This morning at around 8am I got the single greatest voice mail that I’ve ever gotten from a friend of mine. He was out surfing at Ocean Beach yesterday evening, and a seal farted on him.

I don’t think I need to say much more about this, just sit back, click the link below called “sealfart.mp3,” and enjoy the hilarity.

sealfart.mp3

I love this time of year because it’s marathon season, and so each city’s paper inevitably has an article or two about running in anticipation of hosting tens of thousands of crazed marathon runners for a weekend. I ran the Marine Corps marathon several years ago, my first and only marathon, and I’ve run several half’s. I like running, a lot, and naturally I enjoy reading these articles when they come out, as I get to pretend I’m being sophisticated by “reading the newspaper” when instead I’m reading relatively irrelevant fluff about running. The NYTimes this fall has mostly emphasized whether or not long-distance running is even naturally human or not, but the stories that have mostly caught my attention have been the ones about barefoot running.

Yes, there is a fringe movement within the burgeoning running community that is openly advocating running barefoot, in any and all situations. Weird, huh. I’ve told this to a couple of people and they don’t believe me. The basic argument is that throughout long evolution, humans have almost always been barefoot. Our feet were not naturally in shoes, which is only an invention of a few hundred years…a drop in the bucket of human existence. Running shoes, and even newer invention at maybe a century old, overly pad our heels, and so humans run and land much of their weight on their padded heels. However, when you run barefoot, you instead put your weight on the balls of your feet, which is how the foot is structured to actually support your own body weight. If you landed on your heels when you are barefoot, it hurts a lot. But with padding, you can ignore that pain, and subsequently, run in poor form. In other words, by running barefoot, you’re using your foot how it’s supposed to be used; when you run in protective shoes, you let yourself run more sloppily, and invite more injuries.

I’ve been intrigued by this concept since I first hear about it over a year ago, but for some reason it came to the tipping point for me today, so I went for my first barefoot run. While I anticipated doing an 8 mile run, I instead went for about 6.5 miles. The first 1/2 mile was on the road, and the slapping of my bare feet on pavement, I have to admit, felt pretty good. I deliberately designed my run to spend the bulk of it on the beach, as I live very close to Ocean Beach. This is totally consistent with barefoot running ethos, which in general advocates starting your barefoot running on sand and grass, which is also more historically consistent with the material that humans have run on. (Cement, in the grand scheme of human evolution, is a very new invention.) I spent about 70% of the run on the sand, with the last 30% on pavement, and felt great throughout it, as well as through the rest of the day.

Running barefoot is almost unavoidably elitist. It’s hard to not run barefoot and feel a tad bit superior to everyone else. It’s kind of like biking as your commute, rather than driving. You know the type. You meet out a new person, say a friend of a friend at a bar somewhere, you’re chatting, somehow my 40 minute drive commute comes up in the conversation, and new conversationalist that I’m talking to sort of nods emphatically, sighing a bit, saying, “Yeah, too bad you’re trapped in your car. I bike to work, feeling the freedom of the fresh air every morning.” So yeah, as I was running, I felt a bit elite about it all. Look at those poor saps walking along the beach in shoes. Suckers. When the waves rush up on the sand, they have to skittishly avoid the water so their shoes and socks don’t get wet. I pity these people. Me, on the other hand, I am splashing through the water proudly, in slow-motion no doubt, with the heavens playing the “Chariots of Fire” theme song, because I’m barefoot, I don’t care about my feet getting wet. For a real-life example of this type of attitude, get this line from a forum on runningbarefoot.org: “Don’t get disheartened, it takes a while to transition from foot-coffins to freedom!” Foot-coffins, huh.

No seriously, it is pretty cool to run barefoot. You’re more in tune with the feeling of the run, as your feet are literally on the earth and absorbing every bit of it. It’s a no-brainer that running on sand and grass feels good (pretty much every established article on barefoot running starts with a nostalgic memory of running through sprinkles during the summer, as a kid, carefree…..wait for it……BAREFOOT!), but it’s cool to find that running barefoot on pavement actually doesn’t hurt that much. Sidewalks are particularly smooth and feel quite good. Roads can be a bit more inconsistent, and so I found it’s best to run on the sidewalk.

I definitely plan on repeating the experience. Next run I do, it’ll be barefoot. It’s prime surf season, so running may be sporadic, but whenever I do it, it’ll be barefoot. Oh, and I refuse to even consider shoes like the “Nike Free 5.0,” or worse, the “Vibram Five Fingers.” These shoes are made to feel like you are actually barefoot, all for the low cost of $70. You’re kidding right. When you can run barefoot for free, you instead will pay $70 for a token rubber sole on your feet that is otherwise intended to simulate barefoot running? It’s not like you can kind of wear a condom, you either do or you don’t. Same thing with barefoot running. You do it, or you wear shoes.

