What I've been up to...

I've made good on last week's threats and decided to do this comprehensive "what I've been up to" for everyone who is interested. Since I haven't talked regularly to much of the group of people I used to hang out with, we're going to cover a lot of ground and its going to be general, if you're particularly interested in anything, feel free to email me and we'll chat.

~Fall 2007
Moved to Livermore, CA.

If you've never been, (or heard of it) its a town in the edge of what is called the "Bay Area", and they (meaning the local yokels) refer to the towns of Livermore, Dublin, and Pleasanton as the Tri-Valley. As much as I love to shit on the place for being boring, I do like the town because it is similar in a lot of ways to the town I grew up in (York, PA), but it has those characteristics of California that are why I moved here; Vinyards/Wineries, great restaurants, plenty of outdoorsy stuff, short drive to Santa Cruz...all good stuff.

Specifically Sept. 2007 (or when I descended to Hell)
I got a job working with a recruiting firm in San Francisco. Living at home did have advantages (laundry, free food/rent), but a solid 60% of the reason I moved into the city when I did was because I couldn't handle the 3 hours of round-trip commuting I was doing daily. Not to mention the total disintegration of my personal health and socal life, which comprised the other 40%.

October 2007
Kim and Sean got married in October. Drinks were consumed, old bars were visited, people I hated from college were told to die, and I left Pittsburgh with a renewed sense of heartache for the stability and normalcy/regularity that life provided.

To sum of Fall of 2007, it largely sucked with a few signs of life getting better. Regular employment and a fresh start basically kept me sane until I moved into the city.

~All of 2008
Moved to San Francisco, CA.

At this point in life, about 8 months post-graduation and fallout from moving to CA, I had moved twice in 4 months and was feeling really displaced. My parents had moved from the house I grew up in about 18 months prior and I had no good friends left in York, and I had left all my friends and a horrible break up in Pittsburgh, so I was excited to live in a place with so many things to do and to live with roommates my own age. By May '08, I had finally finished putting myself through all the personal hell I could muster and finally adjusted to life in SF, made some new friends, and actually embraced the full kickass-status of San Francisco.

Personal Achievements:

• Adjusting to life in San Francisco (until you've spent enough time here, don't scoff)
• Learning to Surf
• Figured out that whole financial responsibility thing (those of you who have known me longer can attest that this is a medium accomplishment)

To Summarize 2008, I can't really say anything amazing happened (to me). I traveled for business, saw another family members get married, moved to a new city, leared to surf, and finally got a peek under the hood of what it means (in a larger sense of the word) to be an adult.

~2009 Thus far...

2009 has been a whirlwind of craziness so far. All the economic downturn, and its related effects on my job/cash flow, have certainly made their mark. There's been a huge increase in job related stress, and a major decrease in comission. Preferable situation? Obviously not. However, during the last year of cyclical boot-strapping I experienced, I saw the potential positives in this and here's what I've come up with.

Personal Achievements:

• Learning to live on less...everything. Being smarter with money, doing things that are free/cheap and still fun, and generally using less (see any 'green living' guide) has really brought noticble improvements to life. I worry less, live more simply, and find that that the things I do enjoy are now more enjoyable because I'm not trying to handle 200 things at the same time and figure how I'm going to pay for it all.
• Fitness. After losing weight steadily over the course of 2008, I decided to take it a step further and take a marked interest in my personal fitness/health. After keeping an overly detailed spreadsheet tracking my intake as closely as possible, I evened out my diet to what it should be and I've bought a gym membership that starts in a few weeks (for billing purposes with all my other stuff).
• Figuring out more of that 'adult' thing. It really sort of all dawned on me when I was at a house party for a friend's birthday and his brother and a few friends (students at UC) were there and acting the typical college sophmore (guilty as charged, so did I...). When I realized that the guy was being really immature and I kinda wanted to kick his ass, I finally got that whole 'the college years are over' hammer hit on the head. So now, I don't want to say I'm acting my age because I don't ever feel like I haven't, but rather I feel more grown up.

Since I can't summarize a year in progress, I'll say that of the 1.5ish years that I've spent here, this is the one that I really feel is going to be the base for the next 10 years or so. I'm planning to take another European vacation, I'm doing things for myself that I want to achieve, and I'm feeling the best I have in years.

So for everyone who has asked "How are you?/What have you been up to?" since I've left Pittsburgh...there ya go.

Enjoy.

I'm 40 and Single ('cause I smoked grass and hit my brother in the face with an oar when I was 15)

Last Friday I found myself with nothing to do, so my roommate, Ericka, suggested that I go with her and some friends to a film screening in the Mission District. Now, I'm always down to watch some movies, but SF is in no short supply of freaks with fucked up video collections, so I inquire as to the details of this beast.

Vintage Drug-Scare Films, so of course I'm down.

Turns out she found out about this thing on http://laughingsquid.com/. Really interesting resource for unique goings-on in SF (if you care enough to browse events, this event was under the 'squid list' section).

The "company" that put this screening on is called Oddball Film & Video (http://oddballfilm.com/). I was really apprehensive about going the rest of the way with this screening when we walked in the building. It was a warehouse with wooden murder-steps going up 3 floors, and I call them murder-steps because it looked like a place where you'd find the preserved remains of Prom Queens. Once you got to the third floor, you had to negotiate a locked door/buzzer system that must have been some kind of 'Planet of the Apes' prototype because you had to simultaneously push two buttons to get the buzzer to ring, and then quickly push the door in before pulling towards yourself, all while the gentleman at Buzzer Control kept remixing the buzzer pulse like an epileptic Michael J. Fox at a strobe light convention.

