to get me down. It's too bad it's hard to be productive for very long when you're lonely.

grrrr.

Weekend Update

The first Saturday of each month there is an open house at the Artists District in downtown Santa Ana, and I've made it a point to go as often as possible over the last year and a half or so. There are galleries filling nearly every space -- galleries that open up to the fountain in the central plaza, galleries underground hidden around corners, galleries in apartments and up firescapes. Not all the art is good, but that hardly matters when there's so much of it to see. There are always plenty of people, mostly yuppies in blazers and art kids trying to look bohemian, and generally it's not hard to find plenty of free snacks and wine, too. I have a lot of great memories of ripping the night open with all sorts of old friends, many who either don't live here any more or don't plan to live here much longer.
But last night I didn't feel much like running around and soaking up as many galleries as possible. The galleries all change, but I already know which ones hip, which are banal, which are provocative, so some of the mystery is gone. I decided to scope out the outlying area instead. Santa Ana is something of a cultural war zone as the only urban center in Orange County -- there are Mexican street vendors, dozens of quincenera shops, and lots of rundown low-income housing, plus big glass government buildings, plus "cultural centers," plus new trendy artist-friendly apartments, ultra-modern, high-concept architecture firms, and all sorts of people trying to claim a piece of downtown real estate. Half the storefronts seem to be in transition -- just as many are closed down as are opening up.
After wandering a bit and ponderin' stuff, I bought a burrito and returned to the Village. Then these things happened:
-Hung out at The Abbey with people from Canvas, scoped the new show by Jay Summers which focuses mostly on found art with some ceramics and silkscreens of blues musicians thrown in for good measure. There was live blues music, too, which was raaaad.
-Went with Amy to see a free jazz concert down at the The Episcopal Church of the Messiah on Bush St, where we'd gone for Ash Wednesday. It's a cool old church, and I dig it a lot. Got there in time to see the final song and grab some of the last remaining refreshments. Amy said none of the musicians looked very happy to be there, but I imagine that this is because playing free jazz can be difficult. (Or something?) I asked them to play one more song, which they did, even though there were only about half a dozen people in the audience left at that point. I felt important!
-There was a big party going down at the Amoreviejo Art Gallery, which is in the old deco-gothic courthouse building, so we scoped that out. It was hip chaos. I wasn't sure what was going on, which obviously made it that much hipper. Lots of crowded hallways, and a good deejay. Left pretty quickly, but also grabbed a flyer for an upcoming exhibition that will feature signs made by beggars. Sounds cool. Too bad there's not really any examples of the signs themselves on the website.
-Went to Bill & Kathy's new apartment for cake + hangouts. They just moved into a complex across the street from the main plaza which seems to be partially under renovations and is laid out kind of unusually. Bill & Kathy are an older couple who moved to California about a year ago and have been trying to find a permanent place to stay for just as long. It was good to see them getting happily settled, and Kathy makes a good cake.

Because I am an old man, we went home around 10:30 p.m.