I'm getting used to this blog thing, so I'm running a bit behind.  I had
no idea people would read it.  So, my friend Emily is sending me my
greatest hit emails to post while I get my act together.  Here is one of
them:

My sister graduated from University of San Francisco in May. She's three years my junior. Seven years, and she still beat some people I attended high school with. I told her she should send them graduation announcements. 



That weekend was a wonder to behold.



My trained monkey Eric and myself saw Star Wars at 4:00 am before I went to the airport. Thanks to caffeine and diet pills, I was able to make it through, and onto my airplane. I liked the Star Wars movie by the way. Not quite sure what the hell the movie was about, but I enjoyed seeing an 80-year-old Christopher Lee fight Yoda. Sleep-deprivation enhanced the experience.



Arrived in Oakland at noon. Picked up by Rebecca and Kristin (my older sister). Ate lunch. Went back to Rebecca's place, where I slept for four hours.



Awoke refreshed, and spent an hour or two of agony deciding on dinner. We want Japanese. Oh, mom says, but I wanted steak! What happened to that Japanese place. Jesus, mom, you said you wanted steak! Well, the Japanese place can't get us in until 9:00 at this point, so we go for one of my mother's selections: the restaurant where Sam Spade hung out in the Maltese Falcon. I suggested we get an idea of the menu, figuring that any place that focuses more on it being the meeting place of the Dashiell Hammett Society — that’s right — and less on say its world famous crab louie might not be the best place to eat. So we go there. How right I was. Jazz guitarist playing TV show themes. Bad food. Gay Asian waiter, whose combined accents and lisps made him incomprehensible. We ordered the 2000 Coppola Cabernet, which Kristin hated, and was actually quite good. Rebecca gets off the first brilliant line of the weekend: "Well, maybe next time we can have the waiter shake it up for you." We leave. Suggestions that maybe we could walk around the city are shot down. Then we get ice cream. My blood sugar drops. Home to sleep.



Side note: Mom insisted on driving the rental car. A poor driver and a hostile excitable woman, Mom is not the best choice for driving in any circumstance, let alone in the mean streets of San Francisco, with its confusing turns and impossible parking. The suggestion that Rebecca drive was greeted with a shrill No!



Friday. Graduation morning. Mom and Dad call to let us know they are about six blocks away. I said, why don't you just call when you're out front? No! Rebecca tells me to remind them the chapel doesn't open until 8:45 (it was actually 8:15, she mis-spoke). I do so, and my mom, who was not using the phone, screams, "I don't care!" This officially became a long vacation at 7:38 AM. No parking at the church. We go to a garage that is also full. Someone in front of us has tried to violate the height restriction, and need to back up. My parents roll down their windows and start making sarcastic remarks to the driver. I suggest that in honor of Rebecca's graduation, perhaps making snide remarks to strangers could be set aside for another day. I am ignored. Luckily a street space opens up next to the building. After much undue agony, we park there.



The church is packed. My mom and dad scam some handicapped spaces near the front. Kristin and I stand in back. Watch the chaos ensue. An announcement is made that anyone holding seats should give them up now. In the stampede, a man actually pushes two people down. He is removed by security, after a long discussion in which the guards asked the victims to please let it go. They didn't, and the man left. Long boring ceremony. 



The speaker was a linguist from Geaorgetown. I assume that the students wanted Noam Chomsky, and figured one
linguist was as good as another. Basic speech: belive in yourself, blah blah blah. There was a video projection for those of us in back when the diplomas are handed out. The AV kids manning the cam seemed to think we were all interested in seeing the face of the University President and the back of the students. Idiots. 



It ends, we wait around before going to the reception. To my disappointment, there are no mimosas. There were mimosas at Gonzaga University's graduation. Why would two Jesuit schools be so different? Too bad, because I'm going to need the sedation. So we all go to lunch. Nice place in Sausalito. I had a pretty good seafood salad.



Then we all split up for a while. My sisters nap, I see Star Wars again, because I am a nerd.



