No Yawning

The thing about when your friends start having babies is you can never again complain to those friends about how tired you are. Like ever.

As I mentioned, we have some of our best friends in the world in town and the last couple of nights we've been hanging out with them and their two itty-bitty kids. Tiffany and I had a long week. We had friends in town last weekend and I had a business trip for work and got up one day at 3:45 a.m. to catch a flight and Tiffany gets up almost that early practically every day and...

None of that matters. Because Teresa and Bobby also got up super early to catch a plane the same day I did... only they did it with a three-year-old and a five-month-old just like they have to do everything with a three-year-old and a five-month-old until those children become... well, basically forever.

When you don't have children, you can't yawn in front of friends that do. It's like lamenting the fact that a cute guy or girl you met at a bar hasn't called to someone in the middle of a divorce. In other words: totally disproportionate.

I caught Tiffany yawning in the kitchen last night while Teresa was helping their daughter Julia make a better choice about having another rainbow-colored goldfish cheese cracker or not having one so she would be hungry for her dinner and Bobby was pacing the living room with their son Peter trying to soothe him to sleep.

"Suck it up," I hissed at Tiffany as I handed her a plate while simultaneously stifling a yawn of my own.

"You suck it up," she hissed back.

"Who wants more goldfish?" we called into the living room.

Tonight Tiffany and I tucked ourselves into bed early to get ready for our day of babysitting the wee-est one.

"Hey," I said as we were brushing our teeth, "maybe we can take a nap with Peter tomorrow."

Best of Friends

My grade point average went down the semester I became friends with Teresa. I was a sophomore in college and the decline was no small sacrifice for me. I really really really cared about my grades. Once, during my freshman year in high school, I had a 103 percent in my Spanish class. My dad picked me up from cross country practice one day and I told him I'd gotten a 100 percent on a test.

"Uh oh," he said, laughing, "your average went down."

I didn't laugh.

I was a nerd and still am a nerd and probably always will be a nerd. But when I became friends with Teresa, I had to put my nerdiness aside. No, really--she demanded it. She liked to stay up late and watch crappy TV and have sleep-overs on school nights and--crucially--she didn't want me doing things like homework while we did all of that. I had never understood the notion of "cramming" for school before. But suddenly I did. I had to cram all my reading and papers and assignments into the slivers of time that Teresa was busy doing something without me.

And I made those slivers of time as small as possible because, like everyone else who ever met Teresa, I thought she was wonderful.

And she still is. She also still lives in New York, which is far away from San Francisco. But this week, she and her husband--who is also wonderful--and their two children--who are, of course, wonderful squared--are in town. While they're here, Tiffany and I are soaking up every second with them because that's what you do when you're best friends.

Now, I am only one of Teresa's many many best friends (Tiffany is another--we all went to school and played soccer together). On the other hand, she is one of very few best friends of mine. Unlike Teresa, I am stingy with my friendship (not only stingy but brutally honest: in elementary school, I once told a girl who told me I was her best friend that she could be my second-best girl friend because I already had a best friend--Zac--and a best girl friend, Beth Ann... okay, so now you know I'm nerdy and mean)

Anyway, Teresa was the first friend to really teach me that certain stuff--like getting to class on time and getting enough sleep before a test and tenths of percentage points in a grade point average--doesn't matter. And that other stuff--like telling stories to a friend until she falls asleep and and knowing what to do when someone cries and how to make them laugh again--does.

And tonight, Tiffany and I got to teach her three-year-old daughter how to make a fort out of pillows and a blanket.

So that's pretty damn cool.

The Hottest Toaster Around

You know how in "Entourage" the actors are constantly pulling up to the hottest bars, stores and restaurants in their fancy cars and clothes?

(For my most loyal reader--my mom--a brief description of the show: it's an HBO comedy about a group of Queens-born guys who follow their best friend to Hollywood as he becomes a famous movie star)

Well, when Tiffany and I were catching up on an old season last night, we saw a place we went to while we lived in Los Angeles in one of the scenes.

