Behind the Ball

Ugh.

Ugh.

Ugh.

Here at my intensive in Pacifica for school and I just had to swap out my elective courses.

Which is a blessing and a bit of a disappointment.

And just fucking reality.

My elective class was supposed to be taught here at my intensive, but somehow the professor, who is in another department got slated to be teaching at the intensive in Petaluma, she’s the head of another department and it’s required there.

So.

All the work for the elective I was going to take is online and will have to be done via Zoom sessions, video sessions, and all the Zooms are required and all of them take place on Tuesday nights when I have therapy clients.

And so I dropped that class like a hot fucking potato.

I talked to my advisor, who is here at the intensive and got the go ahead to register for another course and I’m all set.

The thing is though, I haven’t read anything for this new elective.

I just ordered five books which will get to my house in a week.

It bums me out that I could have had these books already at my disposal for the last few weeks and gotten some reading done before the intensive.

Also.

That I read a lot while I’m here.

I have both of my previous semesters and it was super helpful to kick out a few hours of reading each day in between my courses.

It’s a lot of work, but considering I’m not obligated to show up for my nanny gig or my therapy clients, who I rescheduled heavy the beginning of the week and had to cancel my Friday and Saturday clients, it’s doable as I’m here just doing the coursework.

Oh well.

At least I got into the elective that will work better for my schedule and I will get to meet with the professor and I will have the class here and I will get the work done.

I always do.

Always.

How?

I can’t quite tell you, but it happens and I sense that what with the transitioning down of my nanny hours there will be the time to devote to the massive amount of reading I will have to do for this semester.

I have two offices spaces to read in and I will be carrying books with me where ever I go.

This intensive I lucked out too, I have a room mate.

Oh well.

I was hoping I wouldn’t have one, but so it goes.

I was not too happy to walk in on her vaping in the room though, especially since I requested to not be paired with a smoker.

“I smoke, but I don’t smoke in the room,” she said, and waved the smoke away.

I was like, hmm, you’re in the room, smoking, so you do smoke in the room, but you won’t any more now lady pants.

Then she said she was “thirsty” and did I want to join her for a drink?

Ah.

NO.

Fuck.

Not the room mate I was hoping for.

But the room has an amazing view of the ocean and I know it will be ok.

I’m not going to worry about it.

Glad I remembered to pack pajamas though!

I’m secretly hoping that my friend who’s coming in tonight from North Carolina doesn’t have a room mate and I can swap into her room.

She was supposed to room with someone who’s dropped out of the program.

I was surprised and not surprised to see that a few more faces weren’t here.

Its a lot of work and it’s demanding work and some people didn’t really seem to have their ideas fleshed out or solid and to be wishy washy about what they’re doing, well, it was obvious to me that some folks just weren’t going to make it.

I, however, am powering through this.

I am going to be a doctor.

I also have to say that registering for the new elective was sort of fun as I got to see that all my courses were under the category “Doctoral” how fucking sexy is that?!

Pretty sexy, even with my bifocals on.

Heh.

By product of graduate school, loss of eyesight from reading until your eyes bleed.

Actually, someone told me today that bifocals were “gangster as Fuck”.

I laughed out loud.

I just thought they meant I was old and losing my eyesight.

I’ll definitely take gangster as fuck any day over that.

Just set my alarm and already I am thinking about winding it down.

It’s been a long day, even though it feels like I didn’t do a whole lot, I did do group supervision this morning for two hours and pack and run errands and clean my house before heading to Pacifica and getting settled in here.

I feel pretty tuckered out.

I’m just going to wait for my friend to get here from the airport, give her a hug and wind it the hell down.

Doctor Carmen signing off.

Heh.

 

Bullshit

I keep expecting someone to say that when I say, “thank you for 14 years.”

It sounds so surreal coming out of my mouth.

How the hell did that happen?

Really?

Fourteen years.

Nights and weekends, nothing in between, nothing to take the edge off.

As if anything really could.

Using or drinking for me over an issue or a problem would just be pouring gas on a bonfire.

I would burn it all down and I don’t actually think I would die.

That would be the easier, softer way.

No.

I think I would live a miserable, dire, soul less, ugly life.

I have so much in my life I cannot imagine ever going back.

I do see it happen though.

