Had The Time
Sunday. I went in to work after breakfast and managed just under two hours, my brain essentially refusing to function, so I came back home and ate an apple. Nothing like an apple to get your priorities straight. In going through my list of things to do at the office, fighting going through my list of things to do at the office, I realized how gummed up I've gotten. I need this coming vacation. I'm worried it won't make much difference when I return, but that's a worry for later, meanwhile I'm going to have fun.
I did ask my landlord about the guy across the way who puts the signs up in the window. Not a guy, but a woman "who spent too much time working for the government" and hasn't let anyone inside the apartment for over a year. She literally doesn't have hot water because she won't let anyone in to make repairs. Which doesn't make sense.
The world I know doesn't work that way. You start putting weird assed signs up in the window all the while complaining to your landlord about the lack of hot water and then not letting the repair people inside, well, your ass is out on the street. Unless they do things differently in Oakland. Unless the woman is related to the mayor. Unless she's got bucks (working for the government?) and she can do precisely as she pleases. Bucks is one thing that will let you go weird without outside interference. Unlikely, since someone with bucks wouldn't be living in that apartment, which has, I believe, a view of the lake and is therefore probably nicer than mine. Except for the hot water. An observation, not a complaint.
There's a coffee shop on the way from Old Oakland, where the company I work for is located, and Jack London Square that I drop by now and then on weekends. It's an old converted corner gas station that's filled with tables and a couple of couches and a high ceiling that opens onto the parking lot. This photograph was taken by another photographer, a student at SF State, who was working behind the counter and with whom I struck up a conversation. We traded a couple of shots with my Nikon (see the banner photograph). For all the photographs I take, this is one of the few I have of myself other than those I occasionally shoot in a mirror. Getting old, I'm afraid. Looking old, anyway.
This one is underexposed, because the background light fooled the meter, but it's OK. I noticed when I'd run the scan, you can't see it here, but I noticed my left eye is focused on the camera and the right eye is off having a conversation with itself. Maybe because one is far sighted and one is near sighted, so one does the work at this distance and the other takes over when things get close. I believe the, um, evil eye looks much the same. What little I know of the evil eye. The right one is looking in the right direction, but it's off in its own world, thinking its own thoughts. I don't think its evil, but you never know and it won't say.
Monday. Another long day, today, everyone going eight hundred miles an hour. I say eight hundred, but it could have been nine hundred, could have been seven hundred, no one was counting, no one had the time.
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