"Oh my god!" I said, as we sat on our couch. "There's the thrift store where we bought our toaster!"

"What?" Tiffany said. "Wow, you're totally right."

Of course, the actors didn't go into the thrift store. They just happened to be walking past it. But still, there it was.

We were both quiet for a minute, pondering what it meant, exactly, to have the thrift store where we bought our toaster appear--however briefly--on a hit television show. Or, for that matter, what it meant to have bought our toaster at a thrift store.

I looked past the TV into the kitchen. I could see the toaster on its shelf.

Every once in a while, Tiffany and I will look around at our furniture--the Goodwill chair, the hand-me-down couch, the store-bought (but discounted because of a dent) desk, the garage sale bookshelves, the gigantic now-years-outdated TV--and wish we had new stuff. Or, like, stuff that matched.

I could feel one of those times coming.

Sure enough, this morning we woke up and Tiffany was in full rearrange-the-living-room-mode which is almost always a sure segue into please-let's-buy-new-stuff mode.

"So, if we move the chair over here, that would open up this and really, we could buy a new chair and, you know, maybe a new smaller couch, which opens up this space here for a great new table..." she trailed off, looking at me.

"We could," I agreed.

We stared at our living room, thinking of all the other things we were saving for. Trips to see our family. Get-aways for ourselves. A house.

"Or we could wait," she said, putting her head on my shoulder.

"We could do that too," I agreed.

Then we moved everything in the room around. And it looked, you know, almost new.

A little bit later, I found I had a fond affection for the toaster as I made our toast while Tiffany made eggs.

I think Tiffany must have had a fond affection for the toaster too:

"What did you do to this piece of toast?" she said as she tried to extricate the piece of bread in the slot on the right.

"I had to smush it," I said. "It was the butt, and I had to make it fit."

"Well," she said, gently using a knife to pry the piece out. "Not at the expense of our toaster!"

Competitive Laundry (For Which I Am Still Grateful)

It looks like a washing machine exploded in our apartment.

Let me explain.

Until Tiffany and I moved into this new building, we had to schlep our laundry once a week--or once every almost-two-weeks if we were feeling dirty--to one of the ubiquitous laundromats in San Francisco. The one we chose was one block down and one block over. Once a man folding his clothes while I was there tried to tell me to invest all my money in gold because the U.S. government was out to get us all and our cash would soon be worthless.

When we were looking for a new place, we had no expectation of a washer and dryer in our building (as renters, of course, we have almost no hope of ever having a washer and dryer in our unit). When we found a place we liked that also had laundry in the scary basement, we were thrilled.

Now, maybe you have laundry and always have and so have no idea how to appreciate this simple luxury. If so, you probably also have a dishwasher, in which case, I hate you. But for us, this was a big perk. Especially since, although this basement is scary and I run the length of its long hall with the weird locked doors when I take out our trash, recycling and compost, it is nowhere near as scary as the little room where our Los Angeles apartment had a pair of washers and dryers. That's because a homeless man sometimes slept in that room and Tiffany once went down with a basket of our clothes to find he had pooped right outside the broken gate.

Anyway, this basement is nothing compared to that. But. This building is bigger than any we've lived in before. There are about 20 units and only one washer and dryer. When I came home from work tonight, I slipped into something more comfortable (a pair of bright green hand-me-down shorts from Tiffany's sister and an orange long-sleeve that my best friend's girlfriend found for me at a thrift store--laundry-doing clothes, of course) and made my way down the treacherous and uneven steps to the laundry room in the basement--only to find that someone's stuff was in the dryer, a pile of wet clothes was on top of the dryer, and another pile of dry clothes was on the folding table.

The washer, however, was open and empty.