So here’s to having more commitments and suiting up and showing up and doing the deal no matter what.

My life is really wonderful and it was with much sweetness that I picked up some metal last night in front of my community who witnesses me with so much love.

It really awes me the amount of love I have been given access to.

Most of all, the love I feel for myself.

The level of compassion and forgiveness I have for myself really is so vast.

I didn’t have it growing up.

Occasionally I would have a moment where I thought I might have something worthy in me, I was certainly smart, but how many times does it take for a person to hear that she is “too smart for her own good,” before she begins, I begin, to think the same.

I used to also wonder.

How come if I’m so damn smart I can’t figure out my life or what I want or where I’m going.

I mean.

I had some idea.

I knew I wanted out of Wisconsin and after multiply failed attempts I made it out in 2002 to travel all the way across the country and cross the Bay Bridge in my little two door Honda Accord.

I still remember what it felt like crossing over that bridge.

I was definitely crossing a threshold.

I had no idea.

Sometimes I think it’s a good thing that I didn’t know all the things that were going to transpire.

Who knows if I would have made it out.

I do certainly remember that.

I had a feeling of dread that my time was soon to be up in Wisconsin and I needed to leave, there was a constant low-level thrum of anxiety, a beating drum of doom that throbbed just below everything.

I was in constant fear.

I had no name for it though.

I had no idea the anxiety I was under.

I knew the depression.

That I had at least been seen for, once when I was in my early twenties and when the therapist wanted to medicate me as my insurance wouldn’t allow her to continue serving me unless I was prescribed meds, I bounced.

I didn’t understand then what depression meant.

All I knew was that sometimes it was terribly hard to get out of bed.

Or bathe.

I remember my boyfriend once made a comment about it, that the sheets needed to be changed or washed and I knew I had to get out and wash the bedding and myself, but getting into the shower was so damn hard.

I can remember how sunny it was too and we lived really close to James Madison park, literally just a few blocks away on Franklin.

I can count the number of times I went to the park on a sunny summer day on one hand and have more than a few fingers left over.

I could not get myself out of the house.

I knew it would pass.

It always did.

But it started to get longer.

And longer.

I might have a day of it once in a while and then nothing for sometime and then it would just snake back in.

For some reason it happened (and can happen for me now, there’s sometimes a feeling of dread during the longest days of the year) during the summer when there was lots of light and no reason to be caged up inside.

People think depression and they see rainy days and grey skies.

I saw sunshine and couldn’t bear to be out in it.

I worked nights.

I slept days.

Sometimes, in the dead of winter I would not see the sunlight at all.

Unless it was the sunrise coming up as I was coming home from closing the bar where I worked.

I was diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder in undergrad.

Turns out that some folks, about 10% of the population that has the disorder, actually experience the depression in the summer.

I remember one year that was really bad.

I was in between jobs, I had just given notice to the Essen Haus where I had been the General Manager and was transitioning to my new job at the Angelic Brewing Company as their Floor Manager (still the worst title ever, how about Queen of Doing Everything, that seems more apt).

I had two weeks off.

I was supposed to have taken those two weeks off to go on a road trip with my boyfriend, but it didn’t come to fruition due to the Angelic needing me to start before the trip had been planned.

I postponed it and planned on doing it the next year which never happened either, but I digress.

My boyfriend went to work in the morning and I sat in the living room of our apartment in a rocking chair.

I sat there all day long.

I might have read books.

I would sleep as long in bed as I could, then get up and sit in that chair until he came home.

Part of me suspected that there was something very soothing about the rocking of the chair, I used to self-soothe as a child when I was upset by rocking back and forth, I can still slip into it if I’m really freaked out.

I don’t remember much of that week, but one particular scene is always in my head and that is of the shadows growing longer and longer in the apartment as the sun set.

They would crawl slowly across the floor and I would watch them inch up the walls until the apartment was muddled in twilight and I would only get up to turn on the light five minutes before I thought my boyfriend was going to get home.

There were many nights of sitting in that chair in the dark by myself alone.

I told no one.

Wowzers.

I had no idea that was going to be what I wrote about tonight, but hey, there it is.

In addition to the SAD, I have depression.

Hahahaha.

Sigh.

Major Depressive Disorder is the clinical diagnosis.

