My Life

Friday Five: Things Through Which I Drove on My Way to Work This Morning

1. The Sepulveda Pass
2. a story about wind farms off the coast of Delaware on NPR’s Climate Connections series
3. the I-405/US101 construction zone
4. the red light at the bottom of the Hayvenhurst off ramp
5. what appeared to be a freshly made bowl of puffed cream of wheat in the parking lot of 7-11

I uploaded some gnarly photos — of the sudden, random eye infection I got this morning — to my Flickr page. I’m fine now, thanks.

On my desk right now is a football-shaped bowl of Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstoppers. I poured three entire boxes into the bowl a few days ago and am now in trouble. You see, I’ve been methodically eating them by color. I started with red and then went to orange. The problem is that now there are only purple, yellow, and green remaining. I had been planning on eating the green ones next. If I do that, though, then there will only be LSU colors left in the bowl. They are an SEC rival, so I just can’t do that. I can try to think of them as the Lakers, but I just don’t care enough about basketball … and the Tigers will still be in the back of my mind. I can’t eat the purple ones because that would leave yellow and green and that’s just hideous. I can’t eat the yellow ones because then there will only be green and purple and that’s even worse. I’m thinking that the best course of action in this situation is to just put the whole bowl on Molly’s desk.

At the top of a tall, round building casting a shadow on the highway — right where Sunset meets the 405 — is a restaurant called West. I ate there Friday night with my girlfriend fiancée and her mom. The view of the city is just incredible and the bone-in New York strip was one of the top ten steaks I’ve ever had.

At some point in your life, you’re going to be asked to find a bat stretcher. This is a terrific story.

I’ve gone through this experience myself, so I know the feeling. It happened to me while I was loading trucks on the midnight-to-ten shift for Old Dominion Freight Lines. One of the dock managers told me that I had about 30 feet worth of furniture to load onto a 28-foot trailer, and that I’d better find a trailer stretcher in time to get the truck on the road.

I’m also ashamed to admit that I’ve done this to every new guy at almost every place I’ve ever worked. At Infosearch Media we told junior tech support guys to find a cable stretcher. When I worked for Regeneration Technologies we told fresh meat that we had to find bone stretchers. When I rowed for Florida Crew we told the rookies that the only way they’d get to sit in a boat was if they found a rigger stretcher. Even at Subway we used to tell kids that the sandwiches were too short and they had to go grab a bread stretcher.

Last night on my way home from work I stopped at La Bruschetta to pick up some of their excellent vegetable soup for my sick girlfriend fiancée. We’ve eaten at La Bruschetta a few dozen times over the years. It’s on Westwood Blvd, just on the other side of Santa Monica from my house. When I attempted to pay, the waiter — who is the owner’s son — wouldn’t let me. He said he could tell that Tricia was sick when she called to order and it was on the house. How great is that?

Unfortunately the chef accidentally gave me a bowl of some other soup. I didn’t realize it until I got home and she told me it was the wrong one. We called them and they apologized profusely. I jumped in the truck and returned to grab the correct soup. Since I was already there, I asked if they could make me some penne arrabiata, too. I forgot that the arrabiata is no longer on the menu there. Not only did he have the chef make me an order and add some breadsticks, but he also refused to let me pay and insisted that I take home two great bottles of wine. Now that is how you earn a good reputation.

I am sure that there are still plenty of people in the world that don’t know this yet, so I have a bit of an announcement to make. I am now officially off the market.

It feels a bit awkward to write about it here, which is strange because I have used this site to talk about almost everything else that’s happened to me in the last seven years. And getting engaged is certainly a biggie. Most everyone knows that Tricia and I have been dating for about six years now.

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Friday Five: My Last Five Dinners

• 03/11 - Wolfgang Puck’s Spago - LA
• 03/12 - Koi - LA
• 03/13 - Wolfgang Puck’s Cut - LA
• 03/14 - Maloney & Porcelli - NYC
• 03/15 - Sparks Steak House - NYC

One of the all-time best stand-up comedians, Richard Jeni (official page, currently down), apparently committed suicide this weekend. My girlfriend and I read about his death on Perez last night as we were getting ready to watch Rome. Just the night before, while celebrating a friend’s birthday at the Dresden, a few of us were talking about his hysterical HBO special, A Big Steaming Pile Of Me, how difficult stand-up is, and how few real geniuses there are in the field.
I still have that show on the TiVo in the guest room. It will be that much harder to delete it now.