Now, I deduced, from the look of the pile on the table that those clothes were waiting for the wash. But there was no one in the room. And, if you're not there, you're not in line. (Okay, so this was totally not good laundry-karma I was putting out there, but Tiffany and I had a back-up of clothes to do because of my out-of-town trip last week.) I put my stuff in... fast, in case anyone came down to claim the washer. The 28-minute timer started.

My mom called and I confessed what I had done.

"I made a laundry mistake," I said.

"What did you do?" she asked, probably remembering the time she tried to teach me how to do laundry in my freshman dorm at BU when we overfilled the machine with soap, bubbles flooded the room and we had to call the custodian.

"I cut the line," I said.

She agreed I had probably overstepped.

29 minutes later, I went back down. Someone had taken my stuff out of the washer and put it on the table where the first pile of dry clothes still remained. The dryer was still running with the wet clothes still on top.

It was obviously a very competitive laundry night.

Now, I'm no quitter. But I quit. I wasn't going to trudge up and down the stairs hoping to catch the dryer empty and beat someone else in. Instead, I unfolded our drying rack next to our open windows and hung all of our clothes on it... and our bookshelf and our blue wooden chair.

Almost makes me miss the laundromat down the street... even with its conspiracy theorists.

The Voice

As I settled into my plane seat last Monday en route back from a visit to family, two young boys came teetering down the aisle, followed by their bag-laden mother.

"Boys!" she called. "How about these seats here! Look, we can all sit together!"

She pointed to the seats directly behind me.

I sighed, as they clamored in and made themselves known with a few kicks to my chair. But their mom nipped that in the bud quickly.

"Boys!" she said. "Remember that there is a person sitting directly in front of you! Right here in this seat. Do not kick her chair!"

The kicking stopped. But then... something worse.

The mom began reading to them--from the laminated emergency procedures card.

"I hope we don't have to land in the water," she began, as if it were a bedtime story, "but in case we do there are yellow life jackets underneath all of our seats."

I tensed. As I've mentioned before, I have an uneasy relationship with air travel. That is, I fly but would prefer not to have to. It was on a plane trip, in fact, that my mom and I created what all my friends and family now know as "The Voice."

I must have been 12. My mom and I were traveling to Florida for a soccer tournament. Most of my teammates had traded seats with parents to sit next to each other and read Cosmopolitan. I sat next to mom. We played gin rummy.

I'm sure I had been nervous on previous flights, but I remember this as the first flight I really felt the weight of the I-am-in-a-hunk-of-metal-in-the-sky-with-no-control-over-how-I-get-up-or-down predicament. My mom must have seen the panic on my face because she squeezed my hand and, out of nowhere, made a noise in "The Voice."

It's impossible to describe in words, but I'll try: it's three short breaths, whispery and high-ish pitched, like something you might do as you stroked a horse. Anyway, it eventually became a tone and sound we used with each other when our regular voices couldn't convey the love we felt at a particular moment. My brother quickly adopted it too. If you've been around any combination of the three of us, you've heard "The Voice" and the noise. Most of my friends can do a fair imitation and, beautiful people that they are, accept its existence without judgment.

I have no idea what the passengers in front and back of my mom and me were thinking when they heard The Voice. Perhaps they thought my mom was calming a skittish pony who happened to be sharing her row.

I was reminded of that moment as the mom behind me read the emergency procedures to her small boys--whom I later learned were 4 and 2 years old. I peered through the crack to see them, tiny in their seats, toys and books scattered around. I tried to share their delight when their mom pointed out that we were flying through "A great big cloud!" (Actually several of them, and they were quite bumpy)

The boys were very well behaved. Still, they got antsy as we taxied to our gate after landing, taking each other's things and bickering. Then the youngest kicked off his shoe.

"Joey, if you take off your shoe again, I'm going to tell the captain to go back up into the sky," the mom threatened.

It was quiet for a moment as we all considered that possibility. Then Joey, who, like me had apparently been feigning delight as we passed through the clouds, put his shoe back on and apologized.