I managed it once in early sobriety with antidepressants but after a few years I got of the meds and deal with it through writing daily in my morning journal, I use a light therapy box every morning, I write affirmations, I get outside as much as I can, I eat really, really, really well, I do my own therapy work, I cultivate relationships with my fellows and I have good damn friends.

And I don’t drink.

Alcohol is a depressant you know.

I didn’t.

Not for years.

And for years I have been pretty free from that great ocean of doom and for that I am so grateful.

My life is lovely.

Challenging, sure.

But absolutely lovely.

Thank you for 14 years!

You know who you are and I love you, very, very, very much.

Scheduling

And moving forward.

I spent a great deal of time talking with the mom today at work regarding the rest of the school year.

What the family needs.

What I need.

It’s been a little over ten months with them.

We are going to sit down and renegotiate the contract in December, make sure my health insurance needs are being met, talk about vacation times, and schedules moving forward past spring when I graduate in May.

I asked off for a little travel time in February.

And I asked off for May 18th.

Which is the day before I graduate, the day before the commencement ceremony.

I suspect that my mom is going to want to spend some time with me.

She has told me that she and her partner will come to San Francisco to see me walk, to see my graduate with my Master’s Degree.

I have some feelings around that and no little nervousness, I haven’t seen my mom in a while and there’s a sense of wanting to show her a different San Francisco than the last time she was here.

Oh.

I didn’t entirely disappoint, I think.

I took her to Hawthorne Lane for dinner.

I took her out to the bars.

I took her to Coit Tower.

I can’t remember if we did Twin Peaks.

I took her to Chow on Church Street.

Philz Coffee before it was hip and Phil flirted his ass off with her.

I got her quesadilla’s from El Farolito, super quesadilla suiza with carne asada.

I took her to Tartine.

I did pretty good

I also ditched her at some point to get absolutely shit faced obliterated.

I was just going to go out for a few drinks with a friend at Blondie’s in the Mission.

I had already been with my mom for a week, I had taken her to London, on my credit card which I was soon to max out, but it still had a few dollars on it, hung out with her, fed her, bought her smokes, and drinks, and tuk tuk rides around Buckingham palace, to the Wheel, to the National Gallery, to see a show, we saw Stomp, I took her to a fancy tea place where we got stinking tossed on fancy ass over the top expensive cocktails.

So.

I was ready for a little mom break.

I ran down to El Farolito and got her the quesadilla.

I called my friend and said, “I need a margarita, I need a break from my mom,” and she said, “I’ll see you at Blondie’s in a half hour.”

I got my mom situated in my apartment on the couch in the living room, my room-mate was out-of-town, thank God.

And I got dressed and fled into the night.

I had two double margarita’s on the rocks with extra salted rim and when my friend said “let’s have another!”  I got a little scared.

I could feel it coming on.

It was probably coming on before I even got off the plane at SFO.

I think I knew.

I could feel it in my body, I knew it in my conscious even if I wasn’t saying it out loud.

I was going to score.

I had all the reasons in the world to get fucked up.

I had been with my mom for a week in a hotel room in London, flown there and back with her, I deserved a fucking drink.

But I knew if I kept drinking, well, something else was going to get up in the mix.

I looked at my friend and said a bit under my breath, “if I drink more I’m going to want to do blow.”

I said this because this was the friend who had used to be sober who had done that AA thing and had said to me once while we were on a run that maybe I might have a problem because of how I didn’t like myself when I used.

I had no idea what the fuck she was talking about and was aghast.

I didn’t like myself?

Truth was I fucking hated myself, but I couldn’t let myself see it.

She had told me that all I had to do is let her know if I wanted to use and she would help me to not pick up.

What ever that meant.

So in that moment, two double margarita’s in, with the urge to call my dealer on my phone and arrange a little something, something for delivery, I said, to the best of my ability what I thought was a plea for help.

Her response?

“I could definitely do some blow!”

Fuck me.

I sighed.

I know I sighed.

I got my phone out of my purse and I dialed my dealer and arranged for him to meet us at Blondie’s.

I went across the street.

“Hey, where are you going,” the cute guy sitting next to me said.

I flippantly replied, “my friend wants to do some blow so I’m going to the ATM across the street to get some cash before my dealer shows up.”