Then its time for dinner. Absurdly, the decision is made to get appetizers and drinks, because gosh, none of us are hungry. We go to this observation deck on the top of a hotel. Nice
view. Order drinks. I had a Long Island (Kristin derided it as a college drink), and later what amounted to an Irish whiskey mudslide. I saw a lot of absolutely beautiful women come through, accompanied by trollish beta males. Maybe SF is the town for me. We had a few snacks, my mother insisting that the hummus plate, the delicious hummus plate, be kept away from her, because the smell sickened her. By then, I'm hungry and suggest we go somewhere else for a meal.



Pizza is decided upon. Place called Georgio's, by Rebecca's house. Parking is tight, as it is everywhere. We witness a parking spot stand-off. An old woman stood in a spot, while a car tried to park. We circled four times, and she was there. We all sided with the car. A few spots
opened up, and Mom refused to u-turn, so we lost them. Finally, she decided she wanted to go home to prove some point. Kristin also decided to go home to prove some point. No idea what they were trying to prove, but off they went. Rebecca Dad and I go to get pizza. Pretty good. We enjoyed beers outside as we waited. I wandered a few blocks looking for an SF Weekly, nowhere to be found. Very cute waitresses. We got the cute waiter. He was cool. Laughed when I offered him $20 to sit on Dad's lap. A one point, I hear a waitress say, "let me tell you about this fucking idiot," but I didn't hear the rest. At the table next to us, a couple, one side of which was very attractive, sat in serious conversation. First date, or break up? No ongoing relationship is that tense.



After pizza, we go drinking. The Abbey, an Irish bar, full of colonized British subjects and young women with watches set to bar time. Also one of the wink-wink allowing smoking bars in California. Hateful place. I keep trying to leave, but Dab and Becky keep giving me drinks. We go home, plastered.



Saturday. Start out with a coffee from Rebecca. She suggests I could have ran up to Starbucks and seen Warren Beatty. I decline. I also have a play date with Griffin, the 5 year-old Rebecca babysits. I go over, play math games and i-spy for an absurdly long time before Rebecca rescues me, and the whole tribe goes down the Napa. Mom had made reservations on the very expensive wine train, which I opposed, suspecting some awful pre-fab tourist thing. But this was Mom's thing, so we all agreed, not without complaint. As long as we went to some wineries. Dress on the train was jacket, so I wore a ties and slacks, shocking my redneck family with my willingness to wear a tie for more almost five hours when I didn't have to. It also prompted many an insulting comment about how I've cleaned up. Assholes. 



We got to Napa at 1:00, giving us about four hours until the wine train, which started boarding at 5:30. First stop,
Peju. Rebecca and I's favorite place. My dad wandered around, apparently despising wine for some reason, while the rest of us enjoyed a tasting. I wanted to get a few bottles there, a few bottles elsewhere. Mom and I end up getting a case between us, which means I'll have to write her a check. Or more accurately, that she will be badgering me for money I will never pay. Of course, I buy their delicious high-end reserve wine, Mom gets their lowest common denominator crap. And an $85 Reserve Cabernet, for when Kristin gets engaged — hint hint. Love the winery, they know Rebecca, so it was a good time. Then we head to the next place. 



Despite my entreaties, we continued past the Sutter Home winery. Rebecca wanted to go to the Sterling Winery, but you need to ride a tram, and there was a huge line, so we decided to move on. Rebecca and I both point out wineries we should stop at, up ahead. Mom keeps driving. We pass the wineries, suggest a u-turn. Mom keeps driving, PRETENDING SHE DOESN'T HEAR US. This was my breaking point. I was like, we don't have a whole lot of time, let's go to some places we know are good, and why the fuck aren't you acknowledging us? At this point it was too late. And Mom
was like, I want to be closer to the wine train before we stop. To which I responded, I
have non desire to wait an extra half-hour in the fucking parking lot of this stupid goddamn train I have no desire to go on anyway, let's go to some wineries. And so we drive. Finally, we encounter a name we all recognize: Rutherford Hill, available in many supermarkets nation-wide. Fine. We go there. After being ignored at the reserve tasting, we get a $5 standard tasting of a half-dozen kind of flavorless wines. Luckily, a pack of drunken girls showed up to liven things up. I wanted to go with them. No luck. Now it's too late, we head for the train, setting a new record of spending 4.5 hours in the Napa valley, and somehow being able to squeeze in tastings at two, count 'em, two wineries.



