Choices: the ones we make and the ones we don't

This morning I got up late. I checked emails and got the address of the restaurant I was planning to meet people at. A quick question to google maps got me directions, which I scrawled on a page of my notepad without really assimilating. All I knew was that it said it would take twenty minutes to get there and I was meant to be there before noon.

But somehow rushing in the mornings never seems to happen and it was dangerously close to noon when I finally got out of chezbob and discovered I had no cash on me. We always pay for lunch with cash. Perhaps it is an American thing or something peculiar to this group in particular. So I went to the ATM and withdrew some money.

By the time I got back to chezbob I knew it was late. Perhaps 12:15? Far too late to set off on the drive and arrive at the restaurant. I shrugged it off though. There were always lunches, missing one was no big deal.

I went back in chezbob and grabbed my bag, a book and the train timetable. Okay, plan a for the day had not worked due to my extreme laziness but that was no reason to write it off. I had to make myself busy after-all to ignore what this day should have been (but I won’t talk about that…).

And so I decided to head into San Francisco. I had a mission, you see, a mission to buy a new watch. My watch stopped working in March. I got a new battery for it but it never kept time. So that was my mission and I chose to accept it.

I had to rush as the next train to SF was at 12:35pm. I could have driven of course but it is infinitely cheaper to take the Caltrain and far less hassle. Plus you get to read at the station while you wait for it to arrive.

But I didn’t have to wait for long. I got my ticket at the machine and hopped on the hourly train almost immediately after. I can’t read on the train but I still use up the hour it takes to get to SF quite well by thinking about emails, tv, books.

My pattern never wavers. On getting off the train, I go straight to WholeFoods and buy a carton of takeaway food and a fruit salad. Sometimes I get the “comfort food” which is mashed potatoes and chicken and peas and gravy… or the Indian food. But today I went for the Chinese. I took it to Yurba Buena Gardens to eat while sitting on the lawn enjoying the sun and reading my book.

Obviously my next stop was the Virgin Megastore. Obviously. I mean, it is there. Who wouldn’t go to have a peak and drool over all the dvds? And buy a Korean film by the same director as Oldboy? And next stop, Borders. No, no watches there. I never pretended to be very good at completing missions. But I did find “Fluke” to keep Myo happy. Then of course a trip to my favourite gift shop was necessary. It has lots of goods with Miffy, TinTin, Walace and Gromit, the Little Prince and Asterix. Perfect for presents for many of my friends. But I didn’t buy anything. I was the only person in the shop and so scurried out pretty fast before the shop assistant could talk to me. Again, no watches in sight. Next up, Lush. Nope, no watches there. Plus no freezer packs of shower-gel and I still haven’t plucked up the courage to try the shower-jelly. Kind of thinking that I really should try to find a watch, I ended my trip at Macys. I was unable to avoid having a sales assistant talk to me this time and direct my attention to a vast array of time pieces. Ignoring the (probably pricy) ones he directed me to, I got a rather ugly but functional (and more to the point reduced) watch. At last. My work here was done.

Another long walk back to the train station (but taking a bus could have been more hassle than it was worth- the last time I took a bus it broke down and even without that the journey seemed to last forever so on the way back Mary-Rose insisted on a taxi). I was forced (oh no) to read for a while and wait for my train. And then, around 6:15pm I stumbled into chezbob, worn but successful.

No, wait. I didn’t do that at all.

I just went to the ATM and came back to chezbob knowing that it was late. Perhaps 12:15pm? I checked on the microwave clock and found to my extreme surprise that it was only 11:45am. How was my sense of time so far off? I rushed into the Dream Car and hit the road, remembering to zero my miles so I could use it to help me follow the google map directions.

I was late to the lunch but not too late to join. They had already ordered and were seated around a large round table. They? Well there is Joe from work and his wife Lisa. I have to wonder whether they always looked like each other or they grew that way after a few years of marriage. There is Joe’s old roommate from Stanford who has been doing these weekly lunches for 25 years. And then a married couple expecting their first child in a couple of months. A guy that always seems to illustrate what he is talking about with elaborate doodles on a napkin. And… oh others that I have forgotten being a bear of very little brain. To be fair, it was a large table and they were far away. We had to have a game of musical chairs and rearrange the table, purloining one from elsewhere in the restaurant while we were at it and arguing over whether we wanted the rounded edges up making a figure of 8 or down making a rectangle. We compromised with a dP motif.

I am not usually chatty around people I don’t know well. Or indeed people I do know well and yet have nothing to say to. But I felt I held my own here though possibly went into the realm of “things you don’t talk about at the dinner table” a few times.