“Holy shit!” He jumped up, “me too, can I get some too?”

And like that, I had a new friend.

I was so popular.

Ugh.

I will spare you the dirty details of the night.

It was so close to my bottom that it was a pretty intense scene.

And I remember all of it, oh yes I do.

Right down to getting back to the house, while my mom was still asleep in the living room, with a couple of grams of blow in my bra, what I hadn’t yet used, to chop and snort and cram as much in as I could before she woke up.

I was that kind of addict.

I did not fucking matter that my mom was in the front room, probably heard me come in, probably knew what I was doing, nope, didn’t matter.

Because once I started, the party was not over until every fucking last bit was gone.

Suffice to say my mom’s last day in town was a bit of a rough one.

I muggled through.

I guess what I’m getting around to is that maybe I’ll want to show her a nicer time than I did before.

We are both in different places, and I also hope to have some time to celebrate my graduating from graduate school.

A nice meal somewhere with friends, good coffee, laughter, connection, company.

A party.

I should throw myself a little party.

Ah, May, you’re a bit away.

But when my employer and I walked through the months and worked on getting my schedule lined up with theirs, well, there you were, a tiny bit bashful but a little smile on your face, a daisy tucked up behind your ear, saying here I am, let’s have some fun.

Yes.

Of course, my dear.

Let’s.

Get Out of Dodge!

Or at least San Francisco.

It’s actually happening.

I am, in fact, going to go to Yosemite tomorrow.

Like early.

Way early.

I’ve just finished packing, I’m only going for tomorrow and half of Sunday, so it wasn’t a hard trip to pack for, just a quick down and dirty, and fortunately for me, I have a bunch of Burning Man food staples in my cupboard, so I just raided that guy.

I’ll need to replenish a little when I get back, but I got time.

Not much time, granted, but some.

Time.

I spent some of that precious coin today.

I read for five hours.

Five.

Well, maybe more like four, I took a couple of breaks for the bathroom and to have lunch, but I really kicked it out.

I have, in fact, completed the reading for one of my classes for the retreat, that will also go beyond the retreat.

One of the classes, I realized after looking over the syllabi, is only during the retreat–a sort of seminar on Yoga and the practice of meditation–for which there is only one book.

It’s still a book that has to be read by the end of next weekend, but I can do it.

The really big reading, I got out-of-the-way today.

Things to think about as I go forward, and I”m just ruminating here, I need to find a more comfortable reading position.

Although I do find it hella funny that I am studying psychology texts from a chaise lounge.

I’m already set up with my “office” furniture.

Freud would approve, I’m certain of it.

The other is a realization that I have don’t have the same coping mechanisms as I did when I was in undergrad.

Namely blowing off steam by going out and drinking with a bunch of my co-workers from the Angelic Brewing Company.

I didn’t rely on drinking to get me through undergrad.

Or did I?

I know that I was a maintenance drinker and I daily drank, I ran a brewing company, it was inevitable that I would be drinking the beer, but I kept it to a “dull roar” I never had more than five pints per shift, and the majority of that drinking was in the late hours of the evening, I didn’t really drink on the job, once in a while a shot.

I drank when I was done counting out the money.

And the king was in the counting house counting out the money/while the queen was in her chamber eating bread and honey.

I didn’t want there to be any question as to the reliability and the integrity of my word while I was securing the tills and the check outs from the various bartenders, waiters and waitresses, the cocktail staff, even the door money which I had to count and distribute to the band that was playing that night, or to the promoter or dj.

I was responsible to a fault.

But I did drink and I had that valve to release steam.

And I often procrastinated to the nth hour.

I am extraordinarily efficient and could manage to write a fifteen page paper on King Henry the V and do it in one night and get an “A” on the paper.

I don’t, obviously, want to employ those kind of tactics to my graduate degree.

I figure, as I have so well learned over the last ten and a half years, that the slow daily progress, the sustained, continual effort, is what is going to work the best for me.

Small chunks, small steps, always moving forward.

Always doing a little something.

And some of the work is going to be easier than others.

The reading I completed today was super dense and had a new theory or concept every other paragraph.

Fortunately I am not finding anything beyond my comprehension.

A few concepts I can see I will need to go back and review them to remember and recall with efficiency and adequate understanding before heading into the first class dynamic, but I’m getting the material.

