You won’t need directions.

“Writers, for all their bleeding insecurity, can have raging egos, and it’s important for all of us to remember that, at the end of the day, sometimes the best thing we can do is hunker down on the floor, open our mail, and try our best to recycle.”

Yesterday I went out for dim sum with friends in Inner Richmond. It was my first dim sum experience, and it was awesome. I’m still recovering. After the meal the six of us decided to carpool back to the Mission for coffee. Since the Prius we came in only seats 5 (we met 2 people at the restaurant), one person was going to be left out. So, we decided the smallest of us, my friend Kathryn (who also happens to be deaf), would ride in the trunk.

I was concerned about the trunk trip, but apparently she has made the ride back there before. Her boyfriend opened the back and she crawled right in and curled up, like it was old hat. Her boyfriend assures us it’s fine, but to tell her to keep her head down so the cops don’t see. I knew the trunk of the Prius opened like a hatchback so that there was no barrier between her and the rest of us, and I couldn’t figure out why he wanted us to tell her. Couldn’t he tell her?

“What, can she not hear us?,” I asked.

“No, she’s deaf,” her boyfriend told me. And I felt like the biggest idiot in the world.

Later he told me that is how you know you have become comfortable around your disabled friends - you forget about their disability. Kathryn makes it easy for those of us who hear to be around her; she does all the work by reading lips. She’s so good at it, that it can be hard to forget not to talk to her when she is walking ahead of me. Sometimes, she says, even she forgets she’s deaf.

Anyway, it’s not every day I ask if a deaf person can hear me, so I thought I would share.

Quote of the day: “I’m going to go take a post-9/11 dump.” -The Boyfriend

My Mom

Do the cops who shot and killed the escaped tiger at the SF Zoo deserve medals of valor?

Restaurants and bars I’ve experienced in the Bay Area since my move in mid-November:

• LuLu
• LuLu Petite
• Zachary’s
• Lanesplitter
• Casa Latina
• Sushi Solano
• Unicorn
• Elephant & Castle
• Vesuvio
• Lee’s Deli
• Boudin Bakery
• Grumpy’s
• E’ Tutto Qua
• Golden Star Vietnamese
• Specialty’s
• Cafe Leila
• YoYo’s
• Four Seasons Restaurant and Cocktails
• Henry’s Hunan
• (more as I remember them)

“Once again, Maureen Dowd dispenses the utterly vapid, facile conventional wisdom, leavened with echo-chamber snark and insulting condescension, and seasoned with her flair for seizing upon one tiny thing and blowing it all out of proportion.”

Tonight I was flipping channels when I ran across a PBS station that showed a man underwater collecting sea urchins. I stopped to watch, but this guy’s annoying voice took me aback.

Me: “I can’t stand that guy’s voice.”

Lisey: “Have you ever seen this guy before?”

Me: “No, what is this?”

Lisey: “That is Huell Howser. He goes all over California doing travel stuff like that, he’s been on t.v. here forever. I think he’s from Tennessee.”

Sure enough, he was born about 15 minutes from where I was born.

Howser became the subject of controversy in the summer of 1979 when he did a story about how the former Tennessee Governor’s Mansion was slated for demolition to make way for a Popeye’s Fried Chicken outlet. He ignored management’s orders to not mention the story on-air. His defiance led to a thirty-day suspension, but before the suspension was over, Howser had secured new employment. He has often since stated that he might still be “looking for more pet pigs around Nashville”^{[citation needed]} if this incident had never occurred.

Same market competitors KRON, the Young Broadcasting-owned station, to be sold. The station has been in turmoil after having lost its affiliation with NBC (they show Dr. Phil reruns at 8 p.m.) and a move to the VJ model had little effect on the bottom line. I’ll be very interested to see who snaps up the struggling station in the days and weeks to come.

I’m sorry I didn’t go to the Frist while in Nashville.