Pitter-Patter...Splash

I pushed Tiffany off her paddle board on Lake Tahoe today. She was already feeling a bit insecure about her balance. The littlest wave made her say, "Oh boy, here we go!"

I was not so insecure about my balance (although it took me about 20 minutes to realize I should switch which hand was at the top of my paddle when I switched sides, which made my stroke far less awkward looking).

It bothers Tiffany when I am better--even slightly--at things she thinks she should be better at. This works in reverse, too, I might add. The first time we played tennis after we started dating, I creamed her. She was so mad she threw her racket, and I thought we were going to break up right then and there on the court. A few months later, however, on a romantic weekend getaway, we played Scrabble for the first time. She smoked me. I almost dumped the letters on her lap.

Anyway, on Friday, we decided to make a spur of the moment trip to Tahoe. We've lived in California almost four and a half years and had never been. So we tossed some clothes in a bag, got up early Saturday morning and made the drive. We checked out a few hotels when we hit the water and ended up, as we almost always do, in a place I have to carefully describe to my mom as "cheap but clean-ish."

"The way I see it," Tiffany said as we pulled out of the lot of a nicer lodge and into the lot of the $60 a night place we chose, "we could spend $125 bucks on an okay place. Or we could spend $60 on a dive."

"I totally agree," I said, and we gave ourselves a self-satisfied high-five.

Tiffany and I plan to Someday stay in nice hotels. Until that Someday comes, we'll stay in hotels like this one, where I pushed the chair up against the door when we locked ourselves in for the night.)

The perk about the hotel we chose was that it was right on the water, which was what we came to see. Of course, for $60, we could not see it from our hotel room, but it was just around the corner--beautiful... and freezing. On Saturday we were brave enough only to wade in up to our shins. But this morning, after our run, Tiffany handed me her shirt, and dove under in just her sports bra and shorts.

"Sh*t," I whispered to myself.

"You don't have to go in!" she said, emerging all fresh looking.

"Of course I do," I said, thrusting my shirt and hers into her hand, and throwing myself under.

A couple hours later, we splurged and rented the boards for an hour, gliding along, marveling at how far down we could see.

Then I pushed Tiffany. Only moments before, I had lost my balance and pitter-pattered my way forward and backward, side to side, to recover. I wanted to see what the pitter-patter recovery looked like.

I watched as Tiffany's board accelerated with my push. She pittered. She pattered. And then she toppled off the board into the water.

I felt a little guilty.

"My sunglasses!" she screamed.

I made a mental note to buy her a new pair.

Then she was gone, diving down, paddle in one hand. She came up after a few seconds, sputtering, with her glasses.

"Sorry, babe!" I said, edging my board away from hers in case she felt like evening the score.

But Tiffany is much too nice for that. We laughed at our pittering and pattering, and paddled our way back to shore.

The Cheez-It Post

My mom packed my lunch until I graduated from high school--every day in a brown paper bag.

In elementary school, my friend Donna and I used to trade sandwich halves. She liked my sandwiches best because my mom made them pretty--filled with sliced deli meat and ruffle-leaf lettuce--and... well, I guess I liked mine best too. But I traded to be nice.

Anyway, I always had a sandwich and a fruit; I always had something salty and crunchy, like Cheez-Its, which will forever be associated with one of my--in retrospect--favorite memories from high school.

One day when I was a sophomore or junior and my friend Rick was a junior or senior, a group of girls who belonged to our high school drama department came crawling through the cafeteria in black spandex, promoting some new play they were putting on.

Rick, who takes pride on being able to ridicule most everyone and everything (in fact, he is a successful comedian now in LA), started calling them dykes (to be fair, he did not know then that I was gay, and, to be fair twice, the way they were crawling around was pretty easy to ridicule).

"Shut up," I told him.

All our friends stared. Not many people told Rick to shut up. What would he do?

He stood up on a chair.

"DYKES!" he screamed at the top of his lungs.

Hundreds of heads swiveled our way.

