Category: Personal

Although San Francisco has somehow become my home city, I haven’t been taking advantage of it as much as I could be. This place is supposedly known for its great restaurants, but when I got asked to name five of my favorites, I couldn’t name more than three. A few weeks ago, I resolved to…

Today I said goodbye for the last time to Burbank and Glendale, as well as my shirtless-and-red-shorts-wearing slavedriver*. I got on the plane in perfect, sunny but cool weather and after a short, uneventful ride, got dumped out into a cold, sharp wind and an impenetrable wall of fog and traffic. And it made me…

I’m in the middle of another week-long stay in the glorious Burbank/Glendale area. It’s made slightly more pleasant by the fact that it’s almost certainly going to be my last. Barring any unforseen catastrophe, of course, and assuming that I’m not seriously mistaken in my belief that Hell is a concept and not an actual…

I’ve been coming down to LA so often that I think I’ve finally reached an amicable relationship with the city. As a resident of San Francisco, I’m contractually obligated to hate LA, and I still do. But now that I’m not looking for the city to impress me anymore, and I’m just interested in the…

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks locked inside my apartment, hunched over a keyboard and staring dumbly at the deadlines that keep flying by. I’ve got that sickly pallor back, I’m back on the sauce, my days and nights are completely reversed, the laundry and the dishes keep piling up, and even the cat…

“Watashi wa nihongo ga mada heta desu” means “I’m still bad at Japanese.” And although that’s a demonstrably true statement, the correct response is supposedly 「いいえ、そんなことは ありませんよ」, “No, that’s not true!” I’ve been taking classes for the past ten weeks at a local school, and last night was the nerve-wracking final. It’s actually a pretty…

I’m currently down in the Lesser Los Angeles area (calling it “greater” just doesn’t feel right to me). The weather has been perfect today — sunny with just a few clouds, the temperature in the high 70s or low 80s with no trace of the San Francisco chill I left this morning. I spent the…

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, but I recognize it’s vitally important to keep the internets up to speed on my whereabouts. I just got back from a week-long trip down to southern California, cementing my coveted status as The Most Boring Business Traveler Ever. I’ve complained about Los Angeles so much that I’ve…

No two ways about it, the past two weeks have sucked. I think I left the apartment only once the entire time, my days and nights have gotten completely reversed, and each day I’m looking more and more like a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski. The key difference, of course, being that he managed to get…