When I have the opportunity I am apt to choose the underdog. Aside from the sinfully delicious Cinnamon Dolce Latte, for example, I dislike Starbucks and will generally go to the mom-and-pop coffee shops scattered around Los Angeles. More often than not lately, though, I am finding that Starbucks’ secret superpower is consistency. Mussolini kept the trains on time, and the Seattle coffee giant manages to use economies of scale and various other buzzwords I remember from my one college economics class to open earlier and provide better service than the little guys.

This morning I stopped at Bueller’s Bagels on my way to work. It was 5:55 and they don’t officially open, apparently, until six. A Mexican radio station was blaring, there was nobody manning the counter, and there was no coffee ready. I waited patiently for about five minutes — an eternity when you’re standing in an otherwise empty bagel shop at sunrise — and then walked across the street to one of the ten Starbucks located on my way to the office. They open at five. I walked into a store bustling with activity, with lovely music playing, and with a bacchanalian amount of caffeinated beverages to drink.

A medium coffee at Bueller’s, including tip, is about $2.50. A medium CDL at Starbucks is $4.00 with tip. This morning my coffee was free. The cash register was malfunctioning so the baristas had been instructed to just give customers their morning sustenance gratis. You can’t beat that. Sometimes the underdog loses for a good reason.

When I ran the LA Marathon last year my goal was to finish in five hours. I had trained for about two months and gotten down to a slender 186 lbs, the least I’ve weighed since my last year of college. Because of a disastrous combination of being mentally unprepared for the event and wearing year-old sneakers, at some point around mile 22 my left knee made a sickening pop. By mile 24 my right knee had joined its brother and I was in excruciating pain. I (literally) limped across the finish line and recorded a disheartening time of 5:46.

This year I decided to run about two weeks ago. I trained my out-of-shape, 200 lb, 33-yr old body for ten days. I figured that I had little chance of doing anything great, but I just wanted to (a) finish the race and (b) beat last year’s time. It was grueling and painful, I got a huge blister on the instep of my left foot, and I thought more than once that I was going to face-plant into the asphalt. But I was much better prepared mentally this time. The miles blazed below me and when I crossed the finish line I was struck dumb by the time: 4 hours, 56 minutes.

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Head coaches in the NFL often “script” the first dozen or so offensive plays of a game. They do this to set the tone and pace of the game, and to try to get their players to understand that they want to dictate how the game will go. With that in mind I have “scripted” the first 3+ hours of the music I’ll hear on my iPod during Sunday’s LA Marathon.

For more than two years now I’ve been aggregating my favorite “running” songs into a discrete playlist specifically geared towards keeping me motivated and moving towards that 26.2 mi marker. Any time I see a song in my 9900+ track iTunes library rated with only one star, I know it means one of two things. Either it’s a crap song that needs to be deleted, or it’s a song that I one-starred while running because I wanted to save it to my special cardio playlist. It’s my own little iTunes lifehack.

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For Valentine’s Day this year I enrolled my girlfriend and myself for a class at Los Angeles’ coolest cooking class: hipcooks. Our class was “The Surprise Guest”, the only one available when I registered. We made an endive appetizer, roasted honey pear salad with tarragon dressing, pistachio-crusted swordfish with a light curry sauce, herbed couscous, and for dessert a chocolate bark with poached pear decorated with raspberry coulis. Our instructor, Alison, was wildly perky and made the experience incredibly bouncy. We had a deliciously good time and I would gladly do it again.

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After last night’s 6.7 mile run — Death by Doheny, I call it — my girlfriend and I headed to Hollywood to catch The Perfect Victim (previously mentioned here) at The Knitting Factory. These kids put on a damn good show. The lead singer is energetic and bounces around the stage like a young Billie Joe Armstrong. The songs are slick and powerful, with a ton of punk-hard rock guitar riffs. I could have done without the drunk girl sprawled in a pool of her strawberry-daiquiri vomit outside the front door, but that’s just life in Los Angeles. If you get a chance to see them, go.