August: We've got big plans for you

• As of last Thursday J is officially dunzo with the Bar! The three-day test went by swimmingly well and while the official results don't get released till November, we're not worried. J is Barack-Obama-cool under pressure and possesses nerves of steel (unlike some fellow test-takers, who, with a bad case of nerves, hacked their brains out in the public restroom the morning of. Yes, everyone in the test hall heard, the acoustics really made the sound carry.) I knew not to worry about J, though, when he called after the first day and said (I think his exact words were): "I don't have two days of the Bar left, the Bar has two days left of me." It was like Chuck Norris was speaking through my husband. So now I've got J far from the clutches of jurisprudence for the next three weeks (muwahaha), which means...

• Cabo San Lucas in 10 days! I know I just started my job two weeks ago, but I already need a vacation. Being in the office at 8am every morning is quickly killing me, and I'm already wondering how I'll go first: lack of sleep or an ulcer from the 3+ cups of coffee I drink on a regular basis. Cabo will be a much-needed respite of sleep, beach, swimming and margaritas (preferably all at the same time?...) In a perfect world I would earn my Mexican citizenship and never come back.

• Since I've started working it's embarrassing what little headway I've made in my 2010 reading list (posted to the right). Yes, I'm still reading American Psycho. Slowly. And though I'm not completely finished yet, I highly recommend it. The main character, Patrick Bateman, plays a 26-year-old Wall Street playboy in the 1980s, when greed reigns supreme. Patrick makes obscene amounts of money and obsesses about every last designer detail on himself and others, down to what type of paper his nemesis' business card is printed on. In Patrick's Wall Street world every man wears double-breasted Cerutti 1881 suits and non-prescription Oliver's People glasses; every woman wears Yves Saint Laurent and Ralph Lauren. Friends (and enemies) spend hundreds of dollars a night eating exotic sorbets and getting into exotic Manhattan clubs and everyone is high on coke and/or attempting to be seen at the elite hotspot, Dorsia. Now lump in the fact that Patrick is a serial killer (and a pretty heinous one at that; I was especially disturbed the day I read about him gutting a homeless person on a lone sidewalk), and you've got one fantastic book. Why? Because taken at face value this is one twisted novel. But Patrick isn't psychotic because he's a serial killer; rather, his serial killer tendencies are just a symbolic extension of the material values he's absorbed being so engrossed in a world that correlates your worth as a person to how much your gazelleskin wallet costs. It's both outstanding and terrifying. And what's even better is after reading American Psycho you feel yourself becoming one (minus the whole serial killer thing, of course). You start noticing what everyone is wearing, where they're eating, how their business cards look, what they drive, whether they think tasseled loafers are an acceptable shoe choice. It's disgusting and fascinating all at the same time. Next up on my reading list: Anna Karenina.
  

• Me. Lady Gaga. San Jose. August. Yes, I'm going to see Lady Gaga in concert with a good friend of mine this month. Be jealous.

• This month J and I have also decided to start a food blog just for fun as a couple. We're going to call it "Eat the Creek" (because we live in Walnut Creek, get it? GET IT??) and it'll be a way for us to review what we like and dislike every time we go out to eat (I'm hoping at least once a week). For a suburb of San Francisco there are a lot of restaurants in this area (and by restaurants I mean cute little bistros and wine bars and fusion eateries) so we can't wait to get started. I've only tried a handful of what our downtown has to offer and was highly impressed. Sure, it'll cost ample amounts of money, but I'm slaving away to enjoy the finer things in life. This includes imported bottles of aged Malbecs.

• So, this isn't a highlight of August (or July, for that matter), but I needed to note it somewhere so those of you with weak stomachs, now is your cue to look away. The other day I was in the city walking to my office building from the subway stop when I saw a homeless guy on the sidewalk lurching toward this well-dressed Asian woman who passed by. Now this area of the San Francisco (the Tenderloin) is DIS-gusting. I won't go into too much detail but the streets smell like pee and garbage and on every block there's a crack-den hotel with a misleadingly lofty name like "Hotel Renoir," et al. So a homeless person in this area isn't the most out-of-place spectacle. But THIS homeless guy was different. Yes, he looked like he had JUST had his eyeball ripped out. There was a big pus-and-cartilage-filled hole where his eyeball should have been (and probably was mere hours before), with dried blood crusted all around the empty socket. Naturally, the Asian woman he hassled was terrified because what was even more eerie (aside from the fact that the guy was bleeding out his eye-hole and his overall hygiene was downright fetid), was that he wasn't moaning in pain or crying about his condition. Nope -- he was laughing. Cackling, really. And mumbling out loud about some Walkman as he lurched toward the woman, who walked even faster to get away from him. The whole disconnect between the severity of his wound and his reaction to it was quite disturbing and for the rest of the day I couldn't erase the picture from my mind.

• And just so I don't leave you on such a bleak note today, I figured I'd throw in a current, questionably-less-disturbing obsession: I never thought I'd say this about a 14-year-old blogger, but I heart the inimitable Tavi Gevinson! Her posts are fresh and fun and (am I really admitting this out loud?) pretty inspiring. I want to be her when I grow up. Or something.