Because it’s Friday AGAIN. And because traditions are important. In which I cover the good stuff and the hard stuff in my week, trying for the non-preachy, non-annoying side of self-reflection.

And you get to join in if you feel like it.

So Selma and I spent half the week in San Francisco.

Which means we are entitled to spend at least half of the Friday Chicken kvetching about it covering it.

There was good. There was hard.

There was hard that turned into good.

It was a lot of week this week, is all I’m saying.

And some of it happened in San Francisco. So if you get bored of hearing about that part, know that I’ll be completely over it by next week. 🙂

The hard stuff

San Francisco.

Somehow I had entirely forgotten how San Francisco is full of [insert stream of expletives here] people who are crazy.

Completely, irrevocably [insert more cussing] crazy.

Which is funny, because whenever someone asks me why I don’t live in San Francisco anymore, the first answer is always that I had to get away from all the [bleeped out] crazy.

The second answer is that if I’m already going to pay that much for rent I’d move to Paris where the [***********************] crazy people are at least being crazy in French.

Of course there is also lots I love (and miss) about San Francisco. And of course it is also the magical place where I met my gentleman friend after getting a (cough, crazy) vision that I needed to move there from Berlin.

But man.

That city! And the sheer number of people who are ….

… seriously unbalanced.

Sometimes scary unbalanced and sometimes “oh, isn’t that charming for the first ten minutes” unbalanced, but it’s a lot to take.

A lot of mental and emotional energy goes to just filtering it out. Challenging.

All my stuff coming up.

There was actually kind of a sneakified thing I wanted to do while purportedly coming to town to a. teach a workshop and b. throw a fabulous birthday surprise weekend for my gentleman friend.

My Israeli passport is expired.

And not even recently expired.

I haven’t been home in almost five years. Even though when I left it was supposed to be just for … I don’t know how long. A few months? A year at most?

Anyway.

I’m going in October and need a new passport. And since it is basically impossible to get anyone at the Consulate to pick up a phone or call you back or anything, and I wasn’t sure I had the right papers …

Well, I knew I could sort that out in person while we were in San Francisco*.

But it totally brought up a lot of unfinished, unresolved gunk for me. And — as if that weren’t enough — you should have seen the awful, awful passport photos.

*If you’re thinking, “Wait, didn’t you already sort this out?” … the answer is no. And also that I don’t want to talk about it.

The worst passport pictures in the history of terrible passport pictures.

I know that no one looks good under fluorescent lights standing next to a pale screen in a dubious-looking Walgreens.*

*Yes, this qualified as an emergency situation and I broke my box-store-boycott. Ugh.

But these photos were spectacularly bad. It was outrageous how unattractive I looked.

Even my gentleman friend, who tends to think that I always look stunning even when that is demonstrably untrue, agreed that these were truly horrendous and distorted photos and that I looked deranged.

Ugh.

Going back to work.

Admittedly, things have gotten a lot better.

I mean, a year ago there was no way in hell you could have gotten me to do four days without being all internet-ed up.

And if you had? Coming back to four days of piled up work would have sent me into weeks of panicked horribleness and lovely emotional breakdown stuff.

So yes, this is better.

But it was still super hard. So much to catch up on.

So much crap. So many little misunderstandings or things-gone-slightly-wrong.

And then someone had to cancel (I know) for the North Carolina workshop* and I am not in the mood to write another personal ad to fill that spot.

*It says it’s sold out but now it’s not! If you want that last spot, please talk to Marissa! She’ll totally let you do the Early Bird thing since that was the spot that opened up.

Very stressful. Very tiring. And now I’m really ready for all the catch-up to be done.

The good stuff

San Francisco!

We went to our favorite haunts. We saw our friends.

We watched the Bay from the S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien. We sang pirate chanteys on the Balclutha.

We had brunch with Casey and her sweet, wonderful husband Dave.

Selma and I got to have dinner with a bunch of my Bay Area Kitchen Table people (and they bought me a pirate dress!)

And there was lots of good walking, lots of good food and lots of happy nostalgic “good to be back”-ness.

Plus, my gentleman friend was seriously elated. And happy gentleman friend = yay.

A total freaking miracle with my Israeli passport.

I came up with a VPA (Very Personal Ad) asking for a perfect, simple solution to my passport-related worries. And?

It turned out that yes, I did have the wrong paperwork.

And also that I could extend my passport for another year and so I didn’t have to renew it!

Which means that I didn’t have to pay sixty dollars. And I didn’t have to put it in the mail and worry about it for a month or two. And I didn’t have to show anyone those horrible, horrible passport photos.

Ah, yes. They have been destroyed. And that, my friends, is good news for everyone involved.

Also, even though I arrived at the consulate five minutes before they closed, they were weirdly cool about it. Awesome.

The workshop.

So. Much. Fun.

I pretty much always get bright, interesting people in the classes I teach, but this group was exceptional.

Seriously amazing people there. It was an honor to be there and do wackiness with them.

Happy!

And … new at the meme beach house!

Yes, that’s a Stuism too.

My brother and I have this thing where we come up with ridiculous band names and then say in this really pretentious, knowing tone, “Oh, well, you know, it’s just one guy.” This week?

Spunky Asphalt

Me: “Are you familiar with Spunky Asphalt?
Ez: “Dude. It’s your own spunky-ass fault.”
Me: “Oh, is that what they’re called?
Ez: “Uh, it’s just one guy.”

And … STUISMS of the week.

Stu is my paranoid McCarthy-ist voice-to-text software who delights in torturing me misunderstanding me. I can’t stand him.

My favorite this week?

When I was trying to tell him where to put in the header tags for someone else to format my post. And inside of the angle brackets instead of H1 he wrote “each one“. Moron.

Anyway, the gems from this week:

• sorrier things instead of “saw your thing”
• at sea instead of “Etsy” (this isn’t all that funny, but it’s funnier if you’re a pirate queen.)
• Water kind of Niece can I back? instead of “What kind of epiphanies can I expect?”
• will always lift you to the thing you need the Maoist instead of “will always give you the thing you need the most”
• Oh. Aaron S. instead of “awareness”
• back to y’all forwarding my tender he instead of “that you will forward me my itinerary”
• on the bazaar illustrated Offense instead of “in a bizarre and a miraculous turn of events”

That’s it for me …

And yes yes yes, of course you can join in my Friday ritual right here in the comments bit if you feel like it.

Yeah? Anything hard and/or good happen in your week?

And, as always, have a glorrrrrrrrrrrrious weekend. And a happy week to come.