I am maybe, just a tad bit, starting to worry about myself. First I formalize my indifference for showering (I went from Wednesday 10pm to Monday 6pm this past week without showering. That’s almost 5 DAYS PEOPLE), and now I’m talking about barefoot running. To clear the slate: yes, I enjoy swimming naked, who the hell doesn’t, but I don’t plan on becoming a nude-beach attendee, and while I’m not a huge shaver, I’m not gonna grow a Jesus beard either. I’m flirting with full-fledged hippiedom, but I’m not there yet. Don’t worry, I’m monitoring the situation closely.

On October 20, 2009, Twitter co-creator and author Dom Sagolla held his book premiere for 140 Characters at the Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco. Dom has been studying short form communication since its inception, and has written a fantastic style book that helps to explain the value of short form communcation, and encourages a thoughtful engagement of tools like Twitter and Facebook. The video clip below, which I shot and edited, gives a small sampling of Dom’s talk, to introduce you to his insightful approach to Twitter and short form communication. However, it’s just a preview. Read the book or attend one of Dom’s talks for a more full appreciation.

The book event featured a packed house, and Dom spoke for a while before answering a wide array of questions. The climax of the event was at the end when he offered demos of a Beta version of an iPhone app for his new book, a concept that excites the hell out of me. However, I’ll have to wait until the app is available for public consumption before I write about it…

For more information on 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form, including where to get a copy of it, go to www.140characters.com, or follow @dom, @thebook, and @bookapp on Twitter.

I’ve been surfing for just about half of my life, and although I’m only in my late twenties, my early days of surfing were in the time when the Internet was a strange, foreign concept, like Finland, or McDonald’s chicken nuggets. I remember watching the weather obsessively, and making dozens of wrong predictions, getting out of bed at 5:30am to drive to the beach and be skunked with crap, yet to occasionally be paid of with gorgeous dawn patrol surf, relatively alone.

Nowadays, we are inundated with online opportunities to learn about the surf conditions. I’m pretty sure the first to get into the game was Surfline, but quick on Surfline’s heels were Wavewatch, Magicseaweed, and many others. Out here in the Bay Area, there was Surfpulse, blakestah, and now the hugely popular Stokereport.com. On Twitter there are surfers throughout the world who post live-update tweets and pictures of surf conditions, and so between all of these options, it’s almost impossible to not know when there is good surf. I contribute to Stokereport, so my feelings on this question might be obvious. But I thought it important to give voice to the unspoken controversy that I know is out there: are online surf reports good or bad for surfing?

Let me first voice the opinion of those who think that over-sharing of surf conditions on the Internet is a bad thing. I have several friends of this school of thought, and so summarizing them shouldn’t be tough. The sentiment is relatively simple: the more people that know about good surf, the more people will actually go and surf when it’s good, and the more crowded it will be. More crowds = less waves for you, so that’s obviously a bad thing. Some places, like the wide-open Ocean Beach or in-front-of-everyone’s-face spots like Linda Mar or Surfer’s Beach in HMB, are going to be crowded regardless, because it doesn’t take any work to go and find them. But scattered up and down the coast are tons of secret spots, and if word got out onto Stokereport.com with updates about spots like (insert, for example, the SF spot that we all know but I refuse to put in writing on the internet, or coves up North and South), there might be real anger about things. I remember reading that when a live surf cam was installed at Linda Mar, locals stormed a town hall meeting after the camera was stolen, literally armed with pitchforks and torches. (Ironically enough, I read about this story in a book about California surf spots.) (It’s more ironic because Linda Mar kind of sucks as a surf spot.) In short: surf reports are equivalent to crowds, which surfers don’t like.

Going to the good side of the argument, surf reports are incredibly convenient. We all generally know that surf is better on a falling tide at most Bay Area spots, but the winds can change, the fog can roll in, the sand bars can shift–the unpredictability of surf in general, but specifically at Ocean Beach, makes real-time updates via cameras or tweets extremely useful. Also, you can better plan around surfing if you know how conditions might be. You can strategically plan a sick day if you have a high degree of confidence, based on multiple sources, that the surf is worth skipping work over. This also applies to the at-home negotiations we must manage in order to occasionally sneak out of familial responsibilities in order to score when it’s firing. Few things suck more than taking on additional chores for the weekend and sitting through a chick flick on Saturday night, all to clear a two-hour window for surf on a Sunday afternoon, only to get to the surf on Sunday and find out it’s awful. Online surf reports greatly decrease such incidents. Likewise, you will know if you’re going to be over your head, if you might be under-gunned, what board to bring, etc etc.

