You birds, always cracking foxy...

Mmmph

According to sfgate.com, the United Way recently found that one in four families in the SF Bay Area can't afford the basic necessities of life without government aid.

Maybe I'll just shut up about being priced out of the housing market for a while and be glad I have a mountain of rent money, a restaurant budget, and health insurance.

Whiners?

After 14 months as a happy tribeling, I'm increasingly disinclined to spend any time on Tribe.net.

They rolled out a big new re-design today, and in a thread titled So, whaddya think? that begins with "Good or bad, we want your feedback.", the CEO responds to a series of (mostly negative) comments with this:

i hear an awful lot of whining about every change we implement and it seems to me you forget that this is offered to you as a free site, you forget to ask yourself whether you have found any value here and if so how you can help make it better. if you dont like something, help make it better.

Uh, hello? Why would we be members of a tribe called TribeIdeas, offering feedback as requested, if we didn't want the site to be better? For this we get called "whiners"???

And the "it's a free site" argument carries no weight with me. It is a free site. But it's a for-profit business. One that relies on its users for after-the-fact beta testing and design/usability feedback. And calls them whiners when they don't like said feedback.

And yeah, Pincus backpedals later. Without actually apologizing. But jeez. they did user testing. They must've seen at least some of these complaints coming. And if you can't handle tactless feedback, don't ask for it from a buncha random people on your SNS.

Walter works for tribe, so I should make it extremely clear that these are my opinions, not his. (I sought Walter out as a Tribe-friend in August '03, in fact, because I loved the way he handled himself with wit and grace in the face of often-obnoxious user feedback. The man's amazing.)

So yeah, my man works for the company. And I hold nearly all tribe employees I've met in extremely high esteem.

Still, right now, I'm not so very gruntled.

Content-Free

Lazy lazy lazy Sunday. The most strenuous thing I did was stumble across the street for juice and coffee. At least we made it to the gym a few times this week, after two weeks of coughing. I should find a tape measure or something. I'm not ready to get on the scale, but I'm definitely smaller.

I'm getting kinda sick of Tribe. I'll read something, start composing a reply, lose interest, and close the browser window.

Still priced out of the SF real estate market. Still daydreaming about travel. Working more. Loving Walter. Wondering where I'll be a year from now.

Oh, heh. Just got a phone call. Abby and Aaron did something this weekend. They made a really silly Cafe Press Shop. Go check it out!

Tits

So I'm on my way to a client lunch, casually dressed in black jeans, sandals, and one of Walter's old shirts. It's golden-yellow, and has buttons, and is *way* outside my usual black-tee-jacket-and-pants uniform. But it's hot today, the shirt is light, and most of my tees are in the laundry.

On Post street, I get a reminder on why I usually wear high-necked shirts. Walk past two guys leaning on a car, and hear "there's gold in them thar hills!". Turn and look, confused, and am greeted with dual leers. I look back in disbelief, and walk on.

WTF? They're just breasts, people. You've seen a million of 'em.

I hate that women's bodies are considered public property. I'm too fat? People on the street let me know. I have ample breasts? Don't worry about me going far without hearing about it. Nice hair? Thanks for mentioning it, whoever-you-are.

Now go away.

Comments Re-Enabled

Trying out comments from HaloScan.com. Let's see how they do with the spammers....

Endings and Beginnings

It's been nearly six months since J and I split (for good, this time).

There's a lot of sadness, of course. We had many, many good years. We grew up together, in so many ways. And, ultimately, we failed one another.

We're working on the friendship thing, which makes me happy. And he's crazy-in-love with his new girl. Some people don't get that I really mean it when I say I want good things for him. Like I could love someone for a decade and not want his happiness. I'm not saying it's all smooth, all the time. I'm just saying that as divorces go, this is about as good as it gets.

J and his gal are compatible in ways that he and I never were. His life is also very different now. (Or at least it appears to be, from the outside.)

I've been posting about feeling rootless lately. But today I'm thinking a lot about what I haven't been posting.

You see, there's a man. He's been my friend, my gym buddy, and my funny, charming "stunt date" since late 2003. Early on, he made sense to me, in a way few people ever have. We certainly didn't plan on anything but friendship, but we both knew very early on that we'd be friends for a long, long time.

Lacking a convenient rooftop to shout from, I'll let the words echo across my corner of the blogosphere.

I

love

him.

Outpriced

A 500-square-foot condo near Precita Park just got bid at least $100k over asking, putting the price well over half a million dollars, and well out of my price range.

This is happening a lot. Places I wouldn't rent are selling for vastly more than I can afford. And thanks to J and I having bought a house many years ago, I'm coming in with an obscenely large down payment.

Maybe it's time to re-define "home". Or find something exciting to do and wait a while before wriggling my roots back into the ground. It's not inconceivable that the market will calm down in a while. Even my Realtor is aghast.

I wonder.

Whine

I'm sick. Wheezing. Lungs fulla crud. I can talk, breathe, and stand up — just not all three at the same time. My fella has been busy with his job and secondary making-ends-meet work, so he hasn't been around. (He did send me off with a big bag of juice and water when we parted the other day, though.) My own bits of freelance work and a big bottle of nyquil are keeping me occupied.

Occupied, but still miserable. At times like this, more than anything, I want to go home. Where that is, though, I couldn't begin to tell you.