I’m also very glad that I didn’t put off the reading.

It was up in the air whether my friends and I were going to be heading out, hinged on a couple of factors, and so instead of thinking, oh, well, I’m probably going to be here in town, I can wait until tomorrow or Sunday to do the reading, I saw my spot today was clear, no work (at least not the kind where I draw a paycheck) and I sat myself down on that chaise and got to it.

I’m so grateful that I get to do this.

I remind myself that this is an astounding gift, if life were fair, I would not be in graduate school.

If life were fair.

Well.

I’d be dead.

Circumstances being what they are in my life, I have been graced and given another (umpteen it would seem) chance to do it right.

Doing it right is also taking the calculated risk, the jump, the leap, the sure, I’m ready, let’s do it, last-minute drive to Yosemite, I’ve never been, what a way to say goodbye to July and hello to August.

Because August is its own monster of a month and well, let’s see it come in like a lion.

It will go out like a Burning Man.

I already know that.

Or perhaps I should say, let it come in like a bear, I hear there are some bears out in Yosemite.

The month of August will hold my “normal” work week, next week, then an eight-day retreat for school in Petaluma, then a five-day work week in Glen Ellen (I haven’t figured out exactly how that’s going to transpire, I may not even come back to the city to only turn right back around to go work in Glen Ellen while the family takes its last summer vacation before the boys start school), after Glen Ellen, I come back, work another week in the city, then end that by leaving for Burning Man.

Oh.

And I have papers due by August 23rd from the work at the retreat and from the reading I just wrapped up today.

Yeah.

Busy month.

So.

The pleasure is all mine to say.

Adios! Good bye! Farewell! See ya!

I’m going off the grid for the next 36 hours, I’ll be back Sunday.

Have a great weekend!

A Little “Light” Reading

Oh.

Bwhahahahahaaha.

Fuck me.

Aside from the hefty price tag of the readers–$208 and change, the weight of what I have to read for my first semester at grad school also nearly pulled my shoulder out of my socket when I lifted the bag off the counter.

Jesus on a flaming raft.

The bag was heavy, nearly as heavy as the three-year old I look after during the week.

He’s about 35 or 36 lbs, he’s a solid kid, stocky, strong, wily, he can throw a tantrum with the best of them or snuggle in your lap like the largest, cutest, kitten on the “Meow Meow train,” all aboard.

At least when I carry him he’s resting on a hip or holding on to me, “pick me,” he will say.

“Why does he always get to ride in the stroller?” The five-year old demands to know.

“Physics, kiddo,” I say, using the apt answer that my best friends husband gave me as a pat answer to the question, “why.”

And at least with this, it’s partly, if not completely so.

it really is a law of physics, less weight for me to haul around, easier to push, much easier to wrangle, although the smart guy knows how to get his brother to unbuckle him when he gets that glint of monkey pants going in him.

Ugh.

Slight sidebar.

Just that feeling.

That one there.

When you are listening to an album that you, I, I, used to listen to when writing in Paris, but now it’s on your Iphone and sometimes when I get a text, the song will pause and I will know that I am being reached out to.

I haven’t had any one reach out to me and I miss someone and don’t know when I will hear from him again.

The heart aches.

It was not a text.

It was just the song ending.

End aside.

I made my way downtown, resolute to get the readers for school.

I ignored the fact that the universe had conspired to not actually have me be in a great big SUV with my friend heading towards the Grand Canyon on a wild and wooly road trip, rather I was to be traversing the canyons of down town San Francisco.

Wending my way through the towers and condos and banks and business high rise windows.

The streets empty.

There really is not a reason to be a Mission and 2nd on a Saturday.

I got off the New Montgomery MUNI station and rode the escalator up into the blue sky, the leaves of the trees lining Market Street pressing into the frame of light coming from the square above me, the street lamp, old-fashioned and burnished with the seeing of too many tourists and the discarded cups from Starbucks stuck into the hands of beggars and street performers.

I suddenly remember the first time I came up on escalator onto Market Street, that first time it was Powell Street, and how I felt seeing a similar street lamp and tree branches–the sky not blue that day, but a mottled March grey one with low hanging clouds and cool breezes.