I think the basic argument has always been convenience vs. crowds. However, I’d like to push this argument a bit deeper. Surfing, it’s fair to say, is an activity that is good for you. It’s good exercise, it’s good for your soul, it’s good for your friendships, it’s just a good thing to do. When I finish surfing, I am in a good mood, and treat people better, which includes my family as well as strangers. And yes, at its essence, surfing is an extremely selfish pursuit. Few waves are best when shared, and so the attitude in the water is of Adam Smithian self-interest. However, in the modern era of anxiety and obesity, it seems to me that encouraging others to engage in a fundamentally wholesome, healthy activity like surfing is good for all. If more people built time into their schedules to do something like surf, we’d have more mellow, balanced people out there, people who constantly appreciate the beauty of a sunset, or a hollow barrel that looks like this.

A society of surfers sounds pretty good. Of course, I don’t claim that online surf reports will create a society of surfers. But knowing the wave conditions in advance, getting advice from other surfers through forums, and meeting people online to surf with in the real water, all which is lubricated by online surf activity, is likely contributing to an increase in the amount of surfers out there. And so if surf reports can help make learning to surf more manageable for newbies, or can allow more people to score a memorable wave or two, then isn’t that good for all of us? I’m not saying that I encourage crowds, but I don’t mind them too much either. The more people out there that are stoked, the more we’ll tolerate waiting in the line together at the grocery store, the less we’ll cut each other off on the road, and in general the happier and more fit we’ll be. And if this sounds overly naive, maybe it’s because I’m writing this in the glow of having surfed almost 4 hours today, in beautiful conditions. Was it crowded? Sure it was. Everyone knew it was going to be good today. But, I still got my fair share of waves, and really enjoyed watching the rest of the surfed waves. I can’t help but wonder if everyone else out there who had fun surfing today is feeling equally naive, idealistic, and let’s just say…optimistic.

So I will absolutely continue to contribute reports to stokereport.com, I will tweet surf-related tweets from @oceanbeach, and in general I’ll encourage people to enjoy the waves. Spread the goodness.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been tweeting with pictures about a surfboard shelf project my wife and I have been working on. We have finally completed it, and I thought it was worthwhile to post all the pictures together with a bit of a description of the steps. I want to also point out: my wife and I never do stuff like this. I’m not a handyman nor a craftsy guy, I prefer film for my creative outlet, so we both feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment in completing this.

First off, surfboards break all the time, especially at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where the waves can be very powerful. I took this picture a few weeks ago, thankfully it’s not my board.

This, however, is my board. I bought a longboard to try and hopefully score some more surf, as it would allow me to paddle out on small days, but it buckled one day in the water. I figured that a longboard is a huge canvas that could be somehow used for something cool, and after brainstorming a bit, we decided to go with making shelves for our guest room. As you can see, Augustus was an integral part of the observation of this project.

The first step was to cut the board down into usable parts. I took a saw and sawed along the wood stringer that runs through the middle of the board, and also made a clean line cut along the part where the board had broken. After sawing, we applied white primer to the board so that when we painted it, it would stick.

After priming, we explored designs a lot, and decided to do a Hawaiian flower, along with some traditional stripes. We found a great stencil online for a Hawaiian flower, and then cut it out with a razor.

From there, it was time to paint. We ended up going with a creamy yellow base for the board, with a blue and green pinstripe leading to our Hawaiian flower. The painting was one of the more fun steps: we set up shop in the garage, played music, and in general really enjoyed ourselves. After the paint dried, with several coat applications, we got a sealant spray can to add a bit of a glossy finish to the shelf, and also to prevent it from chipping.

Finally, it was time to install. I searched for the studs in the wall, and couldn’t find them. As such, we got dry wall anchors to put in the wall, and then screwed the brackets into the anchors. From there, it was easy: just rest the surfboard on the brackets, and we have a complete shelf! The pictures are only the first shelf, as the second shelf had a bit of paint that chipped out that we need to re-coat before installation.

Of course, we had to sign the fin, and the pictures we have up there are one of me surfing (makes sense, you can see the picture here) as well as a pretty awesome collage that a former student of mine made from pictures she took while at the Daraja Academy this summer.

Rad? I think so.

