Scowl, Nu?

Janet and I were in New York City during Christmas. I sort of planned that the trip should include Christmas day in New York because as a non-christian, Christmas can be one of the most boring days to spend in San Francisco.

In San Francisco, almost everything shuts down for Christmas. Sure, some bars are still serving up drinks and a couple of ethnic restaurants are still open for business, but everything else closes down. You would think in a city that touts such diverse cultures, that we wouldn't pander to the christian majority once again.

So, this year we arranged our vacation so we could be in a city with some real diversity. When we got to New York, we made a point to figure out what neighborhoods would have shops open on Christmas day. What we found out was that almost every part of the city still had stuff going on. Sure, the big department stores were closed, but the small shops and restaurants were still in operation. In deference to my Jewish heritage, we decided to spend Christmas in one of the Jewish neighborhoods… the Upper West Side.

So, we grabbed the subway (which, unlike in San Francisco still runs on schedule on the holidays) and made our way  uptown for lunch. Since we were doing the Jews-on-Christmas afternoon, we also grabbed tickets for the 1:30 showing of Star Trek: Insurrection at the Loew's 84th Street Cinema.

Lunch was a couple of fresh bagels from H and H Bagels on 80th and Broadway. We then walked by Zabars, which was not only open, but completely packed with hundreds of people who just saw Christmas Day as a friday off from work. We kept walking up Broadway, noticing how almost everything was open… even the Jewish Soul Food restaurant (read: Chinese) was open and doing a brisk business.

One of the things that they do in New York at the movies (and most of the North East) is that they start the previews about 10 minutes before the movie is supposed to start. It gives the people who got there early so they could get a good seat something to do while they waited. Then the movie started and something amazing happened: everybody shut up.

You see, if you have never experienced a movie in San Francisco, let me describe it to you. First, the crowd hisses at all of the previews. Well, most of the crowd does… some people either use those damned laser pointers or just scream insults at the trailer. Then the movie starts, but everybody still talks. If you shush at someone, it only serves to make them talk louder.

Actually, it doesn't stop at movies. I have been to musicals and plays in San Francisco where people just talk and talk and talk through the whole thing. When we went to see the San Francisco Symphony a few years ago, people showed up in shorts and t-shirts, eating and talking through the whole thing. You don't even want to know what people do at concerts.

Some people blame this on the fact that people spend so much time listening to CDs at home and watching movies on TV, that they are not used to being quiet when at a theater. Bullshit. Most people are just selfish, undisciplined louts whose parents never taught them how to behave.

Back to New York. When the lights went down, so did the talking. At one point, a little kid behind me was asking his father what was going on in the movie. I quietly ssssshed the kid, and the father actually apologized. Then he whispered to his son: When you're at the movies, you have to be quiet.

It's a simple concept that my mother taught me when I went to see my first movie: if you have to buy a ticket to get in, respect the fact that other people had to pay to get in as well. That means, you don't ruin the experience for anyone. When you're at a movie, you shut up. When you go to the theater or to the symphony, you dress well, enter quietly, and save your comments until the applause or until you leave the building.

We left the movie realising that if we lived in New York, we'd start going to the movies regularly again. However, until that happens, we'll save our movie watching to the three channels of HBO that we have at home. At least then, the only time I'll have to go sssssh is if the cats start acting up.

More and more, San Francisco just annoys the hell out of me. However, so does everywhere else I go. When we went to Seattle, it just bored me. Washington, DC? Cold and ugly. Colorado Springs? Don't even get me started. So, when we decided to take a quick vacation and go to New York after visiting relatives, I was sure that I would leave feeling that it was OK… but just as annoying as San Francisco.

I was wrong.

In comparison, San Francisco and New York both have great shopping… New York just has more of it. Both cities have exceptional restaurants… again, New York just has more of it. Yeah, New York has better theater, but San Francisco has better weather. From a standard of life issue, it's easy to enjoy all of the hedonistic pleasures equally in San Francisco and New York City.

The one thing that I really appreciate about New York City is the fact that NYC knows that it's a big city. You see, in San Francisco… they have an infrastructure built around a small city feel. There is only one real east-west artery going through the city, and it is only two lanes wide in each direction. Throw on top of that an excessive amount of traffic due to unplanned growth and almost no parking, and you have a traffic nightmare.

