Archived Observation Lounges for the following months can be found here:
November, 1998
October, 1998
September, 1998
August, 1998
[Janet] 1/27/99
About a month ago, my boss got called for jury duty. A couple of weeks after
that, one of my co-workers got called for jury duty. "Ha ha," I said to them,
"I've never been called for jury duty." A week later I came home from
work to find my very own personal jury duty summons in the mail. Great, I
thought. The way everyone talks about trying to get out of it, this is going
to be sheer hell. I told practically everyone I knew that I had jury
duty, and everyone relayed to me their various tactics that were sure to
keep me from being selected: Don't wear your best clothes! Show your tattoos!
Tell him that you think s/he's guilty no matter what! Tell them you're not
able to be impartial! I told everyone that I didn't feel fit to decide some
stranger's future. They all disagreed. "It'll be fine" they said. Sure, I
thought, all anxiety-ridden.
Just what it was that I was worried about, exactly, I'm not quite sure of now. I thought I was doomed for certain when I was the first group picked to go into a courtroom, and then one of the first people chosen to sit in the jury box and answer all the personal character-type questions. The trial that I was eventually picked to be on the jury for happened to be a high-profile case involving activists (with a capital A) throwing pies at the mayor. The excitement surrounding the case may have been why I ended up actually --dare I say it -- liking jury duty. I learned a hell of a lot about the legal process -- all the stuff I studied in Junior High suddenly came to life! Wow! Actual application of knowledge, how novel!
I also learned that there are many, many, many people in the city of San Francisco that don't know how to speak English very well, if at all. So many people, mostly Asian, in the group that my jury was chosen from didn't even understand the questions that the lawyers were asking them, and spoke in very broken English. One Russian woman claimed that she didn't even really know English. All of these people were promptly excused. How fair is this? People immigrate to the United States, take advantage of all this country has to offer and yet will never have to fulfill their duty of having to serve on a jury because they can't speak English? How do these people even get citizenship in this country?
All in all, I had a very educational time. Courts are not like the ones shown on Ally McBeal. They're small and carpeted, not big and shiny like on TV, and the evidence isn't in little plastic baggies, either. And the whole jury selection process: I mean, I knew that they just don't pick 12 random people out of a crowd, but it was interesting to see just what kind of people they passed for cause, and what kind they excused. Fortunately, the people on my jury leaned toward the young side, so everyone got along really well for strangers joined together by fate. I really feel that people get along best when they're thrown together under adverse circumstances, like Customer Service telephone-answering, or jury duty. We got to do fun group activities, like go out for lunch together, guarded by two bailiffs who took us out a secret back entrance. But after discussing ourselves and our values and opinions and thoughts, not to mention the fates of the defendants, it just...ended. After the verdict was read, we all made a point to leave together in the same elevator as sort of a last group activity. In the elevator, the person we elected as foreman said jokingly, "Well, it's been pleasure; let's do it again sometime," and everyone in the elevator responded in unison, "Two years!" and laughed. Then everyone filtered out the front door of the courthouse, split up and went their separate ways. It was, to tell you the truth, a confusing letdown. And I may be overly-analytical or overly-emotional, but the whole experience really made me think. Gave me bad dreams, but made me think, and made me examine myself and what I thought, and how I thought of other people: as human beings or criminals, whichever the case may be.
[Avery] 1/24/99
As you might know from previous entries, Janet and I are musical theater
buffs.. and lately our favorite musical is Jonathan Larson's RENT.
RENT is coming to San Francisco for the first time in March and the hype
is already beginning: the newspaper ads, the radio spots and now the television
promotions.
The story of RENT is that of a group of young bohemians in Alphabet City, a part of the East Village of New York. UPN 44 decided that the appropriate giveaway for their RENT promotion is a free month's worth of rent (a common promotion on the national tour). However, they decided to combine the promotion by also using it to pimp a television show, also about a group of young adults in New York City: Friends.
Friends is the story of a bunch of white upper class young adults that only associate with other white upper class young adults. RENT, is the story of a multi-cultural bunch of young adults scraping by while dealing with disease, eviction and death.