I place showering pretty low on my priority list. It is not uncommon for me to go several days without showering. Many of my friends find this utterly disgusting. Today I tweeted that it had been about 64 hours since my last shower, and I think that several people vomited in their mouths when they read that.

Why? What’s so important about showering?

Let me talk you through my typical fall weekend. It’ll start with a shower on Friday morning before work. Friday after school I’ll go to water polo practice and swim in the pool, getting chlorinated. Then typically on Saturday I’ll surf in the ocean, the greatest shower in the world. I really like the feeling of the ocean on me after a surf, so I’m not eager to rinse it off. I make it till Sunday, hopefully surfing again, and then by dinner time on Sunday it’s like “hey, why do it now? I’m gonna shower tomorrow morning anyway, so what’s the big rush?” And boom, there you have it, shower Friday morning, and not again until Monday morning.

My “typical” schedule is a bit off lately for various reasons, but one thing that hasn’t changed is my showering. I’ll go several days without it, because it’s not that big of a deal. Granted, I’ll still wash my face pretty much every night. I also apply deodorant so I hopefully don’t smell too terrible. My hair is pretty short, so it’s not like I’m covered in grease.

Some people say “how can you get into bed when you’re all dirty?” Two thoughts on that. A) many, many people shower in the morning only. As such, many, many people go to bed after a long day of whatever, so a lot of people get in bed dirty. But the bigger point is B) We spend on average 8 hours a night in bed. That’s maybe half the time you spend in your clothes on a given day. So 2 nights in bed = one day in clothes. How often do you wash your bed sheets? Or even bigger, your comforter? Maybe once every two weeks for the sheets, but much much longer for comforter. That is more or less the same thing as wearing the same clothes for a week. Awesome! Also, it’s not like sleeping is totally hygenic. We drool, fart, and in general smell like ass while we sleep. Ever notice how bad your breathe is in the morning? Yeah, that’s because sleeping is in itself a bit smelly. And if you need any more proof, read this absolutely hilarious post by my friend Sans Your Pants on the “4 ‘ates that you do in bed.” Holy crap is it good. My point is: your bed isn’t as clean as you think it is, so it’s not necessary that you show up to your bed smelling peachy fresh.

Beyond just these arguments, I recently listened to a really cool RadioLab episode on Parasites. Amazing. At the core of its awesomeness was this story about a guy who deliberately got hookworm, a parasite that lives in human poop, in order to fight his crippling asthma and allergies. It is unbelievable, and introduced me to something called the Hygiene Hypothesis. This idea is fascinating, and basically states that while of course hygiene is good, too much care for our cleanliness may actually deprive us of useful parasites and bacteria that actually help us fight off infections. Makes sense to me, and reminds me of the scene in “Knocked Up” when the chubby dude with curly hair is going on and on about the “Baby Book,” (rationally) stating that humans have successfully been having babies for a very long time without the aid of books telling them how to do so. Same thing with excessive hygiene. I may not smell minty fresh, but maybe covering myself in chemical soap daily to scrub away dirt may actually be worse for my skin than it is good. Not to mention the waste of water.

If I was a chick, and I looked like the surf chick in Blue Crush in her shower scene, maybe I’d shower more. And I’ll admit with full heterosexual preferences that if I looked like Christian Bale in American Psycho in the shower, maybe I’d shower more too. (Side note: very easy to find picture to link for Christian Bale’s buttcheeks; almost impossible for the blond chick’s. When you google “Blue Crush Shower” it turns out that you get a ton of images of the blue garters.)

But you see my point. Try it. You may really like avoiding a shower or two. I showered today, Friday, and it’s the fall, so me and my shower will likely hang out again at some point on Monday. Till then, smell ya later.

No, I’m not talking about that Foursquare. That is obviously loved by all. I used to teach at a school in Maryland where kids would quite passionately and obsessively play Foursquare at all hours of the day. The game is awesome.

I am instead talking about Foursquare the geeky iPhone social networking game. I first tried Foursquare back in March and April of 2009, soon after it launched. Yes, I’m proud to say that I was a relatively early adopter. If you need proof, here’s proof:

So what is it? Basically, whenever you are out doing something in your city (I think there’s 21 cities now registered) you “check-in,” and basically it broadcasts to your friends where you are. For example, last night I “checked in” at La Playa Taqueria while I was getting my usual order of carne asada Super Burrito with black beans.

