the ancient art of sleeping in your clothes

I woke up this morning on a small rectangle of egg foam on the floor of a tiny studio apartment in Oakland. The night before, we had to work in San Francisco, interviewing a band that, luckily, wasn't flaky. They were very polite. I spoke with them in the upstairs area of the record store where they were playing an in-store performance before a proper set at a venue later in the evening. They weren't overly friendly, but they were very accomodating and pleasant, dressed in all black and wearing giant sunglasses. No doubt they'd had to deal with many of my type over the past few years, and I did my best not to ask them the same questions they would have had to answer over and over again. Afterwards, we took pictures of them in the alley beside the store; they were total pros. They knew how to pose, and we got a bunch of great shots in the matter of 10 minutes, right before they took the stage at the record store.

We stayed for a couple of songs, and then decided to grab dinner, because we had tickets and a photo pass to the real show later that night. About a block down we found a Thai restaurant. We had to climb narrow stairs to get there. The restaurant was beautiful--decked out with gilded ornaments, masks and statues that I assume are Thai in origin. Honestly, I don't know much about Thailand. I figure it must be pretty hot and muggy in the summer time and that it gets a lot of rain. I assume there are plenty of large bugs. I've heard plenty of things about Bangkok--things that are much more interesting than Bangkok having the world's longest place name--I've become hip to their growing film industry and I knew a guy from Thailand once, but that's about it really. I've only recently started trying Thai cuisine, which I think is a pretty good way of learning about a region and its people.

My brain doesn't know how to process Thai food. It's so flavorful and fragrant, and I haven't had all that much exposure to it. The combination of ingredients such as cocunut milk, lime, chicken and cilantro confuse me, but it's so good, I don't stop eating. I try not to look too much into what I'm ordering when I'm at a Thai restaurant. I don't try to pronounce the names if they're too exotic. I just point and say "I'll have this," and chow down. That system has worked thus far, but the only problem is, I never know what it was that I ordered, so I've never had the same dish twice, no matter how much I enjoyed it. This time I ordered chicken with silver noodles. I didn't have to point.

There were three waitresses, two of the, including ours, were gorgeous and attentive. They wore ankle-length silk-looking skirts and spoke in soft voices. One scooped bowls of soup and steamed rice with care. The other cleared off empty plates, refilled my glass of water constantly and said "sir" a lot. It's nice to be doted over sometimes.

We hit up the show and sold the six extra tickets we had for $10 a piece. We were going to try to let them go at full price, but the venue wasn't sold out--simple supply and demand. Still, we made enough money to go to this crusty bar in Oakland with a friend who lives down the block from it. He let us crash at his place, which was nice seeing as we didn't have to make the long drive twice in one day.

Got into the office after 1pm. Drove straight there from the city. No toothbrush, no change of clothes, only about three hours sleep. Work was pretty much a wasted effort, but I think I made a decent trade in my fantasy baseball league.