Do you see the parallel? If you do, please let me know, because I honestly have no idea what message they're trying to give the residents of San Francisco with this promotion.
[Avery] 1/22/99
Since Janet was having such a crappy couple of weeks (first being stuck on
jury duty and coming back to work just to find out that her hard drive that
went south on her the day before jury duty was not recoverable... and that
the "computer whiz" at her office still didn't install Windows or MS Office
on her system, so she lost another two days after getting back from jury
duty just trying to get her system close to where it was over two weeks ago),
when I saw a copy of Time Crisis at the EBX store in Embarcadero Four, I
decided to grab it for her as a surprise.
Time Crisis is Namco's version of Vitrua Cop or Area 51. You get the light gun, you shoot stuff. Actually, you shoot everything. Now before you get started on your anti-gun kick let me tell you what I think of you anti-gun people.
First off, I am not a card carrying ember of the NRA. Hell, when I was growing up, my mother wouldn't let me have any guns or anything like that. She even had problems with me getting waterguns... and cap guns? Forget it. She didn't even like me pointing my finger like a gun at people. [For historical accuracy, once on a camping trip to Fort Ticonderoga in Upstate New York, my mother bought me a replica of an old flint-lock rifle... but it didn't shoot, not did it make any noise... and she would never let me point it at people or really play with it at all.]
I have to say that the lesson that I learned wasn't one of fear from her. She didn't threaten to punish me if I played with fake guns or anything... what she did do is teach me at a very early age that guns are powerful and dangerous... and you don't ever play with a real gun. She also taught me to never pretend to point a gun (even if it is my finger) at a police officer... which was a very good lesson, because when I was in my early teens, a teenager in Boston was killed by a cop when the kid pointed his Lazer Tag pistol at the cop and screamed "Bang Bang"... this is also the reason that all fake guns sold in the United States have a bright orange tip so a cop can tell the difference immediately.
About two years ago, Janet and I went to the shooting range for the first time. Our boxing instructor Robb asked if we wanted to go shooting, and we thought that it would be a shame if we never fired a handgun at least once in our lives. So we went to Jackson Arms in South San Francisco, rented a 9mm Beretta, took a quick lesson (Robb was also an experienced firearms handler) and stepped into the lanes.
I don't think you'll ever have the proper respect for a handgun until you hold one in your hand, squeeze the first shot off into the paper target and realise that you could put a hole in the person standing next to you just as easily. It is at that exact moment that you realise how dangerous a gun can be to an untrained person.
My opinion? I think that every child should have to take a firearms safety class in middle school and take a weaponry course in gym. Every 9 year old should take a field trip to a gun range and watch the destruction that a rifle or pistol can do on a side of beef or a watermelon. If kids learn at a young age how dangerous handguns can be, instead of just making them a desirable taboo, maybe we can stop little kids killing their neighbors with the pistol that they found in daddy's sock drawer.
That's the other thing. If you want to own a handgun, you should have to pass a written test (which you have to do in all states) to get a learner's permit. Then you should have to go to a range and under supervision take a certain number of hours worth of supervised shooting lessons and then score a certain amount of points on a standardized shooting test. Then you do the psychological screenings and then you can get a gun. Funny, that's exactly what we have to do to get a driver's license, isn't it?
Once you get the gun, if you have children, the law should be: trigger locks, weapon in a locked case, ammo in a separate locked case. This should be checked by the sheriff's department every 6 months to insure that the weapon is stored safely. If you fail inspection, you lose your weapons until your children are 16. End of story.
Oh, and any resident over the age of 16 in a house where one member has a gun... everyone needs to be licensed to use it safely... even if you never intend to use it.
Still, I believe that it's every law abiding citizen's right to own a firearm... it just doesn't need to be easy to get one, that's all.
So yeah, I like shooting games... but I respect guns... and as an adult, I know that there is a difference between my Namco Guncon and the 9mm Beretta that I shot at Jackson Arms. It helps me relax and if it wasn't for shooting games, the two little kids in Mars Attacks wouldn't have been able to save the President's daughter, right?
Oh, and if you haven't ever picked up a gun, don't even talk to me about it. You're a bigger part of the problem than you'll ever know.