When you check-in, you get Points. I don’t really like that, but I’ll get back to that. You also send a push notification to anyone else who is your friend, so that they get what looks like a text message sent to their iPhone and tells them where they are. This is kind of nice, as it allows you to get a sense of where your friends are…increased chance of bumping into someone. While at a big Festival like the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival this weekend, if someone updates that they are at the Arrow Stage at a given time, that’ll get sent to me immediately, rather than I having to go in, search through my Twitter stream, etc etc. In addition to this, whenever you check in you can get details on the location…for example, there’s a place to automatically get taken to the location’s Yelp reviews, you can check out tweets that were generated in its general vicinity and therefore may be (most likely not) about the place you are at. This is also kind of nice, as Foursquare serves as a one-stop for many different services.

There are some other nice features. For example, there’s a “To-Do” list. I don’t really understand that, but basically whenever you’re in a given location, you can search the public “to-do” list. That will look up any suggested things to do based on where you are. This is kind of cool. For example, if I’m standing at a certain corner downtown with some time on my hands, I could look up the public To-Do list, and find a bunch of nifty little favorite things that I could do that are pretty close to that corner, like antagonize a certain homeless person, find a funny road sign, or order just the right milkshake at just the right place. This I like.

There are definitely features I don’t like. First off, the Points system. Basically, this is a way to peer pressure you into being “social” and “outgoing” and “out in the world doing things.” Big freaking deal. Yeah, I need something telling me to go out and “be in the world” and not just chilling in my house. I like my house, I like chilling in it, and I’m not in high school anymore where people peer pressure you into conducting the type of social life that others want. I like the way I spend my time–surfing, skateboarding, biking, and enjoying time at my house with my wife. So yeah, I’m not particularly into that facet of it. Especially considering you can “check-in” and get points in really stupid places, like grocery stores. The game is supposed to be about engaging a social life. Since when is going to a grocery store a socially cool thing to do? Honestly, WTF. (Notice: I checked in at Costco early on in the game. I am ashamed. Very ashamed. Yet I will do so again.)

In addition to that, their location element is a bit buggy. When I first joined in March, their location was way off. One night I went to the Pizza Place on Noriega, and tried to “Check-In.” They located me as being at the Presidio Bowling Lane, which is a good 15 minute drive away. Not even close. So I had to type in my own address: pain in the butt for something that was broadcasting itself as very, very easy. Later that night, after seeing the Presidio Bowling Lane in Foursquare, we all went bowling in the Presidio. I went to check in there, and I kid you not: Foursquare located me as being at the Pizza Place on Noriega. That’s a huge WTF, and so I dropped the game. (I was also growing sick of the point mentioned above about the peer pressuring.) However, I now acknowledge that this is what comes with being an early adopter: you catch on early, but you get the very buggy version. I don’t know from firsthand experience, but apparently Twitter’s Fail Whale was very common for early adopters to that service. Since re-signing back up yesterday, I’m more impressed with the location apparatus.

There’s this one other complicated thing about it, and that is being the Mayor. Basically, if you check in at a given location regularly, in fact more regularly than anyone else, you become Mayor of the place. It’s supposed to make you feel cool to be the Mayor. I’m not the Mayor of anything, so I can’t verify whether or not it actually makes you feel cool. My friend Dom is the Mayor of South Ocean Beach, and since I basically take my dog there every day and it’s one of my go-to surf spots, I’m planning on taking Dom down, big time, and so I’ll get my first sense of what Mayorship feels like.

Beyond the supposed cool factor, Mayorship is where Foursquare actually can make some money, and this is what makes it interesting, and why I’m back checking the service out again. (That, and their icon is really nice looking, and to be honest, I like seeing it when I turn on my iPhone. Yes, I’m superficial and like things like look good. Why else would I still be holding onto my high school crush for Gwen Stefani?) Since Foursquare is obviously location specific, apparently businesses have taken to advertising exclusively through Foursquare, and provide promos and coupons just to people on Foursquare, and better coupons and discounts for the Mayors. Makes sense right? Being a Mayor is like being a Regular. If you’re the well-known Regular at some hip bar, the bar rewards just you with a pretty sweet special. If others are aware of that sweet special, they too want to be the most well-known Regular, so they frequent your bar more as well. Business makes more money because there’s an increase in Regulars all bucking for that some special. You dig? Of course, since I don’t drink, I couldn’t give a crap about a drink special unless we’re talking about being the Mayor of Polly-Ann Ice Cream, in which case a free milkshake for Mayorship would turn my whole life around. Unfortunately, however, I anticipate that the spots I actually visit with a fair degree of Regularity are nowhere close enough to be hip enough to advertise through Foursquare, but it’s a nice idea.