San Francisco's Rapid Transit System (MUNI) was designed for a population of about 20,000 riders. The primary method of moving people through the city is an antiquated electric bus system. San Francisco has a light rail, but it uses the same major city streets that the cars use (except downtown where it is all underground). The result is that the buses are rarely on time, and the light rail just adds to the congestion of the major city arteries.

Add overcrowding and expensive housing to this mix, and you end up with a very nasty, hostile city population that's going nowhere… and they're not even going there quickly.

New York City, on the other hand, is a large city that was designed to be a large city. They built an efficient underground subway system that is supplemented by a bus system. They had the foresight to realise that if the streets are getting crowded, the last thing you want to do is have the rapid transit system bound by street traffic. For $1.50, you can get almost anywhere in New York City in about 15 minutes. The trains come quickly, they have timed transfer points, and they run on a regular and reliable schedule. The buses are clean and plentiful.

In addition, they also have an extraordinary number of cabs running along the streets. Even at midnight in a residential neighborhood (1003/Bway), we were able to get a cab in less than 3 minutes.

The result is that since the infrastructure is constantly getting better in New York City, the people are getting happier. The angry, hostile New Yorkers of the late 1980s are being replaced by content, civilized city dwellers.

San Francisco, with its 700,000 residents, 500,000 out-of-town commuters and 30,000 tourists and conventioneers (at any given time) is just getting ready to explode.

And Janet's Scowl of the Year Award goes to….Tower Air! (or, more appropriately, Tower SCAir), the airline on which I wouldn’t make my worst enemy fly.

Since we were flying to the East Coast during the holiday season and Avery’s mom was paying for the tickets, we decided that in order to save a little money we would travel via Tower Air. Now, Avery’s mom flew Tower when she came out to San Francisco a year or two ago, and the only thing that I remember going wrong with the flight was that it took in the vicinity of 45 minutes for them to unload the baggage from the plane. No big deal really. We thought.

We decided to do a search for Tower Air on the Internet, just for kicks (and to assuage our fears about flying on a discount airline). The only things that we found were horror stories from previous Tower passengers with all kinds of airplane problems and flight mishaps. On the Tower Air site proper, the bunches of statistics they listed indicated that their planes had never crashed, so we figured that the disgruntled passengers people had just flown on "off" days for the airline, or perhaps were just blowing the regular problems and frustrations associated with flying on any airline out of proportion.

[Let me just interject that the whole entire process of traveling by airplane makes me extremely tense. I hate it. Not because I’m afraid of the plane crashing or anything, it’s just that it’s a seemingly endless cycle of one hurry-up-and-wait scenario after another, and it seems as though you are always a blink of an eye away from everything going very, very wrong. We begin our Tense-Fest with Super Shuttle, an airport shuttle service, who, even though they get to have a 15-minute window during which they can arrive at any time, expect you to be outside your apartment waiting at the beginning of the 15-minute window, and they usually will not arrive until you’ve been waiting at least 14 minutes and 30 seconds. I can just picture all those blue vans, sitting a block away with their lights off and the motor silent, waiting until they're sufficiently late enough. There was one instance where we had to catch a 7:00 AM flight, so consequently had dragged ourselves downstairs at 5:30 AM, waited until 5:45 AM, started to get a sinking feeling, called Super Shuttle at 5:50 AM, and learned that despite us confirming with them the day before, they had our pickup time in the system as 5:30 PM. When they did manage to send over another van, the driver had no idea how to get to the airport. Pass me the Advil.]

So we got to the airport an hour and a half early for a 9:00 PM flight. At 8:00, when we were supposed to board, we queued up at the gate along with the 500 other people on the flight. Before we knew it, it was five minutes to nine, and still no boarding! Not only were we not boarding, but there were no Tower Air personnel to be found. We joked about the conversation that the flight attendants must have been having, since the door to the walkway just kept opening and shutting with no results: "Are they still there?" "Yup, they’re still there, a whole bunch of ‘em, just standing there." 15 minutes the door opens again: "Shhh. Are they still there?" "Yup." "Shit, what are we gonna do now?" "I dunno…maybe they’ll just get sick of waiting?"

We eventually board this immense monstrosity of a plane where we proceed to sit and sit and sit some more, and after almost 2 full hours of sitting motionless at the gate with no flight attendants in sight (we pictured them peeking out of the bathroom: "I told you we shouldn’t have let them on the plane! Now they’re never gonna leave."), the so-called captain makes an announcement that we haven’t left yet because they were still loading the baggage onto the plane. (At this point we pictured the solitary one-armed baggage-handler trying to heave an overstuffed suitcase into the luggage compartment…and missing. And trying again. And missing again, tears streaming down his face, "I’m gonna do this EVEN IF IT TAKES ME ALL NIGHT, GOD DAMMIT!")