Wine train. Lots of old people. Get an introductory wine tasting, one red one white, and a condescending lecture from some twit who needed a savage bare knuckle beating. That was our tasting by the way. You get two wine samples on the Napa Valley wine train, for the $99 price. And while I expected a stupid, pre-fab trap for unimaginative tourists without initiative, it was even worse. It was a three hour trip, with a dinner, and nothing else. The wine was sold at premium. I expected a wine tasting. None of that. Just an overpriced dinner on a train that went about 10 miles per hour on a road, not countryside, but the Napa Valley main drag, that we had already traveled earlier. Our waiter had amazing hair. Like
Joe Pesce with a pompadour. Long trip. Looooooooong. Mom wanted sparkling, so we got sparkling. I got drunk enough to sleep on the way home. I went inside and went to sleep when we got home.



Sunday. Monterey. We drive down along the scenic route. When everyone saw the sign saying 90 miles to
Monterey, they all objected, insisting on a faster route. So we cut over to the freeway. Which took us two hours. By the time we reached San Jose (and irritatingly, every time we saw a sign for San Jose, parents would sing this idiotic song I've never heard before), we would have been there already, and we still had an hour to go. 



Five hour drive to Monterey. We eat lunch, some basic place, then go to the aquarium, which was worth it for the jellyfish exhibit and the penguins. The penguin exhibit has this
bizarre music emanating from a puppet show in the back, while the penguins freak out and do tricks for the kids. Lots of kids. I figured if one wants advice of child-rearing, one could do worse than watching parents take their kids to a museum, and do the exact opposite of what you see there. Loud assholes. So we head back. Mom misses the pertinent exit, and we spend a long time wandering through some weird Mexican town with five formal wear stores.



And off to dinner with the Kael-Sollats, Becky's family, the ones she baby-sits for. Long story. We didn't know where we were going, so Mom and Dad dropped us off at the house while we figured things out. Claire and Carl, the parents for whom Becky baby-sits, suggested a Chinese place nearby. I was really looking forward to seeing Mom and Kristin meeting Clair, who is young, wealthy attractive and Jewish, everything they'd like to be. I figured they think she was throwing her life in their faces. 



So, the Miller kids and the Chinese Jewish family march about five blocks to the hard-core Chinese place. We see Mom and Dad cruise by periodically, looking for parking. Rebecca runs out to suggest she park the car, while Mom and Dad go in, in the same style that Hitler declined capture by the Russians in WWII. We order, see them drive by every few minutes. Then we don't see them for a while. We joke that maybe they went back to the hotel. Then we call the hotel. Dad answer. He'll be over to join us shortly. No, Mom isn't coming. The family has to leave, it being the kid's bed time. Dad arrives, eating leftovers at the lonely table. Apparently, the parking freaked mom out so badly she jumped out of the car, insisting she should walk back to the hotel. She also vomited. True to the tradition that it isn't a family gathering without tears, Rebecca cries, mortified by her treatment in front of the family she baby-sits for, and so desperately didn't want to be humiliated in front of. Kristin snottily informs us that we should just accept Mom's behavior, I explain my position that the reason she acts like such a creep is because people put up with it. Kristin tells me to lower my voice. I point out we're in a Chinese restaurant in the middle of SF China-town, nobody understands a fucking word I'm saying, as evidenced by the waiter who took my drink orders, then wandered off to smoke a cigarette. Of course, there was another table of honkies right next to us, so I guess Kristin was right. Fuck it, we left to get ice cream, and then go home.



Monday. I wake up, watch the Others. Dad said he would pick me up for the airport at 8:00. We're leaving from the Oakland airport, me at 10:20, the rest of the family at 11:45 or something. At 8:30 I get nervous, wonder if I should call a cab. They arrive at 8:45, explaining that since I said last time I made it to my gate in 4 minutes, they figured I could do it again. We say good-bye to Rebecca, all of us but Mom, who has nothing to say to her. Of course there's traffic. My flight is scheduled to board at 9:50; I'm at the gate at 9:55. The plane was late. The family shows, gives me $40. Mom then accuses me of getting money from Dad earlier. While this is happening, my row is called. I board the plane and get the fuck away from my family. Thank fucking god.