So I’m back and giving it a shot. It’s very easy to find which twitter friends are on foursquare, so it increases the chance of actually meeting in real life some of the people whose writing you enjoy. There are many of those for me, so I’m siked about that. I’m cautiously interested in re-engaging, which basically in my language means I’ll be checking in at every chance that I get. I imagine that this game will bring out my competitive side. So what. Just rest assured: I will NEVER update through Twitter that “I’m at Trader Joe’s (blah blah address) with a link to a map.” I hate that.

Two summers ago my wife cut a mohawk for me. I loved it, and I kept it through about the first two months of the school year.

When Brian Wilson, the closer for the San Francisco Giants who comes in and hurls fastballs at close to 100mph, showed up this season with a mohawk that looked strikingly similar to the one I had two years ago, I loved it. Still do.

So now, the Giants are really damn close to getting into the play-offs. They have a huge month ahead of them, with every game having tremendous significance. So I started to toy with the idea of re-igniting the joy of the mohawk to a) change it up a bit, but much more importantly b) show some solidarity and support for the Giants in their effort to make it to the playoffs.

I thought out-loud today on Twitter about it.

By the end of the day, these are the replies I had gotten about the idea:

How rad is that? This was by far the single loudest outpouring of comments I’ve gotten since joining Twitter, and to me, it stands as a fun example of the type of community that can be built through social networking. It was really fun throughout the day to get different people’s reactions, all of them positive, to get me more juiced.

So I came home, and my wife grabbed the shears and clipped away. We’ve got the end result. My hope is to encourage any other Giants fans out there that Hell Yeah, We’re In This, and that with a little love and support, even if it’s nutty, we could have one incredible September and October in San Francisco for baseball. Wouldn’t that be something.

One simple question remains…..Who is cutting a mohawk next?

When I sang for a ska-punk band in college (oh yeah, that’s right, I used to rock and roll), we would often times come out of concerts talking about the various “Awesomes” that we experienced in the show. One particularly epic night our guitarist very memorably said that it was the Night of One Thousand Awesomes, and I’ve loved the phrase ever since. (Mind you, at the time, we were strongly toying with the idea of calling our newest album “Our Lady of Perpetual Awesome.”)

This weekend deserves such a huge distinction as carrying a tremendous amount of Awesome in it. Let me count the ways.

1. We bought bikes. This is huge. Bigger than huge. It’s monumental. Life-changing. I’m calling it the purchase of 2009. (The purchase of 2008, obviously, was our dog Augustus.) We went down to the Ocean Cyclery near City College and had a ball, baby. I have been wanting to be a bike-rider for about 5 years, and so to pull the trigger and finally do it feels amazing. Since purchasing the bike, I have: biked home from the bike shop with my wife (we jogged there, which is another Awesome), biked around Lake Merced, biked to the Beach twice (once to check the surf, once to bodysurf–more on that later), biked to a friend’s house to watch the Giants (more on that later), and biked a big 17 mile loop around SF with my wife. Gadzooks that’s a lot of Awesome.

2. The weather was incredible on Friday and Saturday, which is extremely rare for San Francisco in late Augustu. It’s usually really foggy and cold with no surf, but instead we had hot sunny weather and good surf. Awesome.

3. The waves were pretty good. Not great, but pretty good, definitely good enough to surf. On Friday night I surfed, yet the highlight was not the waves, but the sea life. I have encountered a lot of living creatures in the ocean, but never in such density as Friday night. I saw dozens of seals playfully ride waves, about 10 different pods of dolphins doing full breaches out of the water within spitting distance, whales blowing water out of their blowholes about 300 yards offshore, pelicans dive-bombing like madmen. It was incredible. A lot of Awesome. The only slight non-Awesome was the fact that I more than once found myself thinking of that Other Big Creature of the Pacific Ocean, and that he couldn’t be too far away.  No sign of the Man in Black. Whew.

4. On Saturday, for the first time, I bodysurfed at Ocean Beach. This was a really cool experience. I love to bodysurf (for non-surfers, that basically means riding waves without any board…just swimming into them and sliding down the face of the wave), but had never done it at OB, fearing it was too dangerous. Throwing all hesitations to the wind, I strapped on some swim fins and swam out with a good buddy and had a blast. It was much less worrisome than I had imagined–the fins make a huge difference, even without having a board to float on when you’re tired–and I had some pretty righteous rides. Very much felt like being a kid again, splashing around in the ocean with the warm sun on your face. Awesome.

5. Friday and Saturday night afforded me the chance to get some really good time with two of my closest friends in the city. Let’s just say there was a lot of enjoyable chilling out on couches with excellent conversation.

