sitting watching wind blow, watching time go, watching cars go by

As much as I make fun of my workplace, I have to cop to my own embarassing moment of the day. I was at a meeting, and was giving a presentation, and hooked up my laptop to the LCD to project some slides. Because I am an idiot, I had forgotten that I had the The English Beat's greatest hits cd on my drive. I had also conveniently forgotten the title of the greatest hits cd. So, there I am, projecting my desktop to the room, when the icon for the cd come up. Why is that embarassing, you ask? Blown up to 10X, up for the world to see, was a cd icon with the words BEAT THIS! announcing themselves. Awesome. Next week, my blog will be reporting from an undisclosed location, also known as the unemployment line.

The past 24 hours have been rather in the comedy of errors vein, minus the comedy in a few instances. It started out nicely- Mer and I had a great dinner in downtown Palo Alto. Apparently, you can't get good shawerma in Santa Barbara, so Mer was gobbling up everything in sight at the Middle Eastern restaurant we chose. Mer tried in vain to explain what she is trying to accomplish at the Stanford synchotron. She's exhibiting true researcher phenotype- difficulty explaining her work from a birds' eye view. That's okay- I find that rather charming, truth be told. The restaurant was serving lukewarm mint & sage tea, which may not sound good, but it was actually irresistible. I drank something like five cups. That seemed like a mistake at the time.

After taking leave of Palo Alto, I got on 280 to head home. On the drive home, I was musing over the use of articles to describe highways/freeways. Is this an east coast/west coast thing? Mer was calling 280 the 280, just as SoCal'ers are prone to saying the 405, or even the 101. I never think to use articles for roads, and I wonder if this has to do with growing up in the Northeast. We never called it the 128 or the 95- although I did occasionally call it effing 95 mothereffer. And I definitely said the goddamn parkway on occasion when I was driving into NYC.

These kinds of pointless thoughts were ambling through my mind when suddenly I see a cluster of brakelights up ahead. Son of a...! I slow down, then I stop. Then I notice that we are not moving. Then people start turning their cars off. No way! It's 11 pm at this point. People start to get out of their cars to stretch their legs, make small talk, try to find out what has happened.

Forty-five minutes later. Let me repeat- forty-five minutes later. And thank the middle eastern princes of that restaurant because that tea kept me from falling asleep. One by one, row by row, the lights came back on, and the freeway started moving again. Since I refused to rubberneck at that point, I can't report what actually happened that caused this parking lot, but I'm sure it wasn't good.

I got home, and, well, am I alone on this, or is it impossible to go home and fall asleep immediately? I'm just not capable of it (well, ahem...unless alcohol is involved). I decided it was instead necessary to watch Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon on Letterman, arguing with each other about the use of steroids in baseball. I can't remember which of them said it, but one throws out "Baseball loves cheating." And Letterman pounces on it and announces that should be the new slogan for baseball. And then they all rag on Canseco. And I wonder why I am still awake.

And then I had an 8 am meeting this morning, and there was another accident at 7 am, this time on city streets. And my cousin is flying into Oak-town at midnight. Serenity now! And keeping in the Seinfeldian vein, I think I just wrote a post about nothing.