This morning I put on an old blue coat that four years ago my supervisors at work told me not to wear because it looked like it had been "purchased at a Goodwill." They were unaware, perhaps, that I believe Goodwill almost universally overprices its garments, and that it was probably purchased at the Salvation Army instead. Besides, before I could say that, they had moved on to telling me to get a haircut.
While standing on the bus this morning I leaned my nose into the bicep of my upstretched arm and smelled an odor in the coat that reminded me of walking past a homeless man. After four wet winters in my San Francisco closet the coat had reverted to its natural state of beautiful thriftstoriness. For some reason this made me feel very happy.
In little more than a month I intend to set aflame two weeks' worth of 15.5/33 Ike Behar shirts that I never want to wear again. And I will let my hair grow long and wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion, and all that jazz.
We had hoped to start this past weekend with a celebration, but it didn't work out that way. After putting an offer on another house last Thursday, we thought we would be in contract by Friday afternoon. Instead, we spent all day Thursday and all day Friday waiting for our realtor to contact us. Turns out she didn't convey our offer as we had asked her to and then she underwent a lame effort to cover up her mistakes, primarily by not returning our phone calls or e-mails. When I finally got in touch with her and confronted her about what happened she told me it was inappropriate for me to "interrogate" her and said she wished "my mother could hear the way" I was speaking to her. She told me I was being disrespectful (this, after being incommunicato for more than 24 hours while our offer was out and then telling us our offer was "foolish") .
I wanted to say, "When I'm being disrespectful, trust me, you'll know it." But I didn't. I was uncharacteristically civil when I fired her first thing Saturday morning.
On Saturday we "ran into" Leah and Simon from a girl and a boy. Self-acknowledged as "baby crazy," Leah is a veteran blogger and one of our readers and Simon is such a good sport he arranged for a secret encounter with Wood and I, despite the fact that if I were him I would hate us. Leah has powerful Utah genes that are propelling her towards parenthood, and reading Sweet Juniper doesn't help much there, I guess. It seems she thinks we make parenting look tolerable. I love that people without kids read this blog, although if I were childless, this blog would make me throw up in my mouth every morning. Either that or I would read it just to make fun of my sappy ass. I know many "parenting" blogs have regular non-parent readers. I sometimes wonder what it is about this blog that makes it interesting to anyone, let alone people who aren't just here to commiserate about shitty sleep schedules and dirty diapers.
Sunday was the gay pride parade, and though it wasn't quite as exciting for us as last year (no surprisingly friendly gay barbarians), it's always great to see how the whole city rolls out the welcome mat and the rainbow flags and so many people celebrate gay culture and gay rights on such a huge scale. It reminds me that this society has been slowly arcing towards greater equality, and that heavy resistance is often a sign of desperation against the inevitable. Pride week always gives me more hope that soon every couple who wants to be married or raise kids together will be able to do so with the same legal rights as any other and that someday all the people out there who think it's any of their business to deny others such rights will be remembered just as we remember those crowds of saps you see in newsreel footage from the 50s being held back by the national guard while they hurl obscenities at little black girls just trying to go to school.