6. On Friday I ate a burrito from my favorite tacqueria for dinner. On Saturday, it was pizza (to clarify, not from the tacqueria). In other words, I had back-to-back nights eating food out (extremely rare), and scored my two favorite meals. Hot damn that’s a lot of Awesome in my belly.

7. If you’re not a baseball fan, you can skip this one. If you are, you probably know what I’m going to say. The SF Giants swept the Rockies and are now tied in the Wild Card Race. Holy crap people this is huge. I feel the need to re-visit my old post about baseball, in which I called the Giants a team “not worth running to,” because they were basically out of the playoffs. Well, that was 5 wins ago, with the last 3 coming off of the Rockies, the team that was knocking them out of the playoffs. How sweet it was. Lincecum got his shut-out win on Friday. Zito pitched one helluva game on Saturday, almost going the whole 9 innings scoreless. And Sunday, good God, Sunday. Maybe the most rewarding baseball game I’ve ever seen. A week before, the Giants lost on a grand-slam in the bottom of the 14th. Well, today Edgar Renteria, the current biggest let-down of the team, blasted a Grand Slam in the 7th inning that put the Giants ahead, where the stayed, to win the game. (Notice that a Rockies grand-slam is uncapitalized and hyphenated, a Giants Grand Slam is capitalized and un-hyphenated.) There was even a Giants offensive rally in the 8th for added “Up Yours” emphasis to the Rockies. My boy Brian Wilson had 3 saves over the 3 games. It was glorious, beautiful justice to sweep the Rockies at this point in the season. There’s so much Awesome going on in Giants baseball this weekend that I could basically just focus this whole post on that if I wanted to. But I won’t. I will just say that as of August 30, with a month left of the season, the Giants have 72 wins…as many as they did last year in the entire season.

8. I had excellent phone conversations with two of my siblings this weekend, who are both in excellent places in their lives. It is so Awesome to connect with family and to know that all is well. In fact, my sister just got a plane ticket to come out here in October. Yes.

9. We went to Costco this weekend, which is usually a huge, fat Non-Awesome, but it had been a very long time since we went so it was great to purchase one thing in particular: Nutella. I haven’t had Nutella since the road trip ended, and I am currently feeling the wonderful afterglow of a belly perfectly filled with a nutella-on-whole-wheat-toast-sandwich as my dessert.

10. I don’t usually talk about my wife on this blog, but I think I need to go public and say she was Awesome this weekend. I’m going to leave it vague, but it’s definitely worth pointing out that she’s an Awesome wife. It’s great to have a partner who is so flexible, courageous, and willing to put effort into our relationship. Very fulfilling to say and feel that, exactly three years, one month, and one day after marrying her.

I’ll leave it at that, 1/100 of the Awesomes that I claimed, but I guarantee you, there were so many glorious moments this past weekend that One Thousand might be an understatement. It was wonderful to have so much good packed into such a short amount of time. And it was the weekend after my first week back to school–a weekend you desperately need after being pretty tired from the week back, but also a weekend you greatly enjoy because you finally have school on your mind, and if you’re a teacher like me, you like having school on your mind.

To anyone who might read this: go out and try and pack as much goodness into your weekend as you can, like I did these past two days. I feel like this is how life should be lived. We can make choices to go and experience what we want, and live how we desire, and it’s so incredibly worth-it to make the right choices that keep you happily breathing your next breath with a huge smile on your face.

I saw this sign on the way into Church this morning. Seems to sum things up pretty nicely. Awesome.

I got into baseball for two reasons: Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Johns Hopkins University.

Probably the two nerdiest reasons to get into baseball ever listed, I realize this, but it’s true. Let me explain. I’ve never really been a big sports fan. I love to play sports, almost obsessively so, but didn’t dwell on watching them. In fact, I still don’t. The only sport I really like watching is baseball.

One summer while living in Washington, DC, I picked up DeLillo’s masterpiece Underworld, and to my surprise and amazement, it opened with a scene from a baseball game, and I loved it. DeLillo is one helluvan American writer, and Underworld is an exploration of Americana through and through, and so I think it’s fitting to open with America’s past time. I’ve always loved it when a writer can actually write well about a sport, something that many writers attempt but very few accomplish. I can read lyrical, insightful, informed writing about surfing, skateboarding, baseball, football, etc until my eyes bleed, and DeLillo’s opening scene about baseball is at the top of the list. So from there, I knew I had to give the game a try.