During the 120 minutes that we were sitting motionless at the gate, one of the flight attendants made an appearance to actually admonish a man for not having his seatbelt fastened! So I go to fasten my seatbelt securely around my waist and notice that I can’t because I…don’t have one. Well, I have one, but the two parts don’t click together. At all. No matter how many times I keep trying to jam the two pieces together as if it was magically going to change from a broken piece of crap into an actual seatbelt. I start to panic; I’m afraid to say anything for fear they'll make me deplane, but on the other hand I'm afraid not to say anything because I don 't want to hit my head against the ceiling if we happened to have bad turbulence, like those poor Japanese people that made the news a while back. So I knotted it around my waist, twice, which wasn't easy. The turbulence problem now taken care of, I started wondering what would happen in the instance that the plane went up in flames and I couldn't get out because I had essentially knotted myself into a hot flaming Seat of Death, which, under normal circumstances could have been alleviated with one un-click of the seatbelt, but knowing this airline all the flight attendants would hide and there wouldn't be a Swiss Army Knife in sight to cut me free.

We kept joking about this whole fiasco for a while, since we were going on vacation, after all. We'd sit there in silence and then one of us would start giggling and go "I know, I know…they're having trouble filling all the balloons tied to the top of the plane with helium" or "They can't find anyone to push the plane down the runway for takeoff", but that got old real quick. (Though it was funny when someone yelled out "Distance from origination: ZERO MILES! WOO!") After whatever happened that caused the place to actually become airborne, we realized that the reading lights above our seats weren't working, so we couldn't read. Not only could we not read, we couldn't watch the movie (the only other thing left to do during the four-and-a-half-hour torture that is a cross-country flight) because supposedly there was no electrical flow whatsoever to our seats and countless numbers of other seats around us. The so-called flight attendants were walking around the plane like zombies: "there is nothing we can do, nothing we can dooooo…"

Basically, we could do nothing but sit there for, well, six and a half hours, if you count the two hours we already sat at the gate. Avery sighed and wrote this on his Nino:

Flight boarded very late…at 9pm for a 9pm flight.
Jan has no seatbelt
Her entertainment center doesn't work… Mine doesn't even exist.
Neither of our lights work.
10pm and they are still loading the fucking baggage.
Tower Air Sucks.

The flight back wasn't any better. We had a 4:00 PM flight, and as luck would have it, encountered absolutely no traffic whatsoever from Manhattan, so got to the airport nearly 2 hours early. As we got into line to check in, I asked Avery "Why does the monitor say 'San Francisco 8:00 PM?" Ah ha! It's because the wonderful folks at Tower Air had decided to "reschedule the flight." When we asked the smarmy attitude-laden counter drone WHY, she shrugged and replied "They just did." She then went on to tell us that it said in The System that they called our home number in San Francisco, but we were unreachable. I said, all mad, "Well, that's because we're HERE IN NEW YORK." (for the record, they didn’t leave a message on the answering machine, which was in San Francisco the whole time.) Avery sighed and wrote this on his Nino:

OK…

First off, the 4pm flight was unexplainedly re-scheduled for 8pm. When we asked the counter agent why the flight was delayed, she could provide no reason. At all.They did, however, give us $10 each in free food at the deli.

When coming through the metal detector, the thing beeped at me. So, I took my keys out of my pocket and went through again. Beeeeeep! Off comes the leather jacket that sometimes sets the machine off. Beeeeeep. At this point, I suggest that they break out the little wand thingee because I was wearing too many small things that could be the culprit. The 'security' guard tells me to remove my chain wallet. Ok… it's a bother, but I'll do it. Beeeeeep. So Shecky (my name for the guard) tells me to remove my belt. At this point, I start to get a bit pissed off. I whip off the belt and walk through the detector. No beep. Thank god… because if it wasn't the belt, it would have been either my button-fly or my piercings. Either way, it would have resulted in a major scene.

10:18pm… Somewhere over Toronto. The light over Janet's head is blinking like a defective 'LIVE NUDE GIRLS' sign. The stewardess' answer? Tin foil. Sigh.