[Janet] 1/14/99
Disappointment Is:
Watching Jeff Foxworthy do his entire "You Know You're a Redneck if You..." schtick on his HBO comedy show because...well, frankly because there's nothing else on on Saturday night and you're just too damn lazy to get up and do something else, and then going out to the Toronado and coming back home at 2:00 AM and turning on the TV only to find out that you have just missed by a matter of mere seconds your favorite comedian Denis Leary's "Lock and Load" comedy routine on HBO which you have only seen but once on that night two New Year's Eves ago when all your friends agreed that yes, it would be fun to get a room at the Marriott downtown, but who all ended up "changing their minds" at the very, very last minute, leaving you to pay the bill for the entire amount of the $275 "Special New Years Eve Rate" for the room in which you drank a bottle of champagne and delighted in Mr. Leary's excessive use of the f-word, and though you search the digital cable guide in vain, realize that it's not gonna be on again any time soon.
[Avery] 12/29/98
Janet and I were in New York City during Christmas. I sort of planned that
the trip should include Christmas day in New York because as a non-christian,
Christmas can be one of the most boring days to spend in San Francisco.
In San Francisco, almost everything shuts down for Christmas. Sure, some bars are still serving up drinks and a couple of ethnic restaurants are still open for business, but everything else closes down. You would think in a city that touts such diverse cultures, that we wouldn't pander to the christian majority once again.
So, this year we arranged our vacation so we could be in a city with some real diversity. When we got to New York, we made a point to figure out what neighborhoods would have shops open on Christmas day. What we found out was that almost every part of the city still had stuff going on. Sure, the big department stores were closed, but the small shops and restaurants were still in operation. In deference to my Jewish heritage, we decided to spend Christmas in one of the Jewish neighborhoods... the Upper West Side.
So, we grabbed the subway (which, unlike in San Francisco still runs on schedule on the holidays) and made our way uptown for lunch. Since we were doing the Jews-on-Christmas afternoon, we also grabbed tickets for the 1:30 showing of Star Trek: Insurrection at the Loew's 84th Street Cinema.
Lunch was a couple of fresh bagels from H and H Bagels on 80th and Broadway. We then walked by Zabars, which was not only open, but completely packed with hundreds of people who just saw Christmas Day as a friday off from work. We kept walking up Broadway, noticing how almost everything was open... even the Jewish Soul Food restaurant (read: Chinese) was open and doing a brisk business.
One of the things that they do in New York at the movies (and most of the North East) is that they start the previews about 10 minutes before the movie is supposed to start. It gives the people who got there early so they could get a good seat something to do while they waited. Then the movie started and something amazing happened: everybody shut up.
You see, if you have never experienced a movie in San Francisco, let me describe it to you. First, the crowd hisses at all of the previews. Well, most of the crowd does... some people either use those damned laser pointers or just scream insults at the trailer. Then the movie starts, but everybody still talks. If you shush at someone, it only serves to make them talk louder.
Actually, it doesn't stop at movies. I have been to musicals and plays in San Francisco where people just talk and talk and talk through the whole thing. When we went to see the San Francisco Symphony a few years ago, people showed up in shorts and t-shirts, eating and talking through the whole thing. You don't even want to know what people do at concerts.
Some people blame this on the fact that people spend so much time listening to CDs at home and watching movies on TV, that they are not used to being quiet when at a theater. Bullshit. Most people are just selfish, undisciplined louts whose parents never taught them how to behave.
Back to New York. When the lights went down, so did the talking. At one point, a little kid behind me was asking his father what was going on in the movie. I quietly ssssshed the kid, and the father actually apologized. Then he whispered to his son: When you're at the movies, you have to be quiet.
It's a simple concept that my mother taught me when I went to see my first movie: if you have to buy a ticket to get in, respect the fact that other people had to pay to get in as well. That means, you don't ruin the experience for anyone. When you're at a movie, you shut up. When you go to the theater or to the symphony, you dress well, enter quietly, and save your comments until the applause or until you leave the building.
We left the movie realising that if we lived in New York, we'd start going to the movies regularly again. However, until that happens, we'll save our movie watching to the three channels of HBO that we have at home. At least then, the only time I'll have to go sssssh is if the cats start acting up.