"You're an a**hole," I said.

Our friends gasped. Not many people called Rick an asshole--at least not to his face. What would he do?

Well, he reached over, took my sandwich-baggie of Cheez-Its, smashed them in his hands gleefully and dumped the crumbs in my lap.

We didn't speak to each other for almost a week. I recall stubbornly refusing to talk to him until he apologized. Our friends ran between us for several days trying to mediate. Of course, we eventually made up. It's one of our favorite stories.

Every time I eat Cheez-Its I think of that day.

And now you will too.

What My Weekend Tasted Like

Food is big in my family. Not just what we eat, but when we eat and how. For instance, my mom and I hate to eat after about 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon. We call it the Bewitching hour, and it's that time of day where, if you eat any later, you won't be hungry for whatever awesome meal you've planned for the evening. In our family, if you've forgotten to eat lunch, you're out of luck until dinner. There's no looking back. It's on to the next food adventure.

Because we live apart, when we get to share the same space for a few days, we feel pressure to stuff everything into a short amount of time, including foods that remind us of when we lived together. I stuffed all my family into three days this past weekend--in Oklahoma City, Wichita Falls and Austin--and, to reciprocate, they stuffed many of our favorite foods into three days as well.

For example, on Friday night, my brother, his girlfriend Lindsay and I weren't that hungry because we'd eaten a big near-Bewitching hour lunch. But Brandon and I went to the store to pick out fish to grill anyway. We picked amberjack, which our family used to grill all the time.

"Give me three of those," my brother said to the man behind the counter.

The man held up three huge steaks. Brandon and I looked at each other.

"Ummm, how about just one," Brandon said. "Just one of those."

The three of us couldn't even finish half the piece we bought. We did, however, each manage to down one of the Rice Krispie treats Lindsay and I made while he was grilling.

The next night, in Wichita Falls, our dad cooked out. He had asked us what we might want to throw on the grill. My brother suggested a few options: steak, pork loin, chicken. I told my dad all those sounded good, thinking he would pick one. He picked them all--and added a few links of sausage, which used to be my cook-out food of choice. The grill wouldn't shut there was so much meat underneath the lid. Later, I was full to the brim, but I had a bowl of Blue Bell mint chocolate chip ice cream anyway because it is my all-time favorite and it was only in the freezer because I was in the house.

On Sunday, my mom and I drove to Austin. We shared a Dr Pepper over ice. Because I can't drink a Dr Pepper without something salty, we stopped at a gas station and bought a little bag of Cheez-Its*. A few miles down the road, we drove past a Dairy Queen.

"Mmm, dip cones," I said, remembering the chocolate-dipped vanilla soft serve cones we used to get on road trips when I was little.

"You want one?" my mom asked.

"I don't want one but I do," I hedged.

We looked at each other. And then my mom made a U-turn and we went back and got one. She let me have the first taste. I bit the top of the chocolate shell and sucked up a mouthful of vanilla goodness.

That night, despite the fact that I could not imagine putting another bite of food into my body, I ate some of everything our best friends made for us, including three of the stuffed mushrooms that my second-mom Marilyn burnt in the oven, a near-disaster that would have reduced her to tears if she cried. Because she never cries, she let out a string of curses instead. But, as my mom pointed out, we like a lot of things burnt or near-burnt--hot dogs, popcorn, s'more marshmallows--and we all agreed the mushrooms were delicious.

Anyway, just for fun, this is what my weekend with my family tasted like:

Doritos and Dr Pepper; celery and carrots with ranch dip; a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios; an oven-baked sausage and arugula pizza; bites of cheddar cheese with cherry tomatoes and avocado on crackers; grilled amberjack, salad and crescent rolls; sticky-gooey-wonderful Rice Krispie treats; a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios; Doritos and Dr Pepper; Ruffles with homemade dip; a plate full of of ribs, pork loin, sausage, fried okra and Texas-baked beans; Blue Bell mint chocolate chip ice cream; hash browns, a biscuit with gravy and two breakfast burritos; black licorice bites; a chocolate-dip cone from Dairy Queen; Cheez-Its and Dr Pepper; stuffed mushrooms, steak, ceasar salad and roasted potatoes; a bowl of plain yogurt with fresh frozen peaches and a glass of whole milk; several slices of aged cheese, a handful of dried figs, Melba crackers and green olives wrapped up in a piece of cellophane.