I walk down 2nd Street past the closed doors of the American Red Cross where I have taken so many classes in adult/children CPR and first aid, all the re-certification and tests, the small rubber babies with molded faces that pull off so that the next bored student nurse can be certain its been sanitized before she puts her small mouth to the fake child to push air into it and thump it’s chest with the first two fingers of her dominant hand.

Then, I glance to the right, I have no idea why, and there she is, The Palace, where I have had so many drinks, one was never enough and more was always on the menu, after many a shift at Hawthorne Lane, most times extra dirty vodka martinis with three olives and pints of Sierra Nevada.

Occasionally the glass of champagne before a shift to celebrate a friend’s success or bolster another friends hair of the dog before going into work.

I turn on my travels, down Mission Street, longing to walk further, the Van Heusen sign reminds me of all the starched cream shirts I bought there for my shifts at the fine dining restaurant and how annoyed I always was to spend my hard-earned money on them or laundering them.

I think about the MOMA and wish it were open.

I would go in a hot second and sit in front of a Rothko or wander through the photography exhibit on the second floor, or climb to the top and cross over the suspension bridge, or find the secret doorway to the miniature courtyard that faces out towards the Yerba Buena Center and the park.

I think of all time terrible and awful.

How, even in the utter depths of my using I was never able to bring myself to use in the MOMA.

Although, damn it, I tried.

The best I could do was use the bathrooms to wash up and brush the tears from my eyes that only seemed to surface when I was surrounded by the house full of art, art that I could no longer access because it hurt my heart too much to admit that I was down for the count.

Then I would wash my hands, pat dry the wet circles under my face and go to the cafe and order a non-fat latte and sit out front on a metal back chair and put my feet up on the balustrade that separated the down trodden masses looking for scraps from the tourists like small black starlings with bright eyes hopping under the table legs, except held back by that small barrier of wealth and privilege that I pretended to belong to.

I mean I did wait on them didn’t I?

I would smoke my cigarette, then another, not chain-smoking, but so close as it became a game of semantics, drink my coffee, then head back to the restaurant to make more money that I would later spend, no matter how cleverly I would ration it out–the twenties in my left pocket only to go towards rent, not coke, ok?

Do you hear me self?

Don’t dip into the left pocket.

Or the bra cup, or the left sock.

Never mattered.

Once I got going, it was going to.

Didn’t much matter that brave lecture I gave my “sober” self (sober only in the sense of having abstained while working, which soon wasn’t really happening either), the money always flew, like pigeons circling in weary circles above the sunset lit buildings at the BART station.

I sat and waited at the front counter of the Copy Central store while the one attendant finished a job for a woman wearing navy blue and white polka dot slides and a pony tail that was just a touch too high up on the back of her head.

The stroll down memory lane exiting itself back outside, perhaps over to Dave’s Sports Bar on Third between Mission and Market, where we often ended up after a posh cocktail or two at the Palace, to really get it on.

Didn’t hurt that Marilyn the bartender knew all the words to Chicago, the musical, not the band, and if you sang along with her she would gladly sell you a case or bottle after hours, shhh don’t tell.

The memories were abruptly supplanted with reality, as first one, then the next, and the next, and the next reader was plunked down with a thud that was not satisfying so much as it was terrifying.

“Double check the readers to your syllabi,” the woman said.

I did.

Everything was there.

I pulled out my debit card.

I paid.

I left and walked back to the MUNI train station and as I did the days and ways of old were smoothed over, a soft hand blotting back the memories, a supplanting of this person with that person.

Eleven years ago when I was walking that same route there was no way I could have foreseen the purchase of graduate school readers.

I was too busy cursing that woman who had once again trembled on the lip of indulgence and instead of withstanding, fell over and promised herself, yet again, well since I already have started, I might as well do it up good.

I marveled at the weight in the bag as the readers thumped against my leg.

My graduate school student leg.

It was much less than the weight I used to carry on my back.

I can deal with this so much better than that.

That stack of reading sits on my table, just on the other side of this computer, and as I look around the sweet, safe, room I have nested for myself, I am grateful.

I am so very grateful to have walked down one side of the street and been able to reverse the wreckage to where I am today.

Scared.

Yes.

But free?

Even more so.

Well, I might be tied up with some reading for a bit.

But.

I think you catch my drift.

