I Heart Tech Support

Tonight, after a lovely evening of drinks and a Cambodian meal, my good friend Gene, the person in my life that I run to when I have REAL tech questions, about REAL tech matters, like programming language issues, not just end-user "Why is my iPod doing THAT???" whines, took me back to his office with him and fixed some formatting issues on my blog to make everything look better. He also explained to me some things about html so that in the future, I can fix these little things on my own. I always think it's better if he teaches me to fish, so that I can feed myself. Though, I tell him that since he works only about 5 blocks from me, he could just bring me fish for lunch every day if I never learn to. But, this is not the spirit of growth, I'm told.

Gene answering any sort of tech question of mine is common practice. Just like Marin serving as my own personal iTunes support person. And, Shrey taking my calls at any hour of the day or night to field urgent ProTools questions. I just got it like that. It's great. I am the question ninja, popping out of a darkened corner in my shinobi shozoko and without any introductions, asking my tech question, getting the answer, and fading back into the shadows.

Though, I'm sure that these people in my life, so victimized because they know stuff and can explain it really effectively, must take a lot of abuse from those of us less knowledgeable all the time. They have to explain things over and over again. They can't speak in shorthand because the people they're addressing would never understand them. They don't get paid for these consulting services they're providing for family and friends. Yet they still take my phone calls. I'm so impressed by their generosity. I'm so thankful they took the time to learn all this stuff that I didn't. And, really, I'm so glad I've got them on retainer -- friend retainer. I love my tech support!

Proud to be an Athletic Supporter

It's easy to love the A's. It's easy, and I do it. Even when they lose. Even when there are only 10,000 fans in the stands with me. Even when it's cold and raining, and there's no ride home from BART after I reach 19th Street and I have to walk the 20 minutes uphill at 11:00pm, on a weeknight. Even when my boss, a FORMER A's fan, hassles me at work the day after they lose a game. Even when the team threatens to leave Oakland and move to the suburbs of my behated Southbay. Even when a lot of things.

The reason it's so easy is not just because I always love the home team, or even that this home team exemplifies me really well with their scrappy sort of attitude. It's because they're fun. Win or lose, they have a good time, and keep it light, and show their spirit, and maintain their camaraderie. With heroic star players or with no-name newly-acquireds, they give me someone to love and cheer for every single time. Take Big Joe Blanton, or not-born-in-Japan Kurt Suzuki, or the new Nick Swisher Andrew Brown -- that's the spirit of the A's club that you'll never find in a contending team like the Yankees. (Plus, the A's have Stomper, who's new Make Some Noise video featuring the Stomper Trumpet Puppet is the funniest thing I've seen at a ballpark EVER. After several viewings, I'm STILL laughing.) So, that's why I love this team. And, it's EASY.

My beloved doesn't write that often. (Maybe that's why, when he does, he commits so many little grammatical errors that the OCD in me flags.) But, when he does write, it's good stuff. It's insightful, it's poetry, and it makes me laugh. And by far, the best thing he's ever written, in my opinion, is this, a blog entry from the past winter break, when the A's front office traded away the fans' most beloved player, Nick Swisher.

I'm not going to complain about anything that happens this season. I'm just going to attend all the home games I can wearing my old Jason Kendall tee-shirt, and being thankful to be back in Oakland, where I can root for my A's in person or over the radio, and I never have to contend with a 9-hour time difference, or the inefficiencies of mlb.com's hissing audio stream.

Let's go, Oakland! Clap-clap, clap-clap-clap!

My Pre-Radio Life

This morning, my sister emailed me this picture of a cute baby wearing headphones and called it "Young Martina". I guess it was the headphones that made her think it was me. But I was never that cute, or pale, a baby.

I had to respond and tell her that no, it wasn't me. Despite how obsessed I am with all things radio now in my adulthood, I wasn't so into it as an infant that there ever would have been gigantic, professional grade headphones on my head at any point while I was in my crib. And certainly, I was not the type at that time to listen to anything with such a blissed-out, bemused, eye-closed look on my face. She's so silly, that sister of mine!

Looking back, I'm sure I wasn't very aware even of all my radio listening options let alone how to actually make radio when I was a child. Growing up in SoCal in the 80's, we had one very old, used tuner that was probably donated to the fam by some local church and it was always tuned to the Mighty 690, an AM station that played a lot of Top 40, only 10 songs on their playlist at a time. But, those were my favorite 10 songs of that particular month, easily. That's also where I always got my Sunday hit of Casey Kasem whom I thought was a genius. I remember my sisters and I always freaking out when someone tuned the stereo away from that spot on the dial. I was convinced I'd never find it again on the crowded AM spectrum out of L.A. and San Diego.

Unless you count me recording the Silver Spoons intro theme onto a portable cassette player by holding it up to the TV so I could have it on a mix tape, I also never had aspirations of becoming a radio producer. When you listen back to those tapes now, you can actually hear 9-year-old me off-mic shushing people in the room. God, I was a control freak even then! Or, when I used to read books out loud into the same tape recorder and play it back to myself at night as I went to bed because no one ever had the time to read me to sleep. That's more audiobook than radio broadcast. Sigh.

I must've been cute in those days, but not cute like that kid in the picture. My cute was one of patheticness. That's a totally different kind of cute.

Back at It

After what I comfort myself by saying is an understandable 6-month hiatus from this blog so that I could return home to the San Francisco Bay Area, find a place to live, get a job, and resettle into a life of familiarity and comfort among all my favorite things, a confluence of events has started me back on this path of chronicling my meandering and multi-claused thoughts. I'm financially comfortable now after an impoverished re-entry into my lavish American lifestyle so no longer have to hustle up money and thus have more time on my hands. I recently reconnected with someone I've known for a few years whose writing I've always enjoyed, and he encouraged me to get back to blogging despite my new life of uninteresting bliss back in my element. And, I'm getting tired of only presenting any little witticisms I have in quickies on Facebook. It's too small an audience. It's too scattered across all of my friends' Facebook pages. So, I'm back. Here.

I realized that I used my travels in Europe last year as an excuse to blog, because it was the thing that made me interesting and gave me something to talk about without exposing too much of my more personal musings. It shames me that I didn't think my personal musings were worth posting online when any number of illiterate asses with a broadband connection will create their own websites dedicated to some lame obsession of theirs and post all over the web with their bad grammar and poor punctuation and overuse of little initials (NOT acronyms, dammit!) like LOL and IMHO. It shames me that I needed a gimmick to open myself up in this public forum when I'm always verbally pounding away at my family and friends about the importance of being honest about your thoughts and emotions and sharing more. There's nothing wrong with talking about the pubradio job I got 2 months ago that I love, the cute apartment with wood floors and great natural light I now live in on the north side of Lake Merritt, or how I enjoy going to all my favorite places around the Bay with all my favorite peeps. Bliss can be interesting too.

Okay, fine. The money is now where the mouth is. For every blog entry I write from today onwards, I'm putting a dollar into a piggy bank and then doing something REALLY GOOD with that money when I've amassed a bunch of dollars after another year of blogging. I'm paying MYSELF for posting to my own blog! HA!

So, on this warm and glorious weekend in the Bay, what things, great and small, have I honed my senses to in the world around me so that I might take an interest? The vertical blinds waving and clapping against each other in the breeze coming through my bedroom window keep reminding me that I need to get outside and move around. One cannot enjoy the weekend by laptop alone. I'm putting on a skirt and enjoying the sunshine now.