Yes, the electrical system was again faulty. No surprise here. At this point I was feeling mighty irritable, and the overly-caffeinated teenage Chatty Cathy seated next to me didn't help one bit: "Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom. Excuse me, I need to find a pillow. Do you have a pillow? Where can I get a pillow? I have some candy and gum if you guys want some. <fidget> Do you guys want my sandwich? I didn't get an Oreo. Can I move so I can see the movie better? <fidget> Is that light bothering you, too? I'm so excited. <fidget fidget fidget> Bless you. Do you need a tissue?" Picture my dirty looks and stony silence here.

They made an announcement while we were waiting for our bags that anyone who was traveling with animals should report to the window immediately. I don't even want to know what happened there, but I know this: I have never been so happy to get away from an airline in my life. I join the ranks of disgruntled Tower Air survivors as I virtually beg of you, under no circumstances should anyone, living or dead, fly Tower Air!

Wednesday night, we went to the Toronado to say hi to Ian and have a quick beer. Of course, with us one beer turns into two which turns into four. So, our initial plan of bring there for a half of an hour was scrapped, and it we didn’t get home until after 11pm, two hours after we left.

Wednesday nights are quickly becoming my favorite nights at the bar. First off, it’s quiet. Also, you can usually count on most of the regulars being there (this week it was Tad, Todd and Crab)… and since the new beers seem to come on tap on Tuesday afternoons, there’s usually a surplus of fresh beer on too.

Janet is still on her Guinness kick, and she polished off two imperial pints before the night was over. I started off with a nice Lagunator Doppelbock, then moved onto a Fred followed by a pint of

Untouchable and then concluded the night with a Boont Amber.

I know you’re thinking, “What the heck are you talking about… a beer named Fred?” Yep. Hair of the Dog brewing of Portland makes three beers: Adam, Fred and Golden Rose. Fred is a strong beer served in 13 oz tulip glasses. Fred is a very malty beer that is reminiscent of a barleywine. Regardless of what exact type of beer it is, it’s damn tasty.

There are two types of craft beer manufacturers out there. One type makes very classic-style beers. Breweries like Sierra Nevada, Deschutes and even (ugh) Gordon Biersch makes beers that follow the classic recipes. Their pilsners taste like Pilsner Urquell, the Marzens taste like Spaten Oktoberfest, and the stouts try to taste like Guinness. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t great breweries (with the exception of Gordon Biersch)… just that they aren’t very creative.

Then you have the breweries like Speakeasy, Lagunitas and Hair of the Dog. They start off with the basic idea (I want to make a Marzen style beer…) and then take that and make it into something unique. Breweries like this come up with hoppy doppelbocks (which are usually sweet) like Lagunator and extremely malty Marzens like Untouchable.

The unfortunate thing is that most beer festivals judge against the “classic style.” Based on this, an Anderson Valley  Hop Ottin IPA will always win over a Speakeasy Prohibition and a Guinness will always win over a Lagunitas Imperial Porter. I thought about this while drinking my Lagunator wednesday night. Though it may never win an award, it’s still one of the best beers out there… no matter what type it is.

I always say that I'm fragile, because any little step outside my current routine throws my body into days worth of sickness and distress. Like the time we stayed up with people from the bar until 5:00 AM. Or the time we had to take a non-stop redeye from San Francisco through L.A. to Tampa to visit Avery's dad. By the time we got to Tampa, it was something like 5:00 in the morning and we still had to get the rental car and try to remember whether it was the "Hunter's Green" or "Hunter's Glen" gated community his dad lived in.

So we get there, and of course they wake up and make this huge breakfast, and by then it seems kind of pointless to start sleeping so we stay up all day (which is basically all day and all night and all day at this point) and I start getting this little headache sometime during the afternoon which turns into a little neckache some time later, so I take about six ibuprofin and pray. We're supposed to be going out to this World-Renowned Steakhouse where you can practically choose the cow you want your steak to come from and I'm just hoping that I can make it through this dinner so I can finally sleep.

The steak place is some kind of gigantic castle, just sitting there all conspicuously right in the heart of the Tampa Bay area, with dark lighting and blood-red interior, and the wine list is the size of a dictionary from the Reference Section of the library — the kind that sits on its own pedestal — and is actually chained to the table because rumor has it that people try to steal them as souvenirs all the time, since their wine cellar supposedly has every wine in existence, or close to it. The menu is equally as extensive, where you can not only choose what cut of steak you want and how you want it cooked, but also the thickness and/or weight, and it's one of those dinners where everything under the sun is included in the price of the steak, like a salad and a soup and little garlic toasts, and a baked potato and bread and vegetables as if the 2-pound steak wasn't enough food. And I'm slowly feeling worse and worse, and my neckache is paralyzing me at this point while slowly creeping upwards, taking over the entire back of my skull and pretty soon the whole front of my skull, which of course only serves to make me feel nauseous, and the food keeps coming and the waiters are hovering and the little smelly garlic toasts just start sending me bad nauseous-smell vibes and I just know that I'm not going to make it through this meal.