I Like It Hard and Fast

I explained to her as we stood in the swirling lights of the club.

My music, that is.

Bahahahahaha.

I was asked if I do escatic dance and I said I had gone once and had it recommended to me a number of times but that I did not like the music much the time I went, way too slow and low-key and ambient.

I like it hard and fast.

I like trance and side trance and electro house and French House and classic Detroit dirty four on the floor grind it out and drop it hard.

I like to boogie.

I got some boogie on tonight and my legs are a little boogied out.

I also got a ride home from a friend with a truck who tossed my two-wheel steed in the back and graciously dropped me at the house.

I feel lucky.

And though I did not feel much like writing my blog, I knew I was going to and I realized as I started typing that I would still be riding my bicycle home and not even be writing yet, let alone boiling a pot of water for tea.

“Can you believe I am just going to go home and chill out and maybe watch a bit of a show,” an older man said to me as I was hustling my bike across the street to my friends pick up.

“I’m going to go home and have tea” I said.

He shook his head, “you’re too young for tea.”

Ah.

I love that.

“You should be going out and hitting the after party,” he nodded, “that’s what pretty girls should do.”

Nope, not this pretty girl.

This pretty girl was already up past her bedtime.

Earlier in the evening my darling friend Bonne yawned and I yawned and we both laughed, long week at work, extra hours, what are we doing going out dancing, I think had either one of us not bought the tickets it would have been a done deal, both of us would have gone home to bed.

But we went dancing instead.

And it was good, it was good to get out, it was good to move, although I think I might take an ibuprofen or two here in a minute, I am sore from all the bike riding over the last few weeks, the end of a full nanny week, and yes, dancing pretty solid for three hours.

10p.m.-1a.m.

Not too bad for a 41-year-old lady with cruddy knees.

“You’re older than me?” My friend said incredulously as we were handing over our ids to the bouncer.

I had seen him walking up as I was locking my bicycle to the rack outside the club and we went in together talking this and that, turns out he had been there all day helping the Flaming Lotus Girls get their stuff set up for the benefit.

It was nice to see him and I was not expecting to also get a ride home, which as I said, super grateful for as it winds toward the 3 a.m. hour.

I ran into a few other folks as well, a photographer from the PinHole Photography project who has been bugging me to go play frisbee golf forever and we may finally get out to the course in Golden Gate Park, I should even if he and I don’t hook up.

I haven’t played frisbee golf in over a decade.

It would be fun to get back into it, its great exercise and fun and really cheap.

Like free.

The only cost is a driver and a putter.

You can have a lot more discs in your bag than that, I certainly did when I was playing, but ultimately that’s all you need to start.  There are no “greens fees” and the course is maintained by the parks department.

I have never even walked through the entirety of it.

I did do a piece on it for KQED when I was interning there and it ended up getting air way back, must be five years ago now.

I also ran into an artist whose work I really admired on playa at Burning Man and got to thank her face to face, never having officially met her at the event, and I got to dance.

Dancing being the main draw of it.

The Space Cowboys threw a great show and I was thrilled, although the first set did start out sort of slow, the second slayed it and the third put me over the top.

I was not so enamoured with the fourth set and wandered off to grab some water, get my messenger bag screen printed (the Flaming Lotus Girls were screen printing for donations), take some silly photographs with Bonne and then the text came with the offer for the ride home and that was all she wrote.

I do like it hard and fast, but I can’t do it all night long like I used to.

The knees are just too old and they don’t like that it.

I wish I could.

But there’s nothing wrong with dancing a little less maniacally and coming home to have tea instead of coming home to host an after party and wonder when it’s appropriate to kick the strange guy out of my bed.

“I used up all my drink tickets,” I told the man as I waited for the light to change at 13th and Mission, “I like going home to drink tea.”

Getting to go out and play for a while and then come home and take care of myself is the best of both worlds and I certainly wake up feeling much better than I used to.

And I get to sleep in tomorrow, which I was not expecting, I had a commitment to meet someone in the morning at Tart to Tart and they called in sick.

So I have no plans for tomorrow until I am due in Noe Valley at 7p.m.

I can sleep in all day.

Not that I will, but it’s nice knowledge to have.

And with that, this lady is heading to bed.

Where I shall fall asleep.

Hard and fast.