After breaching the fuzzy porn-door, you must then go up another flight of stairs into the inner sanctum. There was a man, I'd say late 50s and definitely a heavy smoker of cigarettes, etc. sitting behind one of those huge metal desks from the 60s. Admittedly there was some confusion on our part as to who was paying for whom (I and Ericka were the only ones paying for ourselves and frustratingly located at the back of the line), but this asshat behind the desk could not handle simple math tasks and just made the whole process that much more laborious. Once that CF had finally been figured out, we got past the desk to see one of the craziest things I've ever laid eyes on. The space of this warehouse was probably on the order of 2000sq ft. with 20ft ceilings and it was floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall with film canisters. There must have been over 3000 reels of everything from stock film to some (according to cigarette smoking man) extremely rare domestic and foreign films. The screening area was in the back corner of the space, so we walked past all these racks of films to an area with about 12 or so porch-worthy couches, a disco ball, and 70s funk playing over some really crap speakers. I was sure we'd been lured to some Bacchus wine orgy.

Tonight, we would be viewing:
"Narcotics: Pit of Despair" (1967)
"The Perfect Drug Film" (1971) with Beau Bridges
"Dope Is For Dopes" (1972) with Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
"Marijuana, Driving and You" (1980)
"Stoned" (1980) with Scott Baio

As with any cultural/societal movies about the current problems, these things were dated. In particular "Pit of Despair", which looked like it was filmed in 1950 and not 1967. I won't be going into epic detail on all these films, but "Marijuana, Driving and You" and "Dope Is For Dopes" really weren't that great. Sure, Fat Albert talking about pot is pretty funny, but they kept calling it dope (which I think is a stupid word and shouldn't be used ever except, of course, when "that shit is dope"). "The Perfect Drug Film" (1971) with Beau Bridges was funny because I currently look at Beau Bridges and can only assume he partied like a rock star at some point in his life, thus adding a delicious irony icing to the whole situation. He also kept referencing this "perfect drug", which was legal and non-addicting, as a cure all for life's problems which was illustrated by having a 2 minute clip of people from age 14 on up popping pills and immediately smiling in the face of some real FML-style business.

The real winners of the evening were "Narcotics: Pit of Despair" and "Stoned".

Synopsis: "Narcotics" starred one of those clean cut, super-moral "Johnny Everyboy", turtle-neck douches who started the film with grade trouble, an asshole track coach, and uptight NCAA rules that wouldn't let his dumb ass run it out on the field. Johnny "just happens" to meet up with an old friend who "conveniently" dropped out to apparently take up a career as looking like The Wolfman. Johnny and Mr. Bearded Ducks-ass start hanging out again and Johnny gets invited to a party. Here's where it gets great. Johnny is drinking a few beers while Wolfman stands on the stairs and stares (nice opportunity for a play on words) at everyone in this party all creepy like. Then, Johnny ends up "feeling the beer" and smoking pot in the garage where "the real party is". Next week, he's strung out on heroin and living with 2 ex-cons, tied to a bed, writhing from withdraw. Not kidding here people. It was the biggest collection of over-the-top stereotypes I'd ever seen. Oh, and they used phrases like "A square is an angle you certainly don't want to be" and "Get with the countdown and blast off from Squaresville". Moral of the Story: Beer, women, and parties lead to heroin withdraw.

Synopsis: "Stoned" with Scott Baio has Scott playing (himself?) as the high-school nerd with no friends, a crush on the new girl, and a serious 'attached at the hip' complex with his closet-case older brother who has been training for 2 years for some swim meet that would somehow land him in the Olympics (it was not an Olympic qualifying meet, assholes). Their Dad was all about the older brother and was basically forcing him to do this stuff so he could live vicariously through him. So the older bro is swimming laps in a lake, and Scott is following him along in a row boat. Older bro tells Scott to eat shit and die (may not be a direct quote) so now Scott is friendless. Scott starts hanging out with Spicoli-style skaters who smoke pot. Scott starts smoking, somehow lands the girl, and peaks by rowing with his older brother while baked and smashing him in the face with an oar, thus destroying Phelpsian dream. Moral of the Story: Pot helps you get even with older siblings, make friends, and get the girl.

Overall the experience was pretty great, and I had a good time at the bar/chowing down on a late night burrito (easily the best I've ever had and way better than Qdoba). I mistakenly signed up for their email list, so I'm getting flooded with these updates about screenings, some of them do look interesting (see the hip hop documentaries), but the rest looks like the usual trash the self-important sling at you.

On a closing note, I would like to take the opportunity to say that next week's (since I'm lazy and won't get to it before then) post will be a 'personal update' post. Feel free to skip it, but I've decided that it's time to do one of these to stave off the barrage of "what have you been up to's" I recieved recently.

Enjoy.

Introduction

So I've decided to get back on this blogtrain thing...

In lieu of whatever the last blog's purpose was supposed to be, this one will be a chronicle of various goings on in San Francisco (hence the 49 square miles title).

Over the course of the past two-ish years, I've had the opportunity to meet up with a lot of old friends either here, or back East, who bombard me with questions about what living in SF (and California in general) is like. So, for sentimental and practical purposes, I'm going to post weekly and talk about what's been going on here, new restaurants and old favorites, events, stuff I've been personally working on, and finally (at least probably) I'm going to throw some material out there since I'm looking into this stand-up comedy thing.

So feel free to write me or respond about things you'd like to see up here or know about. All I have is an iPhone for pics now, but I'll work on this camera thing and we'll get some better ones up when I can.

Enjoy.