But I keep taking tiny bites of the huge appetizers that someone ordered, and then the enormous side dishes that come with the meal but really are like a meal in themselves, and it's taking an eternity. The steak finally gets extracted from the cow and brought to the table, and I just look at the steak and smell the steak fumes and have to run to the restroom right then and there if only to cry in pain and splash some water on my face. The Avery's stepmother comes searching for me and everyone's concerned and they try to eat really fast and don't even mind that I have to take my entire expensive dinner home in a box. But then they want to go to the dessert building, yes, that's right, the dessert building, built solely for dessert-eating purposes, but FIRST we need to take the guided tour of the wine cellar and the kitchen, with all of the assembly-line salad-makers and assembly-line baked potato-makers and our tour guide, who takes it all very seriously. So we finally get through the dessert course which offers another dictionary-sized menu, and start driving home and I can't even see straight at this point, my headache is so blinding, and every little lurch that Avery's dad makes with the car just sends waves of nausea through me so I'm just gripping the leather seat for dear life and just as I think that I'm going to fall down and die we pull into the driveway. I manage to get the words "open the door" out of my mouth, the headache affecting my brain so much that I've forgotten that it's a four-door car. The only thing I remember thinking is that I needed to find an inconspicuous place to throw up because I didn't want to mar the nice driveway. The I took a Xanax and collapsed on the bed.

In a nutshell, that's exactly what happened to me on Sunday, substituting the Belgian Beer Festival for the Steakhouse. In my vain attempts to find an explanation of why I should be throwing up all day I blamed the lox on my bagel, accused someone of tampering with my All-Sport sport drink, and entertained the thought of pesticide poisoning from the tomato…until Avery reminded me that he ate the exact same things as I did, and he sure as hell didn't spend the day puking.

I hate having to pick up the phone and deal with those travel industry people. It's not that I'm afraid of the phone, its just those people with their try-to-book-you-in-the-most-expensive room spiel with their little scripted questions, and god forbid you try to interrupt them and ask a question. Like this woman from the hotel on the phone just now who read off the rooms that they had, but not the prices associated with those rooms, and doesn't even tell me the exorbitant price of $209 a night until she reads the entire thing back to me confirmation and all, and then, when she asks if I have any questions, I ask her if that is the cheapest room they have (thinking that maybe when I said the room with the king bed she thought that I meant the room with the king bed and the balcony and the spa) and I ask her if any discounts can apply because we all know that the room is not worth $209, and she all condescendingly says "well, I didn't even look for those discounted rates because you didn't say anything," and I didn't say anything because she wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise until she was done reading her scripted presentation to me, and then she starts looking and makes a big sighing production out of it until she finally finds the discount, which would bring the rate down to $105 a night which is a big, big difference if you ask me, and then she makes another comment about how I'm supposed to tell her these things in the first place so that she doesn't have to go back and make all the changes. Then when she's done and starts to launch into her end-of-the-call part of the script in front of her, I interrupt her and she's still talking, so I talk a little louder and apologize for not telling her about the discount in the first place and then she interrupts me and tells me that they "just don't want to keep people on the phone" while they make the changes which only took all of about 90 seconds to change anyway, and what should she care if I brought up the discount late and want the damn discount so much that I don't mind waiting the whole minute and a half to get $104 off the room? Its so obvious that she just doesn't want to do any extra work, so I then remind her that she didn't even tell me the rate until she was done with confirming the whole reservation, nor did she ask if I even wanted it confirmed, and she goes "Ooooohhhhkaaaaayyyy, well you have a Merry Christmas and thank you for calling Marriott" all sickly-sweet which infuriated me even more because for all she knows I could be Jewish or Muslim or anti-holiday in general, WHICH I AM, and I wish that we could just be gone with the whole interacting-with-humans concept of Customer Service because I would rather punch a bunch of buttons on the phone any day and get it over with, rather than have to deal with the condescending attitudes of bitter, minimum-wage-making phone slaves.