My Looking Glass

Oakland - The Bad

When I returned home from Oakland on Sunday, I was in a foul mood and wrote some cryptic line stating it was a "simultaneously good and bad" trip. Since then, I've failed to write another word about it, and I feel kind of guilty now, because in doing so, I've possibly over-dramatized the bad. Let's chalk "the bad" up to a series of unhappy coincidences that were sheer bad luck combined with an uber-case of PMS and call it a day.

So what exactly was the bad? In a matter of a couple of days, the following shit went down:

1) I managed to lose not one but two pairs of prescription glasses (one set of sunglasses and one pair of regular specs).

2) My 10-day-young cell phone stopped working. Dead. Pissed. Me. Off.

3) On the flight home, and this always happens to me, I was seated directly in front of a screaming terror of a child being held by a young and ineffectual parent. Not only were his blood-curdling screams piercing my ears, but his angry kicks were pummeling my mid-thoracic and lower lumbar areas.

Add those three items to the fact I was PMSing, and you can see why I was so grouchy.

But then I saw Sedaris and felt better.

Then, one of my friends on the trip emailed me to let me know one pair of glasses was found and would be returned to me Monday.

Then I went to Cingular where they replaced my phone.

And I appear to have suffered no permanent damage from the kid screaming in my ear, although I'm reasonably certain that nobody on that flight had sex later that night because that child was an effective birth control method as any.

So those three items darkened the mood of an otherwise perfectly lovely trip, and I admit that I'm just a hormonal bitch.

These four pictures were taken from my room on the 15th floor at the Oakland Marriott City Center. On the left-hand side of each picture, you can see a BART station on either side of the street.

posted by LA @ 11:30 AM