Sometimes, when you to wake up early enough to leave a warm bed and a warm house on a cold morning, drive back to Houston in the dark in an oppressive line of rear brake lights with dry, stinging-contact eyes burning everytime you blink , you hear the entire NPR news cycle repeat itself. At which point you start to feel a little doomed.

Marketplace, Morning Edition, The Writer’s Almanac, the whole thing, all over again. And sometimes, within that period of time, you hear ME-chelle Norris deliver an interesting-sounding phrase that if commenced by anyone else without her uniquely velvet-yet-smooth, low and soft way, wouldn’t otherwise catch your ear. Similar to when you hear an artist articulate normal words into lyrics and now those words sound fantastic to you. Yesterday that phrase was “High Stakes End Game,” and when it came back at me the second time around, on my way to work at that point, it still sounded really kickass.

High Stakes End Game she said.
Has surreal, multi-meaning for me in my present turn of affairs.

Even though I had exactly 12 minutes to rush through the morning routine this a.m. in order to have a modicum of a chance of getting to work on time, I specifically did three things to sabotage those chances. Three obstinate, fully-knowing-the-consequences, time-wasting behaviors or activities (or whatever category they should fall in) that I just did anyway, as I do so often, I guess to see how far I could push my own nerve. Like a brat kid. Evil to my self, The Tragic Stupid Saboteur.

I arrived to work a good 2 hours after I should have. And I didn’t call ahead or offer a single explanation or anything. Just walked in, acted like it was normal. Y, my outfit is weird today. Fortunately no one made fun of my stupid boots decision yesterday, so perhaps today’s creative failure won’t be commented on either.

I haven’t finished Christmas shopping, so if I were accosted today by a Christmas elf-devil and made to show my cards, it would be revealed that as of Dec. 21st, no one I love would really be getting anything substantive from me this year. And that just won’t do. It’s time to start pulling rabbits from my @$$.

Does it still count as vegetables if all the vegetables I’m eating today are in soup?

How long, exactly, is a wine hangover supposed to last?

Damn Kim and the awesome new place Sandy found with the awesome (per last night at least) bartender and promoter and dj who tripped over themselves and GAVE away two bottles of wine solely on account of her walking in and sitting down and being an uber-hottie. And damn me for walking in eight minutes behind her and encountering the tasty little set-up and moving right on in next to her to lay damage to those two bottles of wine as if today and this morning’s smack in the face would never happen to me.

I need to read Dooce more often. Need to be reminded about all of those things. Need a bit of everything there to rub off on everything here, in my sphere.

i wondered if i’d do this, and here i currently find myself, here; in the midst of it.

i’m wonderfully wine-primed, listening to the bros’ version of believe, and then after that, to hold tight london.

Occupied all evening, wondering just what it is I’m going to do and how on Earth i’m going to do it. How am i going to do it?

How many of you stick to plans? How do you decide on a plan, out of all that your fingers could be touching, and select one and choose it, and take it near you and hold it and keep it and go with it. How do you do it?

i want new worlds opened to me. i want to see things again. or at all. or to finally get goddamn started. it’s so past time to go globe trekking, but god do i want to do it.
oh char, to getting started.

it really was.

Jay and I recently returned from a fantastic jaunt to San Francisco – as a recon mission for me and a seal-the-deal, how-fast-can-I-possibly-get-there mission for him. And as luck would have it, the experience was flawless. Absolutely undeniably the best trip we’ve taken together, but moreso, the freshest slap in the face either of us have maybe ever received.

Which speaks volumes.

On Friday nite, we joined a house party of locals who proffered peach and cotton candy-flavord shisha from a window sill-perched hooka. Which I mightily obliged. The lot of the group were professional illustrators and designers, which is completely normal in that town the way energy trading and oil & gas auditing are in this town, and fortunately for the two Texans they didn’t mind being generous to strangers.

We tried to hide our tourist-tude throughout the rest of the trip, but what can you do when you still gotta buy some buddhas in Chinatown and walk yourself as close as you can to the blue-eyed bay? Not much. Went ahead and bought the clam chowder in the bread-bowl (but never admitted it). All we really could do was point out “Tales of the City” landmarks and hide the NFT book. We lucked out on the weather, perused FANTASTIC couture resale shops and were stunned with slack-jaw wonder at the total amazingness of all the hidden treasures in Golden Gate Park. Dear god, that place is amazing. Can barely imagine what it looked like in the 60’s covered in hippies.

It’s a crime what a night of dancing your ass off in the Castro with a skin full of Red Bull and vodkas and heads full of pretty f’t up strangers can do to two Western souls…
Wasted. That’s how it left us.