That summer I moved to Baltimore, and enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University to get my masters at night while teaching during the day. It was a tough year, and by the spring I was getting burned out. I needed some sort of occasional, momentary relief from the constant work grind that I was doing–prepping for school, studying and writing for my masters, coaching, and traveling to NYC to see my then-girlfriend, now-wife. And so I found myself casually putting the Orioles on TV to be the background to my busy life. I’d keep the volume low enough that it wasn’t bothersome, but loud enough that I’d know it when something exciting was going on. Starting that spring, and blossoming through the summer, I fell in love with watching baseball. First and foremost, I fell in love with the rhythm of the game. I loved its slowness, and how it seems to crest and fall like swells in the ocean, with long boring innings and then massive swoops of momentum, how patient you must be, how much there is to know about the game that you have no idea about, and how ingrained it is into the American consciousness. It was a beautiful backdrop to a bizarre summer. After school ended, I ended up working as camp counselor during the day, going to night class, and coming home to catch the last half of the game in my spartan apartment. (And I don’t use “spartan” lightly. I had a radical agenda to keep my electrical bill under $15/month, and to achieve that, one of the things I did was to not use the AC or the heat during my entire existence in Baltimore, and I succeeded. I’d sleep at night in the winter in sub 50’s in my apartment in full sweats, gloves, with the hood up and tied shut. In the summer my apartment would often register at being hotter than 90 degrees at night.)

And it was in that venue that I was baptized into the baseball world. I cannot claim any longevity in my appreciation for the game, I basically know nothing about baseball that hasn’t happened to either the Baltimore Orioles or the San Francisco Giants more than 5 years ago. But when I moved to San Francisco, it went from an enjoyable past time to a game I truly and deeply love. It’s been convenient that I live here with a team that has become so much more likeable since getting rid of Barry Bonds, with pitchers like Lincecum and Cain and hitters like Sandoval and Velez to just really rally behind. Truth be told though, I would have fallen for whatever local team I could watch regularly, and I will likely do that if re-locate throughout my life. But it worked out to be the #sfgiants, and so I’ll take them and love them as much as I can.

Tonight was a nice surprise: my wife ended up getting very, very, very good seats to the Giants game for free from her boss. She does not like baseball at all, but knows that I do, and so she snagged them and we ended up going to the game together. We live in the Outer Sunset, pretty much on the other side of the city from the ball park, and so I took MUNI down to about halfway to meet her after work. The plan was to jump on her Vespa from there, and head over to the park. When I got to her with the Vespa, I realized I had forgotten my helmet at home, so I had to run back down to the MUNI and just public transit it to the game. Of course, the one trolly that goes to the park was backlogged, so I jumped on a different train and got dropped off about a mile away, to jog the mile down to meet my wife and the tickets. And to remind you, the Giants are not exactly worth running to right now. They just lost a huge series to Colorado, miserably, with the last-game being so gut-wrenching that it’s hard to think about, and in doing so, likely ruined their chance at making it to the playoffs. As much as we all love to believe in the Cinderella, comeback story, we all know it’s true at the point in the season.

But anyway, I ran to the game because I love the game. I love walking out and seeing all the clear crisp open space that hovers over the field. I love seeing the players go through their indiosyncrasies. I love the cheers, and the hokey things they do on the JumboTron in between innings. (necessary interruption: at one ballgame in Baltimore, me and my friends were so likeably rowdy that we were featured on the JumboTron at three different occasions throughout the game.) I love bringing my glove, I love seeing beautiful girls who like baseball. (Sorry honey, but I do. I really do.) It’s just such a great game. At the park, we had a blast. We had some of the best seats I’ve ever enjoyed, about 14 rows behind home plate. We had hot dogs and hot chocolate, and talked to the dad behind us who was with his 2- and 4-year-old. We chuckled at the guys down the row who desperately, desperately wanted the girls nearby to flirt with them throughout the game, but instead the girls spent most of the game chatting it up with me and my wife. (Sorry, fellas.) And best of all, we had a great game to watch, with some excellent pitching, great plays, and an exciting homerun in the bottom of the eighth with a nail-biter of a finish in the top of the 9th to seal a Giants win. It was a fantastic night.

And so now it’s fully been disclosed. I love baseball, and I’m not ashamed of it. Baseball lets you be a little kid again, whether you’re at the park scrambling to get a foul ball, or are out throwing the ball around with a buddy, simulating throwing a guy out who is stealing second. Baseball reminds me of cold foggy nights in San Francisco and hot sweltering nights in Baltimore. It reminds me of the freedom and joy of summer. It reminds me of what’s good about America.

And I’m OK with that.