Fat umbrella

I've avoided a bulk of the rain by leaving for Los Angeles for Christmas, but mother nature is unleashing her vengeance on San Francisco tonight. I'd made plans to meet up with a friend that I hadn't seen in about three years, and flaking on one of those is kind of like flaking on a first date - you just don't do it, or you lose, forever! So as an acute sufferer of driving phobia, I decided to brave public transit... what, according to Google Maps, should take approximately 18 minutes from the sunset to the mission ended up taking an hour and 15. I really hate driving in the city that much.

Anyway, it turns out that (surprise, surprise) everyone and their momma owns a retractable black umbrella. Mine was gone after dinner, so the waiter gave me a spare umbrella that had been sitting in the back office for months. Apparently someone had left it there and never came back for it. It's one of those big bright football umbrellas... it's freaking amazing. I'm going to miss my sleek, compact umbrella (I sprang for the $11.99 at Walgreen's =( ), but big umbrellas are pretty amazing.

Is there a moral to this story? There's a couple, actually. I've just been so out of practice with my writing that most of it sounds like nonsense.

1. When you don't face your fears, you end up taking the long way home (in a bad way, not a Norah way).

2. Life pays. Be okay with letting go of status quo, and get rewarded with Mary Poppins life-size things.

The Bumbling Fool

This holiday season, resolved to getting in touch with some friends, I went to Walgreen's and bought a box of Christmas cards. I wrote a list of people that I wanted to send cards to, only to realize that writing Christmas cards takes a supernatural level of endurance. I finally get those people who type and print the same generic shpeel about their lives and place them in cards as inserts. I get it. I don't blame them anymore.

My hand nearly fell off after two sessions of 10 cards each, most of them professing how much I cared about the recipient, how much I've missed them, how glad I am that they're a part of my life, and how eager I am to see them again soon.

I really meant those things. And hobbling through last month or so, the experience was cathartic, like a Sara Bareilles concert.

And then one of my friends wrote me back and told me he was distraught with how horribly I write now. My grammar and spelling has deteriorated so much...

The other day I was typing a memo for work. I must have spent too many recent years scouring US Weekly and the likes because I wound up confused that my "custom-taylored" had that annoying red squiggly line under it. Ugh. Tailored. Yes. The effervescent Taylor Swift has corrupted my spelling skills - true story. I'm a little embarrassed to admit these things, but I think it's important to talk about them, as every bumbling fool thinks every morsel of thought is pertinent to the big picture.

Anyway, goal for 2011 is to read/write/think more, and not just about US Weekly.