*Not even I, in my own blog, can digress enough to get my favorite Cheez-Its story into this post. Please see subsequent Cheez-It post.

Turn Left and Right

I am terrible with directions. In Kansas City--where I grew up-- no matter how many times my dad told me how to get to the airport, I could never make it work on the first try. Once, I called him en route and asked him for help.

"Where are you," he asked.

"I don't know," I answered.

"What street are you on?" he asked.

I told him.

"Okay, what direction are you facing?"

"I don't know," I answered.

Eventually, my dad was able to remotely steer me back on track without much help from me.

One good thing about my lack of directional awareness is that it allows me to be--for the most part--understanding when others get lost. When I arrived in Oklahoma City late Thursday night, my brother Brandon, his girlfriend Lindsay and our best friend Zac picked me up at the airport. Lindsay, who had only been living in the city for a couple of months, was driving. As we headed toward downtown, we made quite a few wrong turns. This was mostly because, while we were all laughing and catching up and singing "Cooler than Me" at the top of our lungs, Brandon and Lindsay's British-sounding GPS did not agree with each other and offered conflicting directions.

"Turn right," the female voice instructed in a haughty English accent.

"Turn left," Brandon said.

In a few minutes, we were on a highway headed in the wrong direction.* Brandon, Zac and I turned around to watch the downtown skyline receding in the distance. Then we turned right back around and started talking and laughing and singing again.

In the end, of course, we made it to our destination where Lindsay, without direction or instruction, backed expertly into a parallel spot.

*While trying to find our way, we came across the above signage. Zac took a quick picture to memorialize it for us all.

Wednesday in the Rearview

I had to wear a suit and heels yesterday. On the way to the office, I lifted my pant legs to step over a hose and walk through a series of puddles on the sidewalk. I saw the yellow caution sign. And I knew the ground was wet. But I slipped anyway, the pad of one heel slipping forward; the pad of the other slipping back in compensation so that, on the streets of San Francisco, I nearly did the splits. I righted myself before falling into the puddles, which I knew were a combination of bleach water and pee. Upon recovering, I turned to the man and woman who were power-walking to work behind me (of course I had only moments before passed them) and we all acknowledged the close call. It made me laugh.

On the subway, there were no seats. But as I squeezed my way to an open space, I noticed four old men playing cards in a pair of two-person seats that faced each other. They must have been going a long way--they had a green-felt table set up between them. It made me smile.

Rushing back into the office later, I took the stairs two at a time... and lost a heel in a groove on one of the steps.

"You lost your shoe!" cried the woman immediately behind me as she veered left to pass. As if I hadn't noticed.

I stood on one foot for a moment trying to reach backward into the sea of oncoming people. Then a man reached down and picked my shoe up for me. He placed it on the step where I was standing and raced off.

"Thank you," I called, sliding my foot in and taking off after him.

Later that night, still in my suit and heels, I waited on a corner to go home, dozens of cabs passing me, flicking their lights. I shook my head at each of them. After a few minutes, Tiffany coasted down the hill on our scooter, pulling to a stop in front of me. I put my helmet on and swung my leg over the seat. I wrapped my arms around Tiffany's waist and let my heels dangle off my feet. I could see our reflection in the rearview mirror, two bobbleheads and the retreating downtown skyline.*

It made me happy.

*The picture you see here is not of Tiffany and I on our scooter in San Francisco. It's of Tiffany and I on a rented scooter in Vietnam. But I like the picture. And that scooter ride made me happy too.