[Janet] 12/16/98
I always say that I'm fragile, because any little step outside my current
routine throws my body into days worth of sickness and distress. Like the
time we stayed up with people from the bar until 5:00 AM. Or the time we
had to take a non-stop redeye from San Francisco through L.A. to Tampa to
visit Avery's dad. By the time we got to Tampa, it was something like 5:00
in the morning and we still had to get the rental car and try to remember
whether it was the "Hunter's Green" or "Hunter's Glen" gated community his
dad lived in.
So we get there, and of course they wake up and make this huge breakfast, and by then it seems kind of pointless to start sleeping so we stay up all day (which is basically all day and all night and all day at this point) and I start getting this little headache sometime during the afternoon which turns into a little neckache some time later, so I take about six ibuprofin and pray. We're supposed to be going out to this World-Renowned Steakhouse where you can practically choose the cow you want your steak to come from and I'm just hoping that I can make it through this dinner so I can finally sleep.
The steak place is some kind of gigantic castle, just sitting there all conspicuously right in the heart of the Tampa Bay area, with dark lighting and blood-red interior, and the wine list is the size of a dictionary from the Reference Section of the library -- the kind that sits on its own pedestal -- and is actually chained to the table because rumor has it that people try to steal them as souvenirs all the time, since their wine cellar supposedly has every wine in existence, or close to it. The menu is equally as extensive, where you can not only choose what cut of steak you want and how you want it cooked, but also the thickness and/or weight, and it's one of those dinners where everything under the sun is included in the price of the steak, like a salad and a soup and little garlic toasts, and a baked potato and bread and vegetables as if the 2-pound steak wasn't enough food. And I'm slowly feeling worse and worse, and my neckache is paralyzing me at this point while slowly creeping upwards, taking over the entire back of my skull and pretty soon the whole front of my skull, which of course only serves to make me feel nauseous, and the food keeps coming and the waiters are hovering and the little smelly garlic toasts just start sending me bad nauseous-smell vibes and I just know that I'm not going to make it through this meal.
But I keep taking tiny bites of the huge appetizers that someone ordered, and then the enormous side dishes that come with the meal but really are like a meal in themselves, and it's taking an eternity. The steak finally gets extracted from the cow and brought to the table, and I just look at the steak and smell the steak fumes and have to run to the restroom right then and there if only to cry in pain and splash some water on my face. The Avery's stepmother comes searching for me and everyone's concerned and they try to eat really fast and don't even mind that I have to take my entire expensive dinner home in a box. But then they want to go to the dessert building, yes, that's right, the dessert building, built solely for dessert-eating purposes, but FIRST we need to take the guided tour of the wine cellar and the kitchen, with all of the assembly-line salad-makers and assembly-line baked potato-makers and our tour guide, who takes it all very seriously. So we finally get through the dessert course which offers another dictionary-sized menu, and start driving home and I can't even see straight at this point, my headache is so blinding, and every little lurch that Avery's dad makes with the car just sends waves of nausea through me so I'm just gripping the leather seat for dear life and just as I think that I'm going to fall down and die we pull into the driveway. I manage to get the words "open the door" out of my mouth, the headache affecting my brain so much that I've forgotten that it's a four-door car. The only thing I remember thinking is that I needed to find an inconspicuous place to throw up because I didn't want to mar the nice driveway. The I took a Xanax and collapsed on the bed.
In a nutshell, that's exactly what happened to me on Sunday, substituting the Belgian Beer Festival for the Steakhouse. In my vain attempts to find an explanation of why I should be throwing up all day I blamed the lox on my bagel, accused someone of tampering with my All-Sport sport drink, and entertained the thought of pesticide poisoning from the tomato...until Avery reminded me that he ate the exact same things as I did, and he sure as hell didn't spend the day puking.
[Avery] 12/9/98
THE GREAT BLACKOUT OF 1998
At 8:18am yesterday morning, San Francisco went dark. Due to a human
error at the San Mateo Pacific Gas and Electric sub station, all of the power
for San Francisco and northern San Mateo county went off.