At a point in the conversation, one person commented that the new design of banknotes included a Cylon symbol. And later he made a reference I did not get and said “sorry, I am boasting about my Star Trek credentials, aren’t I?” to which another said “I don’t believe I have ever heard boasting being used in reference to Star Trek.”

So that was the group of people. And the meal was good. Chinese food which appears to taste the same in the US as it does in the UK. Kind of dull. I prefer it when we go to a Thai restaurant which still seems a bit more foreign to me. My fortune was "problems you have will be solved quickly". Napkin-doodle guy reminded the group that all fortunes would be suffixed with "in bed or with a chainsaw... or both". Which works for me.

After the meal, we went to Joe’s flat and parked there (Joe rode with me to show me the way) to start off on a walk. I had a peak at Joe’s living conditions first and have to say that I am so very impressed. For a place owned by engineers, it is surprisingly full with art. Lisa is a fantastic photographer and everywhere I turned there was an amazing city shot or breathtaking natural scenery. Weirdly enough, in the loo they had a picture of York Minster Cathedral. The flat was made even more desirable by the living room, decorated in a semi-gothic style and overlooking the canyon.

Where we walked.

It was a long walk compared to the other walk I have been on with these guys. And much more beautiful than the streets of Los Altos. We passed a lake and climbed one side of the canyon. There were bricks laid into the earth to make steps to make this feasible. The walk was initially steep and it was, as usual for May, hot but I kept up, well practised from the daily “death marches” Joe makes me walk to get lunch. The conversation naturally went onto mountain goats, big cats and the Loch Ness Monster and then much disparaging of the so-called beauty of Scotland. Which I could not defend but at least I didn’t join in.

Apart from sus, I thought of Myopia as I passed the Eucalyptus and inhaled the wondrous scents. I wondered if this was the world that Rian missed or whether she would have kept away from walking up such slopes. I also admitted to Joe what a BAD was after conversation turned to role-playing games. I think that he was amused by the nekkidness but I was not sure so I did not mention the potatoes. Those are even harder to explain.

The walk was tough but the breeze when we reached the top worth it. It makes me glad to have long hair to catch it and dance in it. It was over at 1cp (that is 2:30pm for mere mortals) and I was invited back to play games but I had my mission- I had a watch to buy.

I leapt into the dreammobile and hit the road again… and got utterly lost, finding myself somehow crawling up a mountain with very little petrol. Realising that up could never be a good thing, I went back down the mountain and chose streets with some care this time and found myself in San Mateo, many miles from where I should be but at least I knew where I was. One quick pit-stop at the shell garage later, I headed to Hillsdale shopping center home to such wonders as the shop where you can make your own teddy bear (hmm, does Rian’s Little Prince like teddies?) and the shop where you can choose your lego pieces from lots of bins. They had Batman lego. But no Spidey. I did however get my Spidey kicks by finding a shop that sold a life-sized model of him for a mere $1999. I wonder if that includes tax?

After a quick sweep, I settled on Macy’s as the shop most likely to have watches and escaped the store clasping a watch that has the date and day of the week on it… in Spanish. Maybe I will learn something. I could have gone straight back to Joe’s at this point and joined in the games. But there was a Barnes and Noble right across the road and a dvd/music store. Barnes and Noble did not have any comics I wanted so I begrudgingly started looking at the books. I didn’t see anything there either but I did come across a girl proclaiming to a boy that “Terry Goodkind is my only weakness” which I do believe warranted some sort of thrashing. Unless she had only read the first few books in which case she may be forgiven. Not actually wanting to be arrested for GBH, I started to leave, spying before my exit a Christopher Moore book. Finally I realised that he did exist and I had just been looking for him in all the wrong places. I made a purchase and left. But then there was the small dvd purchase I just had to make (film one in the trilogy that includes Oldboy) and just sitting on a shelf looking like the Holy Grail (the fake one, not the boring real one that Indiana Jones chose) was an issue of SFX imported from the UK. With David Tennant looking dashing on the cover. Or maybe davishing which is my new word that perfectly encapsulates how he looks. So I bought it even though I never would have in the UK. And here it was twice as expensive.

At this point I could have gone back and joined in Joe’s games evening. But I was exhausted. I couldn’t even concentrate on driving and found myself having idle thoughts about, well, everything but driving. Fortunately El Camino is long and straight and sitting in the middle lane I was pretty much guaranteed no hassle.

I got into chezbob at 6:15pm, worn but successful. And thinking about choices. Do they matter? What difference do the choices we are allowed in life make? In this case, I burnt a little more fuel and got an imported magazine. Perhaps I also lay foundations for friendships though that is speculation- perhaps I even destroyed all chances by mentioning my online “life”!

It’s hard to know.