ceci n’est pas un blog

I like this:

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since it’s much more convenient to post quick links and pictures with the tumblr bookmarklet, I now have a tumblr blog too.

Yes, my internet presence is scattered away from here, on twitter, facebook, delicious, flickr, yelp and elsewhere, like so many leaves in the wind. Fortunately, my identity lays intact nevertheless!

Next month I will travel to the most cities and countries in the shortest time period in my life. Most of it will be for work, but I’m also looking forward to spending a brief vacation period in Barcelona and Paris. I wanted to be able to picture the time-line of the madness chrono-grapha-mologically, so I whipped up a Google Map of my whirlwind of upcoming trips.

I am already both excited about the journey and missing home at the same time!

I have never seen a post/discussion that captured the pop culture of growing up in the Denver area so well as this one on boingboing.

As a creatively-thrown-together Santa. (Note the bib beard and stocking hat.) I guess even then I liked to throw together costumes from random items around the house.

This is half of my submission to ze frank’s Color Wars.

Last night, we met up with some friends for farewell cocktails and dinner. When we learned that the two restaurants that we wanted to go to had a wait of more than an hour, we decided to walk to a different area, about 15-20 blocks away.

Just as we started to head in that direction, a limo with its front windows down turned into the crosswalk in front of us. I half-jokingly asked the guys in the front, “Are you guys for hire?” assuming they’d just laugh. Instead their response was, “Sure, where are you going?” and so I asked how much it would cost to go to lower Haight. They told us we could pay whatever we wanted since they were just killing time, waiting to pick up someone who wasn’t ready yet.

So the four of us hopped in the back and we ended up going down to the Indian restaurant in style! All of this reminded me yet again that it never hurts to ask and that life will only give you the answers/adventures to the questions you ask of it.

I posted some pictures of my trip to Yelapa on flickr. What a paradise of tropical jungle and beaches! Accessible only by boat, this town is 15 miles down the coast from Puerto Vallarta. I can’t wait for the next time I can go back.

While home for Thanksgiving, I went through a few boxes of stuff from my childhood. One of the best finds was a diary I wrote in when I was 11 years old. Every page dutifully started out with the words “Dear Diary,” and most of it consisted of me rambling on about boys, whether one liked me, how cute one was, how one talked to me after lunch, how I wished another would ask me to “go with him,” etc.

The best non-boy related part was the list I’d made of things I wanted to be when I grew up:

1) An interior designer
2) A fashion designer
3) An artist
4) A photographist
5) An animal trainer

Since my profession is UI Design and I enjoy creating art and taking pictures, I haven’t been too off-base from my childhood goals. Now if only I can find out how to figure in the animal training, I’ll be set!

• the excellent public transportation system
• the diversity in food and people
• the plantlife and ubiquitous tropical flowers
• the art scene and the museums
• the SFShenanigans antics
• bike rides and walks in Golden Gate park and Glen Park canyon
• the quantity of creative and interesting freaks
• the amount of things to do
• the incredible views from so many places in the city
• the Victorian architecture
• the murals in the Mission
• the friends i’ve made and reconnected with
• out of town excursions to the wine country and other beautiful surrounding areas
• shopping for funky costumes on Haight
• the proximity to the ocean & hot springs
• free concerts at Stern Grove

One option to be able to keep track of all the wonderful restaurants I’ve been eating at would be to make a little list of those places I recommend, and post it to my blog. But a much more insane, hopped-up socially-networked and nifty option would be to post reviews on yelp.com. Since I was feeling zany this morning, I decided to do the latter. This way I can remember all the wonderful food experiences I’ve had here in SF, and share them with all you all. Feel free to check out my hastily-composed and ever-growing list of restaurant recommendations on yelp.

Andy Warhol once said “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” I feel lucky since this last weekend, I got to be famous for a whole 30 minutes.

SFShenanigans, the Improv Everywhere-inspired group, had their second antic, called Create Your Own Celebrity, and I got to be the celebrity. So I was the French-speaking Norwegian Pia Haraldsen, who was supposedly rumored to have something going with U2’s Bono, and who was followed around by a group of very-exuberant fans.

As Pia, I walked down the street, accompanied by my bodyguard who walked behind me and who wouldn’t let any of the plebian masses get too close while I did a little shopping. And this wasn’t any normal shopping. I walked into the most fancy stores around Union Square, such as BCBG, Prada, Emporio Armani and Bulgari. Usually I would hesitate to go into these because I’d be afraid that the people who worked there would turn up their noses at me, but being dressed nicely and being accompanied by my suit-and-sunglass-wearing burly bodyguard made me fearless. I felt like I was right at home casually looking at jewelry that probably cost more than my yearly salary, and saying nonchalantly to those who asked if they could help me that I was “just looking.”

My favorite part was when I went into Bulgari to look around, and a few of the fans rushed in to try to follow me and take pictures. A couple of the Bulgari security guards jumped forward to usher them out, telling them that “they couldn’t do that in here” and that they had to leave.

It was hilarious and awesome to see them move into action to protect me. They locked the stores doors behind me so that the fans were stuck outside, and told me that I could stay there as long as I needed. They could see that I was worried about the fans that were following me, and wanted to make me feel comfortable that I was safe in that elitist place where the special classes could be separated from the lower ones. I couldn’t believe I was being guarded by f’in Bulgari security, as well as my own bodyguard who was stationed at the door, ready for my command.

I told them in my French accent that I would look around a bit more, and then when finally I was ready to leave and the fans had moved on, a guard unlocked the door and said “Au Revoir” politely to me.

When I was out of the stores on the street, I was almost constantly followed by a group that kept asking for my picture, an autograph, or just screamed, “We love you, Pia!” One of the fans even asked me for a date, saying, “What does Bono have that I don’t?” I occasionally turned around and gave a quick autograph, or a demure smile for the camera, but then there were a few times that I blocked the camera from seeing my face or asked my bodyguard in French why these crazy Americans wouldn’t leave me alone.

It sounds like the group of fans got a lot of people curious about who I was. Everyone wants to be able to tell a story to their friends about having got to see a celebrity up close. Some tourists around Union Square who weren’t part of SFShenanigans even took pictures of me, and some even pretended that they’d heard of me when the group explained who I was. It was great fun to be part of an antic that caused such curiosity and excitement. I can definitely see both the attraction to being loved and followed everywhere, and how it would get to be a bit of an annoyance if it couldn’t be escaped.

More pictures of the antics on this Shenanigans flickr set and a debrief of the event on the Shenanigans site.

I love the feature in flickr where you can map all your photos to different places on a map. Here’s my personal flickr map of San Francisco memories. It’s really handy to be able to situate different images to associate memories with locations when you look back at them later.

Just when I had finally gotten refocused back on work and torn myself away from the distractions of the incredible views of the city, the bridges, the ocean and Coit tower (which are all visible from various rooms in the flat where we’re staying in this week on Telegraph Hill), a big group of squawking wild green parrots passed by my window. Thanks a lot, guys!

I thought that this was a very charming part of a letter from our landlady since she’s going to be out of town:

I hope that the cat will not be too needy in our absence. I do have someone stopping over to feed him. The only other thing is Salvatore the box turtle. He lives in the pond and wanders around the garden. Occasionally he falls down the stairs and ends up on your patio. If you see him there please put him back in the pond. He can’t climb back up the stairs by himself. He doesn’t bite.

Adorable.