For the next six hours, we would remain in the dark. You don't realise everything that runs on electricity until its gone. Of course, the computer and television turned off... and the fridge slowly started heating up. But it's the small things that you forget about... like the speakerphone, and the starter/timer for the furnace, which becomes very obvious when it's only 45 degrees outside.
Bigger systems were affected like the rapid transit (check the MUNI Chronicles)... all of the city's electric busses and subway trains were stopped dead in their tracks. The BART system which shuttles in tens of thousands of workers every day was stuck as well, stranding hundreds of people on the elevated tracks or underground in the transbay tube, or in their offices with no way to get home. People were trapped in elevators, and stranded in power-locked rooms.
One person died due to the fact that all traffic signals were out of service due to the power outage.
Still, through the whole thing, Mayor Willie Brown insisted that everything was fine and that the city was functionin' as well as if the power was on.
Me? I wasn't horribly affected, as I was working from home due to a 7am conference call. The power blew, my speakerphone turned off and I had to calm down the cats who got a little spooked.
I immediately called my boss to advise her of the situation, but got her voicemail. When I tried to make the next phone call, I got an all circuits busy message. People were panicking and calling everyone to find out what happened.
Within 15 minutes, I had an old walkman rigged up to the battery-powered computer speakers, trying to find out what was happening. Then I jumped on the laptop and connected out to the local news sites. The situation: no power for over a million people on San Francisco and the peninsula.
By the time I reached my manager (who works out of the East Coast), my laptop battery was pretty much dead... so I changed my voicemail message to say that people could try to call or page, but that they wouldn't have much luck and sat there, hoping the power would come back.
Now it's the day after the blackout. The apartment building owner has re-set the furnace and interior lights timers and checked all of the circuit breakers for the other systems (like the fire alarms). By this evening, everything will be running like yesterday never happened. Except for the fact that we're going to stock up on batteries and canned food, because if a power outage can do this much damage to the city, imagine what the next earthquake is going to do.
[Avery] 12/6/98
Have you ever looked back at your week and realized that nothing extremely
interesting happened. I mean, I'm not in a rut by all means, but when I sit
down to write up my journal entries, nothing really jumps out and says "Hey!
Write about me!"
Part of the problem is that December is a hectic month at work, but since I try not to talk about work stuff on the site, there's not a heck of a lot left to write about. Just in case you wonder why I don't write about work stuff, it's because a number of co-workers read the site... and I don't want to say anything negative about any co-worker on the chance that it would somehow get back to them. Sigh.
Well, this week, the new gym opens up and we have the Belgian Beer Festival on Sunday... so I'm sure that I'll have something interesting to write about. Maybe... hopefully.... probably?
[Janet] 12/1/98
While Avery and I were having our little mini-vacation at the Hotel Sofitel
a couple of Fridays ago, we decided to take advantage of their hotel pay-per-view
movie system and watch "There's Something About Mary," since everyone we
know that has seen it has commented that it is such a good movie, and noted
how it is so hilarious, and that they have never laughed so much at a movie
in all of their lives. Well, $8.95 later we were wondering if we had seen
the same movie as everyone else, because Something About Mary was very un-funny.
OK, to be fair, there were one or two laugh-out-loud funny parts, like when Matt Dillon over-sedated the dog and then has to try to bring him back to life, but what was up with Chris Elliott and the hives? (Every time I see Chris Elliott, I can't help but think of the episode of his long-since-cancelled sitcom "Get A Life" where his neighbors got sick from some bad shellfish, and I guess it affected their brains because he was able to "control" them and made them do the Alley Cat for 2 days straight or something.) So why the resounding success of this movie? Was it the ever-growing hordes of Adam Sandler-type lowbrow humor-loving fans that have been rushing to movie theaters lately? Or was it the fact that Mary embodied a male fantasy of a Perfect Woman who drinks beer, plays golf and watches Sports Center while still being able to show her sweet and sensitive side (in dealing with her retarded brother, for example) at the drop of a hat; a woman who is as smart as a whip and, most importantly, model-pretty and stick-thin to boot? Or maybe I'm just missing something, and things like catching a fishhook in the mouth and using you-know-what as hair gel (huh?) really are funny.